ABSTRACT
The medieval English Resurrection sequences of the Corpus Christi cycles, like the Lazarus, Nativity, and Passion plays, recast the women of the Gospels, giving their laments pivotal roles in the development and denouement of their plots. With the exception of John, who tells us that Mary Magdalene wailed outside Jesus’ tomb, none of the gospel writers suggest that the Maries lamented for Christ.1 Yet, the medieval plays
interpret the drama of the Resurrection as a process of grieving and healing, assimilating the action of female mourning to Christian teleology. Moving from crippling bereavement to awakened perception and joy, the laments of Christ’s female followers give voice to the anguish and mystery of the human encounter with death and the divine. In the Towneley, York, and N-Town Resurrections the three Maries, and especially Mary Magdalene, take center stage and emerge as the protagonists of the Resurrection drama. Only in the Chester play does Peter’s penitential journey eclipse Magdalene’s story of loss and recovery. While the plays deviate from scripture in making female mourning central to the Resurrection story, their portrayals of lamenting women are marked by Christian angst with respect to two interrelated aspects of residual lament: the mourner’s intimacy with death, and the power of her cries to awaken otherworldy forces. Cradling, touching, and kissing the corpse are defining gestures of residual lamentation. These actions, cast as heathenish and idolatrous by later Reformers, are comforting and cathartic to the mourner, helping her to negotiate the unavoidable physical separation, at the same time that her balms and cries assuage the soul of the dead and the community. In the N-Town Announcement to the Three Maries, the mourning holy women long for Christ’s body, so that they may anoint it with their healing salves and tears. When they discover the empty tomb, the body’s absence deprives them of their mutually efficacious ritual, grieving them almost as much as death itself. All of the plays make a point of showing that the women’s ritual has no power over the realm of the dead. The Towneley play inverts the relationship between women and death: Christ reanimates Magdalene, bringing her out of her deathlike mourning by restoring her consciousness and reintegrating her body and spirit in a foreshadowing of the Last Judgment. The York and Chester plays portray Magdalene’s mourning as troublesome. Prefiguring Reformist diatribes against idolatry of the dead, the York play presents Magdalene’s search for the body as obsessive and even idolatrous. In none of the Gospels does Christ mention the women’s ointments or criticize Mary Magdalene for seeking his corpse. Yet in the York Appearance to Mary Magdalene he pointedly tells Magdalene that her ointments and tears are useless. The Chester play similarly characterizes female mourning as an obstacle to Christian faith. The mourning of the three Maries at Christ’s tomb inhibits their perception of the angels, while Magdalene’s mourning impairs her judgment. The women are prevented from performing their healing ritual by the absence of the corpse, and their laments are rendered ineffectual in arousing the dead. One important exception occurs in the N-Town cycle after Christ’s burial. Refusing to cease her mourning, the Virgin goes to the temple and wails, “now xal wepynge me fode and fede / Som comforte tyll god sende / A my lord god I þe pray / Whan my childe ryseth þe iiide
day / Comforte thanne thyn hand-may / my care for to Amende” (965-70). The scene vividly evokes residual lament with a structural link between the Virgin’s mourning in the temple and the rising of Jesus’ anima for the N-town Harrowing of Hell. Simultaneous staging suggests that her sacramental tears, which feed her, also assist Christ’s descent. This link is reinforced by Christ’s unbiblical appearance to his mother immediately following the Harrowing of Hell. The other plays carefully demarcate Christ’s Resurrection from the presence and agency of mourning women. Yet even the N-Town Resurrection privileges the medieval audience as witnesses to the Resurrection, for Christ steps from the sepulcher before the Maries enter to lament and search for him. In the N-Town Resurrection Christ greets and honors his Mother just after he addresses the audience. In all but the York Resurrection, Christ addresses the audience from the edge of the tomb, explaining the meaning of His sacrifice. In the York Resurrection Christ rises silently as the angels’ sing Christus Resurgens; in the next play, Christ’s Appearance to Mary Magdalene, he explains the meaning of his Resurrection to Mary Magdalene rather than to the audience. The structural separation between Christ’s rising and the women’s mourning diffuses any hint that the women’s laments are agents of Christ’s Resurrection. Moreover, each play insists that Christ rises through his own power. In the N-Town, the Second Soldier says “He is resyn by his owyn might” (1492), as if this concept required particular emphasis. In the York, the Angel tells the Maries, “He is resen thrugh grete poostee” (247). In the Chester, the soldiers, who are later bribed into silence by Pilate, awaken and affirm the truth of the Resurrection long before the Maries arrive at the tomb. In the Towneley, Christ emerges and delivers to the audience the longest address of all the cycles, a ninety-six-line explication of his wounds, suffering, and the promise of eternal life for those who “luf” him (307) that recalls and completes Lazarus” address to the audience in the Towneley Lazarus. This emphatic distancing of the Resurrection from the visit of the holy women to the tomb contrasts with the gospel accounts, particularly Matthew’s, in which the women’s arrival at the tomb and the Resurrection appear to occur simultaneously.2
