Urban Drama, Part 15

Birth Pangs of a New Era in the World

At about the same time in the first half of the fifteenth century that this play was being produced in northern England as part of the Corpus Christi Day festivities, the great surge forward in thought, the refinement of artistic sensibilities and the development of self-consciousness about man’s place in the universe was taking place in Italy : the Renaissance.  The stirrings of the Reformation were starting to be felt in the cities and towns of Central Europe, especially in German-speaking areas, and would soon begin to converge with the new techniques of critical reading and critical thinking in order to effect a split in the mentalities that would set loose violent forces for centuries to come.  The northern parts of England, including the borders with Scotland, were not deaf to the sounds of such changes, nor immune to the ideas thus generated.  The shepherds on the moors show in their disgruntlement with the exploitation of their southern lords an awareness of something new about to be born into the world.  Their distrust of Mak who comes from across the border with the nation of Scotland is mixed in with these suspicions of awkward and dangerous metamorphoses, not just in the instability of cross-border raids and wars, but in a clash of sensibilities—the sheep-stealer brings on a sense of emotional and spiritual insecurity. 

The other three shepherds having lay down to sleep, Mak draws a magic circle around them and recites a spell to keep them unconscious while he goes about his mission of stealing sheep.  The incantation, to be sure, is a mishmosh of Christian formulae and folkoric rigmarole.  To a certain degree, he is very much what the others have accused him of being—an outsider and a thieving wretch ; and in so doing, inadvertently on his part, he is also a prefiguration of the way in which Christ comes into the world « like a thief in the night » to bring salvation, or, put another way, to cheat the devil of his due by stealing from him the souls of innocent men and women whose Original Sin dooms them to perdition without any means of absolving their guilt.  In this unconscious parody of Jesus himself, Mak enacts the part of an anti-Christ or, on a smaller scale, of the typical Jew in the context of Christian anti-Semitism.

When he brings the stolen lamb to his own house on the other side of the platea, he hands it over to his wife Gyll (guile).  Uxor, as she is called in the stage directions, thus also plays a part in the mock drama of the Nativity scene on Christmas Eve, since she will present herself as the mother of the little horned boy child, the stolen sheep, or, in other words, the Virgin Mary to the Lamb of God.  Like Eve to Adam, Gyll shows herself as the clever spouse in the couple, the inventor of the ruse to disguise the sheep as a newborn child. 

Leaving his wife to elaborate the necessary disguises and script the game they will soon play, Mak returns to the sleeping three shepherds.  As the first shepherd awakens, he makes a speech full of more than malaprops and misperceptions : he establishes the grounds on which the real Nativity Scene will be manifest, these fragments of discourse waiting only for the correct voicing and the completion of the iconic syntax :

Resurrexit a mortruis !/ Hauen hald my hand.

Iudas carnas dominus !/ I may not well stand :

My foytt slepys, by Ihesus ;/ and I water fastand.

I thoght that we layd vs/ full nere Yngland.

The little joke about dreaming that he and his fellows had been transported to England creates sufficient ironic displacement to tickle the fancy of the audience of northern English townsfolk and countrymen : the trick of geographical confusion, like that of inverted time—the then of the first Christmas and the now of Corpus Christi Day in the Christian England—suggests strongly that the playwright and his crew of performers, along with the original audience, were all quite aware of the multiple and flexible nature of the festival stage they acted on. 

What they don’t speak of explicitly or hint at obliquely enough for the joke to work for everyone involved is the Jewishness of the time and place—and perhaps of the action and themes—where the fictional here and now of the pageant play they present.  As each of the three shepherds rouses himself from his night’s sleep, they feel physically doped, mentally confused, and spiritually full of suspicions about the transformation in the construction of the world as they know it.  In addition to the first shepherd’s remarks cited above, the second says, 

A ye !

Lord, what I haue slept weyll,

As fresh as an eylll,

As lyght I me feyll

As leyde on a tre.

What seems like a refreshing sleep seems to make him light-headed and to feel like a slippery eel.  Then the third shepherd complains of how « my [body] qwakys,/My hert i sis outt of my skyn » and he feels headachy.  They are unaware that Mak has cast a spell over them.  But this drowsiness and disorientation also mark them out as part of a world going through its preparations for the coming of the Messiah. 

While they then discover that one of their flock is missing and decide they must follow Mak home to check out whether or not he has taken it there, all this farcical behavior and talking in twisted discourse of longing for the Christian savior to arrive, as though they had been and still remain partly in an ecstatic dream.  More than them, however, Mak attempts to bluff his way out of the situation he knows will prove difficult for him to explain if they find the lamb at his house, he conjures up for them a supposed dream he had, a premonition that his wife Gyll passed through labor pains and delivered herself of a new son, one « to mend oure flok. »  The more he prevaricates and tries to exonerate himself, the more he becomes twisted into the fabric of the false tale, and thus sets himself up to be the butt of the comical punishment that will be inevitable when his criminal act is exposed.  Foolish as he is, of course, he is more aware of what is happening than his three companions on the moor, and very conscious too of his alienation from their domestic and pastoral hopes and aspirations, thus indicting himself as the Jewish other whose messianic dreams are as empty as they are vain. 

The inevitability of the Christian incarnation at this date on the eve of Christmas and its spiritual reality manifest in the Nativity pageant wagon always visible on the platea, institutionalized in the church structure to which this open space forms the courtyard, and the memorial of an event long since happened in history evident in the festive celebration of the holiday that has drawn the spectators to Wakfield, all this confirms the Jewish exclusion from the benefits of the salvation offered in the Eucharistic miracle celebrated by the whole Mystery Cycle—and yet a celebration whose joyful reality rests on the comic role of Mak, his wife Gyll and their parodied son, the little day-star child with the horns of a ram.  What the three shepherds long to see so much can only be glimpsed first in the almost meaningless fragments of their speech and then secondly in the humorous illusion of Mak and Gyll’s joke : only after that will the angel announce the real nativity and lead them to the creche across the acting place—and even then only through the physical punishment of Mak.