The Baptism and Temptation of Christ: The First Day of a Medieval French Passion Play ed. by John R. Elliott, Jr., Graham A. Runnalls

Abstract

292 ComparativeDrama versed into an arbitrary suspension of the “inside.” Then we would have a Pinter, and the shoe very nearly fits, similar in fundamental respects to Adorno’s Brecht, one who “translates the true hideousness of society into theatrical appearance, by dragging it straight out of its camou­ flage . . “people shrink before our eyes into the agents of social processes and functions, which indirectly and unknowingly they are in empirical reality” (Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” Aesthetics and Politics, p. 182). But such a reading, itself monological, would gain us relatively little. It holds back from a more powerful reading of Pinter which might begin from the very undecidability of the priority of these readings, that is, from the textuality of the plays. JOSEPH J. MOLESKI Kalamazoo, Michigan The Baptism and Temptation of Christ: The First Day of a Medieval French Passion Play. Edited and translated by John R. Elliott, Jr., and Graham A. Runnalls. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978. Pp. ix + 153. $15.00. The Baptism and Temptation of Christ is the title given to an im­ portant manuscript which was brought to the attention of Professor Elliott by the curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection in 1972. On examination the manuscript was found to contain the dramatization of two episodes in the life of Jesus forming the first day of what was prob­ ably a seven-day Passion play written and presumably performed in (northern?) France in the first half of the 16th century. The story of the discovery and identification of the manuscript and the circumstances of the editors’ transatlantic collaboration is described in the useful introduction and in Graham Runnalls’s note in Treteaux (vol. 1, mai 1978, n° 1, pp. 19-21). As the editors rightly point out, the publication of the manuscript is doubly significant inasmuch as it constitutes not only the first published reference to the text itself but also “the first discovery of a hitherto unknown version of a French Passion play for over half a century” (p. vii). That being so, we must be grateful to the editors for this carefully-planned and interesting publication. Graham Runnalls transcribed the manuscript and dealt with any palaeographical and philological problems, while John Elliott undertook to translate and annotate the text and provide chapters on staging and sources. From the editors’ (and apparently publishers’) point of view this was a satisfactory solution, although I cannot help feeling that, not­ withstanding Professor Elliott’s usually unexceptionable renderings from Middle French to modem English, it would have made more sense to write the introduction in French, dispense with the translation and ex­ pand the critical apparatus. Any publication is aimed at the widest possible audience, and I am not sure how many readers there are around who have an interest in “medieval” (more of which later) French Reviews 293 religious drama but whose command of the language is such that they cannot handle what is, after all, a fairly straightforward text. On the other hand, because it is in English and published outside France, this important contribution to our knowledge of the religious theater of its period will sadly not receive the attention it deserves not only among the potentially large public for anything to do with “notre ancien théâtre” but even, alas, among French theater historians. Lacunae in the manuscript prove that some of the original play has been lost but it is unlikely to have been much more than a hundred lines or so; the present edition runs to 1014 lines and the play, in its original state, is not thought to have exceeded 1150 lines at most. Although this is considerably less than some of the famous 15th-century mystery plays such as Greban’s Passion, the first day of which has no less than 10,000 lines, it is “in keeping with what we know about the length of most sixteenth-century multi-day religious plays” (p. 12). The four plays of Marguerite de Navarre’s biblical tetralogy—published, as is indicated in this edition, in 1547 but written perhaps fifteen years before— average 1300 lines each, and other contemporary mystery plays are of roughly similar dimensions, which suggests...