Audience and Meaning in Two Medieval Dramatic Realisms

Abstract

Audience and Meaning in Two Medieval Dramatic Realisms William F. Munson Although it has been more common recently to stress re­ ligious doctrine than realism in English mystery plays, J. M. Manly’s judgment in 1897 has probably not been superseded: “The Towneley Secunda Pastorum has so long been recognized as the best extant example of individualization of typical char­ acters and of rapid transition from the farcical to the sublime that it is expected in every book of selections.”l There is a modem bias here in the interest in a realism involving individual­ ization of dramatic character, an interest which searches out a play which is justly celebrated though hardly characteristic of medieval drama in this respect. Most modems, on the other hand, have regarded with less ease the “rapid transition from the farcical to the sublime” which is common in medieval drama, often minimizing it and treating it as needing justification in a religious play. Low comedy involves a “realism” usually of a different sort from a psychological character realism: it is the realism of “English shepherds” making references to contempo­ rary life and also making low jest of high things. This is the kind of realism the Wakefield shepherds’ plays share with other mystery plays; it is what makes them most traditional, least ex­ traordinary. I should like here to elaborate the interpretive impli­ cations of two realisms—a less traditional one involving some individualization of character and some stage illusion, the other more traditional and involving character stereotypes and a nonillusionistic topicality—primarily by example of some English adoration plays. Criticism of English mystery plays has had difficulty appreci­ ating a comic drama which habitually ignores dramatic illusion, employs stereotypes, and seems casually indifferent to realistic 44 William F. Munson 45 probabilities in character and plot—characteristics obtaining also for Greek Old Comedy. The Wakefield First Shepherds’ Play and the Chester Adoration of the Shepherds have apparently ran­ dom quarrels and feasts in common with Aristophanic comedy and seem more similar to it than to the later, more plotted farces of New Comedy and the Roman imitations. Modem theorists of drama often attempt to locate the nature of comedy by contrast­ ing a drama of types to a drama of individuals. S. H. Butcher’s interpretation and elaboration of Aristotle’s Poetics, for example, sees broad alternatives in comedy and tragedy: “Whereas comedy tends to merge the individual in the type, tragedy manifests the type through the individual.”2 A distinction which is difficult to sustain solely in terms of content may be easier to make in terms of function for an audience, specifically the social nature of much comic art and the dynamics of audience participation as opposed to the more individualistic and disinterested nature of tragedy. Henri Bergson’s essay on laughter is a key statement locating comic experience as distinctively social in contrast to the experi­ ence of the other arts, including tragedy. Tragedy gives the hero “an individuality unique of its kind,” while comedy looks “out­ wards” to surface resemblances of character to construct an “average” by a process of “abstraction and generalization.’^ The type-character of comedy, it is implied, serves a “social ges­ ture” (p. 20) which is a form of pressure for a social end: The pleasure caused by laughter, even on the stage, is not an unadulterated enjoyment; it is not a pleasure that is exclusively esthetic or altogether disinterested. It always implies a secret or unconscious intent, if not of each one of us, at all events of society as a whole. In laughter we always find an unavowed in­ tention to humiliate, and consequently to correct our neigh­ bour, if not in his will, at least in his deed. (pp. 135-36) The immediate, semi-utilitarian function is what makes comedy for Bergson both close to “life” and at the same time the alterna­ tive to seeing a profounder inner reality of unique individual experience, of natural feelings as opposed to social law. This fuller truth is what art proper pursues: Art . . . has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols, the conventional and socially accepted generalities, in short, everything that veils reality...