Male Homosocial Communities and Public Life

Abstract

Societies of men crowd the pageant wagons in the York and Chester cycles, and the first homosocial body that freely constitutes itself in the drama is Lucifer and his cohort.1 By enacting the Fall of the angels, the producers and performers make an ambivalent statement about the nature of homosocial society, about the kind of society the guilds themselves constituted. That such a statement occurs at the opening of each cycle deepens the self-reflexive irony, particularly in the Chester cycle where the vocabulary of play and performance abounds. The Old Testament plays that follow focus almost exclusively on the domestic scene, as if in reaction against the kind of society Satan wants. But with the birth of Christ, male homosocial groups abound and in Christ’s adult life they become dominant. Women and mixed groups do, of course, make important appearances, but they are few and far between. What the viewer more frequently sees are communities of men. Given the “predominance of females in late medieval towns,” the dominance of males in the plays makes a pointed ideological statement.2 The plays construct the world of the guilds, of civic leadership, and of civic political and devotional culture as specifically masculine. Such constructions are not without their anxieties. As we shall see, even in the midst of idealized depictions of homosocial communities, the plays also remind the audience of the exclusionary tactics of community and identity formation, particularly (as Carolyn Dinshaw has shown) where sex and gender are concerned, of the arbitrary and fluid nature of a group’s boundaries, and of the possibilities of betrayal, even from within.3