Mary Magdalene as New Custance?: “The Woman Cast Adrift” in the Digby Mary Magdalene Play

Abstract

A floats helplessly on sea, alone or with a few companions, driven by wind and waves across ocean in a boat without pilot, oar, or rudder. Whether by luck or by grace of God, she arrives in a foreign land, inhere her experiences change both her life and lives of others. SUCH A SCENARIO FIGURES in a number of medieval folk tales, romances, and saints' lives. I would argue that it also appears in late medieval Digby Mary Magdalene play. If this is case, how might play's East Anglian audience have read this motif of the cast adrift in context of a dramatic performance which situates its heroic version of Mary Magdalene within a larger discourse about women's speech, action, and personal power--a discourse which certainly included romance? Hans Robert Jauss argues that there is a system of that arises for each work in historical moment of its appearance, from a pre--understanding of genre, [and] from form and themes of already familiar (22) that influences any given audience's reception of a given text. Further, he claims, The psychic process in reception of a text is, in primary of aesthetic experience, by no means only an arbitrary series of merely subjective impressions, but rather carrying out of specific instructions in a process of directed perception, which can be comprehended according to its constitutive motivations and triggering signals (23). Although Jauss is referring to written texts here, same principles can be assumed to govern an audiences reception of a performance text within horizon of expectations (23) furnished by other familiar stories, both oral and written. It follows that audience of late medieval drama brought their knowledge of numerous other genres to their reception of any given dramatic performance. In late medieval England, such texts would have included everything from saints' lives and religious treatises to secular romance, lyric, chronicle, and fabliau. No study has yet explored ways in which an audience familiar with both saints' lives and romances might have understood Digby version of Mary Magdalene within play's complex dialectic of sacred and secular elements. This essay seeks to initiate such a discussion. Current scholarship has demonstrated ways in which many Middle English romances are modeled on or echo saints' lives (Hopkins, Crane) and, conversely, how saints' lives employ folk motifs in their narrative structures (Elliott, Pinto-Mathieu, Thompson). Thompson's thorough study of narrative strategies in South English Legendary demonstrates in great detail extent to which narrative conventions of romance, and indeed a romance sensibility, had thoroughly permeated South English Legendary's versions of many of its saints' legends by late thirteenth century. It is now clear that boundary between saints' legends and romance was highly permeable. V A. Kolve has noted connections between Chaucer's Custance and traditions about Mary Magdalene and Virgin Mary, woman cast adrift;' and image of rudderless ship (Kolve 311-12). Similarly, medieval drama also borrowed from other genres--saints' lives, certainly, but also from more secular genres such as fabliau and romance. Monica Brzezinski Potkay has demonstrated importance of fabliau elements in Corpus Christi drama (103-23). It makes sense, therefore, to look more closely at connections between religious drama and romance to understand how play's audience would have received and understood Digby play's Mary Magdalene. Recent studies have shown that late medieval English audience was familiar with a wide range of literature and had a keen appetite for both religious works and romances. By fourteenth century audience for such texts included significant numbers of what Riddy calls bourgeois-gentry--an increasingly literate sector of society (Middle English Romance 235-38). …