Miracle Play Research Articles

“But Now I Consydre Thy Necesse”: Augustine’s Doctrine of Jewish Witness and the Restoration of Racial Hierarchies in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament

This paper examines the depiction of Jewish and Christian merchants in the medieval English Host miracle play, the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. This play is a critical illustration of religious racialization, effectively demonstrating the perpetuation of anti-Jewish stereotypes and legitimizing violence. Positioned within a broader scholarly debate, particularly in relation to Augustine’s doctrine of Jewish witness, the play portrays Jews as allegorical figures that validate Christian theological constructs. This paper delves into the representation and linguistic depiction of Jewish characters in the play, emphasizing their systematic dehumanization and instrumentalization in Christian narratives. A significant focus is placed on the coerced conversion of Jewish characters, which forces them into the archetype of the “Wandering Jew”, thereby highlighting motifs of symbolic aggression and unending diaspora. This paper also confronts contemporary scholarly perspectives that view the play as challenging religious boundaries, positing that such interpretations overlook the ingrained racialization and marginalization of Jewish identity during the European Middle Ages. It argues that the play’s transient disruption of power dynamics ultimately reinforces prevailing social hierarchies, thereby solidifying deep-seated anti-Jewish sentiments.

Grechaninov's Sister Beatrice and the Consecration of the Stage in Orthodox Russia

AbstractWhen Alexander Grechaninov's opera Sister Beatrice on a text by Maurice Maeterlinck premiered in Moscow in 1912, it promised to bring together two conceptual worlds, those of symbolist aesthetics and the Russian Orthodox liturgy. Critics who hoped that Grechaninov's experience as a composer of sacred music would help bring alive the ‘unheard music’ of Maeterlinck's symbolist ‘Miracle Play’, however, were sorely disappointed. The opera drew scorn from critics for its overly concrete musical rhetoric, while conservative commentators levelled claims of blasphemy. In this article, I consider the two scenes depicting miracles in Sister Beatrice to demonstrate how it negotiated these competing perspectives, employing insights from religious philosophy as well as symbolist aesthetics. Drawing on new archival evidence, I also demonstrate how church and state censors co-participated with composers and critics debating whether and how the sacred might be displayed on stage and in sound.

Conspicuous Discontinuity: Theatrical Variations on the Life of Anthony in Medieval Italy and France

We know of only four medieval plays on the life and temptations of Saint Anthony of Egypt. Relying neither on a common hagiographic source nor on a shared formal model, each play tells the story of Saint Anthony very differently. With this ‘conspicuous discontinuity’ in view, I examine the four plays: a lauda drammatica (vernacular music drama) from mid-fourteenth-century Perugia; a mystère (mystery play) from Compiègne known only because of a brief 1459 record of payment for expenses in the city accounts; a late-fifteenth-century sacra rappresentazione (miracle play) from Florence; and an Occitan or, more specifically, Alpine Provençal (Briançonnais) mystère whose surviving text was ‘copied’ in Névache in 1503. Close attention to each play’s local context and narrative goals allows me to reassess the literary and dramatic quality of the works on their own terms.

Жанровое своеобразие пьесы Ю. Клавдиева „Победоносец”

В статье рассматривается творчество одного из самых ярких и самобытных представителей «Новой Драмы» – драматурга Юрия Клавдиева (р. 1974). На позднем этапе творчества автор проявляет интерес к каноническим жанрам, в частности обращается к средневековому жанру «миракль», художественные принципы и поэтику которого он кладет в основу своей пьесы Победоносец [The Victorious One] (2015). В статье проводится анализ пьесы с учетом особенностей жанра «миракль», рассказывается о его влиянии на структуру и основную идею драматического произведения, а также на его восприятие читателем/зрителем.

Traits of Mystery (miracle play), Tragedy and Commedia Dell'Arte in a Fairy-Opera-Film

This article deals with a fairy-opera-film and its specifics. The author reveals traits of mystery (miracle play) in a fairy-opera-film, basing upon a notion of mystery of Carl Orffs theory, in the way as Orff meant it. Syncretism in different kinds of art, specifics of word as an art facility (meaning of a word and a word as sound) are specified. As examples the following films are taken: Bluebeard's Castle (composer Bela Bartok, filmmaker W. Golovin,1968), Iolanta (composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, filmmaker W. Gorriker,1963) and animated musical The Snow Maiden (composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, filmmaker I. Ivanow-Vano,1952). Special attention is drawn to the opera film The Queen of Spades (composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, filmmaker R. Tihomirov,1960). The author discloses in fairy-opera-film elements of commedia dell'arte, that is improvisation and masks. For example in films The Love for three Oranges (composer Sergei Prokofiev, filmmakers W. Titov and J. Bogatyrenko,1970) and The Magic Flute (composer Wolfgang A. Mozart, filmmaker I. Bergman,1975). The author comes to the conclusion concerning the targets and tasks of a fairy-opera-film. Through watching fairy-opera-films children should live cultural and psychological history of humanity step by step in its development through music, dance culture and drama (theater). The main task of fairy-opera-film is to save an entity of a human being, to prevent a childs mutation into either a superman (or bermensch in F. Nietzsches term) or degeneration.

L’edizione completa del laudario perugino

Lauda is a type of Italian poetry in praise of the Virgin Mary, Christ, or the saints. The poetic lauda was first associated with the early Franciscan friars (the 13th-century Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi wrote many laudi spirituali in the vernacular), then it was used in confraternal groups and for religious celebrations, and eventually became part of the Italian version of the miracle play, the sacra rappresentazione. Laude were composed either in sestina or in ballata form for recitation, their content usually consisting of exhortations to a moral life or of events in the lives of Christ and the saints. The composers were mostly anonymous. The so-called Laudario Perugino is the largest existing collection of laude. It was assembled about the mid-13th century and copied in several manuscripts. The first critical edition of this Laudario, consisting of more than 180 poems, has been published in two volumes by Gina Scentoni and Maurizio Perugi (2011 and 1012). This paper deals with the most important features of this abundant material, which will considerably enlarge our knowledge of medieval Italian language and poetry.

Medieval French Miracle Plays: Seven Falsely Accused Women

Medieval French Miracle Plays: Seven Falsely Accused Women

Shakespeare's Miracle Plays

The essay argues that with regard to the doctrine of miracles, Shakespeare travelled outside the pathways of, on the one hand, Catholic belief in saints' wonderworks and, on the other, philosophical scepticism about and Protestant disdain for miracle stories.Henry V,All's Well that Ends Well, and all four of Shakespeare's romances are “miracle plays” that embrace and exult in a new kind of miracle. The wonders achieved in these plays are secular, often erotic, and always conspicuously theatrical. In an Age of Reformation, Shakespeare claimed miracles for the stage. Shakespeare worked not against but within a culture which for some time had wedded miracles to stagecraft. To this tradition he added a heightened self-consciousness, or metatheatre. Representing miracles as plays, Shakespeare gave centre stage not to the wonders, but to the plots and contrivances that produced them.

Dramatising the Romance: from La Manekine to La Fille du roy de Hongrie

In the fourteenth century, a new kind of religious drama gained popularity in France, the miracle play or miracle par personnages. The genre originated in the numerous legends of the Virgin Mary in both Latin and French, of which the most famous are those collected by the thirteenth-century monk Gautier de Coincy. The miracle play was intended for the edification of the people, and its overarching theme is the Blessed Virgin's intercession in favour of mortals who have gone astray or who are otherwise in distress. The earliest-recorded dramatisation of the non-scriptural miracles attributed to Mary is Rutebeuf's well-known Miracle de Théophile, in which the cleric Theophilus rashly sells his soul to the devil and does his bidding for seven years; then, repenting of his sins and transgressions he invokes the aid of Mary, who conquers the devil and restores Theophilus to the path of righteousness. However, the major source of our knowledge of miracle plays is the two-volume Cangé manuscript (Bibliothèque nationale de France MS fr. 819-820), a remarkable record of dramatic production comprising forty miracles composed and performed in Paris, over the lengthy period between 1339 and 1382, during the annual assembly of the Saint-Éloi Gold and Silversmiths' Guild.

Preface

Preface As Mary Magdalen stood weeping outside the empty tomb, he called her by name—and suddenly she recognized him. She went and told the disciples: "I have seen the Lord." Mary Magdalen's faith in the resurrected Christ was grounded in direct contact with the Son of God.We may imagine that once she heard Jesus call her name she no more needed to reason about whether Christ rose from the dead than we need to reason about whether light radiates from the sun. None of us can claim the immediate, transforming religious experience of Mary Magdalen—or of Peter, or Paul, or other disciples and apostles of Christ. And few believers purport to have had the less immediate, but perhaps no less convincing mystical experiences of, say, Teresa of Avila or Meister Eckhart. Many believers experience God in less dramatic ways, as they look at the lilies of die field, the starry skies above, and are flooded with gratitude and joy—but they are well aware that others look at the same lilies, the same skies, and feel no consciousness of the divine. LOGOS 3:2 SPRING 2000 LOGOS Despite a relative paucity of immediate religious experience, however, people believe. And people move from nonbelief to belief, as Mary Magdalen herself did so long ago. How do conversions occur?What role does miracle play in the process? How do time and affection and imagination and reason and will and service and grace figure into the picture—or pictures, since paths to God are multiple? These questions are among those addressed by articles in this issue of Logos. In "Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited" Douglas Lane Patey traces the conversion of Charles Ryder and shows us how events inWaugh's own life, his ownjourney toward God, anchor the fictional masterpiece. Love is the major theme of allWaugh's works, Patey argues; in Brideshead Revisited love finds its proper object as Ryder's affections move from Sebastian, to Julia, to God. "The White Nun in Rattlebone," by George Bellis, offers a reading of a story set in a black Kansas City ghetto in 1 947, in which a renegade nun determined to win converts for Catholicism enthralls a group of children with magic and miracle. Though Sister Joan loses the battle in the short run, the children's encounter with the idea ofmiracle lodges in their imaginations long after the white nun is gone. How is Augustine's conversion story to be read? Khaled Anatolios provides an answer in "Quest, Questions, and Christ in Augustine's Confessions."Augustine's drama develops through questioning , and through attention to the role and meaning questions play in the search for God. The long process of questioning through whichAugustine ascends to God is made possible by Christ's descent. Robert Pasnau gives us a very different (though not inconsistent ) reading ofAugustine's autobiography in "PlottingAugustine's Confessions." Pasnau explores the philosophical dimensions of the work, offering a careful analysis ofAugustine's conception of weakness of will and an account of the role this conception plays in Augustine's understanding of his conversion. PREFACE In "Aquinas and the Credibility of God" Michael Torre suggests that though Aquinas is famous for his "Five Ways" of demonstrating God's existence, this doctor of the Church held that most who believe in God do so because God works miracles. Belief in God is based primarily—and quite rationally—on the saints and martyrs, men and women whose lives witness to divine truth. "The Theocentric Foundation of John Henry Newman's Philosophy of Education," by Jane Rupert, comments on Newman's early conversion to a sense of the invisible, and on the development of this sense into a conviction that God is the ultimate ground of an objective, intelligibly unified universe.This conviction of Newman's shapes his understanding of liberal education and the idea of the university. Thomas F. Dailey, O.S.F.S., shows us how some of Newman's ideas about the unity of knowledge and the function of the university find expression in John Paul II's encyclicals. In "Toward a Culture of Truth: Higher Education and the Thought of Pope John Paul II" Dailey...

Stage Devils in English Reformation Plays

Stage Devils in English Reformation Plays John D. Cox ? The More Things Change. . . . Prevailing conceptions of stage devils in early English drama derive from patterns of critical interpretation that were established early in the twentieth century. Most influential in forming these patterns was E. K. Chambers, but Chambers was assisted to varying degrees by W. W. Greg, A. W. Pollard, and W. W. Skeat. Pollard's English Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes went through eight editions in a little under forty years (1890 to 1927), becoming the standard anthology for students, who used it until well past the middle of the century. Pollard judged the late morality plays severely; he rejected their penchant for personification because it tended "to didacticism and unreality," and was therefore "wholly undramatic," with the result that "the popularity of the later Morality significantly coincided with the dullest and most barren period in the history of English literature."1 Pollard's view was not seriously challenged until seventy years after his first edition, in the work of Bernard Spivack and David Bevington, who both in various ways vindicated dramatic personification and the Vice in particular. Yet even in their important revision of the critical tradition, they supported an evolutionary teleology that had been established by Chambers. Spivack's interest in distinguishing personifications from fleshand -blood characters was dictated by his thesis about the influence of the Vice on late Elizabethan dramatic characterization, and he therefore exaggerated the place of devils in the mystery plays while understating it in moralities: "The Devil, who in the Christian mythos is the father of evil, has only a negligible place in the morality drama. In the cyclical mysteries and in the miracles he is a familiar personage." Only two plays among those that Spivack designated as "miracles" (usually now called saint plays) 85 86Stage Devils in English Reformation Plays are in fact extant in English, and devils are a late addition to one of them, the Digby Conversion of St. Paul, so Spivack's generalization concerning the miracle plays is based on an extremely small, and likely unrepresentative, sample. According to Spivack, devils appear in "only nine of the almost sixty surviving" morality plays,2 but he does not note that this proportion is about the same as the proportion of pageants that include devils in each of the extant mystery cycles.3 If the devils in Protestant morality plays are approached without evolutionary assumptions, continuity with earlier devils is apparent and more important than Chambers's account would suggest. The principal difference is not a gradually evolving secularism but the sudden impact of the Protestant Reformation .4 Devils that appear in Protestant plays are no less morally and spiritually serious than devils in pre-Reformation drama, but the assumptions that motivate them are radically new. The earliest Protestant dramatists, John Bale and John Foxe, were themselves formed by traditional religion—that is, by pre-Reformation Christian faith and practice.5 Bale in fact spent more than twenty-five years as a Carmelite friar until his conversion to the reformed view in 1533. Bale and Fox therefore understood the Devil's traditional role in cosmic history, in the life of the community, and in the individual Christian's life, and they also understood how that role was embodied in drama.6 Early Reformation dramatists' deliberate attempt to redefine the Devil's role was no mean task, but ultimately it succeeded, even if it did so by compromise, in the manner of the English Reformation as a whole. Demolishing prevailing views through satire and iconoclasm was only the first step. Putting something new in place required the ability to assign new meaning and impose a new shape on ecclesiastical, liturgical, and dramatic tradition , to master assiduous historical scholarship according to the new humanist model, to put scholarship to work in winning hearts and minds, to reinvent dramatic convention, and to persevere in all this against overwhelming resistance, both official and popular. The task succeeded when political events eventually took a decisive turn in the reformers' favor, so that their innovations became an established tradition in their own right. The reformers ' opponents' effort to preserve and renew the old faith, including its...

The Third Southern African Online Information Meeting

In setting the scene, in my editorial for the Proceedings of the Second Southern African Online Information Meeting (The Electronic Library, 11(4/5), August/October 1993), I considered attendance in relation to the ‘interesting and difficult times’ in which we then found ourselves as the country teetered towards the first democratic election. Much has changed since that miracle play acted out by millions of ordinary people in April 1994, and much continues to change as the rainbow nation struggles to take again its place in the international community. In spite of — maybe even because of — the euphoria following the election, the times are no less difficult and interesting. It was against this colourful backdrop that the Third Southern African Online Information Meeting was held on 6–9 June 1995. The effect of another colourful production, the Rugby World Cup, was another unsettling factor.

Iconographic Contexts of the Swedish De uno peccatore qui promeruit gratiam

The De uno peccatore qui promeruit gratiam the play of the sinner who found mercy is the oldest surviving play in any Scandinavian language.1 The Latin title is misleading, for the work is written entirely in the vernacular. Compared with the vast multi-day spectacles of late medieval France and Germany, the Swedish De uno peccatore is a compact work indeed, running to a mere 362 lines of four-stress couplets. Despite its modest scale, however, this anonymous miracle play offers useful examples of some of the ways in which verbal and pictorial image-making interacted on the late medieval stage. Curiously enough, the De uno peccatore qui promeruit gratiam owes its survival to a priest's willingness to skirt the rules of his order. In the closing years of the fifteenth century, a certain Johannes Gerardus served as chaplain to abbess Sigrid Birgersdotter and the Cistercian nuns at a small convent in Askaby, about fifteen kilometers east of Linkoping in what is now the southeastern Swedish province of Ostergotland. Gerardus was also a passionate bibliophile. Although the rules governing Cistercian libraries discouraged such practices, he compiled for his private use a large anthology of vernacular chronicles, romances, lyrics, and devotional pieces. Dated colophons in the manuscript, now known as the Askaby Codex (Copenhagen, Det Arnamagnaeanske Institut, AM 191 fol.), indicate that Gerardus acquired the text of the De uno peccatore around 1492.2 The play itself is clearly somewhat older; estimates of the date of its composition range from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century.3 Dialectal evidence confirms that the work was composed not far from Askaby.4 Two kinds of internal evidence establish that the De uno

ATKV KAMPUSTONEEL '92 / ATKV Campus Theatre '92

Summary Kampustoneel (Campus theatre) is a project of the Afrikaans Language and Cultural Society (ATKV) who assign money to each university in South Africa to enable them to commission a playwright (or would-be playwright) to write a new text in Afrikaans. These plays are then workshopped in the drama departments and presented in Pretoria where public feedback is given for each production. Since its inception ten years ago, Kampustoneel has revitalised Afrikaans playwrighting in South Africa—more than sixty new texts have been presented at this festival, of which 11 have been published, and 17 professionally produced. It has also produced a number of the leading playwrights of the 1980s, including Reza de Wet, Deon Opperman, T.T. Cloete, Hennie Aucamp, Charles Fourie and Nico Luwes. At this year's Kampustoneel, from 7 to 11 April, six new plays were presented as main-stream productions, and ten on the fringe. The plays ineluded a modern miracle play, Des coninx bode by Engemi Ferreira; an absurdist play ...

The Iconography of Audience in the Cuzco Corpus Christi Paintings

The Iconography of Audience in the Cuzco Corpus Christi Paintings Barbara H. Jaye and William P. Mitchell Drama audiences appear in a number of well-known medieval and renaissance art works. 1 Two manuscript illustrations, the Jerusalem entremet (1378) and Jean Fouquet's Martyrdom of St. Apollonia (c.1460), show courtly audiences.2 The Arsenal Terence frontispiece,3 paintings of two Louvain pageant wagons of 1594, Daniel van Alsloot's illustrations of the Brussels pageant of 1615,4 and at least two seventeentii-century paintings by Jan Steen5 feature audiences of townspeople. A sixteenth-century painting by Pieter Balten after Peter Breughel the Eidero and a Flemish drawing of 15427 showing comic scenes on outdoor platform stages portray peasant audiences. The audiences in the manuscript illustrations are idealized, showing little portraiture . The painter-producer Fouquet's courtly audience at the miracle play of St. Apollonia and die nobles of the Jerusalem entremet behave themselves too decorously; these subdued and attentive audiences seem to flatter the courtly readership for whom the minatures were painted. The audiences of townspeople and peasants are also decorous although they gesture and show active interest. As supposed records of actual audiences, there are no signs here of misbehavior of the kinds for which we know fines were levied,8 nor are there any traces of problems with crowd control and rowdyism, both of which are revealed by extant municipal records. More realistic and varied audiences appear in sixteen littleknown paintings from Cuzco, Peru, a mountain city that was the capital of the Inca empire before the Spanish conquest of South America. These seventeenth-century paintings, which depict Corpus Christi celebrations in Cuzco, are an important source of information about community drama. They are large panels (most are at least two meters in height and breadth), 94 Barbara H. Jaye and William P. Mitchell95 heavily influenced by Spanish and Flemish fifteenth- and sixteenth -century works, and some of them show over a hundred participants and spectators. Although the paintings reflect the colonial social context, our preliminary study indicates that most of the fiesta events and some of the depictions of audience follow European precedents.9 The paintings, twelve in the Museum of Religious Art in Cuzco, four in private collections in Santiago, Chile,10 include a Last Supper on a raised platform, processions of dignitaries and religious orders, pageant wagons, and shoulder-borne floats or andas like those still carried in the Corpus Christi fiestas in modern Cuzco. H The audiences are numerous, specific, and varied. They include peasants and nobles, churchmen and merchants , nuns, laywomen, and children. Because of careful portraiture as well as both devotion and inattention by people of different classes, these paintings are especially valuable as records of the iconography of audience. In our discussion of the paintings we have retained Mariátegui 's numbering of the paintings for scholarly consistency even though the basis for his numbering system is open to question . Although he acknowledges tiiat at least two different artists worked on the series, he assumes tiiat the paintings portray a single procession which follows a route from the cathedral around the main plaza to the municipal building (the cabildo) and back.12 Although diese paintings are all from Cuzco and portray aspects of the Corpus Christi celebrations, there is, however, no reason to suppose that they were painted in the same year or that they represent one particular celebration . The paintings have been dated c.1680 by their style and the incorporation of portraits of Carlos II and Bishop Mollineda (Bishop of Cuzco, 1673-99).13 The saints shown in the paintings have traditional European attributes—e.g., St. Jerome has his lion, St. Peter has his keys. However, die European iconography is modified by the indigenous American culture. 14 The accompanying table (see p. 96) summarizes the subjects of each of the paintings. The anonymous painters were followers of Diego Tito Quispe, a leading artist of the Cuzco school. The works of Quispe and other seventeenth-century Cuzco painters reflect the circulation in Peru of European woodcuts.15 Quispe is known tiirough his signed copies of Flemish engravings as well as for his independent paintings. The Corpus Christi paintings...

Critical Studies on Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (review)

Reviewed by: Critical Studies on Gonzalo Torrente Ballester Paul Ilie Janet Pérez and Stephen Miller , eds. Critical Studies on Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. Boulder: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1989. 196 pp. $40.00. Best sellers and postmodern fiction rarely originate in the same author, but Spain's eighty-year old Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, born into the same generation as Nobel Prize winner Cela, indeed successfully mixes conventional realism with metafictional fantasy. However, Torrente's career follows no linear sequence. The fifteen critical essays in this collection suggest that his penchant for parody, together with an abiding interest in myth, reveal themselves early and continue into maturity while alternating with such realistic novels as the trilogy Los gozos y las sombras. Torrente circumnavigates the straight course of contemporary narrative history from the Joycean intellectual hero (Javier Marino 1943) to the science fiction and/or serious spy novel of Hawkes, Pynchon, Burgess, Calvino, and Fowles (Quizá nos lleve el viento al infinito, 1984, studied in this collection by Kathleen Glenn). Torrente's long-term narrative diversity, no less than his affinities with international currents, stands out in this collection of fifteen essays. Janet Pérez summarizes the main points of each essay in a panoramic Introduction. Stephen Miller and she divide the collection into three groups: studies of individual works, of techniques and themes common to several novels, and of Torrente's literary theory. Despite these distinctions, the studies coincide in enough concerns to produce a connecting axis of critical problems inherent in most of Torrente's fiction. The most recurring observations involve his ironic and self-conscious humor, his metafictional subversions, political demythifications, and preoccupations with multiple-narrative personalities. Torrente's lesser-known works share prominence in this book with the more popular ones. The 1951 novel La princesa durmiente va a la escuela comes under a [End Page 639] speech-act analysis by Leo Hickey and reveals its echoes of Tristram Shandy and Don Quixote by virtue of "floutings of the Consistency maxim." The worrisome issue of Torrente's youthful alliance with right-wing movements surfaces in other early works that thematize fascist ideology, except that they apply mythological vehicles parodically in order to elude censorship, as Margarita Benitez shows for Ifigenia and El retorno de Ulises. Further light on Torrente's opinions emerges from an interview with Francisca and Stephen Miller, published here. Torrente's fiction's political underside is exposed by Frieda Blackwell's comprehensive view of literature-within literature. Despite his ludic postmodernism, the fiction-history relationship is reversible, as Lynne Overesch-Maister shows. Torrente complicates his intellectual task by his fiction's proteic dimensions, notably the metafictional characters in novels like Fragmentos de apocalipsis, described by David Herzberger, and the multiplication of narrative personality in Yo no soy yo, evidently, described by Carmen Becerra. Nevertheless, whether it is a quest for purity in a miracle play, as presented by Robert Nugent, or a conflict of good and evil in the apocalyptic terms described by Amparo Pérez Gutiérrez, Torrente lends himself to the formalist and intertextualist approaches of Santiago López Torres, Jaime Carbajo Romero, and Genaro Pérez. Ultimately one turns for guidance to Torrente's historiographical and artistic concepts, here represented by his aesthetic of grotesque reality, explained by Angel Loureiro, by the compendium identified by Janet Pérez in La rosa de los vientos, and, finally, by the "Apuntes literarios" studied by Miller. Paul Ilie University of Southern California Copyright © 1990 Purdue Research Foundation

JEWS AND DEVILS: ANTI-SEMITIC STEREOTYPES OF LATE MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ENGLAND

In pictorial representation, the earliest extant English caricature drawings ofjews stem from the thirteenth century. The best known, which may serve as our example, is the group caricature by an anonymous court scribe that appears at the head of a vellum Tallage Roll from the year 1233, now in the Public Record Office London.1 Whatever may have been in the mind of the sketcher, we cannot be certain of the precise intention of his drawing, perhaps little more than a doodle in an idle hour, for the contents of the roll do not allude to it. The figure, however, at the centre of the sketch is identified as Isaac of Norwich, whose head surmounted by a crown has three faces, one full, the other two in profile, each of them protruding into a goatee beard. It has been suggested that a fourth face, behind the others, is to be understood, so that the crowned figure of Isaac is shown casting his eye over his possessions to the north, south, east and west.2 In his day, Isaac of Norwich (d. 1235), the son ofjurnet, was probably the wealthiest Jew in England and the drawing seems to allude both to the sphere of his influence and to his double dealing. For, some years earlier, Isaac is reported to have loaned huge sums of money to the abbot and monks of Westminster, despite the support they enjoyed of Pandulf, Bishop Elect of Norwich and former Papal Legate, a clergyman who had tried to have the Jews expelled from England.3 Also in the mind of the anonymous caricaturist may have been the tallaging of the Jewish community during the reign of Henry III, by which Jews were forced to pay considerable levies to the Crown. We know that Isaac owned taxable assets and land at Norwich, but in 1231 the King, in an unusual step, granted him freedom from being tallaged for the rest of his life, though the records show that even after this he was sufficiently rich to remain among the most heavily taxed.4 Below the three faces of Isaac is a complex tableau that has been described by Cecil Roth as 'the setting as it were of a contemporary miracle play', the drapery representing 'the stage, and the architecture ... that of the church

Devotional Themes in the Violence and Humor of the Play of the Sacrament

Devotional Themes in the Violence and Humor of the Play of the Sacrament Richard L. Homan The Play of the Sacrament has long been regarded as a historical curiosity but not as a work of art worthy to be compared with the best English plays of the fifteenth century. William Davenport's assessment in his recent book, FifteenthCentury English Drama, exemplifies the position of most critics. After summarizing the plot, he says, "This material is presented in a very odd way; it sounds in outline like a devout miracle play, but in fact it is, for much of the time, farcical."! Davenport echoes the many critics who have interpreted the admittedly sensational events of the play as intentionally comic.2 Though Davenport applauds the author's effort to employ comedy toward teaching a lesson, he concludes that this playwright does so poorly: "When a dramatist controls the relationship between slapstick and exemplification better, as in Mankind, then it is no longer at all a matter of the 'addition' of comic effects to serious subject matter ..." (p. 76). This then is the gist of the complaint against the Play of the Sacrament, that its comedy is not integral. The scenes most at issue constitute the central third of the play in which Jonathas and his four companions witness a series of miracles occasioned by their torturing of a Host, and Doctor Brundyche and his boy Colle call upon Jonathas. Because the principals are Jews and because the events are so violent as to be gruesome, most critics have assumed an underlying tone of ridicule, and indeed the play derives from a traditional antiRICHARD L. HOMAN is an assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Rider College, Lawrenceville, New Jersey. 327 328Comparative Drama Semitic tale. Also, the Doctor's scene appears tangential at best to the main action. Hence, critics have charged, the play's violence is unintentionally comical, and its intentional comedy is irrelevant. My analysis will concentrate on these three scenes: the dismembering of Jonathas (11. 385-524), the introduction of the doctor and his boy Colle (11. 523-652), and the climax which includes the appearance of Christ (11. 653-797).3 Preceding these scenes is the circumstantial sequence which results in Aristorius delivering the Host to Jonathas. Following is the sequence in which Episcopus takes over and performs a series of liturgical actions. I will suggest that the scenes with the Jews could have been taken quite seriously by the original audience, both because of the skill with which they are written and because they incorporate devotional sensibilities popular in the art and prose of the fifteenth century. Furthermore, I will show that the admittedly comic interlude with the doctor and his boy reflects the serious message of the main action in ways not previously detected. In doing so, I do not pretend to solve ultimately the problem of interpreting the play, but I hope rather to add another layer of meaning to our reading of it. A similar purpose was accomplished by Sister Nicholas Maltman, who traces the liturgical references throughout the scenes in which the Jews appear to show that their actions are not simple, physical farce, but a detailed re-enactment of the Passion with the Host taking the place of Christ himself. Her study is significant not only because it shows a pattern behind the Jews' actions (the banns which accompany the play explicitly call their actions a "new passyon "), but also because it establishes the continuity of the scenes of torture with the liturgical scenes which end the play. Though arguing that "The Croxton play deserves greater respect than it has received," these central scenes must, according to Maltman "strike the modern reader as crude and grotesque" (p. 162). Yet, perhaps like much that we admire in the Corpus Christi plays, they need only to be seen more fully within the sensibility of the fifteenth century. Any performance which hazards the use of horrific special effects risks appearing ludicrous. If the audience has any doubt about their justification in terms of the overall theme and action, the effects cause laughter or, if they are quite vivid, revulsion. Such apparently was the...

The Durham Play of Mary and the Poor Knight: Sources and Analogues of a Lost English Miracle Play

The Durham Play of Mary and the Poor Knight: Sources and Analogues of a Lost English Miracle Play Stephen K. Wright Judging from the number of extant texts and documented performances, plays depicting the life and miracles of the Virgin delighted audiences across the breadth of medieval Europe for well over three centuries. Today the Marian miracle play is perhaps most commonly associated with fourteenth-century Paris due to the survival of the forty plays known collectively as the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages in the famous Cangé manuscripts (Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 819 and 820). During the Middle Ages, however, the genre flourished throughout the Continent. Examples are preserved in libraries scattered from Sweden to the Mediterranean and from Spain to Poland. England is a notable exception. Despite evidence of vigorous local traditions of civic and ecclesiastical drama from as early as the twelfth century on, the English Marian miracle play is an all but vanished species whose very existence can only be inferred from a handful of tantalizing clues. The deliberate zeal of Protestant reformers, the unpredictable changes in the tastes of audiences and patrons, and the slow devastation of centuries of neglect have combined to obliterate nearly every trace of the English performances of the miracles of the Virgin. Because of the unique place of the Marian miracle play in medieval culSTEPHEN K. WRIGHT, Assistant Professor of English at The Catholic University of America, is currently working on comparative studies of medieval historical and hagiographical plays and studies of theatrical patronage in late medieval France and Germany. 254 Stephen K. Wright 255 ture, however, it is especially important to examine every scrap of available evidence in order to develop as clear a picture as possible of the life of the genre in England.1 Unfortunately, the few hints that have survived have attracted little scholarly attention. What is more, by reading the extant records in isola­ tion from their Continental sources and analogues, English critics have occasionally been led into serious misinterpretations. A case in point is the short text commonly known as the “Dur­ ham Prologue.” The “Durham Prologue,” which is preserved on the dorse of a volume which has been in the possession of the Durham Dean and Chapter since at least 1359 (MS. 1.2 Archdiac. Dunelm. 60), was composed not far from its present home in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century.2 The lines are apparently written in a monastic hand and may well have been intended for performance at Durham Priory itself, the site of numerous musical and dramatic entertainments throughout the Middle Ages.3 The thirty-six lines of the text constitute what is obviously the complete spoken prologue to a Marian miracle play. The speaker begins with a conventional appeal to the “lordyngs” of the audience for silence and then gives a brief synopsis of the dramatic action which is to follow. What is to be presented, we are told, is the tale of a rich and powerful knight who falls into abject poverty when fortune turns against him. While lamenting his lost wealth, the knight is approached by the devil, who offers to restore his riches if the knight will swear allegiance to him and his host of demonic powers. Al­ though the knight apparently agrees to the bargain, he never renounces his devotion to the Virgin. Eventually, Mary takes pity on the knight and prays to her Son for his redemption. Her request is granted—by what means we are not told—and the knight is released from his pact with the devil. Despite the relatively clear outline of the contents provided by the prologue, however, there has been considerable confu­ sion and uncertainty about the exact subject of the lost play ever since the fragment came to light over twenty years ago. June Cooling, the first editor of the prologue, declined to offer any speculation whatsoever on the nature of the play which she had discovered.4 The history of contradictory opinions about the play can be traced back to J. A. W. Bennett, who mentions the Durham fragment in a 1967 review of Beverly Boyd’s edition of The English Miracles...

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access EVERYMAN AND MEDIEVAL MIRACLE PLAYS , edited by A. C. Cawley . Everyman, 1974 , pp. xxi+266 ; £1.90, paperback 95p. BARBARA C. RAW BARBARA C. RAW Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume 23, Issue 2, February 1976, Pages 78-a–78, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/23-2-78a Published: 01 February 1976