The Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play
Urban
Procession on Corpus Christi Day
How lucky that they should be arriving just in time
for the Corpus Christi procession… (p. 185)
She got seats in the grandstand. The happy solemn pomp of the procession lent
her a warm and rejuvinating glow. From
the days of her youth she probably knew all the phases, parts and rules of the
Corpus Christi procession as well as the master of ceremonies,as the old
audiences in their family boxes knew in every sense of their favorite operas. ….
(p. 186)
And the Emperor came : eight pure white horses
drew his carriage. On these, in black
coats with gold embroidery and wearing white periwigs rode the lackeys. They oooked like gods and yet were only the
servants of the demigods. On either side
of the carriage stood two Hungarian bodyguaredss with black and tawny panther
skins slung over their shoulder. They
were reminescent of the guardians of the walls of Jerusalem, the Holy City, whose king
the Emperor Francis Joseph was….
At the crossroad and at street
corners fat flowerwomen with layers of aprons—urban sisters of the fairies—watered
their glistening flowers from green watering cans. They smiled blessings at passing courting
couples, tied up lilies of the valley, and let their old tongues wag. The brass helmets of the fire brigade
marching to attend the display were bright reminders of danger and disaster.
(p. 188)[i]
The above passage
comes from a modern novel, Joseph Roth’s The
Radesky March. While celebrating the
annual display of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Josef’s rule, the description
shows how certain features of the medieval processional events we have talked
about above continued right to the eve, as it were, of World War I in Central
Europe. Some of these important elements
need to be noted before we make our transition into the study of the fifteenth-century
Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play. Of signal importance is the integration
of the religious spectacle to the civic celebration of the Apostolic Emperor’s rule. Franz Josef is at once a sacred and an
historical person and thus the procession embodies his symbolic role in that of
his political function as head of the Dual Empire. The crowds observing and the participants
parading share the same solemn and happy occasion. It is simultaneously a work of art, a theatrical
entertainment, and a civic duty, one that is experienced in the moment of this
particular day—the one in which the fictional characters in Roth’s novel attend—and
in the memory of the older members of the audience, and thus an experience
integrated into their own personal history.
Notice, too, how the costumes worn by the various attendants, guards and
celebrants in the procession combine animal skins, attesting to the essential
primitive elements of the Empire and combined nationalities, the masks and
disguises of biblical history, alluding to the religious and spiritual
dimensions of the dynastic House of Hapsburgh, and the old-fashioned garments
of the recent past, showing continuity of the entire people. The plan of the city—its street corners,
crossroads, public buildings, along with palace and cathedral—forms the stage
and scenic backdrop of this processional theatre. The flowerwomen remind the novelist of
fairies, that is, of the legendary and mythical inhabitants of the idealized
empire, while their care for the flowers points towards the erotic, fertilizing
dimension of all the Emperor and his entourage stand for, as did the wedding
ceremony and adoration of the newly married Queen Isabel coming into Paris. The firemen in their brass helmets signal a
different but related aspect of the procession : the danger and the
disaster that are ready to break out at any moment, the chaos and anarchy that
would explode into the world if the Emperor and the Empire did not exist.
Transition
from France to England, from Courtly to Civic Drama
The most well-known
play in late medieval drama—judged both by how often it is studied in
undergraduate courses and by how frequently it has been revived for modern
audiences—is the Wakefield Masters’ Second
Shepherds’ Play. It belongs to a
much longer series of so-called pageant plays performed annually—or at least
every two or three or more years, depending on financial, political and social
circumstances—as part of the Corpus Christi Day Festival in early spring. Rather than spending time rehearsing all the
historical details about the organization of the companies in Wakefield or some
other nearby cities that have been suggested as the original site of
performance, I want to examine the spiritual and symbolic geography of the
performance—as evidenced in this and other related mystery play texts—and to
make a few relevant comparisons and contrasts to the discussion of Froissart’s
account of the Civic Welcome accorded to Queen Isabel in Paris in 1389.
The author, known
only as the master maker of a few plays with a similar sense of magic realism
and symbolic intensity, may have been a former or a secret Jew.[ii] As a Crypto-Jew or a Marrano, he (or even
she, if we really want to muddle the surface of historical evidence) would be
aware of the rabbinical legends concerning the days of exqpectation and dread
near the start of the Common Era, before
the Fall of the Hasmonean/Herodean Temple, and of the way the narrative logic
of extension, enhancement and application of such rabbinical exegesis works, as
well as being sympathetic to and particularly sensitive to issues related to
child birth, persecution of families, and charges of magic and demonic
criminality.
Thus while this Second Shepherds’ Play[iii]
has become the representative type of a Passion Play or Corpus Christi Pageant.[iv] It is assigned a specific playwright, the
Wakefield Master, who supposedly composed this and a few other short plays in
the cycle of such celebratory dramas for presentation on Corpus Christi Day in
the town of Wakefield. As such it is the exemplar of how the idea of prefiguration,
thought to be the driving force in the creation of these kind of civic
performances, matches up not only the Old Testament type of the Incarnation and
its New Testament fulfillment, but also two other modes of pre-Reformation
exegesis: the allegorical projection of the doctrine of the Real Presence, that
is, the sacramental transformation of the Eucharistic wafer into the living
body of Jesus Christ, the corpus christi.
the raison d’ētre of the entire
festive as decreed by the Lateran Council of 1296 and finally promulgated by
the Bishops of England later in the mid-fourteenth century and adapted by
various cities and towns as a way of demonstrating their faith and power as
civic corporations; and lastly the moral; significance of the sacrament and
historical event within the time of ordinary Christians living in contemporary
times, who individually and collectively are to make of their mortal lives an imitatio christi, a living emblem of
Christian life.
Thus the entire
population plus all the visitors, casual and honorary, who observe and
participate in the plays that constitute the Pageant Cycle meet at the heart of
Christian sacred history mystically conceived.
Corpus Christi celebrates not the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus but
the sacrament of the Eucharist itself, that singular but extended moment when
human and divine history converge and when the corpus politicus of the city corporation embodies the physical
presence of the transformed Eucharist.
Simultaneous with the Roman Church as the historical and mysterious
embodiment of the corpus christi each
town and city in England—as well as urban spaces on the Continent also
celebrating the same mystery—enacts its sacred role.
As we have
indicated, the symbolic universe and the liturgical geography of the medieval
stage can be schematized as the stage on which many—certainly not all of the
play types—are performed. This is the
world-view, as it were, the Weltanschuung
of the age of transition between the feudal Christian-Latin synthesis we call
medieval and that of the Renaissance, a time when classical ideas and images
are self-consciously given new performative life, Christian ideals are no
longer strictly displayed within the parameters of Catholic beliefs such as the
real Presence, Figurative Representation,
Miliitant Saints, the efficacy of
relics, and so forth. These plays,
though they progress into the city through the gates of the walls, then wend their way through the labyrinth of narrow streets, actually present themselvres
in one of the great central plazas, usually in front of either the Guildhall or
the Cathedral, and may climax by an entry into the church itself, where the
final drama of End of Days is enacted before the altar and in the light of the
late afternoon sun shining through the high stained glass windows.
[i] Joseph Roth, The Radetsky March, trans. by Eva
Ticker, based on an earlier translation by Geoffrey Dunlop in 1933 (Harmondsworhth
Penguin, 1984); originally Radetskymarsh,
1932.
[ii] I have been working on and thinking about this and its
sister play-pageants for a long time.
Here are some of my published articles dealing directly with the topicm
of this little essay, each with sources listed in them: "Some Social and Theoretical Aspects of Late
Medieval Drama in London", Parergon 4 (1972). 10-19 ; "Medieval Theatre
in London", Playbill (Hamilton,
1973) 16-17 and 19 ; “Medieval Guilds, Passions and Abuse” Journal of Psychohistory 26:1 (1998)
478-513 ; “Ambiguous and Problematic Jews on the Late
Medieval English Stage: The Case of Mak the Sheepstealer in the Wakefield
Pageant in
Representations of Jews on the Medieval and Early-Modern Stage, ed. M.
Addison Amos (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003) ; “Jews on the Late
Medieval Stage” Queens College Journal of Jewish Studies 12 (2010)
13-22.
[iii] There is a First Shepherds’ Play marking a point in which the whole cycle of
Passion Plays in the Cycle breaks at tghe end of one year and then begins a
year later by overlapping t he story of the Incarnation and Birth of Jewsus as
the Christ Child, Interesting as the
earlier play—in terms probably of chronloogy of composition and of
performance—may be, it is not as complex artistically, symbolically or
psychologically, partly in terms of the need of the second play to recapitulate
quickly for the audience what happenbs in sacred history before the opening
scene, and partly in terms of the more dire circumstances in which the people
(generally, and probably moreover the Jews) of Wakefield found themselves
sometime in the middle years of the fifteenth century.
[iv][ Yet it is no more
typical; opf such plays in England than it is of the generic Passion plays in
western Europe; no more so than Everyman
is a typical morality play, since most other exemplars of these allegorical and
psychological dramas are long, multi-scenic with large casts of personified
characters. In fact, both the Second Shepherds’ Play and Everyman are atypical, and by their high
degree of artistic compression make excellent teaching texts for modern
undergraduates as they are for revival performances for lay modern
audiences. This is true in the same
sense that King Lear or Twelfth Night are atypical Elizabethan
plays.
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