Rixus, Praxis and Texts
in Late Medieval Drama
Like a parable in
the Gospels, the entrance of the three shepherds—the two fathers-of-a-family
and the young boy Daw their servant—are social types who interact in a
relatively small space in a relatively short time. But the details of their domestic
arrangements,m work experience, and relationship to one another spell out a
more relaistic, almost fictional of the world they inhabit than are found in the
moral narratives used in sermons. If it
were not in rhyming verse, their speech would come closer to a short story than
an exemplary tale.
But what
constitutes realism in a narrative tale, a work of art? This certainly isn’t a matter of the artist
(whoever it is that composed the script or that was called in later to adjust
it to current circumstances, to keep it up-to-date for the audiences who would
gather at Corpus Christi time to participate in the festival at Wakefield or
Townley or wherever the production could be afforded and felt necessary) ;
since the mirror on reality or the window into the concerns of the city fathers
and the ordinary citizens is neither inadvertent nor an unconscious reflection
of what shapes their use of traditional tropes, motifs and icons. Rather, the immediacy of the language and
allusion to persons, places and events in the locale is of the essence, and yet
serves as the physical grounds of the mythical world always waiting for
salvation and the rebirth each year of its Christian savior. Thus it is not a symptomatic performance, an
example of what Gombrich called (disparagingly when critical of Aby Warburg’s
studies of Renaissance culture and the long afterlife of symbols) physionomism.[i] In paintings of the Jesus and his family in
the manger in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve, the structures of the building, the
decor and attendant characters, animal as well as human, as well as the
costumes and other props, all attest the very opposite of an attempt to
reproduce an historically or geographically accurate scene from Israel in the
early years of the first century of the Common Era. Not only are these features recognizable to
the an original audience—the landscape, the architecture, the seasonal
atmosphere—but specific persons are recognizable, patrons, authorities, and
what we would call « characters », including often the painter
himself tucked into a corner and peering into the domestic circle of the Holy
Family and the adoring shepherds.
There is a
collaboration, to be sure, but not that of an artistic with aesthetic skills
and intellectual knwoledge of his antecedents in the long history of European
culture from the classical period through the Christian era and his rich,
powerful patrons, influential ecclesiastics who seek to at once impose their
own tastes and political interests through the commissioned work and to ensure
a decent, proper interpretation of sacred history for the spectators—from the
most lowly, illiterate to the most aristocratic, educated—to see and larn, find
comfort in, and be uplifted to spiritual ideals. The ruling guilds distribute the pageant
performances to the individual corporate groups of craftsmen, merchants
associations and parish organizations, some years having to approve of two or
more guilds joining forces, switching topics, and hiring outside expertise to ensure
continuity, coherence and proper standards are kept to. But there are other strange, secret and
unconscious motives at work too. On the
one hand, as we know from the small subversively satirical figures to be found
carved into niches and out-of-the-way corners of church design, the workmen
themselves—or women, who were key players in the building and designing of
cathedrals and other structures in the day-to-day industry—c reating a
counter-text or anti-text of iconography, from caricatures of the great patrons
and lords to self-portraits of themselves and their family members, through to
rude, obscene and satirical depictions of formal political and social
relationships, the whole of the late medieval work of art does not adhere to
official ideologies. The margins of a
manuscript provide a field for private and eccentric commentary, whether
carried out by some alternative artistic programme of the illuminator at some
point in the preparation for the inscription of the official text or at a later
point, following the scribe’s copying oput of a traditional document, when
decorators fill in the page. There are
also instances when bored or frustrated scribes themselves add asides—pictorial
as well as verbal—in the margins or other open spaces. If not overtly subversive in intent, such
excrensces may be simply playful squiggles, doodles and personal messages—I am
bored, I disagree, I know someone just like this character in the narrative.
We cannot know
usually what extempore actions or words were inserted into the performance of
the pageant plays by the actors, except by a very few casual remarks in
chronicles. There were a few times
recorded, for instance, when the actor hired to depict Jesus being crucified became
so caught up in the ecstasy of the moment that he almost killed himself by
having real nails driven into his body, or when the players representing Adam
and Eve in a Garden of Eden pageant were erotically aroused. The men hired to play Satan or Judas Iscariot
sometimes had to be brought in from distant towns because the audiences would
attack local actors after the performance, confusing fiction with reality. Not
everyone, by virtue of being born in the early fifteenth century, was au fait with the theories of figurative
interpretation of Scripture or the principles of symbolic thought.
Another bizarre
characteristic of guilds, brotherhoods, fraternities and similar corporate
bodies in the late Middle Ages is that, while nominally they were organized to ensure
an orderly, disciplined control over the city and its bourgeois population—matters
such as the due progression of apprentices in training towards becoming
journeymen and masters, the maintenance of quality control over products and
procedures of distribution, the monitoring of prices and wages, and also, as
with many social clubs today, sdupervision and chastisement of morals, ethics
and charitable works by members ; these guilds were also sites of drinking
parties, social-relaese and relief mechanisms, and even, it would seem, emotional
outbursts of energy—the so-called rixus
in which an enthusiastic, dionysian atmosphere was allowable within certain
boundaries. In times of crisis or
uprising,[ii]
the corporations could at the same time as they mediated the power-structures of
the feudal state, provide direction and opportunity for subversive,
revolutionary or heretical thoughts and acts.[iii] During the 1381 Jack Straw rebellion when
large numbers of disaffected townsfolk and especially craftsmen, overseers and guildsmen
marched on London demanding an end to threats of reducing them again to serfdom
and forced service of overlords, as well as the collaborationist middle class
within the city who opened the gates to them and joined in their burning of
feudal records and the homes of offending nobles, what was subsequently found
during the trial of offenders was that they were not apprentices, servants and
outlaws from the countryside causing mayhem for its own sake, but respectable
citizens, masters and sometimes professional men such as doctors and lawyers.[iv] This is also what happened during the
so-called Captain Ludd, Captain Swing and other agrarian revolts and sabotage
raids, rick-burnings and beating up of toll-officials in the early nineteenth
century :[v] to
the surprise of the defendants themselvs, the courts revealed that it was good
citizens and not riffraff causing the troubles—surprise because an older, more
archaic consciousness (or unconsciousness) seemed to take over during the
riots.[vi]
[ii] "Passion, Compotatio, Rixus and the Shameful Thing: English Guilds and the
Corpus Christi Cycles" Mentalities/Mentalités 11:2 (1997) 45-60.
[iii] "Peasant Rebellion as a Folk
Language", Miorita 3:1 (1977) 16-22.
[iv] "Clamor Horrendissimus - The Sacred
Shout in Folklore, Myth and Literature", in Dialogue on Religion - New Zealand Viewpoints 1977 eds. Peter Davis and John Hinchcliff
(Auckland University: Chaplain's Office,
1977), pp. 75-81.
[v] "'Scotch Cattle':
Una forma gallese di spettacolo.
Il dramma folkloristico alla luce della storia del teatro in
Europa", Biblioteca Teatrale 23/24
(1979), 117-131. (Translated by Cesare Molinari.)
[vi] "Ned Ludd's Mummers Play" Folklore
89:2 (1978) 166-178.
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