The Towneley and Chester Plays of the Shepherds: The Dynamic Interweaving of Power, Conflict, and Destiny

Abstract

The Towneley and Chester Plays of the Shepherds:The Dynamic Interweaving of Power, Conflict, and Destiny Norma Kroll The two Wakefield Shepherds' plays in the Towneley cycle and the Shepherds' play in the Chester cycle offer far more complex and subtle representations of human nature, power, and destiny than scholars of medieval drama have yet recognized.1 These versions of the rustics' exploits differ notably from each other, but, like the brief York and N-Town equivalents, they all end in scenes of the shepherds' adoration of the infant Jesus. Scholars tend to regard these encounters between the divine and the human as the point of the actions and to treat the characters' antics as typological prefigurations of Christ's birth.2 [End Page 315] While this critical approach highlights the ways that the plays' parodic elements parallel Jesus's incarnation, it locates the Godhead at the center of power and marginalizes the human characters' potency.3 Yet the playwrights expand the brief Gospel accounts into works of drama, not just dramatized spectacles, by giving the shepherds enough power to struggle against each other and against the limiting forces in their worlds. These cycle plays do not simply repeat or reinforce theological points of view based on Scripture, scriptural interpretations, or the liturgy; rather, they subordinate such perspectives' emphasis on divine might in the universe to human potency on earth by representing the rustics' deeds as vital contributions to God's plan. To this end, the Wakefield and Chester dramatists transform an episode from Christian history into drama by interposing patterns of destiny between the human and the divine. In general, destiny refers to fated events or inevitable outcomes, whether providential or not; in drama, it signifies the sets of forces operating (however ambiguously) within the characters' natures as well as in their larger social and political contexts. In the cycle plays, as in dramas of other eras, these earthly [End Page 316] forces and the characters who embody and struggle with them have a substantial impact on the course of events. The overlay of patterns of destiny on those of divine Providence became possible in the cycle plays because of earlier shifts in philosophical views of free will, in poetic uses of Christian material, and in the status of the peasant and middle classes. As John Coldeway argues, the "prosperity in countryside and town usually translated into a redistribution of power and wealth from the relatively few to the relatively many."4 This power is reflected in the Towneley and Chester portrayals of shepherds who have enough freedom to make their own imaginative, emotional, or physical choices as well as to struggle with each other and with the forces of destiny shaping their existence.5 The rustics' conflicts also accommodate or advance humans' relationships with God as well as the plays' intersections of earthly and cosmic events.6 Thus the three Towneley and Chester versions of destiny function as the organizing principles of the works, reflected not only in consistent patterns of characterization and action but also in coherent systems of language and imagery. I. The Generic Necessity of Human Power in Drama Before considering the medieval context of the three Shepherds' plays, we might usefully look at the interdependence of destiny and genre in classical Greek drama.7 In the tragedies, destiny is fate, with the [End Page 317] action an inevitable design either imposed on or emerging from particular human natures and satisfying larger social and cosmic purposes. The comedies are shaped by fortune, a series of events occurring by chance and comprising a character's earthly luck. In Greek drama, as in the English cycles, the power or presence of the gods or of other extrahuman forces resonates in the background and intervenes in the actions, and, in some plays, the gods themselves become the main actors. Yet, as in the Iliad where the gods' wishes give way to the scales of destiny, the Greek plays give the operations of fate and fortune power over the major and minor gods as well as over the human characters.8 In Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, for example, the Titan has the power to foreknow what is destined and...