ABSTRACT
Scholars have long recognized that medieval concepts of reciprocal justice and divine retribution underpin the dramatic patterns of the Herod plays.1 However, they have overlooked the evidence suggesting that this moral design is embodied in the mothers’ laments. There is also critical disagreement over the strength of the typological association between the mothers of Slaughter plays and the Virgin Mary of the Flight, Purification, and Passion sequences. While scholars agree that the plays skillfully blend topical realism with the biblical story in portraying Herod and his knights, they vary in their assessments of the mourning mothers.2 There is critical disagreement over whether or not the mothers are of the Slaughter active or passive in their suffering. This issue leads directly to the problem of typology: those who see the mothers as active tend to construe the Virgin as passive. These critical discrepancies expose tacit biases with respect to the dramatic representation of female grief, particularly that of the Virgin. Implicit in much of the criticism is an expectation that female sorrow, and especially the Virgin’s, should be dramatized as restrained, picturesque, and lyrical: in short, aesthetically contained rather than emotionally real.3 Scholars have focused primarily on how the parallels between Mary and the mothers support the typology between Christ and the Innocents, a relationship that has been thoroughly charted.4 The evidence of the plays suggests, however, that the affinity between Mary and the mothers is meaningful in its own right. This chapter demonstrates the significance of the typology between the Virgin of the Flight, Purification, and Passion sequences and the mothers of the Slaughter plays. In all four cycles Mary’s narrow escape with her child prefigures the plight of the mothers, just as their dilemma, in turn, foreshadows Mary’s woe during the Passion. The Purification
play adds the last thematic thread to the dramatic tapestry that intertwines the fates of Mary and the mothers. It underscores the tragic kinship between them by auguring both the mothers’ loss of their children and Mary’s inevitable loss of Christ. The maternal mourning of the holy women in medieval drama is rooted in the songs of sorrow through which medieval women and their families coped with the deaths of their loved ones.5 In these plays, the mourning Mother of God is not a mute emblem of grief; her power emanates from her wails, not her silence. Her laments condemn Herod, while the cries of the bereaved mothers reiterate her denunciation and engender his fate. This dramatic typology conveys not only Christ’s tragic burden, but also his mother’s. Matthew 2:13-18 makes no reference to a public confrontation between Herod’s henchmen and the mothers of the slaughtered children, but all of the plays include such an encounter. Apart from an allusion to Jeremiah 31:15, when Rachel weeps for her children, the Gospel makes no mention of lamentation, and Rachel’s lament does not include oaths and cries of vengeance.6 Yet even the briefest renderings of the episode, in the York and the N-Town cycles, the women struggle to protect their babes as they lament. In the Chester cycle and the Digby play, the women directly confront not only the soldiers, but Herod as well. The full ethical force of their grief impinges upon the consciousness of those who see and hear. In the Towneley play, Herod himself dreads the mothers’ mad cries. As he sends his soldiers off on their mission, he warns: “If women wax woode, / I warn you, syrs, to spede you” (454-5). These significant deviations from scripture suggest that the women’s cries and curses have a dramatic coherence that requires further investigation. Because public sermons and treatises, such as those published in Mirk’s Festial, blend formal theology with more widespread cultural practices and ideas, they open a window into the same creative tensions that produced medieval communal theater.7 Three of Mirk’s works, two homilies from the Festial, and a treatise on cursing included in his Advice to the Clergy, help to elucidate late fifteenth-century English popular beliefs about the moral force of oaths in general, and of maternal mourning in particular.8 Mirk illustrates the power and danger of oaths in both “The Points and Articles of Cursing” and a homily written for Passion Sunday. In “The Points and Articles of Cursing,” he sets forth the communal enterprise of excommunication. This serious act
was accomplished by means of a formal curse, a ritual speech-act pronounced against those who committed wrongs against the clergy or the church.9 Conducted four times a year, on the first Sunday after Michael’s Feast, “Mydlenton” Sunday, the feast of the Holy Trinity, and the Sunday after Candlemass, the practice anathematizes erring parishioners “til þei come to amendmente” (61). Referring to the declaration of the curse as a “hydowse þynge” (60), Mirk treats the ritual as a necessary evil, one that must be performed “reddely” (60) and without “wonde” (60) on the part of the clergy. In the preliminary address, he explains to the parishioners that the priest’s tongue is “goddus swerde” (61). Just as a “swerde departuth þe heued from þe body” (61), so the priest’s curse severs a man’s soul from the body of the church: “fro [ihesu cryste] and fro oure lady, & ffro alle þe cumpany of heuen” (61). The souls of those who are excommunicate, he explains, are in the hands of the “fende off helle” (61) and “hys mynestrees” (61) and will suffer the “peyne of helle, al so longe os god is in heuen” (61) unless they amend their ways. Performed within the context of religious ritual, the curse of excommunication draws much of its moral force from the weight of the community and from the authority of the priest within that community. Those who were excommunicated were prohibited from participating in the rites and offices of the church. But, just as these rituals were directed toward the health of the soul, so the curse of excommunication also directly affected the fate of the soul after death. The efficacy of this punishment thus stems from the belief that words can bind and transform human existence: uttering the curse cuts excommunicates off from God’s grace. The curse thus embodies the logic of ethical reciprocity: those who injure God are punished by suffering injury themselves, if not during their lives, most certainly after death. This belief was not restricted to the performance of ritual, however. Routine swearing, according to Mirk’s homily for Passion Sunday, also encompasses the binding power of language and the logic of moral reciprocity embodied in speech-acts.10
