Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England by Ruth Nisse

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Ruth Nisse. Defining Acts: Drama and the Politics of Interpretation in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Pp. x, 226. $40.00 cloth, $23.00 paper. Ruth Nisse argues in Defining Acts that late medieval English theater, by the very fact of vernacular textual performance, was deeply invested in the practices of interpretation of authoritative religious texts and especially in the contested problems of translating and conveying meaning with truth and clarity. In these carefully conceived and persuasive chapters , form follows argument; in Nisse’s sure hands, this religious theater becomes extraordinarily compelling and cogent and clear. That this is so, despite the notorious elusiveness and silences, the complex manuscript and performance histories, and the vexed scholarly speculations regarding this theater, is no small tribute both to what she calls medieval drama’s ‘‘desire for legibility’’ (p. 8) as well as to her own skill, learning, and tact. But it is also tribute to the bold and successful effort made here to engage with this theater in an informed context of other kinds of lay, vernacular late medieval texts—ranging from The Miller’s Tale to sermons and chronicles—that confront, critique, and interrogate the ‘‘dangers and pleasures of theatrical representation’’ (p. 5). Chapter 1 begins with Chaucer’s fabliau gaming with the instability of exegetical categories in and through the ‘‘shot-window’’ stage of The Miller’s Tale, which Nisse reads as ‘‘an architecture of the imagination’’ (p. 16) through which parodic enactments of Incarnation are outrageously performed. That all ends crashing in disorder at the end of the tale not only rebuts the idealism of ancient Athenian tournament in The Knight’s Tale, but offers, Nisse argues, Chaucer’s own awareness of the mystery play challenges and contests to staged Scripture. In constructing her argument, Nisse invokes a fascinating passage in Thomas Walsingham ’s Historia Anglicana, in which the scornful puppet show jesting by rebels of 1381 with the heads of the chief justice John Cavendish and the hapless, assassinated prior of Bury becomes a perverse performance of mystery play tyrants with what the chronicler calls ‘‘absurdly improper action’’ (cum maxima ineptia). As Nisse puts it, Bury St. Edmunds did indeed stage this performance ‘‘literally over the prior’s dead body’’ (p. 15). But the furious contest between clergy and laity over how to interpret and translate sacred texts and bodies would take a wide range of forms, she argues, over the course of the next century. The York Plays, the subject of Chapter 2, belong to what Nisse, folPAGE 310 310 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:11 PS REVIEWS lowing Anne Hudson, calls the turn-of-the-century ‘‘window of opportunity ’’ for the relatively free exchange of Wycliffite reformist ideas (p. 25), especially from the pulpit. In this chapter, she demonstrates that the York Plays draw on far more heterodox ideas about translation and interpretation that has been previously assumed; indeed, the insistent preoccupation with the ‘‘full clere,’’ open, plain sense of Scripture in a play like the skinners’ ‘‘Entry into Jerusalem’’ identifies scriptural understanding and authority with civic rule itself. It is in the courts and temples of tyrants that sacred text dissolves into interpretative chaos, giving a play like The Judgement of Christ before Pilate the force of lay Lollard polemic. In Chapter 3, perhaps the most provocative chapter of this lively book, Nisse reads the York cycle pageants as skeptical, however, of female lay authority, especially female visionary authority to interpret Scripture, and she suggests that a play like the York Dream of Pilate’s Wife reveals antagonism to female visionary claims. Through its repudiation of Procula and the Devil’s misleading visions, the play enacts both warning about the discernment of spirits and labels women’s mysticism as a ‘‘dangerously excessive form of knowledge and writing’’ (p. 49). Although Nisse probably goes too far in calling the York Nativity play ‘‘a dramatization of St. Bridget of Sweden’s vision’’ (the Marian speech she cites as Bridgetine example is, in fact, right out of the ubiquitous Franciscan Meditationes vitae Christi) and in calling Mary’s prayer at the manger the...