Urban Drama, Part 1

Froissart’s Description of a City Welcome 

in Paris

and the 

Wakefield Master’s 

Second Shepherds’ Play.

Theoretical Opening

“As the tents of Kedar” (Cant. i.5).  As the tents of the Ishmaelites are ugly without and comely within, so also the disciples of the wise, though apparently wanting in beauty, are nevertheless full of Scripture, and of the Mishnah, and of the Talmud, of the Halacha, and of the Aggadah.

Shemoth Rabbah, chap. 23

Over the past twenty or thirty years, many authors have touched on transformations of political and social power on the medieval stage and this has led to more and more mining of the resources in urban and ecclesiastical archives, investigations in the demography and economics of city life in the Middle Ages, and the ideological functions of the great processional drama performed, often at huge expenses—so that by the close of the medieval period many towns and cities could no longer afford to put them on.  This approach seems to have pushed aside somewhat the role of crowds and of space in regard to the display, manipulation, of the city-scape, the kind of study prevalent earlier in the twentieth century.  For me, the study of crowds into urban space and of the reshaping of the mentality of the new age coming into being needs to be revisited: the old questions have not been fully answered, and the contemporary analyses seem too ephemeral and formulaic. 

There is a tendency these days—over the last ten to fifteen years—to set medieval literature, including drama, so firmly into specific times and p/laces, that meaning, insofar as there is anything to be found in such an exercise, belongs only to the usually one-off moment of performance.  This goes even further than the trend in the mid-twentieth century to treat such works as verbal icons and to read them so closely that they no longer can be explained by what used to be called sources and analogues.  Such modernist interpretations provided descriptions of how a poem, a narrative or a drama was made, but not what it meant to the people who performed, observed or thought it worthy top formally remember the text.  While such an approach to the integrity of the text was an improvement on two other kinds of older criticism, one that  tried to read literature back into biographical features of the author—and this has a later avatar in taking these poetic or dramatic documents as the equivalent of dreams or associationist discourses interpreted by psychoanalytical paradigms; and the other, related in romantic theory, to the critical reader’s responses as orchestrated effects of the poet’s emotional score—something also given a contemporary spin in audience-response theory—the approach still remained within the perspective of what had developed out of Christian biblical exegesis, albeit in an ahistorical way: there was assumed to be an idealized, perfect reality which the poem, narrative or drama reflected or opened a window on, that window, in addition, serving as a rhetorical lens to consolidate and sharpen the words, images and actions perceived.

In this little essay I am going to compare and contrast—and inter-illuminate—two rather different kinds of text: one, the description in Froissart’s Chronicles of a royal entry into Paris in 1389; the second, the script of the so-called Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play from the same period, the late fourteenth century.  First of all, taking them at face value, I accept them as products of Christian society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.  Both of the plays represented are examples of street theatre in which not only large numbers of people from almost all levels of society participate, both in the organization and performance of the festival and concomitant theatrical event, with all its ritual functions of transformation through education and assimilation of the powerful forces articulated or created by the event, but also the throngs of people who attend, the spectators who arrive from all parts of the city and the outlying districts, as well as visitors, pilgrims and special guests invited to represent important institutions of the nation and foreign governments the organizers of the performance wish to impress.  Some of the guests themselves are granted special status in that they see and perform in all or at least the most important parts of the plays, while most people see only portions of the total theatrical event and enjoy the whole by a form of synecdoche or metonymic contagion, the part not only representing the whole but acting as a conduit for meanings and feelings to pass from one to the other.

But then, later, these same texts and the performances they outline, recall and project into remembered matrices of thought, will be examined from a Jewish perspective: (1) in the sense that we ask what if some of the composers of the scripts, the organizers of the festival, the players dancing, singing and speaking the text, and the people watching and listening as the procession went by and the skits were enacted, what if some of them were Jewish? (2) in a different sense, how do we, if we are Jews today could imagine ourselves to be Jews living at that time, how would we have reacted to such festive and dramatic performances in places where we lived?  (3) More particularly, would our own Jewish sensibilities, knowledge and experience then or (4) now reconfigure the way the performances can be understood and remembered?  Lastly, (5) is there any intellectual or critical advantage to be gained from asking such as if questions and exploring our own receptivity and critical assessment of these texts?  If this line of questioning is to be open to discussion, however, then we must shut down much of our normal sources of evidence, and proceed as though we were discussing another matter and using a different form of argument altogether.  In reading our texts, therefore, we have not only to read closely, contextually and be aware of subtexts, but also of techniques of reading against the grain, seeking tensions or, if they are not explicit and visible in the words and images, then in the distortions to the structures, in the gaps and excrescences otherwise inexplicable; that is, what seem s ugly on the outside by these deformations and breaks may actually be beautiful in terms of what is implied indirectly and alluded to through several layers of mirroring.