Playing the Victim: Mockery, compassion, and racialization in premodern English Buffeting plays

Abstract

Passion episodes such as the Buffeting are known for the powerful acts of compassion they occasioned within audiences through their performance of violence on the person of Jesus. Few critics, however, have considered that these episodes depend on antisemitic, Islamophobic, and anti-Black depictions of antagonists when engendering such emotional dispositions. By investigating the dynamics of mockery through a deeper look into the composite identities of Jesus’s antagonists, this study reveals that these plays and the communities that produced them rely on a disingenuous stance of victimhood for their effectiveness. This ‘victim play’—the collaborative community effort to claim the status of victim while simultaneously participating in the victimization of others—obscures that those who are attributed cruel acts of mockery are actually its targets. The powerful rhetorical strategies of the premodern English episodes are thus unearthed in this study.