A Cultural History of Tragedy in the Middle Ages by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Entertainment, Performing Arts, Theatre, History & Criticism, History
ISBN: 9781350154940
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

MIXED MESSAGES

Although the prospects for conceptualizing the tragic dimensions of medieval biblical drama have received little attention overall, the tragic potentialities of the Massacre of the Innocents as both an episode in scriptural history and a popular subject for medieval performance have not gone unnoticed. Alluding to the mingling of comedy and tragedy in the Chester Massacre, Katharine Goodland identifies the dramatic agency of maternal mourning as the voice “that bestows tragic significance upon the biblical story.”22 So too, Jane Tolmie speaks to the ways in which “comic strands … mitigate horrific violence” in the Chester play’s unruly juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy.23 In calling out the comic moments that punctuate these spectacles of horror, though, such critical assessments speak to the difficulty of ascribing purely tragic valences to this dramatic corpus, whether those of plot (human infants are gratuitously murdered by a brutal tyrant) or affect (mothers mourn for their lost children and themselves). Tolmie’s characterization of the aesthetic and formal challenges of the Massacre plays is apt: “High and low, serious and unserious, sacred and secular, painful and pleasurable—these plays on the darkest of subjects shift modes with a speed that can seem dizzying to the modern reader.”24

Across verbal, visual, and performative media, the robust medieval traditions of representing Herod further complicate the effort to ascribe tragic modalities to the Middle English Massacre plays. Within the corpus of Middle English Innocents plays, David Staines posits two traditions for representing these plays’ central and enduringly memorable character, Herod: the comic braggart and the tragic hero.25 Addressing these contradictions, Robert Weimann was perhaps the first interpreter of medieval biblical performance to examine the Herod figure as a dense symbolic site as well as a dramatic character. Weimann linked Herod’s role to festive customs of status inversion and mock ceremonial that, from the eleventh century at least, characterized European observances of the Feast of the Innocents during the Christmas season. In such celebrations, lower clergy and choristers in monastic and cathedral churches created Herod as a lord of misrule.26 When these festive Herods migrate to the liturgical performances of Christmastide, they retain the transgressive character that was “ever lurking on the outskirts of the liturgy of the twelve days of the … season.” A famous Epiphany play from Padua, Representatio Herodis in nocte Epyphanie, depicts Herod punctuating the ceremony’s liturgical singing by throwing his wooden staff at the chorus while his ministers, cum magno furore, beat fellow celebrants with inflated bladders.27

For Weimann, these festive customs constitute the “genetic background” of medieval English drama’s exaggerated, bombastic Herod figure, an epitome of feudal tyranny who endowed Christmastide rites of inversion and misrule with social meanings and political commentary.28 Weimann’s most influential contribution to reading medieval English dramatic Herods was to emphasize the figure’s self-conscious, deliberate performance of his role, whose popularity is attested by medieval and early modern memories of the character inscribed in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the fifteenth-century Paston Letters.29 The profound theatricality of these Middle English Herods has likewise inspired important commentary on the verbal and visual signs that constitute it.

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