Marriage in Late-Medieval German Easter and Shrovetide Plays

Abstract

The topics of love, marriage, sexuality, and family in late Middle Ages and Renaissance have attracted tremendous interest for some time now because we have realized how much relationship between genders proves important for well-being of any society. (1) By same token, these topics have almost always been object of intense debates in theology, law, arts, and especially in literature. (2) In fact, one of key functions of fictional texts has been to serve as a public medium to negotiate most critical issues affecting practically every member of a community, especially in matters difficult to solve by means of laws and governmental rulings, teachings of Church, and other authorities. This function finds powerful expression in numerous late-medieval plays, which present marriage either as an object of satire or as a model of ideal behavior relevant for their urban audiences. Of course, emotional aspect of these matters, particularly as they affect lives of men and women, requires constant re-examination, an enterprise for which literary discourse appears to be ideal forum. (3) After all, love is a most elusive phenomenon, affecting most people at some point in their lives more or less intensively, and marriage adds an additional level of complexity to this issue, as poets and others through ages have confirmed. But who would dare to offer a precise, generally acceptable definition, unless we foolishly trust medieval satirists such as Andreas Capellanus (c.1190), Matfre Ermengaud (c.1288), or Juan Ruiz (c.1340) in their claims mostly formulated tongue-in-cheek to have dealt with topic exhaustively. (4) The critical studies on marriage and gender relationships in past and present are legion. (5) Considering relevance of marriage in history of mentality, we can trace this broad discourse as far back as Middle Ages (and even earlier) when poets, theologians, artists, philosophers, and jurists began to engage in a public debate at least since twelfth century, though among theologians, debate on various approaches, values, ideals, problems, and concerns involving love and marriage goes back much further. (6) Some of most popular genres that lent themselves particularly well to this discourse were sermons, prose novels, secular song books, marriage treatises, verse novellas, and exempla. (7) As to be expected, many of these have been studied in great detail and need not be revisited here, especially if we think of Elisabeth Waghall Nivre's impressive Women and Family Life in Early Modern German Literature (2004). She correctly emphasizes that texts investigated move within at least three different discursive fields inherent in a larger gender discourse: sexuality, marriage, and family life. (8) But to probe discourse on marriage even further, I would like to focus here on late-medieval plays, both religious and secular. Such an approach is possible and makes perfect sense particularly in relation to Easter plays and Shrovetide plays which tended to include highly humorous scenes for comic release, drawing their essential material from everyday experiences and basic conditions of human emotions? Surprisingly, neither drama specialists nor social historians have adequately examined late-medieval plays as ideal objects to study how marriage was presented, evaluated, and discussed in public during that time, although stage performances essentially thrive on intricate interaction with their audiences, either on a reflective or on a prescriptive level, which Manfred Pfister has called multimediality of theater. (10) Many scholars of medieval plays have convincingly demonstrated that the medieval theatre was above all a collective undertaking through which urban social groups and urban elites in particular gave expression to what may properly be termed a bourgeois ideology. (11) But performance itself is not an isolated event and does not exclude subsequent discussions and explorations of issues presented on stage, especially not within framework of late-medieval urban communities. …