All Things Medieval

During the 12th and 13th centuries, serious theater was gradually moving out of the church, into the street. One of the transitional works is the Fleury Playbook, whose plays are in Latin, so they seem more likely to have still been produced inside the church. The book was bound around 1520, and it was found in the Abbey St. Benôit de Fleury, on the Loire River in central France. There are a few odd details about this book. First, it’s unusual to find books from this period that contain only one genre. Binding a book was a matter of convenience and use, and it was done locally, not at some central publisher, so it was common to bind some saints’ lives, sermons, and plays together without the modern sense that “the reader wants to find all of one type of thing inside the binding.” This book, however, contains only plays. The collection was probably put together by someone, perhaps students, who were interested in theater per se.

Also, it’s found in central France but its works seem to come from other places, and one important clue comes from the curious state of medieval music during the 1200s. Like Adam de la Halle’s secular play “Robin et Marion,” these religious plays used music. It took Europe a long time to come to a standard method of musical notation. Place dots or squares in ascending or descending order to indicate melody was pretty universal. But the hard part was to indicate duration of a note. The eventual solution was the time signature, with measures and stems/flags to show what fraction of the measure each note occupied. But during the 12th and 13th centuries, notation systems were personal or local. And the Fleury Playbook’s notation methods include systems from other regions, like Aquitaine.

The collection includes one Bible story that isn’t found elsewhere in the Latin liturgy plays: the Conversion of St. Paul. It’s in Latin verse, so probably only appreciated by monks; but its staging is interesting enough to keep a secular audience engaged. The staging envisioned Jerusalem on one side, Damascus on the other, with the in-between space designated as the house of Ananias, represented by a bed. In the story, yeshiva student Saul goes from Jerusalem to Damascus to arrest Jewish Christians, but on the road, he is struck blind by a light, with a vision of Jesus. Ananias is a Jewish Christian in Damascus, and to his consternation, he hears God telling him to go find Saul and bring him home. Although he is afraid to obey, he finds Saul, and of course he discovers not a powerful man but a blind one, probably abandoned by his traveling companions. At the home of Ananias, Saul is healed of his blindness. Later, the Damascus stage has Saul let down the wall in a basket on a rope, which the stage directions clearly expect to be carried out literally.

This brings us to a general consideration of the place of Jews in these plays. The stories include five with Jesus, the conversion of St. Paul, and four miracles of St. Nicholas. The stories from Jesus’ life begin with the Magi, Herod, and the Slaughter of the Innocents (always a favorite with medieval audiences). they include later his raising of Lazarus, a play called The Visit to the Sepulcher in which the empty tomb is discovered, and a dramatization of Jesus’s appearing to some disciples as a pilgrim on the road to the village of Emmaus. All of these stories involve Jews: in fact apart from the Magi, all of the characters are Jewish. But they’re divided into good and bad Jews: Jews who are on Jesus’s side, and Jews who are against Jesus.

The Jews who are against Jesus are characterized chiefly as envious and angry to the point of rage and murder. Christian audiences are to identify with the Jews who are for Jesus, who are honorary Christians, like Peter, John, Lazarus, Mary, and the children of Bethlehem. While the actual disciples had doubts about whether Jesus could really have risen from the dead, the disciples in these plays have no doubts. All doubts are shifted to Jews. Most oddly, this is true even for the Emmaus story. In the actual story in Luke, the men who are walking from one village to another are aware that there are reports of Jesus’s resurrection, but they find it baffling until Jesus himself, in disguise, explains it. But in the medieval play, the disciples are perfectly confident that Jesus has risen. Any doubts that exist are reported as belonging to the Jewish priests and their milieu.

Even more oddly, in the Slaughter of the Innocents play, the children of Bethlehem (played by choir boys) and “Rachel weeping for her children” also speak as Christians. The children form a procession through the church, singing a hymn about the future Sacrifice of the Lamb. When the (Jewish) soldiers come to kill them, they sing a hymn, “Hail Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!” My source, disappointingly, does not tell us how the deaths were represented: wooden swords, choir boys falling down? When Rachel comes on stage, weeping for her children, she passed from the actual children there to her lost son Joseph, to her future lost son Jesus. She closes with an antiphon sung in the Good Friday liturgy.

Even one of the St. Nicholas plays involves a Jew, who for some reason is venerating an image of St. Nicholas. But strangest of all, when Jesus appears at the end of Visit to the Sepulcher, the stage notes direct for him to be wearing phylacteries bound on his forehead (“filacteria preciosa in capite”). Who would have looked to the medieval period to find a risen Christ in tefillin?

Jews posed a serious challenge to the medieval church. They were the source of Christian-accepted Scriptures, and all of the main characters in the Christian stories were Jews. And yet they also represented the outsiders, the doubters, the skeptics and mockers. The solution as presented in this play collection was to adopt the named characters as Christians and then set up “the Jews” as the opposition. They functioned in medieval drama much as the Mafia functions in Hollywood movies. Need a villain? Jew. It’s illuminating to realize to what extent their theater may have been denigrating Jews in the background all through the period.

sources:

“Jews in the Fleury Playbook,” by Theresa Tinkle. Comparative Drama, Spring 2004.

The Medieval French Drama. Grace Frank. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.

Adam de la Halle is the other famous name from early Arras, France theater. He was an educated man who composed both poetry and music; Adam is also called le Bossu, which does not mean “boss” in Japanese, it means “hunchback,” but nobody thinks he actually was deformed, so go figure. He’s known for two plays, which seems little compared to later writers, but to have gotten anything down on paper, and persisting through the vicissitudes of time to the present day, signals real importance. Adam’s life seems to have run between about 1240 and 1285; he lived and worked in Arras until, later, he went to the court of Charles of Anjou, a French prince who had become King of Sicily, ruling from Naples. He may have accompanied Charles on his Crusade.

So we know he left Arras eventually, but ironically, his most famous work “Le Jeu de la Feuillée” poses the question: will he leave Arras tonight? It turns out that he does not. It’s an interesting composition because its form is unusual, as is its “plot.” The year was 1262, and the event was the Confrèrie des Jongleurs et Bourgeois annual banquet. The play takes place inside the banquet, and it seems most likely that it was a series of sketches put on during the actual banquet itself, perhaps one per hour, as the night passed in eating and drinking. The banquet lasted most of the night, and the sketches end with “morning” dawning.

During the sketches, Adam de la Halle appears as the protagonist, probably Adam himself acting the role. He is in his room, telling his family and friends that he is now leaving Arras to study in Paris. Each sketch is a different set of persuasions not to leave: his father, a harlot, a monk, a fool, and a doctor all try to persuade him not to leave. At midnight, three fairies arrive for the banquet (people may have come and gone during the night, so the fairies may have just showed up at the door like anyone else). What did they look like—men or women? We think of Disney, but probably not so much.

Three fairies at a banquet are always trouble. These fairies notice that their places have not been set correctly; something, a spoon perhaps, is missing. One of them vows that in retribution, Adam de la Halle will be cursed with an inability to leave Arras! And so it proves: by the last sketch, everyone is tired and drunk, and Adam de le Halle has not left his room. Church bells ring, and they all go home. If Jelle Koopmans is correct (he formed the hypothesis that it was a set of sketches within the real banquet), the audience was also tired and a bit drunk, and ready to go home.

Adam’s other well-known work “Le Jeu de Robin et Marion” is actually musical theater, with the 13th-century-notation music still preserved. It’s a play about Robert the Shepherd and his girl Marion, who is courted by a gentleman out hunting but remains true to the shepherd. The play appears to be the fleshing-out of an old song, “Robin m’aime, Robin m’a.” Of course, the music has been reconstructed and recorded. Here you can enjoy (audio only) the full production, presented by Ensemble Micrologus, an Italian group. They once staged it with costumes, but there’s no video on YouTube. Here, you can see the musicians playing and slightly acting a scene: Robin et Marion. Here, you can read an English translation of the play!

footnote: Jelle Koopmans’s essay, “Arras, Where Jongleurs Meet, Play, and Develop Forms Aftewards Seen as Theatre,” appears in The Routledge Research Companion to Early Drama and Performance (2016).

In Hamlet, a rat is famously behind an arras. The arras screen (tapestry) was named for the town of Arras, in northern France, so far north that it was once part of the Netherlands. During the 12th and 13th centuries, the town had an unusually active theater scene. There were two drama clubs (to use an anachronistic term for it). One was called the Puy d’Arras, “the podium of Arras,” the other was the Confrérie des Jongleurs et Bourgeois d’Arras.

The Confrérie des Jongleurs begins with a legend that two jongleurs—traveling players and acrobats—had a dispute, and the Virgin Mary told them to go to Arras Cathedral, where the bishop would settle it. But Mary also appeared to them at the church and gave them a holy candle, whose wax could be used as medicine for the current epidemic. The Confrérie was founded around 1175 to safeguard and honor the Sainte Chandelle; its members were both townsmen and jongleurs. The Confrérie also took care of burial rites for its members and kept a death record in which we find the only recorded names of various playwrights. The Puy d’Arras probably formed later, since it was especially dedicated to the courtly poetry that came north from Provence. In France, troubadours were called “trouvères.”

The two best-known names of early jongleur-playwrights from Arras are Jean Bodel and Adam de la Halle. Adam will get his own entry, next. Jean Bodel worked as a municipal clerk in Arras, but he was clearly central to the poetry community of his time (circa 1200). When he legally died of leprosy, he wrote a farewell poem to his friends. Bodel’s two plays were inventive, stepping farther away from the strict saint or Bible story.

In the Jeu de Saint Nicolas, we see a miracle done by St. Nicholas. The setting is a Crusade in North Africa (Bodel’s time was still high tide for crusading, just after the 3rd), with several co-existing “places” on the stage. Here’s a link to an French literary archive, which sums up the play for us: “Set in the middle of an epic battle between Christians and Muslims, the play tells the story of a good Christian who escapes the battle and is found praying to a statue of Saint Nicolas by the Muslim forces. The Muslim leader decides to test the saint by unlocking the doors to his treasury and leaving the statue as a guardian, stipulating that if anything were stolen the Christian would forfeit his life. Three thieves attempt to steal the treasure, but Saint Nicolas stops them. As a result, the Muslim ruler and his entire army convert to Christianity.” That’s kicking the drama up a notch or two!

His other play is about the Prodigal Son, whose name here turns out to be Courtois/Curtois (both spellings) d’Artois/Arras. It’s 650 lines, broken into eleven scenes. At the start, Curtois asks his father for his inheritance, and leaves. Most of the play takes place at a tavern, where Curtois interacts with other characters as he foolishly spends away his money. I have the text, but it’s hard to read, so I am not able to follow the dialogue. Both this play and the St. Nicholas show realistic taverns, where people joke and play games that were popular in Arras at the time. The scenes display people at their worldliest: sinful, greedy, secular. But the tavern scenes act as a foil to the devout parts, the saintly miracle and the parable’s closing scene of the father’s forgiveness.

From 1000 AD forward, cathedrals and monastery chapels increasingly used simple drama to illustrate the Latin Bible reading. They didn’t invent lines, nor did they create stage sets. But they did use very simple arrangements, like a table and chair, or a special type of robe, to serve as set and costume. We have stage directions written in the margins of some readings, telling when the “angel” or “prophet” was to enter.

But in church, it all had to be serious, and it was spoken in Latin. Many people would have known what the simpler lines meant even if they did not have formal schooling, as long as they attended services enough to have heard them several times. But it still was not their language.

Dancing bears, sleight of hand tricks, the latest ballads, and comic skits: medieval Europe always had its traveling musicians, actors and acrobats. Their favorite gigs were at castles, where they were guaranteed a decent place to sleep (well, it was the stable, but okay). As towns grew, they performed there as well.

We call them minstrels, but the most common word at the time seems to be “jongleurs.” They often traveled together for safety on the roads and shared their skills to create new acts. The most serious musicians spent the Lent season in France at the annual convention, where new songs were shared.

By the 900s, we know that Easter and Christmas liturgy was usually accompanied by simple acting by the monks. They didn’t think of it as a play, nor did they call it “ludus,” the normal Latin word for dramatic plays. They were just deepening the emotional content of the service to help worshipers experience the story fully.

Bishop Ethelwold of Winchester wrote the first account of how Easter drama was to be staged, so we know that this was done in England around 950. Obviously, there was probably much more of this than we have evidence for in writing, in other times and places.