Resistant Female Grief in the Lazarus Plays

In the N-Town cycle’s Raising of Lazarus, as soon as Lazarus is interred, Mary Magdalene declares to her sister Martha, “Lete us sytt down here by þe grave / or we go hens wepe all oure fylle” (167-8). Martha joins her, proclaiming, “Vs for to wepe no man may lett” (169). Their exchange suggests that they expect their weeping to provoke opposition, and it does. Four male consolers, outraged by the sisters’ conduct, take turns chastising them, denouncing their behavior as shameful and offensive: “Arys for shame зe do not ryght / streyth from þis grave зe xul go hens / þus for to grugge ageyns godys myght / Aзens hyз god зe do offens” (173-6). The consolers seem unduly scandalized. How can women’s tears offend one so powerful as God? But Martha explicitly poses the sisters’ mourning at the grave as a form of resistance to male control, and the consolers respond in kind. They view the sisters’ mourning as potent, a dangerous affront that must be curtailed. The public nature of this confrontation – in the open, at the gravesite – implies that the sisters’ laments have a rhetorical appeal that the consolers find threatening to their position as the self-appointed spokesmen of “godys myght.” This gendered conflict between two discourses, female grief and male control, so clearly delineated in the N-Town cycle, manifests itself, albeit more subtly and in different ways, in all of the extant manuscripts of the medieval English Lazarus plays. But there is more at stake here than gender. In its deep structure it is an encounter between two different constructions of death and mourning: the dominant Christian belief that faith in God brings eternal life, and therefore one should not grieve over the dead; and the residual practice of lament for the dead, an oral tradition usually led by women in which eternal life, living on in the memory of the community, depends upon repetitive performances of mourning. As a social practice presided over by women ritual lament poses resistance to male social authority and the central tenets of Christian eschatology. Inconsolable grief seems to subvert the Christian promise of redemption and eternal life, and the belief that women’s cries could commune with the dead challenges the Christian belief in Jesus as the mediator between the human and heavenly realms. The medieval English Lazarus plays, even more than the Passion plays, manifest ambivalence in attempting to reconcile these opposed systems of value. In the Passion plays Mary’s laments for Christ, despite the resistant sentiments noted by Dronke, align themselves

with the religious pedagogy that construed weeping for Christ as a sign of compunction for sin.1 While the Lament of Mary is non-biblical, the doctrine of Mary’s Compassion, her share in Christ’s suffering through her mourning, assimilated this resistant mode to Christian eschatology.2 Such a rapprochement between grief and faith is less tenable and more complex in the Lazarus plays. Rosemary Woolf argues that the medieval English Lazarus plays shift the emphasis of the Gospel narrative away from the miracle that reveals Jesus’ divine nature to the problem of mourning the natural death of a family member.3 This focus upon the problem of death and the propriety of the sisters’ mourning reveals an ideological preoccupation not found in the Gospel’s presentation of the climactic moment of Jesus’ ministry: his command, “Lazarus, come forth” (John 11:43). Woolf points out that all of the plays dwell on the problem of the sisters’ grief, but this does not necessarily diminish the dramatic impact of Lazarus’s miraculous return to life. In performance this moment has an iconic power that exceeds its textual framework. These opposing constructions of death and mourning coexist in dramatic tension. In medieval English drama, the scriptural story of Jesus’ divine power over death is also the story of the death of a family member and how the two surviving sisters should grieve. The discursive practices of these plays seem aimed at transforming, or at least moderating, the social construction of mourning: turning the grief-stricken away from the practice of lament led by women toward the rituals of the church controlled by men. The sisters’ central role in the plots of the Lazarus plays indicates the lingering authority of women over matters of death and mourning in medieval England. The plays’ ideological work is complicated by the fact that in scripture Jesus weeps with Mary Magdalene and her fellow mourners just before he raises Lazarus from the dead: “When Jesus saw her [Mary] weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled; and he said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus wept” (John 11:33-6). This moment gave rise to two opposing interpretive traditions: one that framed Jesus’ display of sorrow as an endorsement of women’s tears, and another that discredited this perspective. Early Christian and medieval exegetes interpreted this moment in different ways: as an example of Jesus’ emotional restraint in the face of death; as a sign of his spiritual exertion while performing the miracle; or as an indication of his pity for nonbelievers. Christine de Pizan uses the scriptural passage to argue against “those who attack women for their habit of weeping” (24). She points out that Jesus was moved to

compassion “when he saw Mary Magdalene and her sister Martha weep for their dead brother,” and asserts that their sorrow moved Jesus to resurrect Lazarus: “What special favors has God bestowed on women because of their tears!” (24). Her defense of female grief draws on a tradition of Christian thought that sees tears as expressions of compunction for sin.4 Women were considered to be naturally more compassionate than men, and therefore more easily moved to Christian compunction and piety. An opposing homiletic tradition censures female grief and mourning for the dead. These texts interpret Jesus’ weeping as a gesture that signifies disapproval rather than empathy. Basil of Seleucia argues that Jesus wept in order to limit mourning by setting an example of restraint: “He wept, He did not lament, or wail, or moan, or rend His garments, or tear His hair” (180). In contrasting Jesus’ simple weeping with ritual lamentation, the Bishop seeks to reform the mourning practices of his audience. Like the consolers of the N-Town Lazarus who echo him, he argues that excessive weeping implies a lack of faith and offends God: “Do not offend the One who has experienced the Resurrection by weeping immoderately” (180). He asserts that Jesus wept, not out of pity for Mary Magdalene or Lazarus but out of mercy for the “misguided views” of the Jews (180). A late Middle English sermon, dated sometime after 1490, like Basil of Seleucia’s homily, shifts the meaning of Jesus’ tears from sorrow to censure, stating that Jesus wept in order “to make us undirstond how hard it is for anny man to ryse ageyn from synne when that he is fallen ther-in (272).” These interpretations efface the Gospel’s description of the sisters’ grief, indicating that female mourning practices were a significant source of social friction. The discursive maneuvers of the medieval English Lazarus plays, like those of the homiletic tradition, reveal cultural anxiety over the performance of female grief. Each of the Lazarus plays differs in its portrayals of mourning women, variations that are consistent with each cycle’s central theological idea. David Mills notes the Chester’s emphasis is “upon the fulfillment of divine purpose,” the N-Town’s “concentration upon grace,” the York’s illumination of “human foible,” and the Towneley’s exploration of “vital sin” (60). These distinct thematic emphases help to account for the differing ways each play treats the sisters’ grief. The Chester Lazarus assimilates the sisters’ ritual tears to prayer. Paradoxically, their feminine helplessness endows them with spiritual power: because they cry out for Jesus, he hears and answers their tears. The sisters’ faith in Jesus drives the plot of the Chester play: when he responds to their prayerful laments, Jesus fulfills his divine purpose. In contrast, the N-Town, York, and Towneley versions depict the sisters’ sorrow as excessive, contrary to faith, and offensive to God. In the NTown, the male consolers praise Jesus’ miracle as a gift of grace that the Magdalene, in her resistant and excessive mourning, never acknowledges. The York Lazarus casts mourning for the dead as the result of limited human perception, and therefore reveals the human foible of incorrectly interpreting the meaning of a dead body. The Towneley’s stern focus upon sin is consistent with its negative portrayal of female grief. In this version Jesus reprimands Mary Magdalene for her spiritual weakness. Finally, the Digby

play presents a stoic Mary Magdalene whose manly self-control marks her as a uniquely devout and heroic woman. This portrayal is in keeping with the genre of the play and the aristocratic ethos of its heroine. Lawrence Clopper observes that “the playwright wishes to present Mary as an apostle in her own right” (245). Because she is meant to be an exemplum of unwavering faith following her conversion, it is incumbent upon her to refrain from mourning the death of her only brother. As in the homiletic tradition, the scriptural moment in which Jesus weeps appears to have presented a dilemma for the compilers of the medieval Lazarus plays. Each of them uses different strategies to distance Jesus from female grief and any association with mourning for the dead. These divergent representations reflect Christ’s different overall function in each cycle, which Alexandra Johnston succinctly identifies: “In York he teaches; in Chester he acts; in Towneley he suffers; in N-Town he forgives” (30). But when the plays are viewed synoptically, Jesus’ tears also emerge as a source of tension. In the York Lazarus Jesus teaches Martha and Mary Magdalene that grieving is sinful, and therefore refrains from weeping himself. In the Chester, he actively responds to their tears, and the moment at which he purportedly weeps is ambiguous. Two Jews, who are portrayed as evil and unreliable witnesses, comment upon his weeping, but nothing else, either in Jesus’ words or the stage directions, indicates that he actually weeps. In the Towneley, Jesus weeps as he prays, implying that his tears are the result of his spiritual exertion. Here Jesus weeps, not in empathy with Mary Magdalene’s sorrow, but instead because of the immense effort required to lift Lazarus out of his sinful state. In the NTown, like the Chester, the moment is ambiguous. Jesus says that the weeping of the Magdalene and the Jews who are with her cause him to weep, but the Latin rubric has an odd distancing effect. It says “hic ihesus fingit se lacrimari” [here Jesus pretends to weep] (between line 372-3). Does the rubric mean to suggest that the real Jesus only pretended to weep, or that the person symbolizing Jesus is supposed to enact Jesus weeping? The second possibility is inconsistent with the text, for presumably the other characters in the play are also pretending to weep, yet no rubric designates this action. The first possibility is even more strange. Why would the real Jesus pretend to weep? This textual mystery may be related to the play’s ambivalence toward female grief. In the N-Town Lazarus, Mary Magdalene’s grief is at once necessary and sinful: her tears impel Lazarus’s resurrection, but Jesus’ response to her, pretend or otherwise, denotes forgiveness rather than empathy. The thematic differences among the cycles and the varying depictions of Christ’s tears are no doubt also related to the regional historical development of each cycle, a question that merits further investigation. All of the extant Lazarus plays deviate markedly from John’s Gospel in ways that indicate considerable anxiety over the control of female mourning for the dead. Moreover, all of the plays are predicated upon the view that grieving is a gendered activity, and that mourning women are potentially helpless, immoderate, and in need of containment through prayer, privacy, and perhaps above all, masculine control. Yet the plays equivocate with this position, for in all of them female grief is integral to the unfolding dramatic action. The sisters’ mourning, however

denounced, curtailed, and eventually supplanted by Christ’s divine power, is nevertheless a precondition for the performance of the miracle.