“Now is aloft Þat late was ondyr!”

The Digby Mary Magdalene play’s deployment of space and boundaries, and particularly its use of locus and platea staging, constructs a complex system of “spatial semantics,” to borrow Pamela King’s phrase. ¹ I have discussed elsewhere the play’s use of space to depict Mary Magdalene’s personal journey from naïve aristocratic lady to heroic female saint, and the ways in which the use of the playing space blurs conventional gender boundaries. ² In that context, my focus was on movement between stages, or between locus and platea, between one type of playing space and another. Indeed, this is a play that depicts the crossing of geographical and political boundaries at every turn in a sweeping series of horizontal movements from stage to stage and across the playing space.