Domestic Crisis and Peace in the Home
Though depictions
of low people and places and accounts of squabbling between husbands and wives
were stock in trade of traditional satire, including the often raucous parodies
of the fabliaux—middle class couples aping the love-talk and erotic intrigues
of the aristocratic romances—what comes through in The Second Shepherds’ Play is a focus on the harships of the poor
families out on the Moors, the tensions between husbands and wives brought
about hard work, deprivation and forced labour for the absentee landlords of
the south. In one sense, these comical
complaints and rough attempts to maintain peace in the family appear as
continuous with the so-called gospel speech and franciscan realism developed to
instruct the urban and rural poor in the basics of Christian morality, a
submission to patient poverty to God and Church, and an imitation of the Holy
Family iconpographically seen in the stable, creche and fearful journey from
Bethlehem to Egypt. In another sense,
however, there is a rumblking of discontent that derives from the new sense of
injustice and lack of sympathy from Church and State evidenced in Lollard
sermons, turned to poetry in the mid-fourteenth-century Piers Plowman—Jesus and the humble clerics facing up to the
hypocrisy and corruption of the princely ecclesiastical clergy.
More than that,
there is something distinctly unchristian about the way the three shepherds
from Wakefield come into the open place of the stage, probably descending
fropm the pageant wagon that has made its way through the streets of the town,
and talk directly to each other and the crowd pressed around them : they
are the men who suffer from the bad weather of the world, from the cruelty of
their masters, and from the officials of church and state who neglect them
against the principles of the religion that supposedly is meant to care for
them in its pastoral system. Those
winter storms that assail them also suggest that nature and its creator have
abandoned them to their own fate.
But we sely shepherdes/ that
walkys on the moore,
In fayth, we are nere-handys/
outt of the doore !
No wonder, as it standys,/ if we
be poore,
For the tylthe of our landys/
lyys falow as the floore,
As ye ken,
We are so hamyd,
For-taxed, and ramyd,
We are mayde hand-tamyd
To be sure, one of
the ways in which these cries for aid and compassion fit within the order of
feudal and clerical England is by imagining that the time of the scene presents
itself before the coming of Christ, a time when the devil held sway, the Old
Law proved inadequate, and there was no scheme of salvation and sacramental
system to provide love to the folk. That
being the case, then these poor men standing on the rain and wind-swept moors,
though they represent the three shepherds who will hear the call of the angels
announcing the imminent birth of Jesus and therefore are men of Judea, in other
words, Jews of the old dispensation, are also more than
Christians-in-waiting : they are contemporary Yorkshiremen suffering from
a government that, for all its paraphernalia of piety, is no better than a
Herodian tyranny. The Church in England
lacks grace. The King in London and his
political body are no better than pagan rulers.
They occupy a land that deserved better.
Such talk, of course, is seditious and heretical. Note here too the ironic forebodings that
begin in this opening long speech by the first Shepherd :
There shall com a swane/as
prowde as a po,
He must borw my wane,/ my ploghe
also ;
Then I am full fane/ to graunt
or he go.
Thus lyf we in payne,/ anger,
and wo,
By nyght and day.
He must haue if he langyd,
If I should forgang ity.
I were better be hangyd
Then oones say hym nay.
Literally,
following the letter of the text and its seeming tones of ironic resignation to
the injustices of the times, the shepherd says he will always be subject to the
power of the gallants who are sent to rob him of his worldly goods : the
« swane » who demands to confiscate his wagon and plow cannot be
resisted. If there were resistance, the
shepherd would be punished, as good as hanged for his efforts. There is no
justice for the poor. However, read in a
slightly different light, the passage
begins to foretell of a different order of things. « There shall com a swane » seems
to begin to say « There will come a day when a different kind of visitor
comes into the world, a representative of a higher order of Truth and
Justice. » This strange figure will
overturn the current order and replace it by something else. Then, not the lowly and ignorant countryman
will be threatened by hanging if we dare to stand up for his rights and to keep
possession of the implements he needs to till the soil, reap a harvest and feed
his family, but another man will let himself be hanged, be crucified on a
cross, in order to open the way to salvation.
Yet at this stage
of history, in the fictional mystery of the play, the implications of his words
are not clear to him and the gospel talk remains a vague, more than half-hidden
message, which nevertheless should be grasped by an audience who are regular
church-goers. That it is not, and only
gains its way towards the surface of the discourses of the players, stands as a
further indictment of the failure of the local priests to instill a deep
understanding of what the Incarnation means.
The great hint lies in the setting of this drama. Always visible as the backdrop to the action
that circles around the platea stands
a model of the creche scene, fixed against the imposing entrance to the
Cathedral : and though the occluded sight will show Mary and the Infant
Jesus, along with the other objects and characters familiar to this iconic
structure, for the moment—the
overwhelming proportion of the time and lines devoted to the comedy of the
shepherds in their miserable and foolish lives—the promise of salvation is
there only in potentia.
Because the still silent voice of Christian expectation lies fallow in
the soil of the text for so long, the emphasis falls on the characters, actions
and speeches to present a sustained complaint of Jews in England in the
fifteenth century who are themselves hidden, probably all hidden in the
disguise of Christian identities—such as the friars who are responsible for
keeping the words of the script up to date and relevant in each annual
performance, the professional singers and dancers who who help organize the
performances, and the anonymous visitors who come into Wakefield for the
festival for entertainment and a chance to listen with their sensitized ears to
a resonance in the performance that expresses their longing for redemption,
justice and freedom to be themselves.
What they want most of all for the moment is shalom ba-bayit, peace at home: To live in harmony and love with
their wives and husbands and their children.
The second shepherd comes on stage as the first finishes his long poetic
speech and begins by repeating with variations the complaints of the first,
this time stressing the problems within the household brought about by wives
and children who suffer from poverty and neglect. Young men are lured into marriage with promises
of love and pleasure but soon learn that life is hard, women demanding and sons
and daughters constantly in need of what fathers cannot bring them—food,
clothing, comfort. This litany of
unhappiness comes at once closer to the standard complaint literature of the
period with its misogynistic themes of women’s nagging for everything,
including sexual favors, infants’ squalling and puking, and a home that is
anything but pleasant to be in; and to the confusion, madness and meaningless
of life without a Christian base. At the
same time, the speech comes closer to sounding explicit hints of what is to
come. God is mentioned, albeit in oaths
and in empty asseverations of hopelessness, and there is reference to “as euer red I pystill”—indicating that
the speaker has enough literacy to read the Epistle, meaning by metonymy the
whole of the New Testament, although in the context of the fiction it can also be
taken to refer to the Hebrew Bible, with its prophetic promises of a messianic
time to come.
It is important to remember that for Crypto-Jews and Marranos (they are
not the same, to be sure), the main object of their presence in such
performances and in the textualized expressions found in the script is not to
be recognized, not even to be suspected.
Yet as we look backwards through the lens of history, not least our own
experiences of the Holocaust in the mid-twentieth century, our eyes and ears
attuned to the lies and distortions of anti-Semitism, we cannot but drawn
towards to the conjunction of factors: first, and most obviously, the strong
emphasis on the pre-Christmas events in the play, that is, the fact that barely
one seventh of the whole text deals with the appearance of the angels to the
shepherds and then their appearance before Mary and her child; second, the
nature of the things that are wrong with the world that cries out for a
messianic figure, such as natural disasters, mismagement and corruption in
both Church and State, and disharmony between members of the same family, their
neighbors and strangers, like Mak and his wife Gillian, who also live on the
moors. We shall also see that in Mak the sheep-thief there is a strange,
mystical, almost kabbalistical language that makes him more than just a
northern (Scottish) invader; but someone who both is excluded from the new, rising
dispensation of Jesus incarnation and excludes himself and his family from
participation in the church’s body of Christ.
Recognizing these aspects of the play require us to develop a new way of
seeing medieval drama, just as it makes it necessary to recognize that there
were people involved in the production and reception of these plays who saw the
world differently from most of their fellows in Wakefield and its
surroundings. To see the world
differently moreover does not only mean that they had alternative
interpretations of words, images, and gestures, that is, gave them new and
other meanings; but that they actually saw differently, saw different things in
the world, as they heard other resonances and imp;lications in the words, and
valued thew action of the players in different ways.
[i] “The [Second] Shepherds’ Play”,
Townley Plays in Joseph Quincy Adams, ed., Chief
Pre-Shakespeareean Dramas: A Selection of Plays Illustrating the History of the
English Drama from its Origins down to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Houghton
Mifflin Co./The Riverside Press, 1924) pp. 145-157.
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