ABSTRACT
Early on in Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), William Empson offers the Wakefield Master’s Second Shepherd’s Play (c. 1500) as the example for the function of the comic interlude or “double plot” that characterizes one enduring version of pastoral. In addition to telling the story of three humdrum, disgruntled shepherds, the play includes the comic disciplining of no-good, sheep-stealing magician, Mak, and Gill, his long-suffering and compellingly outspoken wife, who famously hide a stolen sheep in a cradle, passing it off as their newly born child. In the event, they get caught, and shepherds find themselves transformed into “Englished” versions of the Magi, arriving in Bethlehem to praise the baby Jesus and learning to sing in the process. As Empson remarks, the sheep-stealing interlude constitutes “a very detailed parallel to the Paschal Lamb, hidden in the appearance of a newborn child.” The interlude, as it were, serves to literalize and make manifest the metaphorical content of the overarching nativity plot to which the shepherds are bystanders. The structural parallel, as Empson elaborates briefly, derives from a key set of reversals of reciprocities: “the Logos enters humanity from above as this sheep does from below, or takes on the animal nature of man which is like a man becoming a sheep, or sustains all nature and its laws so that in one sense it is truly present in the sheep as the man” (28). Critics since Empson have returned to the Second Shepherd’s Play and elaborated on the sacramental pedagogy the play unfolds, and, notably, have contextualized the shepherds and their complaints within the probable contexts of local performance. But there remains something strangely excessive to the play’s structure, something not quite handled or resolved by its structural reversals and parallels. Empson, for example, remarks that for all the ingenuity of the structure, he finds “the effect hard to tape down.”
My aim in this chapter is to speak to the mobility or unruliness of this “effect” by approaching the play’s structure and metaphorical estrangements through the lens of critical animal studies and, crucially, with an eye to the biopolitical quotient to sheep and shepherding. It is no coincidence that the founding scene of biopolitics, as conceived by Michel Foucault in his lecture course on Security, Territory, Population (1977–78), derives from the archetypal activity of shepherds counting their sheep. The Second Shepherd’s Play stands, then, as a self-aware, pastoral, and pastoralizing moment in the long history of the co-making or co-articulation of the animals we name “sheep” and those we name “human” as coeval multiplicities. Its ovine-rich pedagogy and emphasis on charity as ultimately a forensic tool in differentiating the “good sheep” from the “bad” who must be “cut” from the flock for the good of the flock offers the distributive and so differentiating function of pastoral care both as an end and as a dramaturgical technique. Mak and Gill are punished; the three shepherds learn to sing and by the theological-theatrical function of the play enter the nativity story itself. All serve also as differently configured exemplars of Christian being.
The structures that The Second Shepherd’s Play deploys were structures that governed a medieval and early modern imaginary in which sheep and Christians exchanged properties as part of a material-semiotic chain that created a field of metaphorical possibilities. Given that the only copy of the play dates from a manuscript compiled in the 1570s, the texture it offers stands as a fascinating trading ground between medieval and early modern traditions, both religious and dramatic—especially so given the suppression of cycle drama and mystery plays in the mid-sixteenth century, their archiving, and the rise of public theater in London. As scholars speculate still on both the confessional preference of William Shakespeare and whether or not he might once upon a time have seen a cycle play, I offer the play as evidence to a core, constitutive matrix within which Shakespeare’s own animal metaphors and engagements might be understood.
