The Clashing Texts of Culture
To « brush history against the grain »
(die gegen den Strich zu bürsten], as
Walter Benjamin urged, one has to learn to read the evidence against the rgain,
against the intentions of those who had produced it.[i]
Is there a clash of
cultures in The Second Shepherds’ Play ?
Not at all, common sense tells us : there are contentions, tensions and
debates, to be sure, between the simple folk who live on the moors and have
been subjugated by the rich and powerful landlords of the south. These are the divergent points of view
characteristic of what is called hegemony versus
counter-hegemony, or as I have described them often as a text versus a
counter-text : two versions of the facts and their interpretation, each
one complementing the other, and offering legitimate, understandable narratives
about the existential world. The
wealthy, titled aristocrats and the upper middle class burghers of the cities
believe that they have a right to dominate society and to control the land, the
workers, and the products and profits created in the territory they own. The shepherds and their families, servants
and small-village craftsmen associated with them believe they are being
exploited because they have been conquered, placed in inferior, dependent
positions, and are not treated with justice or compassion, as the so-called
Chrisatian language of feudalism pretends.
Both sides in this struggle for control over the land and the texts
agree basically on the facts, but disagree on the interpretation of the
situation.
There is, however,
another clash that does come close to the collision of world-views implied in
the modern paradigm. This is based on a
struggle between a text and an anti-text, wherein if one side comes to dominate
the world then the perceptions of what constitute reality and the actions consequent
to that way of valuing the facts on the ground leave no room for the other side :
only one Weltanschauung or World
Picture can be legitimate and viable, the other being reduced to myths,
legends, folklore and empty babble. What
the shepherds feel and complain about is, in the eyes of the great lords and
ecclesiastical princes, is at best a heresy, an illusion—or a worthless residu
of the ancien regime, that of, the Jews and their Dead law of Moses.
The basic comic irony
of the play therefore is that what the shepherds believe to be true about the
world, its unfairmness and its lack of Christian charity, is true if the
fiction of liturgical history is true, in other words, that they are living in
a world that is—or is just like—that in which the Saviour had not yet been
born. The satirical element in these
complaints reveals itself in the fact that, as their language already bears the
burden of Christian themes and images, the sermo
humilis of sermons, liturgy and iconography, and therefore the powerful men
and institutions oppressing the shepherds are hypocritical and demonic. For as the audience and participants putting
on the Corpus Christi Festival know all too well, the present time is that of
the Christian dispensation, and the failures to live up to the standards of Christ’s
mission are the fault of the individuals occupying positions of authority. The foolishness of the three shepherds
becomes manifestly the wisdom of God, and their physical and emotional suffering
is a key feature in their imitation of Jesus in the world. If this is comical, then it is in the same
sense as Dante’s great epic journey of the soul’s journey from suffering in the
world to salvation in heaven is a Divine
Comedy, a transition from sinfulness through purification to grace.
The opening act, as
it were, of the play continues as the three shepherds make their enrtances one
at a time, overlapping with each other, and making their cumulative complaints
about the ills of a fallen world into which they have born. Like the dancers in
a local folk play, they speak or chant their lines and set up the conditions for
the action which will follow. The two
elder shepherds (Pastor I and pastor II) are older, married men, with families
and domestic responsibilities. The third
shepherd is a youth, Daw (or David) works for them, and his complaints concern
the poor treatment he receives from his masters.
Unlike classical
and courtly pastorals set in the Arcadian world of a pre-modern wilderness,
this shepherds’ play speaks of the concerns of a harsh contemporary reality,
using the plain language—albeit in rhymed and metrical lines—of sermo humilis, the humble discourses of
gospel speech whose themes are not merely rustic and rude but above all spoken
in the dialect of the time and place where the pageant theatre is
performed. Whereas the swains and nymphs
of ancient Greek (e.g., Theocritus) or Latin (e.g., Virgil) pastoral speak in
allusions to mythic characters and events, complaining of the inroads of the
city and court as corrupting influences, these three rural laborers remind us
of Chaucer’s « shitten shepherd » in the Canterbury Tales. In Italy
and France, at around the same time, what is already early Renaissance
classicism shapes the characters, settings, actions and themes of pastoral
poetry in Italy and France, as it will a century later in England, too, in
Spenser’s Shepherds Calendar—even
though this courtly poet draws on a background in the language of Chaucer and
the Wakefield Master.
Still more than the
two elder men who preceded him, Pator III, Daw, brings to the surface of the
text references to Christian topics, from liturgical formulae to
premonitions of the coming Messiah :
Crystys crosse me spede,/ and
Sant Nycholas !
There-of had I nede ; / it
is wars the it was.
Whoso couythe take hede/ and
lett the world pas,
It is euer in drede/ and brekyll
as glas,
And slyths.
This warkd fowre neuer so,
With meruels mo and mo,
And all thyng wrythys.
The young man
speaks also of Noah’s Flood and more vaguely and allusively of the end of time
that is approaching, yet this language is what forms the assimilated patterns
that lie well below the consciousness of the speaker or his two listeners.
These allusions
rise even more ocne the second act of the play begins, that is, when the action
concerning Mak the Sheep-stealer begins.
[i] Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof : The
Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures (Hanover, M and London: Brandeis
University Press and Historical Society of Israel, 1999), Introduction, p. 24.
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