PREAMBLE
In his recent book on The Medieval Saints' Lives: Spiritual Renewal and Old French Literature (1995), Duncan Robertson identified St. Augustine's conversion as a classic case of 'hagiographical reader's response'.(1) In Book VIII of Augustine's Confessions, Ponticianus recounts how two converts had been influenced by the story of St. Antony, the Egyptian hermit, to abandon their respective fiancées in order to follow Christ. Impressed, St. Augustine fell into an agony of indecision from which only his reception of the Biblical text of St. Paul (Rom.13.13-14) would deliver him. When the text said 'put on the Lord Jesus Christ and take no thought for the flesh in your desires' (induite dominum Iesum Christum et carnis providentiam ne feceritis in concupiscentiis), Augustine received it as a call to immediate conversion.(2) In consulting Scripture, Augustine was imitating St. Antony who had taken a public reading of the Gospel in church as personal advice to convert. Thus Robertson defines conversion in the hagiographic tradition, in similar terms to Kierkegaard's 'leap of faith', as a 'seemingly absurd belief that the text which one reads is directed to one personally.'(3)
For those interested in Medieval theatre, the classic case of audience reception would be the early sixteenth-century Dutch play of Mariken van Nieumeghen in which Mariken is converted by watching the 'Play of Masscheroen' performed before her on a wagon. She also receives the text - the play-within-the-play's abstract debate about salvation - as a personalized message.(4) The only difference is the medium by which the message is transmitted. Instead of just hearing or reading a text, as in the case of St. Anthony and St. Augstine, the play-within-the-play actualizes it before her. In the context of performance,
where image (worth a thousand words) is allied with rhetoric, the result can be more persuasive than a sermon.(5) In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the possibility of conversion through watching a play was thought to be a real-life experience. A popular tale of a husband murderess pops up in association with Amsterdam, Kings Lynn and Strasbourg. With minor variations on the plot, the guilty wife is generally so moved by a stage representation of a murder, which reminds her of the one she orchestrated, that she immediately confesses her sin.(6) Likewise, Hamlet's expectations for The Murder of Gonzago presuppose a similar emotional identification between actors and spectators, when he says that he has 'heard\ That guilty players sitting at a play' have occasionally been so struck by an artful scene that they proclaim 'their malefactions'.(7) For Hamlet, there was never any doubt that this play-within-the-play was the thing wherein to 'catch the conscience of the King.'(8)
In the case of Eloy Du Mont's Résurrection de Jésuschrist, the 'King' is neither Shakespeare's Claudius, nor his Danish twelfth-century prototype, Feng, but François I, roy treschrestien (1515-1547), in little danger of falling from grace. It is the author, Eloy Du Mont, whose grace is in question, not with respect to the Catholic Church, but insofar as his own claim for artistic recognition is concerned. Sometime around 1535, Maître Du Mont, régent and later principal of the Collège du Mont in the Université de Caen (1546), presented his 4,000 line Resurrection Play to François I.(9) Documents recording the specifics of the occasion have not survived. Neither is there any proof of a performance before the king. We can only hypothesize that François I accepted the manuscript, dedicated to him by Du Mont, into one of his royal libraries by its existence today in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (B.N. fr. 2238). Rubricated round stamps placed at the beginning and end of the manuscript in the seventeenth century identify its provenance with the Bibliothecae Regiae of either François I or Henri II.(10)
The acceptance of the playtext into a library is little guarantee that either the play or its author was received favourably. In fact, hints repeatedly dropped by Du Mont that he would like to serve the King as a valet, implying the role of valet de chambre played by Clément Marot, must have been rejected. There is no evidence that he ever entered the Royal Court on any footing. Nevertheless, if we are to trust his own words, he did speak to the king on one occasion when he would have had an opportunity to present the playtext and possibly even a performance of it to François I. A suitable year for this event would have been 1535, which offers three opportunities for the king to have been in Vatteville (near Rouen): 7-12 April, 22 April or 8-15 May.(11) In a poem of a later date, Du Mont mentions an encounter at this location as well as some unspecified gift to himself for which the king was responsible:
Aulx bienfaicteurs, entre lesqueilz avez
Le premier lieu (Sire), car vous sçavez
Qu'a Vasteville il me fut ung present
Faict de par vous, lequel sera present
Tant que vivray en fons de ma memoire.
Je n'avoies pas (Sire), non ay je encore,
Mery qu'a moy vous voulissez parler.(12)
The very reaction of Du Mont to the circumstance of speaking to the king as something of which he was never worthy (non ay je encore, \ Mery...) suggests that it was entirely exceptional. However the author may have been rewarded (il me fut ung present), possibly for the play, François I did not promote the transmission of the playtext, as a true patron should, by having it copied, or printed, and circulated. Publication was a strong possiblity, because four families of booksellers (libraires) were printing, among other plays, the Passion of Jean Michel between 1507 and 1541.(13) Put away for posterity, Du Mont's Résurrection remains to this day deprived of a personal history of reception. One may discuss its reception only in generic terms.
The playtext of the Résurrection de Jésuschrist may be regarded in the same light as Mariken van Nieumeghen as a transitional or liminal work between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is imbued with a Franciscan-like piety as emotive as that of the Dutch 'Play of Masscheroen' which so effectively brings about Mariken's conversion. Du Mont's Resurrection Play is mainly a series of Andachtsbilder or devotional tableaux which move from the Crucifixion through the Deposition and Burial of Christ to a ritualized Visitatio Sepulchri (heightened by notated liturgical fragments), at which point the transition to resurrection occurs. The structure is basically comic in the medieval sense of a movement from mournful tragedy to bathos; the sub-plot of the stereotypical guards who cannot manage to prevent the resurrection concludes the play. It is a transitional work insofar as it elaborates its Biblical source in a late-medieval manner, while anticipating some of the dramatic principles of the French Renaissance: the abrupt beginning in medias res and the repetition of previous events, a decorum which omits the popular torture scenes of the Passion, and a shift from anthropomorphic to psychological representations of good and evil. Consequently, two characters who typify the medieval mystère have been ostracized: God the Father and the Devil. None of these principles need draw upon an Aristotelian poetics, since Horace's Ars poetica suffices to justify them all. The mixture of the grand style with the playful also indicates that Du Mont consciously adopted Horace's precept 'to delight and to teach'. Furthermore, the poetics of Horace was still the authoritative work in France at the time; the first Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics was not available in France until Alexander Paccius' edition of 1536.(14) Since Du Mont was a renowned Latinist,(15) and there is no proof that he taught Greek, he is unlikely to have consulted Aristotle while compiling his play.
On the medieval side, the Franciscan spirituality which Du Mont has adopted in large part from the pseudo-Bonaventure Meditatio Vitae Christi expresses the 'affective piety' which is normally associated with the Low Countires. The opening, almost static tableau leading up to the Deposition can be related to paintings like Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece as discussed by James Marrow in his Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (1979). One point in the play at which the graphic fuses with the rhetorical occurs in the pietà scene, when Mary laments her son's death at the moment of burial:
Il est deffaict, palle et hydeux
Ou beau estoit et triumphant.
On l'a traicté comme ung meschant,
Battu, craché, tiré, tendu.
Pour d'humain gerre estre marchant
Son propre corps il a rendu.
Il a son sang tout espandu
Pour faire la redemption.
Il est mort, en la croix pendu,
Par dure mort et passion.
Las ! qui n'auroit compassion ...? (16)
Here, the rhetorical devices of repetition with variation, inversion of syntax (Pour d'humain ... marchant\ Son propre corps ...rendu), asyndeton (Battu, craché ...), and antithesis (hydeux\ Ou beau estoit ...) with others like the interrogatory apostrophe and the common anaphora developed elsewhere, are intended to induce an extended meditation upon the sufferings of Christ and his mother. Such an interpretation of the authorial intention is reinforced by the total absence from this play of other medieval conventions like typology and allegory, the didactic expositor, prologue and epilogue. Thus the pathétique as a subject for meditation overshadows more rational appeals for faith. Whether the term 'empathy' or the 'emotive theory' is employed to rationalize the relationship between text and recipient,(17) one could explain it simply as a two-way outpouring of emotion which triggers the first level of an aesthetic response.
ARGUMENT
The question to be addressed in this paper is whether a religious play, whose aesthetic expression is purely Catholic and whose original reception in the sixteenth century appears to have been weak, would invite a better reception today, if not in France then cross-culturally in an English-speaking nation. At a first glance, the success of such a venture seems unlikely, especially in France to whose tradition it genuinely belongs. In general, students throughout the world, not to mention popular audiences, are unschooled in the Biblical episodes appropriated by the drama. Today, students everywhere know no more of the Bible than of classical mythology.
France itself appears to be much less open to religious drama now than in the first half of the sixteenth century. A recent attempt at resurrecting a version of Gréban's Mystère de la Passion on the parvis of Notre-Dame Cathedral was blocked and has not, to my knowledge, been repeated.(18) This is not to deny that France has experienced the same revival movement as those found at York in England and Oberammergau in Germany. Since 1904, the industrial town of Nancy in Lorraine has staged, at various intervals, a 'clone' of the Oberammergau play in the French medieval style of magnificent spectacle.(19) Other isolated experiments, such as Gustave Cohen's adaptations of French mystères in the 1930s, following the 1920s movement for new compositions on medieval themes, organized by Henri Ghéon in and around Paris, were short-lived.(20) Paul Claudel and Charles Péguy have had a broader influence with more sophisticated compositions, but the general practice of lay religious drama continues to be 'entirely Catholic and chiefly confined to the parishes.'(21) Moreover, when one compares the Faculty of Theology in Paris, to which the monarchy would appeal for a ruling in international matters of faith in the sixteenth-century, with not only the abolition of the Faculty, but also the current ostracism of all Catholic teaching within the state system of education on any level in France, the cultural climate seems entirely unfavourable.
The soil may be richer in a foreign field, where historic abuses are coloured differently. Since England rejected Catholicism several centuries before France,(22) the religious and cultural distance, as well as the temporal one might permit the English-speaking countries a more impartial view. Furthermore, the re-enactment of English Biblical Plays is a regular practice in which both the City of York, England, and Toronto's Poculi Ludique Societas regularly engage, among other more sporadic English-speaking practitioners. What distinguishes these re-enactments is the high degree of scholarly imput.(23) Still, the losses involved in a cultural transplant from France might outweigh the gains. If one may be so audacious as to compare Eloy Du Mont with Shakespeare, the carrying of the latter into Germany at the turn of the seventeenth century provides a case in point.
To develop the question, I first consider the stakes of performing a late medieval religious playtext from Northern Europe before an audience necessarily encumbered by post-modern interests and expectations. Then the issue of a cross-cultural transplant is addressed. With few exceptions, critical analysis is limited to the terms established by the German initiators of reception theory, in particular Wolfgang Iser and Hans Jauss.
DEVELOPMENT
Whether we define the medieval genre of religious (Scriptural or Biblical) drama as a 'cult play' following Rainer Warning,(24) or as a 'myth-play' (auto) following Northrop Frye,(25) the cultural components with which the plays were bound up are 'pre-'almost everything which constitutes present-day consciousness: pre-computer technology, pre-humanism, pre-Renaissance and Reformation, pre-World Wars and likewise prior to almost all of the scientific paradigms defined by Thomas Kuhn.(26) According to Warning, the 'alterity' of Medieval Drama is 'insuperable'.(27) By this argument, modern interpretations of medieval plays must either deliberately reject the original aesthetic expression or innocently misrepresent the authorial intention. The latter is forgivable, the former unethical. The only solution is not to bury Medieval Drama along with Christianity and God, but to make even greater efforts to contextualize and reconstruct it.
For a literary discussion, the historical revolutions wrought by the 'founders of discursivity' (fondateurs de discursivité), whom Michel Foucault has defined, are more relevant than the purely scientific models suggested by the original use of the term 'paradigm'.(28) To those whom Foucault identified as fondateurs, Freud, Marx, Galileo, Newton, Cuvier, and Saussure,(29) a medievalist could add Martin Luther. For a consideration of religious theatre, Luther and Marx are valuable indicators of the transformation in worldview which history has wrought between the sixteenth century and the twentieth fin de siècle. Naturally, there are many, many more contributors to the alterity of a Medieval mentalité, whose consideration could never be exhaustive, even if time and space were unlimited. The rather impressionistic outline here does not signify ignorance of the Renaissance contribution to individualism, nor of the ever-increasing post-colonial belief in nihilism (Nietsche), Buddhism and Islam within Western Europe and North America. All of these elements, and more, necessarily alienate the Christian worldview of the Middle Ages from our post-modern audiences.
In the sixteenth century, even one schism disrupting the unity of the Catholic (universal) Church was unthinkable,(30) let alone the future 'schisms-within-schisms' of the Protestant Churches. Luther, the initiator of the movement, is associated with a breed of individualism which hovers upon the brink of open revolt. Today, such individualism is not only the norm, it is acclaimed as a virtue. In early sixteenth-century Normandy, it was a temptation to be resisted. Eloy Du Mont's colleagues in the University of Caen, although accused of Lutheranism in 1531, adhered to the humanist values of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Erasmus.(31) Du Mont himself viewed Luther, metaphorically, as an heretical infection to be healed from within Catholicism:
Plusieurs païz et nations infaictes
Sont grandement de menteurs hereticques...(32)
In comparison with a separate poem in which Du Mont specifies Luther in the same historical context, when this one Reformer bore the brunt of all accusations of heresy in France, the heretical liers (menteurs hereticques) can be considered Lutheran.(33)
An equally powerful barrier to cross between medieval theatre and the
post-modern audience is the wide-spread influence of Bertolt Brecht, who may be
placed under the umbrella of a Marxist discourse. Around 1926 Brecht wrote:
When I read Marx's Capital I understood my plays... It wasn't of
course that I found that I had unconsciously written a whole pile of Marxist
plays; but this man Marx was the only spectator for my plays I'd ever come
across.(34)
Brecht's allegiance to Marx and communism is rather self-evident. One must note, however, that Brecht was fully conscious of his own authorial intention and, furthermore, grateful for the supposed existence (although deceased) of an ideal receiver of his plays. Thus the frequent application of Brechtian theory and performance practice to Medieval Drama is, at best, anachronistic. At worst, it betrays the intentions of the authors, scribes, players and patrons of the medieval playtext by superimposing Brecht's method of creating an 'alienation effect' (Verfremdungseffekt) upon the dramatic practice of medieval communities closer to feudalism than communism, just because of the alterity which necessarily exists when non-Christian audiences view medieval theatre.
Furthermore, in order to estrange the audience from the action, Brecht prescribed the creation of a complementary alienation between the actor and his role, partially in reaction to Stanislavsky's method acting.(35) In contrast, there seems to be no cause for a player of the Middle Ages, or of the Renaissance, to deliberately alienate himself from his role. In fact, the Middle Ages was not afflicted with most of the aesthetic elements which Brecht was so anxious to oppose: art as a commodity and mass consumerism, to name but a few. In the violence of his reaction, Brecht thoroughly misunderstood the medieval theatre. It was not his concern to understand it; he was more interested in Chinese theatre. One aspect of this misunderstanding is the function of masks in the medieval play. In his Kleines Organon für das Theater, Brecht asserts: 'Ancient and medieval theatre alientated its characters with the aid of human and animal masks' (Das antike und mittelalterliche Theater verfremdete seine Figuren mit Menschen- und Tiermasken).(36) No masks are specified in Du Mont's Résurrection, but a director might impose them upon the two angels at the tomb. Whenever the medieval actor did don a mask, however, his intention was not to estrange himself from his role and his audience, but to acknowledge the 'alterity' of the identity he was assuming. The mask would allow him (rarely her) to hide his own humanness behind it, in order to fortify the identification and thus liberate him, all the more, to assume the character without inhibition. Such would be the case for the actor playing God in a Passion Play. An aboriginal re-enacting the animal role in a hunt, by donning a mask which represents the animal, provides a more recent example. In both cases, the masks permit human beings to identify with non-human roles.(37)
Finally, Brecht's insistance upon a non-Aristotelian method for creating an alienation effect in his epic theatre, by which he means a method which excludes 'empathy' (i.e. catharsis), is irrelevant. We have already noted that Horace, not Aristotle, was the received authority thoughout the Middle Ages and up to at least 1535. Nor was the practice dependent upon the theory. The dialectic relationship between player and audience could still involve empathy, even if the concept of catharsis was not yet formulated on the popular level.(38) Traditional rhetoric itself sufficed to require the speaker to be passionately aroused in order to move his audience.(39) 'What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?'(40) expresses Hamlet's admiration for the actor who succeeded in doing just that.
One further 'alienating effect' between the present and the Middle Ages is the rise of literary criticism itself as a discipline. If the first consequence of Adam and Eve's sin was their self-conscious recognition of their own nudity, then the widening circles of self-reflexivity which further remove humankind from nature, natural perceptions and reactions, may be regarded metaphorically as a consequence of the same fall. For all the sophistication of literary criticism, the tendancy to view the Middle Ages as naive and simple is in-itself simplistic. The saving grace of the best scholars like Northrop Frye is their ability to recognize the limitations of the critic's perception. Jauss even goes so far as to admit that only 'aesthetic snobbery will consider vulgar the communicative achievement of art at the level of primary identifications such as admiration, emotion, laughing, and crying with the hero.'(41)
Fundamentally, few medievalists would disagree with Wolfgang Iser's insistance upon the dialectic relationship between text and recipient, or the concept of intersubjectivity which Jauss introduces, whereby the receiving consciousness identifies with the norms represented or assents to a judgement demanded by a literary work.(42) It is also true that effort is required from both the author and the receiver to create the dynamic process of reception which Iser describes as a 'happening'. The receiver (spectator) shares a responsibility in the act of reception. An aspect of this responsibility which is particularly relevant to the theatrical experience involves a corollary dialectic within the receiver alone. While viewing the spectacle, a dialectical tension arises in the spectator's mind and emotions which normally oscillates between subjective involvement and critical distance.(43)
Even if all these concepts are equally relevant to drama, the wide diversity between theatre and the act of reading must be emphasized; the primary relationship between player and spectator is far more complex than that between the text and a reader, because playtexts are intended for performance. There are at least two supplementary mediators between those responsible for the text (rarely a single author) and the audience: the director and the players themselves. The former fills in the gaps commonly left by inadequate stage directions, the latter are no more passive recipients of the text than the audience. At Châteaudun, for example, the players convinced Pierre Jahan, the director, to revise and supplement the playtext with further additions.(44) They were at least more co-operative than the actors at York, whose additions as well as omissions were recorded by John Clerke (1510-80), the under clerk to the Common Clerk of the City, at the first playing station(45) during the performance when it was too late for censorship. Ecclesiastical authorities in France, notably at the Université d'Angers, attempted to maintain a tighter control over the orthodoxy of the text, but with little more success.(46)
Another aspect of the reductionist tendency in modern criticism is Iser's broad consideration of all medieval literature as didactic. We have already noted that Du Mont's Résurrection excludes many of the traditionally didactic devices. According to Iser, nevertheless, the strategies of the didactic text permit a minimial scope for the recipient's participation because the audience is offered only one choice between acceptance or rejection of the message?(47) In defense of the medieval religious play, it could be objected that Medieval Drama, in its proper context, permits an even broader scope for participation than the act of reading. Whereas Brecht's truly didactic theatre limits the audience to a self-consciously rational response, the medieval spectator used to participate in the 'happening' on both the conscious and the sub-conscious level: symbolically, materially and emotionally.
First of all, the medieval dramatic event is a community experience. The 'myth-play' engages the audience in a communal possession of the myth and 'emphasizes dramatically the symbol of spiritual and corporeal communion.'(48) Second, the interaction in medieval theatre between the players, as mediators of the text, and the audience is so widely practised in re-enactments that it need hardly be mentioned. Textual justification of the practice is beyond the scope of this paper, since there is no explicit demand for it in Du Mont's play. Nevertheless, the entire community was involved in the play production materially. Nowhere is this more evident than in the York records, where the burghers anachronistically played themselves in pageants like The Entry into Jerusalem, and where the very structure of the guilds as well as business affairs between them were influenced by their involvement in the Corpus Christi Play and Procession.(49) In France, the same kind of community involvement is typical, but no one city was ever committed to one basic form and performance practice for over a century as at York. In the case of Eloy Du Mont, a one-off type of community involvement is more likely to have revolved around the University of Caen, but this too is undocumented.
Hans Jauss has acknowledged the role of communitas in the reception, if not the performance of Medieval Drama. According to him, the spectator of the medieval passion is drawn into the action as a witness to the Christian tragedy.(50) This certainly accords with Christian theology. Moreover, he likens the audience's experience to that of a devout Christian engaged in the mystical contemplation of God. Basing his facts upon medieval passion tracts and supportive evidence from Gréban's 'Prologue' to the third day of his Passion, he describes the mystical ladder as leading from meditatio through compassio to imitatio, but not to the 'unio mystica' in which the mystic recipient might lose himself.(51) He seems to feel that the last two objectives are mutually exclusive. Jauss also denies that catharsis is possible, since compassion cannot be purged.(52) To this, Frye agrees when he says that the pity and terror which are raised by a Biblical Play (naming that of Towneley) do not affect a catharsis because 'they remain attached to the subject.'(53) In this case, the community still witnesses to the events.
Compassio, however, is a function of the recipient's disposition to the 'happening', as much as a rung on the mystical ladder. Gréban's 'Prologue' actually introduces '...matiere ...\prouffitable ... \ a cueurs plains de compassion.'(54) Compassio is thus a pre-requisite for a proper reception. To those open to it, the theatrical mix of tableaux vivants and traditional rhetoric might well bring about a transfer of pity and fear from the subject to themselves through personal identification and empathy. In this case, it would be the hardened recesses of the heart (present in all but the saint) which are purged.(55) Such an emotional impact upon the audience does not exclude the possibility that they might feel inspired to imitate Christ, Mary, the disciples or other holy persons. Yet such an imitatio, in reality, seems more difficult and less immediate than the emotional response. Today, despite the deadening effect of daily inundations of international news, spectacularized and violent as they often are, and despite the theft of real community ties by the impersonal global community, surely humankind is still capable of compassion?
Having set the stakes for a modern revival, let us consider those of a cultural transplant. The main cause of a possible exportation of Du Mont's Résurrection from France to England is the apparent lack of interest for it in France, especially among the learned. In the late sixteenth century, the cause of the mass emigration of actors from England to Germany was both oversupply and foreign demand. As the theatres in London began to thrive and more men were tempted to try their hand at the profession, their labour, especially that of a poorer quality, became cheap and salaries fell. Thus when an English player failed to find work in London and the provinces, he sought his fortune abroad.(56) Those of better quality were invited abroad by a patron.
A notable example of patronage is supplied by the Earl of Leicester who took his company to the Netherlands with him in 1586, when he commanded the English forces there against the Spanish. He subsequently encouraged further travels by recommending his players to King Frederick II of Denmark (1559-1588).(57) Consequently, in June of 1586 George Bryan, Thomas Pope and Will Kemp the Clown played before the Danish court at Elsinore (Helsingör), the future setting of Shakespeare's Hamlet.(58) It may be no coincidence that four years later when the Globe Theatre had just been built and when two of the six 'housekeepers', who split the owner's share of the 'take' from ticket sales, were the same Thomas Pope and Will Kemp in association with William Shakespeare,(59) that Shakespeare was just then appropriating Hamlet to himself. There is a strong possibility that the two previously itinerant actors influenced Shakespeare's version of the play with their eye-witness accounts of the Danish court.
More to the purpose is not what the English actors brought home, but what they took with them. Up to the year 1600, the actors, who spoke little German, were mainly instrumentalists, dancers, tumblers and clowns, much given to 'roaring and shouting', leaping and mime, in short, anything but 'literary masterpieces'.(60) The favourite character was the clown, whose obscenities in both language and gesture, mispronunciations of German and slapstick delighted the German audiences. An eye-witness account of such a performance at the Frankfurt Fair of August 1592 underlines the difference between the English and the German reception:
... the Germans, not vnderstanding a worde they sayde, both men and wemen,
flocked wonderfully to see theire gesture and Action, rather then heare them,
speaking English which they vnderstoode not, and pronowncing peeces and Patches
of English playes, which my selfe and some English men there present could not
heare without great wearysomenes.(61)
Certainly, this was not Shakespeare, but a hodgepodge aimed solely at pleasing the German audience. The English clown, particularly a 'foul-mouthed character' called Pickelherring, 'did more to create a bond of understanding between two great peoples than many of his more respectable colleagues.'(62) Such bonding across cultural and linguistic barriers may have been beneficial, but the aesthetic quality of the 'happening' is certainly debased.
Thanks to the encouragement of Continental patrons like the Landgraf Moritz of Hesse who built a theatre in Kassel, full plays by Shakespeare were eventually attempted. Nevertheless, language was still a barrier: Shakespeare's blank verse was flattened into German prose and the soliloquys abandoned because competent translators were lacking.(63) Der bestrafte Brudermord oder Prinz Hamlet aus Dännemark most resembles the 'bad' Quarto of 1603 or a prompter's copy, with 'no grace, no charm, no poetry [and] no sign of individual authorship'.(64) Furthermore, slapstick is still a major feature of the play. For example, the Ghost of Hamlet's father boxes a Sentinel on the ears in the opening scenes, Ophelia slaps Phantasmo, the fool whom she has confused with Hamlet in her madness, and the counterparts of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern mistakenly kill each other when Hamlet ducks.(65) The latter had cleverly fallen forward after his final prayer, having asked the two thugs to wait on either side of him and only shoot when he spread his arms as a sign of completion. Unfortunately for them, they acquiesce in his last wishes.
CONCLUSION
The experience of English actors in Germany at the turn of the seventeenth century demonstrates that humour forms international bonds far more easily than the pathétique, perhaps because it requires less effort on all sides. The same phenomenon must account for the recent success of Toronto productions of Hans Sachs in English.(66) Without skill and great effort in preparing translations, the grand style of one linguistic culture is likely to be debased in its appeal to a foreign one. Moreover, unlike Hamlet, all of Du Mont's Résurrection is written in verse form. Nowadays, fewer and fewer translators are willing to attempt to reproduce rhyme patterns in a foreign language, since the artificiality which results is less and less tolerated. Consequently, Du Mont's rhymes will be lost in blank verse, or worse, flat prose. Finally, if John Elliott and Garrett Epp oppose the mere conversion of Middle English into modern English, because of profound alterations in meaning,(67) then how much more devastating would be the translation of a French play in the grand style into English. Even if the intended exercise in meditatio did not dissolve into laughter, much of the impact would be lost in translation.
In conclusion, let us re-affirm the dialectic relationship in the act of reception, wherein both parties bear some responsibility for the result. Today, the extant playtext from the Middle Ages is fixed, somewhat artificially in cases like that of Du Mont, because of centuries of disuse. Others were more fluid in their original contexts, as we have seen merely in the textual changes introduced by players at York, Châteaudun and Angers. If producers and directors today wish to remain faithful to the original aesthetic expression of the plays, however, they cannot ethically pervert the Catholic ethos of the late medieval texts. This is their part in remaining responsible to the aesthetic expression. On the receiving end, the sophisticated post-modern audience seems little disposed to compassio towards a humiliated Middle Eastern Jew and his mother. Luther has long since consecrated a dissent which Brecht has furthered through the promotion of religious and political scepticism, and a deliberate policy to distance the emotions. Yet an emotional response to human suffering is far easier to trigger than imitatio and conversion; the aesthetic reception precedes the ethical one. If repentance and conversion seem less likely these days, there is always hope that contemporary spectators would exercise their responsibility in the reception by, at least, opening their minds and emotions to compassion.
It is the tragic irony of the post-modern world that global communication increases alienation and impersonalization. No longer are we merely alienated from nature, but we are also divided from each other behind barriers of race, sex and religion, with no sense of corporate union besides the artificial ones of political solidarity or multinational incorporation. The historic abuses perpetrated by the Catholic Church, as well as 'aesthetic snobbery', have greatly contributed to the hardening of people's hearts. Yet reality will bear neither over-simplification nor too much rationalism, since religion in all its manifestations surpasses reason even as it crosses the threshhold of mortality. To come full circle to a post-conversion Augustinian description of a successful reception, we can glimpse the response at which Eloy Du Mont was most likely aiming: 'For by applause they indicated that they were being taught or delighted, but by tears they indicated that they had been swayed (acclamationibus quippe se doceri et delectari, flecti autem lacrimis indicabant).'(68)
1. Duncan Robertson, The Medieval Saints' Lives: Spiritual Renewal and Old French Literature, The Edward C. Armstrong Monographs on Medieval Literature 8 (Kentucky: French Forum Publishers, 1995), p.17.
2. 2. L. Verheijen, ed., Sancti Augustini Confessionum Libri XIII 8.12.29, CCSL 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), p.131. The English translation is my own.
4. 4. Elsa Strietman, Mariken van Nieumeghen (Girona: SITM Conference, 1992), 28 pp. (unpublished).
5. 5. Emmeken (Mariken) explicitly states in the play: ' Ic heb mijnen oom hooren seggen ... \ Dat dit spel beter is dan sommige sermoenen.' (J. van Mierlo, ed. Mariken van Nieumeghen : reproductie van de post-incunabel van W. Vosterman, 2nd ed. [Antwerpen, 1951], ll.1027-28.
6. 6. Plays which were believed to have actually triggered confessions of guilt from individual spectators were the History of Fryer Francis, presented by players of the Earl of Sussex at Kings Lynn in Norfolk, and the Four Sons of Aymon, performed by English players in Amsterdam, according to Thomas Heywood (An Apology for Actors by Thomas Heywood, preface by Arthur Freeman [New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1973], fols. Gvo-G2vo).
7. 7. Hamlet 2.2, 576-581. Hamlet's allusion to tales of theatrical performances which 'prick the conscience' of a spectator is amplified in the German version of the 1620s to embrace the familiar wife-murdering-husband motif, transferred to a closer setting in Strasbourg (Albert Cohn, Shakespeare in Germnay in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, London: Asher & Co., 1865, p.cxxii & 'Tragoedia. Der bestrafte Brudermord oder: Prinz Hamlet aus Dännemark' 2.7, Cohn, p.267).
8. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. G.R. Hibbard (Oxford: OUP, 1987) 2.2.594.
9. K. Janet Ritch, 'Notice Biographique sur Maître Eloy Du Mont dict Costentin...' BHR LVII (1995), pp.401-6.
10. J. Bruno and P. Josserand, 'Les Estampilles du département des imprimés de la Bibliothèque Nationale', Mélanges ... offerts à Monsieur Frantz Calot (Paris, 1960), pp.264-65.
11. Catalogue des actes de François I (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1887-1908) VIII: 488 & 543.
12. B.N.fr.2237, f.11vo. Cf. David Hobart Carnahan, 'Poésies de Maistre Eloy du Mont, dict Costentin', Connecticut Academy: Transactions 13 (1908), p.107.
13. Graham A. Runnalls, 'La Circulation des textes des mystères à la fin du Moyen Âge : les éditions de la Passion de Jean Michel', Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, t.58.1 (1996), p.29.
14. 14. Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), pp.10-11.
15. Ritch, 'Notice Biographique', p.403.
16. 16. K. Janet Ritch, ed., A Critical Edition of Eloy Du Mont's 'La Resurrection de Jesuschrist' (Toronto: Doctoral Thesis, 1995), vol.II, ll.1175-1197.
17. 17. According to Iser, Roman Ingarden explained the initiation of both the link between text and reader and the production of the aesthetic object by means of 'empathy' or the 'emotive theory' (Iser, p.174).
18. 18. 'M. Jean-Eudes Rabut, Chef de Cabinet, a clairement indiqué son refus catégorique de jouer le Vray Mistère de la Passion de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ sur le Parvis de Notre-Dame, au nom d'un principe de <<non-privatisation du sol public>> ... En même temps, il nous a imposé une location du sol public à un tarif exorbitant ! ... Notre association est d'ailleurs prête à verser les bénéfices de la recette du spectacle à une cause humanitaire.... Le président, Jean Poncel' ('Seconde lettre à Jacques Chirac', Le Monde, Vendredi 26 mars 1993).
19. Lynette R. Muir, The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe (Cambridge: C.U.P., 1995), pp.167-68.
20. Muir, p.169; Margaret Hayne Harrison, Modern Religious Drama in Germany and France: A Comparative Study (Boston: The Stratford Co., 1936), pp.197-209
21. Harrison, p.222. To my knowledge, there has been no substantial change since 1936.
22. 22. Of course, neither nation has ever entirely eradicated Catholicism.
23. 23. Scholarly interest in medieval theatre is a predominantly English phenomenon with some notable exceptions, such as the plays produced by the Dutch Theatre Company Marot and by Georges-Philippe Danan in France. For evidence of the amount of experimentation 'happening' in England and North America, see John R. Elliott jr, Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 186 pp., and the Medieval Drama section of any current issue of Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama.
24. Rainer Warning, 'On the Alterity of Medieval Religious Drama', tr. Marshall Brown, New Literary History 10 (1979), pp.265-92.
25. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p.282.
26. 26. The one exception to the scientific paradigms which Kuhn describes as beginning in the seventeenth century is that of dynamics, whose Medieval study of motion he regards as a paradigm (Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, 2nd ed. [Chicago, 1970], pp.20-2).
27. 27. Warning, p.285. Elsewhere, having considered the production at Oberammergau (ein degeneriertes barockes Jesuitendrama), Warning concludes: "Die geistliche Spiele sind tot, und nichts wird sie je wieder zum Leben bringen." (Rainer Warning, Funktion und Struktur (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1974), p.11.
28. 28. For decades, medievalists have been attempting, unsuccessfully, to shake off the influence of Darwin's concept of selectivity upon developmental theories of Medieval Drama. The term 'founders [or initiators] of discursivity' not only avoids the scientific bias, but also places a much-needed emphasis upon human influence, even if no founder can be held entirely accountable for all the consequences of his thought.
29. Michel Foucault, Dits et Ecrits (1954-88) vol.I, pp.804-7.
30. 'Men could not yet face with equanimity the appalling prospect of a permanently divided Christendom' (Frances A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century [London: Warburg Institute, 1947], p.199, citing H.O. Evennett, The Cardinal of Lorraine and the Council of Trent [Cambridge, 1930], p.93).
31. Henri Prentout, L'Université de Caen, son passé - son présent (Caen: Imprimerie Artistique Malherbe de Caen, 1932), pp.91-3; H. Prentout, 'La Réforme en Normandie et les débuts de la Réforme à l'Université de Caen', Revue historique 114 (1913), p.18. For further details, see Ritch, A Critical Edition, vol. I, pp.65f.
32. 32. Eloy Du Mont, Resurrection, ed. Ritch, vol.II, D44-45.
33. 33. Ritch, vol.I, p.70; Eloy Du Mont, Poésies (B.N. fr. 2237, Poem # 7).
34. 34. John Willett, tr. Brecht on Theatre (London: Methuen & Co., 1964), p.23. 'Als ich >> Das Kapital<< von Marx las, verstand ich meine Stücke... Ich entdeckte natürlich nicht, dass ich einen ganzen Haufen marxistischer Stücke geschrieben hatte, ohne eine Ahnung zu haben, aber dieser Marx war der einzige Zuschauer für meine Stücke, den ich je gesehen hatte' (Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater, ed. Werner Hecht [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963], p. 181).
35. 35. Bertolt Brecht, 'Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting', Brecht on Theatre, tr. Willett, pp.91-99. This essay which introduces the term Verfremdungseffekt was first published in an English translation in London, in 1936. The German text was printed in 1949 (Ibid., p.99).
36. 36. Brecht, 'Kleines Organon für das Theater' 42, Schriften zum Theater, p.32. The translation is my own.
37. 37. It is not surprising that the two attempts to stage à la Brecht the mystery plays at the York Festival in 1960 and 1963 enraged local audiences (Elliott, pp.87-92), during the second of which God and his angels wore Oriental masks (Ibid., p.90). For the medieval stage, a Stanislavskian interpretation of the nature of identification between an actor and his role would be as anachronistic as Brecht's methodology, for as much as the nature of the identification may be controversial.
38. 38. From the perspective adopted by Jauss, Brecht's understanding of Aristotelian catharsis is reductionist when he equates it with empathy between the 'individuals represented' and the spectators (Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, tr. Michael Shaw, Theory and History of Literature 3 [Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982], p.105).
39. 39. Jauss, Aesthetic Experience, p.26 citing Klaus Dockhorn as interpreted by H.G. Gadamer, 'Wahrheit und Methode', Gòttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 218 (1966), p.176.
40. 40. Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Hibbard, 2.2.547.
43. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore & London: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp.127-34.
44. 44. 'Le Compte nous apprend que le meneur du jeu, Pierre Jahan a 'corrigé les livres par oppinion des joueurs, cotté iceulx livres, escript et couché en iceulx plusieurs additions baillees par lesdits joueurs...'' (Graham A. Runnalls, Mélanges ... Jean Dufournet [Paris & Geneva : Droz, 1993], p.1253).
45. Peter Meredith, 'John Clerke's Hand in the York Register', Leeds Studies in English, n.s. xii (1981), pp.249-260.
46. 46. The scribe of the Chantilly manuscript of this mystère specified 'aucunes addicions particulieres que aucuns des joueurs d'iceluy mistere y cuiderent adjouster a leurs plaisances, pour ce qu'elles estoient impertinentes a la matiere et furent blasmees des maistres en theologie qui ce present livre visiterent et aprouverent' (Pierre Servet, Le Mystère de la Résurrection: Angers (1456) [Geneva: Droz, 1993], t.I, p.12).
47. Iser, pp.190-94; 'An expository text does not require a great deal of ideation [effort of imagination] on the recipient's part, because it aims to fulfill its specific intention in relation to a specific, given fact by observing coherence in order to guarantee the intended reception' (Iser, p.185).
49. Alexandra F. Johnston, 'Cycle Drama in the Sixteenth Century: Texts and Contexts', Early Drama to 1600, Acta XIII (1985), pp.8-11.
54. 54. Omer Jodogne, ed. Le Mystère de la Passion d'Arnoul Gréban, vol.I (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1965), ll.19906-8.
55. 55. Jauss accredits the idea that Medieval Drama can purge hardness of heart to Max Kommerell (Lessung und Aristoteles, Frankfurt, 1970), but dismisses the possibility because the medieval tracts emphasize the mirroring of models to be imitated (Jauss, 102).
56. Albert Cohn, Shakespeare in Germany in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries... (London: Asher & Co., 1865), p.xxi.
57. Ernest Brennecke, Shakespeare in Germany 1590-1700: With Translations of Five Early Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), p.2.
58. 58. Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574-1642, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.34. The German documents specify that the same actors were 'Instrumentalists' (Cohn, p.xxiii).
61. 61. June Schlueter, 'English Actors in Kassel' (Conference paper), p.5, quoting Shakespeare's Europe: A Survey of the Condition of Europe at the end of the 16th century. Being unpublished chapters of Fynes Moryson's Itinerary (1617), 2nd ed. with introduction by Charles Hughes (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), p.304.
64. Brennecke, pp.10 & 252; Cohn, p.cxx.
65. Cohn, Act 1.2, cols. 247-48; 3.9, 283-84 & 4.1, 287-88.
66. Hans Sachs, "The Wandering Scholar From Paradise", "The Doctor With the Big Nose" & "The Stolen Shrovetide Cock", performed by the Poculi Ludique Societas, Toronto, 27 February - 8 March 1998.
67. 67. Garrett P.J. Epp, 'Pulling Old Strings: Medieval Cycle Drama on Modern Stages', Formes Teatrals de la Tradició Medieval, Actes del VII Colloqui de la Société Internationale Pour l'Étude du Théatre Médiéval, Girona, 1992 (Barcelona: Institut del Teatre, 1996), p.278.
68. 68. Joseph Martin, ed., 'De Doctrina Christiana' 24.53.15-16, Aurelii Augustini Opera, pars 4.1, CCSL 32 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1962), p.159.