The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture (The New Middle Ages)

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THE DRAMA OF MASCULINITY AND MEDIEVAL ENGLISH GUILD CULTURE

Christina M. Fitzgerald

THE DRAMA OF MASCULINITY AND MEDIEVAL ENGLISH GUILD CULTURE

© Christina M. Fitzgerald, 2007. Portions of chapter 2 were previously published as “Manning the Ark in York and Chester,” by Christina M. Fitzgerald, in Exemplaria 15.2 (2003): 351–84 and reproduced here, in revised form, with kind permission of Pegasus Press, P. O. Box 15806, Asheville, NC 28813. Portions of chapter 3 were previously published as “Of Magi and Men: Christ’s Nativity and Masculine Community in the Chester Drama Cycle,” by Christina M. Fitzgerald, in Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Susan Karant-Nunn, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, 7 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2003), pp. 145–62, and reproduced here, in revised form, with kind permission of Brepols Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–7277–4 ISBN-10: 1–4039–7277–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fitzgerald, Christina Marie. The drama of masculinity and medieval English guild culture / Christina M. Fitzgerald. p. cm. — (The new Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7277–X (alk. paper) 1. Masculinity—England—History—To 1500. 2. Drama, Medieval—History and criticism. 3. Men—England—Social life and customs. 4. Guilds—England—History—To 1500. 5. England—Social life and customs—1066–1485. 6. England—Social conditions—1066–1485. I. Title HQ1090.7.E85F58 2007 307.76081⬘0942—dc22

2007060047

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For my parents, Donatus and Marita Fitzgerald

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1. Men in the Household, Guild, and City

13

2. The Domestic Scene: Patriarchal Fantasies and Anxieties in the Family and Guild

41

3. Male Homosocial Communities and Public Life

95

4. Acting Like a Man: The Solitary Christ and Masculinity

145

Notes

165

Works Cited

191

Index

201

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

have always loved reading the acknowledgments of scholarly books to discover the professional, social, affective, and communal ties that have shaped the work. This book has many such ties, most of which begin at the University of California, Los Angeles, where my initial research and writing was guided expertly and enthusiastically by Del Kolve. To write a book on medieval drama under the tutelage of V. A. Kolve was a rare privilege and one of the best educational and professional experiences of my life. I am also grateful for the many other extraordinary scholars who have read or heard all or parts of this project and offered their suggestions, advice, and encouragement. Gordon Kipling and Teo Ruiz read the entire work when it was my dissertation, and both offered invaluable advice and support as I began to transform it into a book. To them both I am deeply grateful. I also owe thanks to Christopher Baswell, Scott Kleinman, George Edmondson, Michael Calabrese, Andrea Denny-Brown, and Melissa Valiska Gregory, who read and offered critiques of parts of the project at various stages, or who loyally came to hear me present at conferences and asked thoughtful questions, even at early morning Sunday sessions at Kalamazoo. Segments of this work have been presented at several conferences over the years, and I owe thanks to the organizers and audiences at various meetings of the Medieval Academy of America, the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo, the Modern Language Association, the Medieval Association of the Pacific, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Small sections of chapters 2 and 3 have been previously published—here altered significantly—as “Manning the Ark in York and Chester,” Exemplaria 15.2 (2003): 351–84, and “Of Magi and Men: Christ’s Nativity and Masculine Community in the Chester Drama Cycle,” Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Susan Karant-Nunn, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, vol. 7 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2003), pp. 145–62. I am grateful to Simon Forde of Brepols Publishing and Al Shoaf of Exemplaria and Pegasus Press for their permission to reprint my work, and to the anonymous readers selected by each press.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would also like to thank the anonymous reader of this book and Bonnie Wheeler, series editor of The New Middle Ages, for their detailed suggestions for revision at various points in the process from proposal to published work. Farideh Koohi-Kamali, senior editor at Palgrave Macmillan, saw me through the process and helped me settle on a title at last, and I owe thanks to her, as well. My friend Tison Pugh has my gratitude for pointing me toward Palgrave Macmillan in the first place. Any remaining mistakes, misreadings, or infelicities of thought or language in this work are entirely my responsibility, and no reflection on anyone I have named here. Revision of this work was financially supported by a University of Toledo Summer Research Fellowship in 2004, and travel to conferences and libraries has been supported by the University of Toledo Department of English, the University of Toledo College of Arts and Sciences, and the UCLA Department of English. Two one-year fellowships from the UCLA Department of English supported my early work on this project. But not all of my support has been so institutional or formal. Colleagues, friends, and peers, academic or otherwise, have provided me with intellectual stimulation, companionship, inspiration, friendly competition, and emotional support. Beginning with the most recent debts first, my colleagues in the English Department and the Humanities Institute at the University of Toledo have all been absolutely wonderful in their enthusiasm for my scholarship and teaching. Matthew Wikander, Christine Child, Melissa Gregory, and my department chairs, Sara Lundquist and Samir Abu-Absi, deserve special note, as do my students in my medieval drama courses in 2003 and 2004. Moving further back in time, I would like to thank all of the UCLA medievalists, faculty and students, and all the people with whom I have shared seminars and reading groups, for being an impressive and inspiring community of scholars. Two of my closest graduate school friends, David Witzling and Chris Hamilton, were not medievalists, but years of talking, thinking, and teaching with them has probably shaped my habits of mind more than any of us realize, and both of them have provided invaluable friendship and much needed levity. I feel I should also thank my neighbors in my courtyard apartment building in Los Angeles—none of them academics; most of them in the entertainment industry—who cheered my progress on the dissertation and the job market as I applauded them as they wrote their screenplays, recorded their music, and sweated through countless auditions. My family has always been supportive of my endeavors and admirably restrained from asking “Is it done yet?” and for that I am grateful. My parents, to whom this book is dedicated, and my oldest sister, Lucia Fitzgerald, have

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also provided much needed financial assistance in the leanest years. And finally, last in these acknowledgments, but first in my heart, is Sam Nelson, whom I thank for being my best friend and companion in my new life in Toledo, and for going through the experience of publishing a first book before me, so I knew what to expect.

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INTRODUCTION

he late medieval drama cycles of York and Chester were masculine enterprises.1 This may seem to state the obvious: the plays were produced and performed by men who belonged to merchant and artisan guilds, whose official membership consisted almost entirely of men. But the York and Chester cycles were more than incidentally male-oriented; rather, they form a “drama of masculinity,” a distinct subgenre of dramatic activity specifically and self-consciously concerned with the fantasies and anxieties of being male in the urban, mercantile worlds of their performance.2 Generally conservative and nostalgic in tone and content, the Chester and York cycles frequently construct an exclusively male or male-dominated world as it “should” or might be, with particular attention to where the interests of the mercantile classes lie. When a play cannot construct from its biblical subject an idyllic male world, it presents instead a critique of what it sees as unmasculine, unmasterly, and unproductive behavior. By no means a cohesive indoctrination into a stable, singular ideology, the plays reveal the ambivalence and anxiety of these particular men about their increasingly complex, urban, market-oriented world and their growing role in its public culture, economics, and politics; they also at times reveal the heterogeneous divisions and hierarchies within the guild system, and the tensions these divisions produce. Moreover, the plays present an image of Christ very different from other popular devotional depictions of him in the late Middle Ages. More distant, more silent, and less immediately present for affective, psychologically intense devotion, this Christ contributes to a construction of masculinity: strong, silent, and ideally unemotional in the face of gruesome and public torture and death. This model of masculinity not only works in contrast to much of the dominant affective imagery of Christ at the time—imagery frequently associated with women’s devotional practices—but also presents a man alienated from both domestic and homosocial spheres, an alienation that speaks again to the ambivalence guildsmen had about both their emerging public roles and their participation in the drama.

T

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THE DRAMA OF MASCULINITY

In short, the plays, like the men who produced and performed them, grapple with multiple masculinities and the sometimes irreconcilable roles of men in home, city, and religion. What is more, the very act of performing these plays in turn produced homosocial masculine communities, doubled by those of the men depicted in them.3 Because these two particular cycles were dramatically performed again and again over centuries in the city streets where the guildsmen lived and worked, that reiteration also symbolically performed normative social and gender roles and authorized them through the plays’ devotional and civic contexts.4 Because the plays remained a constant presence in guildsmen’s lives over the course of the cycles’ long existence—as witnessed by guild and civic records—the daily, habitual activities and social relations that made the plays possible also produced the guildsmen’s occupational and gendered identities. That is, periodic performance of the plays reinforced and reiterated a process of identity formation that was perpetually performed in the plays’ maintenance and preparation. And yet, throughout the cycles—in representations of the domestic sphere, of homosocial communities, or in the Passion and resurrection of Christ—the drama reflects deep anxieties about performance, representation, and contemporary life for urban men, even as it holds up normative ideals of behavior. The York and Chester cycles, therefore, are not only guild-produced dramas, but also guild-producing dramas. They are a “drama of masculinity” because they consist of men, belong to men, and refer to men; because they address men as their subject (the content of their narrative), and express men as subjects themselves, calling medieval urban masculinity into being. The absence, then, of critical attention to these cycles’ significant participation in the cultural construction of masculinity is surprising; it may rest in part on the predominant critical emphasis on the larger “social body” of the plays and their culture ( both civic and religious), in the wake of Mervyn James’s influential essay on that subject.5 But as Ruth Evans wrote over a decade ago, James’s “over-homogenised account” ignores that the corporate identity supposedly bestowed upon the guild community during the Corpus Christi procession was “enabled by [the guilds’] difference from women in the economic and social formation” of those corporations, and was ultimately “conceptualised as hierarchical, masculine, and only fully represented by the ruling classes.”6 Evans offers these critiques of James as starting points for a reconsideration of the social body of Corpus Christi as it evokes masculinity and continues with a number of potential readings of the York “Crucifixion” play. The most salient argument worth noting now is the following: It is striking that this pageant, unlike the corresponding pageants in the other cycles, completely lacks female figures. The fact that it is men who perform

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this act of ritualised punishment, on behalf of other men, and for a man whose only pleas are addressed to God the Father, suggests the creation of a fantasy of masculine anxiety, a fantasy in which the male body and male sexuality are regulated by men, and in which women’s absence suggests the disturbing eradication of feminine difference.7

This is one of many suggestive readings in an essay primarily focused on the way critics have (en)gendered readings of cycle drama thus far. Her brief essay is thus an open and welcome call for new research in drama and gender, and I see this book as one answer to that call. For it is not only the York Crucifixion that is all male. The cycle dramas in toto are overwhelmingly masculine. Given the “predominance of females in late medieval towns,” the dominance of males in the plays makes a pointed ideological statement.8 Even episodes that might be devoted to women are dominated by men; take, for example, the Purification of Mary episodes. In both York and Chester, what might have been a meditation on Mary as the mediatrix between the divine and the human becomes instead an exploration of one man’s faith, as the character of Simeon essentially steals the audience’s attention. In individual pageants and in their totality, the York and Chester cycles are largely about men and masculinity, about “fantas[ies] of masculine anxiety,” and about the construction of male homosocial communities. They are, in short, a “drama of masculinity.” The same cannot be said of all “cycles” of biblical drama in late medieval England, not of the East Anglian collection known as “N-Town,” nor of the Towneley manuscript of plays identified with Wakefield, Yorkshire.9 Despite the seemingly generic resemblances, the control and production of the cycles at York and Chester by their guilds makes them very different creatures, in context and content, from N-Town and Wakefield. Although attention to the specific performance, production, and/or manuscript contexts of medieval drama has been a laudable trend in medieval drama studies in recent years, the general tendency, especially in drama anthologies, still to see York, Chester, N-Town, and Wakefield as a generically similar quartet, separated only by geography and the specifics of local contexts, has obscured their important cultural differences, especially concerning gender.10 Only the most recent book to address English vernacular dramatic activity as a whole, Lawrence Clopper’s Drama, Play, and Game, delineates the differences in context and content between the various manifestations of English festive culture, to explain why certain kinds of drama flourished in some parts of England and not in others.11 In other words, Clopper draws together the numerous surviving records of English drama, only to show its lack of generic and contextual uniformity and to demonstrate the specificity and individuality of various dramatic enterprises in medieval England.

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And individual the cycles are, as a close study of them reveals. In her work on East Anglian dramatic culture, Gail McMurray Gibson observes that she “became more and more struck by the evidence that, except for the most superficial resemblances of genre and function, the N-Town cycle was a very different dramatic and devotional artifact from the drama cycles created by northern civic piety.”12 Clopper refers to the Towneley manuscript as “the most problematical of all the northern texts,” and discusses the “growing uneasiness” among critics with the assumption that the text “contain[s] a cycle of plays intended for performance in one town,” that is, Wakefield.13 Towneley, too, may be a “compilation,” as Gibson calls N-Town, with some of its plays coming from Wakefield, while others are borrowed from York, and still others being of uncertain provenance.14 But how are York and Chester distinct from N-Town or Wakefield in either character or content? Although it is beyond the scope of this book to make a full account of the differences, I will nevertheless provide some salient examples. First, the obvious differences that make N-Town, in Gibson’s words, “a very different dramatic and devotional artifact.”15 N-Town is a compilation of plays, whole segments of which, such as the “Mary Play” and its two “Passion” plays, likely had independent lives. Moreover, not only have scholars been unable to discover any records of performance for N-Town, they have also not yet determined a specific provenance or sponsorship for the plays. Internal evidence suggests that, if performed, N-Town called for multiple stationary stages, rather than the pageant wagons of York and Chester.16 But it is not only performance and manuscript contexts that make N-Town a different “devotional artifact.” At “the heart of the East Anglian N-Town compilation is a play cycle,” writes Gibson, “unique in extant medieval English drama, of the conception, birth, and life of Mary,” and it is that dedication to Mary, and to women in general, that makes N-Town so distinct from the “drama of masculinity” of York and Chester.17 In contrast to N-Town, Chester subsumes the Annunciation and Visitation episodes into a broader “Annunciation and Nativity” play (Play 6), two-thirds of which focuses on Joseph’s doubts and the Emperor Octavian’s conversion, with only one-third (a mere 258 of 702 lines of dialogue) concerning the experiences of Mary and Elizabeth. Moreover, only Joseph and the male Expositor appear and speak alone on stage, and only Joseph’s speech suggests interiority. Likewise, York also combines the Annunciation and Visitation, devoting only a handful of lines to the former and dominating both episodes with the Doctor character’s scholarly disquisitions on the theological meanings of the events portrayed. Thus, in each of the northern cycles’ depictions of a potentially Mary-centered episode, male subjects—domestic, courtly, or clerical—are allowed more

INTRODUCTION

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voice and presence than are women, motherhood, or female kinship and community. Of course, York does include a sequence on the death of Mary and her Assumption, unlike Chester, but they are slight in comparison to the expansive “Mary Play” of N-Town, and they, too, are dominated by men and their experience of these events. Because of their figural association with the Virgin Mary, female characters in general receive greater and more positive characterization in N-Town than in any of the northern cycles, Wakefield included. A good example is Noah’s Wife. Most medieval English plays of the Flood expand upon the basic biblical narrative with an additional story—handed down from Eastern legend—of Noah’s Wife’s reluctance to board the ark.18 Of the five extant episodes (one is a single play from Newcastle), only the N-Town version does not include some form of the Wife’s resistance. It presents her instead as a figure of the Virgin Mary, devoutly and meekly accepting God’s will, in keeping with N-Town’s emphasis on Mary.19 The social and cultural reasons for N-Town’s greater interest in Mary, types of Mary, the Annunciation, and women’s connection to incarnational theology is taken up in greater detail throughout Gibson’s work.20 What is important here is that each cycle, though working with narratives of a common faith, adapts those stories through local eyes for its own contextual, cultural, and performative purposes. Moreover, the diffuse and subtle mechanisms of ideology and culture—more persuasive than coercive— combined with the recurrent performance of these plays and the cultural habits associated with them, serve to produce and reify the cultural differences between the cycles. Although we do not know definitively who sponsored, performed, or recorded the N-Town plays, we do know, from scholarship such as Gibson’s and Theresa Coletti’s, or from contemporary accounts such as Margery Kempe’s, that East Anglian women were a major economic and cultural force behind devotional practices in their region, particularly through their influence in parishes and religious guilds.21 It thus seems likely that women were involved in the sponsorship of drama in East Anglia, in clear contrast to York and Chester, where devotional drama was in the hands of occupational guilds, which were exclusively male in membership. But Wakefield presents a more obscure picture in terms of the sponsorship and impetus for the plays of the Towneley manuscript. Again, there is even a “growing uneasiness” with the assumption that these plays were indeed a cycle meant for performance in Wakefield. We do know that five of the plays were clearly borrowed from York; thus some critics argue that the manuscript is a compilation by a connoisseur, perhaps meant for private reading.22 Critics once thought that Wakefield, like York and Chester, was guild-produced because five of the plays bear guild ascriptions

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in a sixteenth-century hand; however, as Clopper points out, those ascriptions generate more questions than answers. First, Wakefield “appears to be too small and economically underdeveloped” and without “sufficient guild structure” to have produced a full-scale cycle like York’s or Chester’s.23 And as Clopper asks, “Why do only some of the plays have guild ascriptions?” His tentative answer is that perhaps Wakefield had individual, stand-alone plays, produced by a handful of guilds independently, as seems to have been the case in Norwich, as well.24 But again, we have little evidence for Wakefield of the kind of guild structures that larger cities had, and there is no external evidence of such sponsorship. I would argue, rather, that the sixteenth-century ascriptions are an antiquarian imitation of a cycle like York’s.25 Even Martin Stevens, who believes the plays were performed at Wakefield, sets out the important differences between the York and Towneley manuscripts, the former of which is clearly a “register” made for practical use by civic officials, while the latter, he argues, is a “book of literary value.”26 The difference between York and Wakefield—or Chester and Wakefield— lies also in the content, as well as in the manuscript contexts. Whatever its origins and sponsorship, Wakefield is much more interested in the conflicts of class and agrarian labor than in gender, and when it does portray women, the often farcical, stereotypical portraits become central to their narratives.27 Let us turn back to the Noah story as an example. Wakefield, like all versions except N-Town, depicts Noah’s Wife as hesitant to board the ark. But Wakefield expands the Punch-and-Judy style comedy to proportions that threaten to obscure any other purpose of the play and develops the character of the Wife at the expense of Noah’s characterization.28 So where York and Chester are largely concerned with the trials and tribulations of Noah, of which his Wife is only one part, Wakefield shows an almost subversive glee in the Wife’s rebellion, which becomes the focus of the play. Similarly, in the various shepherds’ plays, only Wakefield gives us a female character other than Mary—Mak’s wife Gyll in “The Second Shepherds’ Play”—and pays attention to the specifically female burdens of childbearing and rearing, which York and Chester never address. And again, though Gyll, like Uxor Noah, is the product of antifeminist satire, the play nevertheless evokes sympathy for her, while explicitly punishing her husband Mak. Though Wakefield is not as devoted to the Virgin Mary as is N-Town, it nevertheless provides more attention, however satirical, to female characters and typically female experiences than do either York or Chester. In contrast, as I will argue throughout this book, the production of York’s and Chester’s dramas by guildsmen over the course of two centuries constructs those narratives and their import as a specific kind of middle-class,

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masculine territory in a way that occasional performances of other drama would not have done. The York and Chester cycles thus become a “drama of masculinity” distinct from other cycles. Moreover, as part of an official, public guild function, which is itself part of a larger discourse of guild and civic culture, the performances delineate the guilds’ boundaries and identities and mark the world of work as significant but limited to men, thus shaping the socioeconomic and sociocultural lives of all these towns’ inhabitants. The plays’ regular performances also align masculine identity inextricably with occupation and, as I will argue, reinforce that identity by the narratives themselves. Recognizing, with Theresa Coletti, that the archival documents of dramatic and guild activity “have their own historicity, their own relation to the processes that produced them,” and sharing with her a desire to “return to the text, understood not in the conventional sense of the literary artifact distinguished from its ‘contexts,’ but in relation to the broadly construed complex of verbal, social, and symbolic representations which early drama enacted,” I have set out in this work to read the plays with the documents of guild culture, and to read those documents with the plays.29 In doing so, I have discovered a complex and intimate intercalation of fantasies and fears about class, guild identity, domestic and civic social structures, and the nature of representation, all expressed through issues of gender, particularly masculinity. The merchants and artisans who financed and performed the York and Chester cycles not only produced them but were also produced by the plays. Their identities as men, as merchants and artisans, as laborers or leaders, as domestic and/or public figures, and as the Christian faithful, were constructed, contested, and complicated year in and year out by their performance of these identities in the cycles, in the plays’ material production, and in the habitual repetitions of quotidian guild life. The survival over the decades and centuries of these cycles may in large part be due to their success in initiating York’s and Chester’s men into the complex ideologies and hierarchies of civic, domestic, and devotional life. The combined readings of texts and contexts, and the argument that the texts construct the ideals and anxieties of the guilds performing them, might for some readers prompt the question (despite the influence of Roland Barthes and Foucault): who authored the plays?30 It has been a critical commonplace for many years that members of the clergy wrote the cycles. But as Clopper has pointed out, there is no reason to assume this is so. There exists no concrete evidence that the clergy were directly involved in either the York or the Chester cycles, and the power of the laity in both cities provided the necessary contexts for the cycles to develop as they did.31 Furthermore, Clopper reminds us that the late Middle Ages was a

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period of steadily increasing literacy among the laity and of concomitant growth in vernacular culture. As a result, the materials were available that would enable laymen who were unlearned in Latin to write plays for laymen. The Stanzaic Life of Christ, the Northern Passion, the Cursor Mundi, the Gospel of Nicodemus, and the Franciscan Meditations on the Life and Passion of Christ were available in English and alone could supply all of the materials that playwrights would need to construct a cycle or part of a cycle of plays.32

The lay producers and performers of the York and Chester plays not only had the literacy and the libraries to have had some hand in the plays’ creation, they also had physical control over the play texts throughout their histories. In York each guild had its own prompt copy (known as the “original”) of the play for which it was responsible; the text as we know it is a collation of those “originals,” compiled between 1463 and 1477 as the official civic “register” of the plays.33 All of our complete copies of the Chester cycle, meanwhile, are antiquarian copies that postdate 1575, the year of the cycle’s last performance. The earliest of these, now Huntington MS 2, was written in 1591. The only earlier text is a copy of Play 23, “Antichrist,” which is probably from the late fifteenth century.34 The survival of a single play manuscript suggests that, as in York, Chester guilds held their own prompt copies; and in the last year of the cycle’s performance, records show that the smiths brought two different texts before the mayor for approval.35 According to David Mills, however, Chester’s cycle was rather more centrally controlled by the mayor.36 For the purposes of the present argument, however, it matters little whether guilds or the mayor and/or aldermen controlled the texts, for all were laymen of the mercantile or artisan class. What is important is that the texts as we have them are very late manifestations of civic and lay events with substantial histories. Even if original versions of these plays had been written by clergymen, not laymen, can we confidently assume that the texts did not undergo alterations over the years at the hands of their guardians, the men who financed and performed them regularly for nearly two centuries? The rich use of guild vocabulary and guild-relevant situations that I see in these two cycles may have been the result of years of tinkering and editing. In many respects, however, it does not matter who literally composed the texts. Medieval literature in general is a literature of memory, reiteration, repetition, reuse, and compilation. New contexts generate new meanings for even the oldest of narratives and texts. Certainly the cities of York and Chester and their guilds appropriated the plays for their own uses. What they saw in the texts must have spoken to them not just as

INTRODUCTION

9

subjects of God, as Christian devotees, or as citizens of their cities, but as men, as masculine subjects. In the use and appropriation of the texts, in their constantly reiterated performances, the guildsmen made the texts their own, perhaps even deriving unintentional catharsis, anxiety, or pleasure, thus altering the texts without ever changing a word. As performance and as popular culture, the cycle dramas are particularly open to this kind of appropriation. Drama as a cultural text—a sign or system of signs that says something about the culture that produced it—is more than just the written text; dramatic art gives sovereign importance to production and performance, which is open to ideological interpretation and appropriation by producers, performers, and audience alike. But drama also, like any cultural or linguistic production, equally produces its own subjects; in each year of York’s or Chester’s repeated performances, men took up subject positions (as players, as guild members, and as masculine beings) that were made seemingly natural by their repetition. My approach to the York and Chester cycles is perhaps as much ethnographic as it is literary and historical. I am interested in what and how these plays meant to the male guild culture that produced them and was produced by them, and in creating in turn a “thick description” of that cultural significance.37 In the first chapter of this book, “Household, Guild, and City,” prefatory to any analysis of the plays themselves, I will discuss in some detail the socioeconomic and political culture of late medieval guilds in northern England, particularly in York and Chester, not as mere “background,” but as part of the intricate matrix of culture, symbolic representation, community, identity, and subjectivity that constructs and is constructed by the plays.38 The cycle plays do not simply hold a mirror to the reality of economic life in late medieval cities, but rather construct a masculinist response to that world and perform a masculinist culture of work and occupation. This chapter will describe the material circumstances that shape the plays (which they in turn shape) and lay the groundwork for the following chapters. The rest of the book focuses on my reading of the plays as a deeply fraught and contradictory “drama of masculinity.” Throughout these chapters I maintain that the plays reveal a persistent anxiety concerning the “performativity” of masculinity and guild identity. Whether in episodes regarding the domestic sphere, homosocial community, or the solitary man, the plays continuously express a fear that masculinity is unstable, shifting, open to resignification, and therefore not innate or essential. Such gender performativity, in turn, provokes a discomfort with the more explicitly performed roles of the guildsmen in the drama itself. The famously selfreflexive nature of the plays thus suggests an uneasiness with the propriety of “playing” itself, especially with respect to masculinity.

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The second chapter, “The Domestic Scene: Patriarchal Fantasies and Anxieties in the Family and Guild,” addresses the subject of patriarchs and the double bind of their responsibilities in private or domestic and public or civic roles, as played out in various segments of York’s and Chester’s cycles. Again and again in these episodes, “proper” masculinity comes to be defined by sacrifice, by quiescence, by emotional reticence, and ultimately by absence from the demands of this world, including those of the household. Contrary to the terms of poststructuralist psychoanalysis, in this culture it is maleness that is marked by lack, not femaleness. Such masculine (self-)sacrifice is an ideal that will find its apotheosis in Christ; that all of the subjects of sacrifice are specifically sons suggests on some level that obedience to God and civic duty—as represented by this devotional, civic drama itself—demands and requires the destruction of the patriarchal family. Thus the York Corpus Christi cycle is not only “sacramental theater,” it is also sacrificial theater, for it required the guildsmen to sacrifice their time, money, attention, authority, and perhaps, also their domestic duties.39 The domestic episodes also express a nervousness about the fragility of the patriarchal household and masculine identity specifically in the midst of the city and its influences, the very milieu in which its instructions are meant to register. These plays, as well as the episodes of homosocial community, discussed in chapter 3, thus offer an ambivalent reading of the urban culture that produced the cycles. When the domestic plays posit an escape from urban culture or from the disorder of the heterosocial household, that escape frequently involves a fantasy of homosocial intimacy with God, but such respites are fleeting. More characteristic of the plays are larger homosocial groups—both constitutive and reflective of the sponsoring guilds—so that the experience of viewing the cycle from beginning to end must have seemed like the complete erasure of feminine difference in the guild world, given that even the few women’s roles were likely performed by men. But the portrayal of homosocial communities was by no means uniformly or even largely positive. Indeed, some of the plays—such as episodes of the Fall of the angels—seem to be warnings against the kind of undifferentiated unions of craftsmen that the riots of 1381 threatened to bring, while others express a more generalized uneasiness about the conflicts between duties to civic, homosocial groups and to the domestic sphere, about the arbitrary and fluid nature of a group’s boundaries, and about the possibilities of betrayal from within. Such anxiety cannot help but suggest discomfort with the homosocial groups these plays produced: the guilds themselves. And even in the midst of otherwise idealized depictions of homosocial communities, the plays also remind the audience of the always exclusionary tactics of community and identity formation. Thus chapter 3, “Male Homosocial Communities and

INTRODUCTION

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Public Life,” will address the male groups—both harmonious and adversarial—that abound in the cycle plays from their first constitution in episodes of Lucifer’s Fall to their final idealization in the Last Supper pageants. It is in these scenes that the chief fantasies and also the concomitant anxieties of guild life itself are enacted. This chapter also begins a more concentrated discussion of Christ as an inimitable and conflicted model of masculinity. Both before his trial and Passion and after his resurrection, the adult Christ is presented predominantly in the homosocial community of his apostles, yet he consistently stands apart. While this state might befit a figure who is both man and God, it also underscores the plays’ ambivalence about homosocial community; on the one hand, Christ’s presence serves to authorize homosocial structures, but on the other hand, his emotional distance withholds complete validation. Moreover, the plays’ careful emphasis on Judas as part of Christ’s community, and on the Pharisees and trial courts as yet more versions of homosocial structures, reiterates that ambivalence. Christ’s emotional and dramatic distance from such groups marks him off from the other players and marks ideal masculinity as itself something apart and isolated. That solitariness in Christ’s trial, Passion, resurrection, and postresurrection appearances are the focus of chapter 4, “Acting Like a Man: The Solitary Christ and Masculinity.” There I will argue that the drama’s depiction of the central Christian story is vastly different in execution, intention, and ideological impact from the affective methods and intentions of other, more private devotional works, many associated with women’s devotional culture. Scholars generally assume that all drama of the Passion in the late Middle Ages is necessarily participating in modes of affective piety, but it is my contention that the York and Chester plays are producing something distinct from and even consciously counter to those affective modes. Instead of focusing on the suffering of Christ, and inviting identification and communion with his vulnerable humanity, the York and Chester cycles present Christ as an ideal of “masculine” behavior—at times very powerful, triumphant, and resistant to the attempts to humiliate him—but also as a man isolated and alienated from both the domestic and homosocial spheres, an alienation that reflects anxieties about the contemporary condition of men. For the participants, this drama also enacts an anxious and unfulfilled longing for the presence of God; even as it brings “Christ” into the streets of medieval England, it simultaneously recognizes its own status as mere “play.” Moreover, the Passion plays represent more strongly than any other the evils of homosocial community, even representing those who would kill Christ as members of guilds and “conscientious” craftsmen, thus bringing to a head the anxieties about group identity and homosocial culture expressed throughout the

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cycles—indeed expressed about the cycles and their culture—and discussed in chapter 3. The figure of Christ brings together much of the conflicting, paradoxical impulses of the plays and their conceptions of masculinity, as well as the problematics of spectacle and representation within an ideology of masculinity that wants to produce reticent, removed, and “docile bodies.”40 The plays simultaneously shape guildsmen into public figures and attempt to fix their corporate and corporal identities even as they make masculinity into an “absent presence,”41 spectacularly visible but emotionally distant, a model of masculinity that must eschew the histrionic and spectacular. But if reticence and withdrawal are the sine qua non of masculinity, then in what ways are the performances of the guildsmen in the plays at all “manly”? This contradictory impulse is at the heart of the plays and its anxious conception and construction of urban guild masculinity. That is, the plays underscore and produce the contingent, shifting, performative nature of masculinity and guild, occupational, and class identity. The guildsmen are not only playing Christ, or Noah, or Abraham, or Eve, but they are also performing themselves in a “drama of masculinity,” not only making visible their identities as men, civic subjects, and guildsmen, but also revealing that their roles are as shifting, malleable, and movable as the pageant wagons themselves.

CHAPTER 1 MEN IN THE HOUSEHOLD, GUILD, AND CITY

eneralizing about “guild life” in England in the late Middle Ages is a tricky business, to say the least. Only in London did the guilds become complex, orderly, bureaucratic “worlds within worlds.”1 And new historicist attention to the idiosyncrasies of local culture prevents us from applying conclusions drawn from London’s model to just any English city. So the logical choice of sources for my study of the cycle dramas of York and Chester would seem to be the guild records of those two cities. And certainly there are printed and archival resources, both primary and secondary, from which to draw this information.2 But even given these sources, there are gaps in the historical records we cannot fill. Most of the Chester guild records that survive are from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. And York, though more complete and more ancient in its historical record, still does not tell us everything we want to know, especially about the lives of guildsmen and the ways in which their guild identities and responsibilities did or did not play significant roles in their lives. It is part of my argument throughout this book that the plays themselves enact some of the more emotional and psychological aspects of guild life, particularly where gender expectations are concerned. But those plays are creating as well as responding to a social and cultural life intertwined with guild identity, and I must first establish some idea of what that culture in York and Chester was like, insofar as that is possible, both theoretically and practically. To do so, however, I must rely more on York than Chester for information, since its documentary resources for the late Middle Ages are far richer than Chester’s. I do not intend this portion of my book to be a thorough history of guild life in northern England in the late Middle Ages and early modern periods. Rather, here I hope to address general aspects of guild and civic life that seem pertinent to an understanding of the plays. I also do not see this discussion as mere “background” to the artificially “foregrounded”

G

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literary text of the plays, but rather as a part of a mutually constitutive cultural matrix with the plays that must be addressed first for the sake of clarity. Since the primary focus of this project as a whole is masculinity, it seems logical to begin with gender. How male-oriented were English guilds themselves and what roles, if any, did women play? Guilds and Gender It is no surprise that in the index of Stella Kramer’s 1927 book, The English Craft Gilds: Studies in Their Progress and Decline, there is no entry for either “women” or “female workers” or anything else designating the discussion of women and the guilds.3 Kramer’s book, like other early histories, relies entirely on documents comprising the official discourse of guild culture: public documents such as ordinances, legal disputes, correspondence with city councils, and the like. Women rarely show up in such records. To uncover women’s involvement in the economic life and guild culture of late medieval English towns, one must look at private records such as wills and indentures—as Heather Swanson in Medieval Artisans has done—which reveal a world more complicated than that constructed by the official discourses.4 One of the purposes of my larger project is to show how the drama helped construct a world of guild activity that was masculine in ideology if not in reality. Of course, ideology can be a powerful tool for shaping reality; as Swanson puts it, “The sheer fact that the increasing number of written records articulated the social structure in terms of men, perhaps in itself demeaned the status of women and inevitably contributed to the denigration of their economic worth.”5 But despite such denigration, women did make a significant contribution to the economies of York, Chester, and other medieval English towns. As Martha C. Howell points out in the first sentence of the first chapter of Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities, in what has surely become a commonplace idea in economic history, “In northern Europe during the late Middle Ages, the household was the most important center of economic production.”6 And in that household, multiple members, male and female, practiced multiple trades and handicrafts, despite Edward III’s 1363 ordinance requiring that “Artificers, Handicraft People, hold them every one to one Mystery,” and despite the conventional, nostalgic, and popular vision of a household working to assist the patriarch in his profession.7 Although this book is concerned with the ways the drama contributed to the construction of urban masculinity, male roles can only be described and constructed vis-à-vis women, since to be a man in the Middle Ages was often defined by not being a woman.8 In what professions did women

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work? And what was their relationship to guilds? In what ways did they contribute, if at all, to the public or civic life of guilds? And what was their impact on the economic and social structure of medieval cities? These are the questions that this section must address generally before I can show how the plays rewrote and reconstructed craft and mercantile life as almost wholly male. Women worked in some capacity in nearly every profession. Often, they worked in support of their husband’s occupation or in a closely related craft. The York founders (who made pots and pans) recorded the importance of a wife’s labor in their ordinances when they regulated the number of apprentices a member could have but made an exception for Giles Bonoyne because he had no wife.9 Widows could take over their late husbands’ occupations and work as a feme sole, but generally only if their husbands had been financially successful enough to leave them sufficient capital.10 Although not necessarily full members of the guild, these widows often appear in lists of names in craft ordinances. The names of four such women appear among the fifty-nine at the end of the York dyers’ ordinances of the 1380s.11 However, such an option was not generally open to the widows of poorer craftsmen; many widows, in fact, lived in poverty.12 It seems the widows who carried on their husband’s craft were more the exception than the rule. Women more commonly practiced trades separate from their husbands’ crafts, either as entrepreneurs, manufacturing and selling their own goods, or as wage laborers working for other craftsmen. The victualling industry attracted large numbers of women workers, and in the less bureaucratically organized occupations, women dominated. Hucksters, in particular, were mainly women and were very numerous.13 In Winchester in the late thirteenth century, for example, hucksters selling bread outnumbered bakers nearly four to one.14 The sale of fish was another profitable sideline business that allowed many people, women included, to practice it without official victualling license. Because they lacked recognized status, women find little place in the records of fishmongers, but two from York left wills: Agnes Newton and Margaret Williamson, both salt fishmongers at Foss Bridge.15 Brewing, too, was frequently practiced as a sideline occupation, especially by married women. In fact, both the manufacture and distribution of ale was generally female-dominated.16 However, only the wives of better-off craftsmen could have afforded the expensive brewing equipment along with the fuel and malt.17 It is no accident that Margery Kempe, “on of the grettest brewers” of Lynn, was also the daughter of a mayor and married to a merchant.18 Women who could not afford the equipment on their own sometimes took out loans or inherited the equipment, often, in the latter case, from other women.19 Though brewers were usually married women

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and practiced brewing as a part-time activity, a few supported themselves through the trade.20 Like other victualling crafts, brewing’s unofficial character may have allowed women more opportunities to practice the trade, but it may also have led to the unsavory reputation of the craft, as well. Women also had a hold over the retail sale of ale, even after hops were introduced to England and professional male brewers began to take over the large-scale production of beer in the fifteenth century. Some brewers hired tapsters—again, usually women—to assist them in their retail trade. And since some women ran small alehouses or taverns out of their brewing properties, their servants did double service as public ale taverners. But not all women involved in the ale industry were brewers; many poorer women earned a living solely through the sale of ale. They were known as tipplers and sold ale not by the gallon, but in smaller, unauthorized amounts, “a matter of grave concern to civic authorities wanting to curb prices as an aspect of wage regulation.”21 It is no great wonder, then, that the only female character with a speaking part in Chester Play 17, “The Harrowing of Hell,” is an alewife who is left behind when Christ liberates everyone else. She, too, sold her ale in illegal amounts: “Of kannes I kept no trewe measure. / My cuppes I sould at my pleasure, / deceavinge manye a creature” (ll. 289–91).22 Regulations to prevent such arbitrariness were made in numerous cities and with such frequency to suggest that they were regularly flouted. Ordinances were also concerned with the hours of taverns, and more particularly with those who entered them at unauthorized times. As P. J. P. Goldberg writes, “Taverns and tavern society, though an integral part of the social life of the medieval city, posed a threat to order and good government and needed strict regulation.” He goes on to note a Coventry ordinance of 1492 that “virtually equate[s] the tapster with the prostitute: no person of the city is to receive any tapster; no tapster is to receive any man’s servant or apprentice.”23 It seems hardly surprising that anxieties about women’s participation in the economic life of the city should surface in such pointedly gendered, sexualized terms. And though the drama is more concerned with masculinity, such unsavory associations between women and illegitimate trade practices do show up in the plays. But the victualling and brewing industries were not the only trades with which women were involved, and not all of their involvement was deemed so immediately threatening to good governance. The textile and clothing industries relied quite heavily on women’s work, especially as wage laborers; this is not surprising given the strong cultural and ecclesiastical associations of Eve with spinning, and of women in general with sewing. Throughout the wool-producing towns of England, the tasks involved in preparing woolen yarn—combing, carding, and spinning—were done almost exclusively by women. The economic fortunes and status of these women

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17

could differ widely. Three female combers and carders were made free in York in the fourteenth century (that is, they purchased the right to buy and sell goods free of “tolls,” a kind of taxation meant to limit the practice of trade), but the majority of female textile workers were either paid piece-rates for their work or were paid by the weight of the wool.24 Although many women performed this work as a sideline, a number of poor women made their living only this way. Swanson quotes two wills that mention the poverty of textile workers: William Shipley, a draper who died in 1435, bequeathed 6d. “to each poor woman who works and spins for me,” and William Crosby, a litster [dyer], left “20s. to be divided by my executors among the poor women working for me, preparing and carding my wool.”25

Given the formulaic nature of wills, any mention of a person’s attributes or personal situation, such as their poverty, is notable. But not all women who spun, combed, and carded wool were poor; these were part-time activities for women of varying economic and social status. For example, in 1390, Isabella Barry, a wealthy widow, bequeathed 38 pounds of wool, numerous cards, and a spinning wheel.26 Despite the significant involvement of women in the production of woolen cloth, only one woman appears in the York Register of Freemen as a weaver; in 1441, Isabella Nonhouse was made free, two years after her husband’s death. Even without official license, however, women comprised a significant proportion of those performing weavers’ work. This can be seen, for example, in the aulnage (cloth taxation) of 1394–95; 180 of the 460 names were female.27 But despite women’s crucial role as a skilled workforce in the weaving industry, or perhaps because of their relatively great numbers, the official discourses of both crafts and civic bodies attempted to regulate them and exclude them from the occupation. In Coventry, Bristol, Hull, and Norwich, women were specifically excluded from the weavers’ craft.28 A 1461 civic regulation from Bristol anxiously worried that the women who worked as weavers left men of the craft without work: [D]ivers persons of Weavers Crafts of the seid Towne of Bristowe puttyn, occupien and hiren ther wyfes, doughtours and maidens, some to wever in ther owne lombes and some to hire them to wirche with othour persons of the seid Crafte, by the whiche many and divers of the Kynges liege people likkely men to do the Kyng servis in his warris and in the defence of this his lond and sufficiently lorned in the seid Crafte, gothe vagaraunt and unoccupied.29

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In York, though women were not exactly forbidden to work, they were still regarded with deep suspicion. An ordinance of 1400 declares, [N]ulla mulier, cujuscumque status seu condicionis fuerit, ammodo sit posita unter nos ad texandum, causa perjoracionis pannorum venalium et prejudicii artificii nostri ac deterioracionis firme regie predicte, nisi fuerit bene erudita et sufficienter approbata ad operandum in artificio nostro predicto. [No woman of whatever status or condition shall be put among us to weave, in case they spoil the cloth for sale and jeopardise the name of the craft and its income, unless they have been properly taught and are sufficiently knowledgeable to work in the craft.]30

Of course, through the apprenticeship system or their own arbitrary standards, the guildsmen could see to it that few or no women were considered “bene erudita et sufficienter approbata” [well taught and sufficiently approved] in the craft, and should the guild itself be willing to overlook these regulations, the “searchers” appointed by the civic council to regulate the quality and conditions of production could still fine unauthorized practitioners. At any rate, it is clear that while women were unofficially involved in the weaving industry in considerable numbers, official and public discourses attempted to write them out of the profession. Women also worked in minor crafts too numerous to mention, but one other occupation significantly filled by women is worth noting here: the household servant. In larger towns, a third or more of all households employed servants, both male and female, most of whom lived in the household and began their service at relatively young ages. Although female servants did not have access to the formal apprenticeships that their male counterparts did, they performed work that was more than simple housekeeping and often assisted in craft occupations, particularly cloth and garment production. Unlike the apprentices, however, servants “frequently moved from one household to another, staying in each perhaps only a year or two.” Female servants indeed often came to their work through their association with male craftsmen.31 What such associations tell us is that women were clearly important to the household economy and relied upon trade contacts for finding work just as their brothers did for procuring their work and apprenticeships. What women lacked were the status, the stability, and the privileges of formal membership in crafts. Although apprenticeship, as will be discussed below, was not the guarantee of success and stability that it appeared to be, and although boys and young men, too, were hired as servants, apprenticeship nevertheless provided young men a gender-specific institutionalized opportunity for social and economic advancement. What is more, over the

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course of the fifteenth century, what opportunities women had for household service began to diminish. As Goldberg writes, The evidence from York testamentary sources suggests that whereas a wide variety of artisans employed female alongside male servants during the earlier decades of the fifteenth century, by the end of the century they employed only male servants. In the generally wealthier mercantile households, however, servant groups became increasingly feminised. This. . .must be seen in the context of the erosion of female work opportunities in a period, for York at least, of growing recession and unemployment. Female servants may thus have become increasingly associated with non-productive functions and the advertisement of wealth.32

Such masculinization of artisan households and the concomitant association of productive work with masculinity can also be seen in the official discourses of the crafts, the most public of which is the drama. Thus, as I will argue throughout this book, the habitual performance of the drama actively shaped and reified normative gendered roles for men and women, in households, public spaces, religion, and labor and manufacturing. It is not only in household service that women lost economic opportunities during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Martha C. Howell describes in great detail the paradoxical ways in which women’s entry into market production at first strengthened, then weakened, the household economy, thus threatening household and patriarchal structures and setting into motion the fundamental restructuring of urban society that would limit women’s public and economic roles.33 As Swanson summarizes the situation, Any discussion of the relationship between artisans and the civic authorities is immediately going to exclude half the adult population, for women had no public status in late medieval towns. They could not hold office, nor were they usually free of the city in their own right; they derived their status from their husbands or fathers, and in York only 1 per cent of all those admitted to the freedom were women. Similarly. . .they had no public role in the craft guilds, nor were there any guilds exclusive to women workers in provincial towns. In consequence, the relationship between artisans and the civic authorities concerns, almost exclusively, the craftsmen of late medieval towns.34

And Goldberg gives us this anecdotal example from London, where women generally had more opportunities than in provincial towns: “When John of Ely was presented by a London jury in 1422 for farming his office of keeper of the assay of the oysters to unqualified women it was stated that it was contrary to the worship of the City ‘that women should have such

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things in governance.’”35 That example provides a telling contrast between everyday practice and official, public discourse and policy, a contrast taken up by the civic drama in Chester and York. Though women were significantly involved in the economic life of these towns and their artisan occupations, I will show that the plays constructed a world that was almost entirely masculine and concerned primarily with masculine interests, including anxieties about such feminine participation in the town economy. Guilds and Civic Structure in York and Chester Given that one half of a city’s adult population was denied any civic authority, what access to such authority did the remaining half have? Was access to authority available to all the male half of the adult population, and if not, how was access determined? What roles did the various guildsmen play in civic and economic structures? These are the questions I will address in this and the following section. To speak of the “organization” of guilds and civic “structure” is almost oxymoronic, since, unlike London, provincial cities such as York and Chester did not have highly organized, bureaucratic structures. Nevertheless, guild culture and civic organization did overlap, though to be a guild member was by no means a guarantee of access to power or influence. In London in the late Middle Ages, influential, wealthy merchants, who were distinguished by their guild liveries (their ceremonial clothing), could be found among several of the city’s guilds.36 In cities such as York and Chester, however, economic wealth and power were largely concentrated in one or two merchant guilds—the mercers and drapers, in the case of York.37 The remaining guilds—the artisans—were by no means an economically or socially homogenous group, for they included “at one extreme the wealthy and prestigious pewterers and goldsmiths, and at the other indigent and even destitute members of the textile and building crafts.”38 If they can be defined as a class at all, Swanson argues, it is in terms of their deliberate polarization from the merchants, the ruling elite.39 At times that polarization was the source of great tension, though more often than not, the civic leaders of towns such as York and Chester successfully kept these tensions at bay. Who had access to what kinds of power I will discuss shortly, but first I want to discuss what a guild was and the ways in which “guild” became an idea with a multitude of ideas ascribed to it. From our distance in time, the vision of an orderly line of guilds in a Corpus Christi procession, or the list of their names in pageant records, suggests, as Swanson puts it, “a degree of order and coherence in the structure of medieval industry,

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a precision in the definition of artisan employment that is in fact quite illusory.”40 It is instead a hierarchical and, as we have seen, masculinist order that the authorities—particularly the keepers of administrative records—imposed on an otherwise amorphous collection of craftspeople. Historians in the nineteenth century were quick and enthusiastic to accept such orderliness at face value and to believe the guilds to be precursors of modern trade unions; but alas, as R. B. Dobson wittily puts it, such “widespread enthusiasm for the concept and ideal of the English craft guild. . .did not long survive the melancholy demise of John Ruskin at Brantwood on Lake Coniston in 1900.”41 Dobson, in fact, laments that the word “guild” has become the preferred term in scholarship of the last century, especially discussions concerning York and its drama cycle. As he points out, it was not a term used in York at the time of the mystery plays; the record-keepers preferred the terms “arte” or “artifice” (in French), “artificium” (in Latin) and “crafte” (in English). It is in the earlier periods of its history that “guild” or some form of it is used in York, but its derivation from the Latin word for tax or tallage makes it “a highly ambiguous word as early as the eleventh century.”42 Like early historians of the drama, early historians of the guilds tended to see “evolutionary” connections between “early” and “late” manifestations of similar creatures.43 But Dobson agrees with Swanson that “the craft guilds which formed part of the administrative structure of late medieval towns were wholly different from those which make fleeting appearances in the twelfth-century pipe rolls and in thirteenth-century urban records.”44 Early guilds, Dobson explains, were essentially political groupings, designed either to facilitate the payment of taxes to the crown or to resist discrimination against their craft on the part of local government. Dobson further distinguishes the early guilds from later ones: The activities of these pre-1300 craft guilds were essentially directed externally; and they still lacked the internal stability (provided by an apprenticeship system, control by their own masters and searchers, and religious cohesion focused around an altar or chapel) which was essential if they were to provide the structural basis for the production of an elaborate and annual series of mystery plays.45

But Dobson may yet be overestimating the “internal stability” of later guilds. It is true that the ordinances and other administrative records of guilds, along with the play cycles, want to present and construct an image of “stability” and “cohesion.” But as Swanson shows, that may be more illusion than substance. Later in this chapter, I will discuss the so-called apprenticeship system, but now I want to address guild “stability,” “cohesion,”

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and “control by their own masters and searchers,” aspects of guilds in theory and practice that will be important to my reading of the plays. Many, perhaps even most, craft guilds in English provincial towns originally had a religious component to them similar to the wholly religious and social parish guilds. Swanson refers to this side of guild culture as the “fraternity,” which was responsible primarily for prayers for the dead and for relief of the poor.46 In some cities, craft guilds preserve this element in their official name; for example, the full Latin name of the pelters guild of Norwich was Fraternitas Sancte Trinitatis, Norwici, ac sancti Willelmi Innocentis et martinis, de Norwico.47 But civic authorities, and thus the official discourse as found in the ordinances, were almost exclusively concerned with the occupational activities of guilds or crafts, which Swanson calls the “mystery.”48 In York, only the carpenters’ ordinances speak of the religious component of the guild, thus drawing attention to the omission of such clauses in the ordinances of other crafts.49 Moreover, the structure of those ordinances shows that a distinction between the different roles did exist in the minds of the members and the authorities. The first twelve clauses of the carpenters’ ordinances relate to the “broderhode.” The following ten clauses address “the regulation of work, the employment of servants and apprentices, the examination of the quality of goods” and use the word “occupacion” instead of “broderhode.”50 Such ordinances, as recorded in the York Memorandum Book, make clear that the impetus for the formation and the administrative organization of crafts comes less from the members themselves and more from the civic authorities. In fact, as Swanson puts it, “Craft ordinances are thus very ambiguous documents; they express both the interests of the crafts and the preoccupation of the authorities. Sometimes the two coincided, at others they were opposed. In a clash of interests, the council prevailed, and many of the clauses that express the intentions of the crafts are merely wishful thinking.”51 Ordinances almost always begin with formulaic language, whether in Latin, French, or English, proclaiming that the following regulations were called for and assented to by the mayor and usually some combination of aldermen, sheriffs, and searchers of the craft; then the masters or members of the craft are mentioned. The 1471 ordinances of the York coopers are a prime example. The document begins thus: The xxjtie daie of Juyn in the xjth year of King Edward the iiijth (1471) were gadered in ye counseill chamber of the cite of York, William Holbek, mair, John Gillyot, John Glassen, Christofer Marshall, aldremen, Thomas Alan one of the shirraffes and John Towthorpe of ye xxiiijti of the same cite; at whiche day yere and place the serchiours and the honest personnes of the craft of

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coupers cam in ther propre personnes and with grete instance desired the constytucions under writen to be added to thaire saide crafte ovir all othir thair constitucions and ordynances tofore made. . .52

That the members of the guild had to come before and petition the mayor, aldermen, and sheriffs to amend their constitution is telling. Even more suggestive is the 1467 York girdlers’ ordinance that contains the following clause: Forsein alway that if this ordenance or any parte therof be founde at any tyme here after preiudiciall unto any of the kynges people, and specially of any of this citee, that than it shalbe leiffull to the maire for the tyme beyng by thadvise of hys counsell to amende correcte and refourme it and every parcell therof at his pleiser, etc.53

Clearly not only is the impetus for formal organization coming from the civic elite, but also the mayor has final say and control over the guild’s regulations. The mayor of York—as well as the mayors and councils of other towns—was acting on the orders from those politically more powerful than he. In 1363–64, the statute that famously ordered that “Artificers, Handicraft People hold them every one to one Mystery” also required that crafts record their ordinances with local government and that “Two of every craft shall be chosen to survey, that none use other Craft than the same which he has chosen.”54 A later statute of 1436–37 required all guilds to register their ordinances with civic authorities “in order to prevent them from formulating any regulations against the franchise.”55 As Swanson writes, “The statute[s] acted as a spur to local government. Throughout the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries efforts were made to corral all artisans into their respective crafts,” and crafts in towns such as York, Beverly, Norwich, and Coventry began to be required to bring their regulations before their local mayors for approval.56 The requirement of two “searchers” for each craft also clearly came from the royal statute and thence from civic leadership. This is an important point, for the existence of searchers might seem to support the longheld idea that guilds, through their organization and offices such as searcher, enforced economic monopolies and were thus responsible for inhibiting economic growth or contributing to the supposed decline of urban economies in the late middle ages. But as Swanson shows us, Searchers were appointed not to enforce craft monopolies, but to examine all goods for sale to see that they were properly made. They could enter the

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house of any artisan and examine goods in the course of manufacture, irrespective of the occupation of the head of the household. . ..The power was vested in the searchers rather than the craft, making them essentially council agents.57

The use of searchers also provided city councils with a steady source of revenue, for fines were levied on faulty work or on those practicing work that they were not authorized to do (that is, those not officially registered in the craft). In York, these fines frequently went to support the Corpus Christi pageant of the searcher’s craft. For example, in 1425, it was agreed that fullers could shear any cloth that they fulled themselves, but that for shearing any other cloth they had to pay a fine toward the shearmen’s pageant.58 The plasterers and tilers made a similar agreement in 1413.59 In general, half of the fines raised went to the council and half went to support the pageants.60 The use of searchers for raising these funds may have led councils to create as many crafts as possible; according to Swanson, in York the bowstringmakers seem to have existed as a distinct craft purely to make provision for the searchers.61 She and Dobson also both argue that many smaller crafts and their respective searchers were formed for the express purpose of funding and producing a pageant.62 Swanson gives the example of the York saucemakers (also known as sausagemakers, they worked mainly with meat by-products to make soups, sauces, sausages, lards, etc.), who were “conjured into existence” in the early fifteenth century; as she argues, “there was no real justification for isolating a craft whose work was also done by taverners, cooks, and butchers,” nor did the guild last long.63 In short, the appearance of protectionism in craft ordinances and other legislation may have arisen as a way of generating much-needed funds, particularly to support civic displays such as the drama.64 The irony of this system, then, is that the funds needed for a signifying performance of hierarchy and unity were thus largely generated by the flouting of hierarchy and the blurring of social and economic boundaries.65 Thus, even in the practices of power that seek to fix and control masculine and class identity, opportunities for subversion, sites of resistance, and possibilities of resignification and identity “play” are built right in. This slipperiness—a site both of fantasy and anxiety—manifests itself throughout the drama, the product that is not only funded by the flouting and crossing of occupational identities but is also a mechanism producing those identities. Like Chaucer’s John the carpenter of “The Miller’s Tale,” who also “gestes heeld to bord” (l. 3188), or the clerk Absalon, who moonlighted as a barber and a scrivener (ll. 3326–27), the men who practiced their trades in late medieval York and Chester were much more flexible in that practice than the neat categorization demanded by the crown and the civic elites would have us

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believe.66 The same can be said of other provincial cities in England. In Beverly in 1493, official ordinances admitted as much, for they merely required that each man register with the craft “that he most get his living by.”67 As we have seen, other members of the household, especially women, contributed through the practice of additional occupations as well. Thus, as Swanson puts it, “If households could not be restricted to one craft, [then neither] could the boundaries between these crafts be properly defined.”68 For most manufacturing artisans, a highly structured guild was not practical or entirely necessary. More important to the practice of a craft in late medieval cities was the “freedom” of that city. The term is a multivalent one, “open to a variety of interpretations depending on time and place.”69 In London, from the late fourteenth century, one gained access to the freedom through the sponsorship of guild; “by the sixteenth century citizenship was dependent on membership in a livery company.”70 But in provincial towns and cities, access to the freedom was governed by civic authorities, who sold it at will.71 In York in the early fourteenth century the freedom was a privilege chiefly granted to a few (similar to the liveried class of London’s guilds), but by the end of the century, it had become an obligation “imposed as widely as possible, so that the purchase of the freedom had become one more aspect of the ‘fiscal tyranny’ of the urban elite.”72 By 1400, if a craftsman wanted to practice his occupation free of tolls—particularly if he wanted to sell goods— he had to purchase the freedom. (Two other means of becoming enfranchised were through patrimony and apprenticeship, but “redemption”—the purchase of the freedom through the payment of a fee to the municipal government—was by far the most common means of access.)73 Even crafts that had been previously excluded from the freedom show practitioners being admitted in large numbers in York from the 1330s on. The exact reasons for such a change in the meaning and administration of the freedom remain a matter of speculation, but certainly the extension of the franchise provided greater revenues for city coffers, and thus for civic projects such as the cycle plays. Furthermore, although it may seem at first that the extension of the franchise to most artisans was an act of inclusion, “it is doubtful that such an extension. . .would have been achieved if it had proved a threat to the commercial advantage of the civic elite or the growing merchant class. The franchise extended the obligations more than the opportunities of the artisans.”74 What is more, many were still excluded, particularly women, socalled “foreigns” (English, but not born in York), “aliens” (non-English), and those too poor and unconnected to purchase the freedom or gain admission through apprenticeship or patrimony. The obligations that the freedom required were primarily to the municipal government rather than to the guild. Although many craft ordinances from late medieval York required taking out the freedom before becoming

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a master, it was not always necessary to do so, as Swanson shows. Women workers, piece-workers and day-laborers, and those working for the church or in its “liberties” (church-owned land not under the jurisdiction of civic authorities), including many “foreigns”—together a large proportion of the late medieval urban workforce—were usually not franchised, nor did they need to be in most cases.75 There were other ways to practice an occupation without taking out the freedom and registering in that craft. For example, craftsmen who took out the freedom in one craft could practice another without re-registering under the subsequent one. Throughout her study, Swanson shows men who are listed in the York Register of Freemen under one craft ascription having inventories noting the tools and goods of a different or additional craft.76 In other words, being franchised in general was more important than belonging to a specific craft. However, the obligation of the freedom may have even contributed to the bureaucratic organization and creation of some crafts and added to the “illusion of economic structure” that Swanson details, for, as the fourteenth century progressed, among those who did take out the freedom, few did so without a craft ascription. Everyone was seemingly categorized and labeled, at least in name.77 That claim to organization and corporate identity did not guarantee any kind of access to power, however. In York, although craft guilds elected members to the “common council,” their role was essentially “to approve aldermanic decisions, a public-relations exercise.”78 Real political power belonged exclusively to the aldermen on the city council, who had become a closed and self-electing body as early as the end of the thirteenth century.79 The true governing body thus consisted of the mayor and the council of twelve (the aldermen), as well as a council of twenty-four. Below them were the guildsmen elected to the “common council,” who were also known as the “forty-eight” or the “commonalty.” Again, their purpose was merely to rubber stamp decisions of the mayor and the aldermen.80 Whatever ceremonial role crafts might have had in the civic government, as in the processions and plays, their material influence and power was very little. Indeed, that spectacle was also “intended to sustain the social order and the oligarchic political structure.” Artisans could make few interventions into the system of rule since “the closed corporation and the costly pomp were the features of urban life more likely to deter the investment of outside capital than the regulations of artisan guilds that had no real economic power.”81 While more prosperous artisans, in particular successful masters of their crafts, might aspire to and even participate in the values and ideology of the mercantile elite, and be generally committed to a hierarchical order, and while the superficial organization of guilds and civic structures generally kept tensions at bay, rebellion was not always avoided. At times of crisis, the vague identity and solidarity the artisans had as being distinct from merchants was

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enough to unite them as a front. In the 1381 revolts, artisans in York, Beverly, and Scarborough rioted with the peasants. As Dobson has shown, their participation was an expression of grievance at their exclusion from civic systems of governance and power.82 And many of the participants in the York riots were masters from prosperous crafts: goldsmiths, armorers, tailors, and a number of butchers.83 A century later, from the 1470s to the early sixteenth century, the city of York was “in an almost constant state of turmoil,” as economic fortunes changed and the artisans seized opportunities to claim more say in civic government.84 As a result, in 1517 the constitution of the city was revised. But the change was mostly superficial and misleading. Though more crafts were included in representation on the common council, mercantile representation was actually increased; minor craft representation consisted only of affluent craftsmen (those most likely to be committed to existing hierarchies), and large and troublesome crafts such as the tanners, cordwainers, smiths, and carpenters were excluded entirely. The final roster looked like this: the thirteen major crafts, with two representatives each were the mercers, drapers, grocers, apothecaries, goldsmiths, dyers, skinners, barbers, fishmongers, tailors, vintners, joiners, and glaziers; the fifteen minor crafts, with one representative each, consisted of the hosiers, innholders, vestmentmakers, chandlers, bowers, weavers, fullers, ironmongers, saddlers, masons, bakers, butchers, glovers, pewterers, and armorers.85 Whatever access to power their resistance and rebellion had brought the artisans of York, it was small and largely ceremonial. Thus far I have concentrated on York’s civic structure, as we are much wealthier in archival sources and secondary studies of its civic and economic structures. Chester’s civic structure was little different from York’s. It, too, had a centralized government of a mayor and an aldermanic council consisting almost entirely of mercantile men. David Mills summarizes the development of Chester’s civic government thus: It had, indeed, been a gradual process, in which the power of the city had slowly extended. Symptomatic of that extension is the charter of 1237 by which the sheriffs, hitherto the earl’s officers, were appointed by the burgesses, and the citizens, not the sheriffs, became responsible for paying the fee-farm. By the 1240s Chester had a mayor, though with limited powers. From c 1300 the mayor was the leading figure among the citizens. A charter of 1317 is the first reference to the election of a mayor by the guild Merchant. By the late fourteenth century a city government had emerged, headed by the mayor. Until that time there were no craft guilds. Although the guilds kept records of their ordinances, admissions, and accounts, some of which survive from the early fifteenth century, the majority of records date only from the last quarter of the sixteenth century. There is, therefore, little in the guild accounts to supplement the losses in civic records [due to the late development of a civic government].86

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The fact that no guilds existed until a civic government was in place suggests that Chester’s guilds, perhaps even more than York’s, were agents of that government, rather than independent corporations. In discussing the dearth of records of medieval Chester, Mills goes on to say that “It is indicative of the importance of the office of the mayor that Chester antiquarians arranged their chronicles, not by date, as in the monastic annals, but by mayoralty.”87 In fact, Chester’s mayor may have ultimately been more powerful than York’s. That affirmation of mayoral authority also appears in the Early Banns of the Whitsun plays: Our wurshipffull mair of this Citie with all this Royall cominaltie Solem pagens ordent hath he At the fest of whitsonday tyde.88

A similar rhetoric is also used in reference to the Corpus Christi procession: Also maister Maire of this Citie withall his bretheryn accordingly A Solempne procession ordent hath he to be done to the best Appon the day of corpus christi.89

Such official rhetoric may not be mere wishful thinking or an illusory construction of power, for the performances of Chester’s Whitsun plays in the post-Reformation age went on at the behest of the city’s mayors, despite the protests of local Puritans and the suppression order by the archbishop of York, Edmund Grindal.90 What is more, the last mayor to stage the cycle, Sir John Savage, upon being summoned before the Privy Council in 1575, claimed that he alone had been responsible for ordering the performance.91 While this is not entirely true—the Chester Assembly had voted 34–12 in favor of staging the plays—such an insistence may have reflected the political and social power of both the position and the man, who was well connected, rich, and continued to play a major role in Chester’s and Cheshire’s public affairs for the rest of his life.92 Certainly the production of the plays in Chester was more centered on the mayor as an individual than York’s plays were, even in more normal circumstances. The Responsibilities of Belonging to a Guild Thus far I have discussed artisans’ lack of access to power in civic structures. But what were the responsibilities of a craftsman, either to his guild or to

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the city? What was expected of him? Before I begin to answer those questions, let me reiterate what has already been said earlier in this chapter, that where the official discourse and duties of guilds are concerned, half of the adult population will be immediately excluded, for women had no public status in late medieval towns. And given that the plays were part of that official discourse, they, too, constructed a guild culture that was largely, even exclusively, male. Meanwhile, most of the responsibilities of a guildsman—outside of the practice of his own craft and the management of his shop and household— were to the city and its agents rather than to other members of the guild.93 Pace Foucault, the medieval (or premodern) self did not live in obscurity, unnoticed by authority, if that self was an urban guildsman. Guild regulation and activity, including drama, intervened in the lives of the guildsmen to police and normalize their identities as guild members and as men, and to discipline them into “docile bodies.”94 The “guild” was not a tightly organized community, club, or secret society, but a loose bureaucratic and civic designation deployed by mechanisms of power. Occasionally, guild ordinances speak of duties such as helping impoverished members or paying for members’ funerals. Such clauses seem particularly common in Lincoln guilds, as in the ordinances of the Gild of the Tailors, which make arrangements for a seven-pence weekly allowance for any member who has fallen into poverty—out of which he must still discharge any payments owed to the guild. And the ordinances of the Gild of the Tilers mention that a part of the festivities of Corpus Christi include a guild feast at which ale, blessed during the feast, was to be shared with the poor.95 But these charitable activities, whether toward a guild’s own members or the city’s poor in general, do not get mentioned in the ordinances from York, which are largely contracts of responsibility and duty with the city, rather than with the membership as a corporate body. Much of what the mercantile civic authorities were interested in regulating was not the manufacture of goods, but their trade and distribution, for this was the source of wealth in towns, thus dominated by the merchants.96 The specialized organization of guilds and the recording, through the ordinances, of a system of regulations, responsibilities, and fines for failing in them, reflect the mercantile anxiety toward “any situation in which a chain of operations, from the acquisition of the raw material to the marketing of the final product could be undertaken by the craftsmen themselves.”97 A close look at one of these ordinances will stand metonymically for the body of them, for they tend to follow a standard form and address the same points. The 1475 ordinances of the York glovers are particularly instructive. They begin, as all ordinances do, with the date and a roll of all those present who command and agree to the ordinances. In this case, the ordinances

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were brought forth on May 13, 1475 “at the instance ande prayer of all the godemen of the saide crafte” and with the assent of Mayor William Lambe and nine members of the “24 in the Counsaile Chambre.”98 From the very beginning, the ordinances are made to appear the impetus of the guild itself, though it is clear that the civic authorities are attentively involved. The first item addressed—the first duty for which the members of the glovers’ guild are responsible—is their Corpus Christi pageant. “In primis,” the document reads, it is ordayned that who so ever sells openly within this cite in thaire shoppez any glovez, pursez or keybands called Ynglisshware shall paye yerely to the pagende maisters of the saide pagende ande crafte, that is to seye, of a deynsyn [denizen, inhabitant] 2d, ande of a straunger 4d, to the sustentacion ande uphalding of the pagende of the forsaide crafte yerely.99

The guild—or rather, the civic council—is less concerned with who is authorized to sell gloves and related items than it is with making sure that those people fund the pageant of the glovers. What is more, the first guild office mentioned is not “searcher” or “master,” but “pageant master.” It is clear already from this short excerpt that, as Alexandra Johnston writes, “The internal structure of the guilds was. . .closely tied to the play. Pageant masters were elected annually to manage the episode of the craft, collect the pageant silver, organize the players. . .see to the pageant wagon and props, and then account to the craft.” And in the case of the elite merchant guilds such as the mercers, the position of pageant master seemed to be the first step toward becoming an alderman and ultimately mayor.100 In the less influential guilds, however, this position was one of the many ways the civic authorities regulated the guilds and guaranteed that they would be able to perform their public duties, thus shaping their masculine and social identities both public and private. Although the collection of fines for “pageant silver” is clearly of great importance to those who assented to these ordinances, it is interesting to note who is exempt from payment. The first item of the ordinance continues in this manner: alle the brether and susters of the fraternyte ande gilde of the Blissed Trinite within the saide cite maynteyned by the merchaunts of the saide cite allway except, ande also all maner of men sellyng London ware like wise to be excepted.101

The Guild of the Blessed Trinity was not a manufacturing or trade guild, but a religious guild of social distinction whose members were largely “the merchaunts of the saide cite” and their wives. They are thus allowed to sell

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gloves with impunity, as are the mercantile importers of London goods. Surely the glovers themselves would not have been so keen to exclude the wealthy merchants from funding their pageant; such a clause works to the benefit of merchants, not glovers. The rest of the ordinances work in similar ways, detailing the ways in which glovers, like other artisans, are limited in what their profession is allowed to do, and listing the fines they will incur should they break these rules. On the surface, the regulations seem to protect the glovers—and in some cases, they would have happily agreed to them, as in the clause that prohibits the hiring of Scots102—but generally they are constructed to keep glovers from engaging in trade outside of the retail sale of goods of their manufacture, and to raise money for civic coffers. For example, glovers are enjoined from hanging “skynnez by the nekks to shue in thaire wyndouse, upon payne of forfettyng 20d.”103 While this might seem a regulation designed to enhance the quality of life in York’s narrow streets, it is most likely meant to prevent glovers from trading animal skins, rather than merely working them into gloves and purses. Such skins would have been displayed as an enticement for purchase. The enforcement of these rules and the collection of fines for infractions was the responsibility of each guild’s searchers. Over time searchers became the guilds’ representatives in the “commonalty” or the council of fortyeight. This conjoining of functions evolved during the fifteenth century as the searchers increased in authority and were granted more powers by the council, so that ultimately, “it must have seemed logical for them to take on a representative function.”104 But this representative duty was hardly the result of the power of the guilds; rather, it reflects the authority of the council. Although the council of forty-eight members’ records that survive from before the 1517 revision of that body show the commonality as being thoroughly representative of the crafts of the city,105 “usually it is clear from the York records that the group of forty-eight was largely excluded from the political process,” a fact that led to near constant turmoil during the life of the Corpus Christi pageants.106 Ultimately this turmoil produced the reactionary 1517 revision of the constitution, in which the role of the merchants was increased at the expense of artisans. While searchers provided some economic benefit to the guilds, they were largely controlled by the council for mercantile interests, and as such, the position of searcher was yet another public duty required of guildsmen by civic authorities. Again, the glovers’ ordinances are instructive. After detailing all the infractions for which a searcher can fine a glover, the ordinances read, Item, that no maner of man of the saide crafte within this cite from nowefurth be rebell unto the serchiours of the saide crafte for tyme beynge in any thynge tochinge the wele ande honestye of the saide crafte, apon the payn of 40d to be forfayte in fourme above-saide.

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Item, that if any maister of the saide crafte, duely warned at enny tyme commynge by the sercheours of the same crafte, com not withoute he hase a reasonable cause in that behalfe, [he] shall forfayte 4d. at every time.107

If the ordinances require two clauses warning masters that they will be fined for being “rebell unto” the searchers, or for failing to appear for a prearranged meeting, then perhaps it is because such incidences were common or commonly feared. Surely if the searchers were working in the interest of all glovers as an organized corporate body, there would be no need to punish members of that body for being “rebell.” Though searchers may have come from among members of the same craft as the subjects of their searches (though not always), they were clearly seen as authorities of the government, to be avoided if a person was guilty of breaking one of their rules. Pageant master and searcher were the two public offices that an ordinary craftsman might hold, and the only two offices that held any relation to the internal organization of guilds. In both York and Chester, guildsmen could also serve in various civic offices, including council member (or alderman), sheriff, chamberlain, and mayor, but these offices were generally limited to the merchant class. Also, some professions, such as the victualling crafts, were excluded by statute in York, Coventry, and London even as other cities began to relax this law.108 And although matters of election in York were debated before the entire commonalty, they were by no means democratic. The commonalty did vote for the mayor for much of the late Middle Ages, but they were limited in their choice to two or three candidates handpicked from the aldermen by the outgoing mayor. As the Middle Ages wore on, even this tiny voice of the forty-eight in civic government was silenced; by the fifteenth century, the sheriffs and chamberlains, the men most likely to become mayors, were chosen by the mayor, the aldermen (otherwise known as “the twelve”), and the twenty-four, while the forty-eight were limited to merely endorsing these decisions.109 However, as mercantile fortunes began to be threatened by economic crises in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, merchants began to shirk their duties of civic officeholding, for fulfilling such responsibilities was generally a costly matter. For example, Thomas Gray of York, a fifteenth-century goldsmith, who had been not only mayor, but also a member of Parliament for York, gave up his aldermanic gown and its responsibilities, citing poverty as the cause.110 Apparently, such avoidance of office was so common in Lincolnshire, that guilds in Lincoln and Kyllyngham made provisions in their ordinances for the payment of fines in goods (sometimes barley, sometimes wax) for refusing to hold office.111 Though obviously not required of most craftsmen, officeholding was another public duty that a wealthy craftsman might be pressed into performing.

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I began this discussion of the largely public and civic duties of guildsmen with the Corpus Christi pageant and the way it figures so prominently in the ordinances of York guilds and in the internal structure of guilds. I would like to return to a discussion of the plays—the Whitsun plays in Chester, as well—for not only are they the major subject of this project, but they are also the most common ways that the majority of guildsmen would have had any involvement in public duty. However, their involvement was not always cheerful or even entirely voluntary. Though it seems that guilds independently raised their own money for the support of their particular pageant, as suggested by the first clause of the York glovers’ ordinances, above, the presentation of those ordinances by the guild to the council was illusory; the council had much more say in all such matters than it seems at first glance. Indeed, throughout the guilds’ history in York, half of all money collected from individuals or crafts as a whole went to the city council. Originally the other half went to the guild for spiritual and fraternal purposes (poverty relief, funeral services, feast days, etc.), but during the lifetime of the Corpus Christi plays, that began to change. The saddlers’ ordinances of 1398 reveal the shift; theirs is the first set of ordinances to show that the half that was originally earmarked for general guild purposes was now meant for the “searchers and governors of the craft for the support of the Corpus Christi pageant.” From the late fourteenth century on, the portion of money meant to go to the guild is described in ordinance after ordinance as the pageant money, for that is the “only aspect of the expenditure of the guild that the council was interested in.”112 What is more, apparently the money for the pageant was still collected even when the plays were not performed. According to a 1535 document in the House Books of York, money collected for pageants not played was then used for the financial support of “our neghburs of this City that apperyd before the kynges moste honourable Councell at london at the suyte of Trestram Tesshe for the maintenyng of ye common ryght of this Citye in Byshhopfeyld.”113 Even when the plays were not presented, the money levied on the guilds was used for an expense of civic interest, rather than remaining with the guilds for their individual financial needs. Individual guilds in both York and Chester (as well as other cities with civic drama, such as Coventry) routinely brought before their respective councils complaints that they could not afford to produce a pageant alone, or that those who should be contributing to it were not doing so, and so forth. Such “appeals against the expense of the pageant were generally met unsympathetically, with fines or entry charges in the craft being raised to meet the cost.”114 Again it almost seems that the entire raison d’être of the guilds—from their entry fees to the regulation of work and fines for infractions of those regulations—was to fund the civic spectacle of the plays. A guildsman’s duty, then, was primarily to the city.

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Apprenticeship In discussing the public duties of master craftsmen in the previous section, I used the York glovers’ ordinances as an index to what was most important in the eyes of the civic authorities who demanded and ratified the ordinances. After the provisions made for determining who was to regularly support the Corpus Christi pageant, and after a long paragraph on who had earned the right to set up shop as a master glover, there comes a one-sentence paragraph that reads, “Item, that ilke maister that taks a prentez he shall pay for him to the said crafte the first tyme that he settes him on werk, 12d.”115 That is all that the glovers’ ordinances have to say on the subject of apprenticeship, and other guilds’ ordinances are similarly laconic. Their relative silence is telling. The frequent ( but brief ) mention of apprentices in these documents suggests a systematic practice of taking them on and training them—and the plays frequently reinforce this ideal—but in reality, apprenticeship was a system that did not always run smoothly, especially for the apprentices, and was never quite so systematic or stable. Just as wealth and influence differed from guild to guild, so too did the experiences of apprentices. In occupations such as weaving, which faced severe economic hardships from the late fifteenth century on, apprentices were little more than a cheap source of labor, given few social or economic benefits. Of forty apprentices taken on by York’s master weavers in the 1470s, only five became free; and only thirteen of the eighty-one taken on in the 1490s became free.116 There must have been some awareness of these abuses in York as a glance through the York Memorandum Book shows most guilds regulating the number of apprentices that a master was allowed to have (often only one).117 But other sources show craftsmen frequently breaking these regulations; for example, founders Robert Toche and John Browne had three apprentices each, despite the 1390 founders’ ordinance that limited each master to one apprentice.118 Swanson argues that rather than controlling these abuses, the “constant reiteration of regulations concerning apprentices was designed in part to sustain this supply of free labour.”119 The appearance of an ordinance regulating the number of apprentices a guildsman could take on only made procuring them more desirable. Ultimately, the gap between the theory of apprenticeship and its practice was substantial. As Swanson writes, In theory a child taken on as an apprentice was trained by his master in the well-kept secrets of his craft until skilled enough to become a journeyman, and subsequently a master himself. . .In practice the situation was rather different. The majority of the freemen of York did not become free through apprenticeship but by redemption, that is purchase. The council could in fact sell the freedom to anyone they liked.120

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Even if the council did not see to it that the promises of the apprenticeship system were made good, it was in the council’s interest to encourage the taking on of apprentices. Generally a fee was paid upon the taking on of each apprentice; the glovers’ ordinance, above, specifies 12d “to the said crafte,” but the ordinances of the plasterers and tilers from 1475 show that it is the searchers who must ratify the apprentice’s indenture and collect all fees.121 This arrangement suggests that the fees, though nominally going to the craft like any other fees, were really used to support civic duties such as the plays. One may imagine that the graduation of an apprentice to master would have been in the council’s interest, as well, since most ordinances specify the fees that are to be paid by all new masters opening up shop. But apparently the council was only interested in the moment those fees came due, not in the seven or eight years it took to get to that point, for rarely do ordinances address any part of the apprentices’ training, care, or keep. Not every experience of apprenticeship was miserable or a dead-end, of course, otherwise the practice, such as it was, would not have continued for very long. Occasionally, it even approximated the ideal. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in York, a new craft evolved: the founders, who concentrated on the production of pots and pans and thus prospered on the strength of the local market for personal and household goods. Perhaps because of the craft’s newness and the relative prosperity of its practitioners among artisans, the founders’ apprentices also thrived. One particular foundry was passed down through four generations of apprentices who went on to become its masters.122 But it is as likely as not that the experience of these particular apprentices was the exception to the rule; nevertheless, such exceptions likely contributed to the viability of the mythic ideal, keeping apprentices in check through such false consciousness. Apprenticeship in York, Chester, and other provincial cities was not the stable system that it appeared to be in official discourse, whether that discourse was that of the ordinances of the guilds or (as we shall see) the metaphorical master-apprentice relationships presented in the civic drama and underwritten by its association with the sacramental and sacred. Like the guild “system” itself, the ideal of apprenticeship was an illusion. No more stable was the household, the subject of the next and final section of this chapter. Guilds and the Domestic Sphere The “Noah’s Flood” play from the Chester cycle depicts, in part, a family united in the practice of one trade: woodworking, specifically shipbuilding. In the beginning of the play Noah’s wife, his three sons, and their wives all work in some way to build, load, and supply the ark. The scene functions

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on one level to construct the guild and the family as equals, united with one another across coterminous boundaries. While such a model was not unheard of in late medieval towns, a family working in support of the patriarch’s occupation was not the usual state of affairs. The household unit was fundamental in economic and industrial terms, but as already mentioned, households were not always engaged in a single craft or even related crafts; indeed, “the system of craft guilds imposed on artisans cut across the diverse interests of the household, disguising its importance and obscuring the structure of urban industry.”123 Members of a household could very well practice multiple crafts and that household would not necessarily be composed only of kin. The family and household were both very fluid units. High mortality rates produced remarriages as well as orphans. What is more, household size generally depended on the number of servants, not sibling groups. It was very unusual for a married couple to house adult relatives, except occasionally for a single son. However, a large proportion of urban households contained live-in servants, with their number linked to income levels.124 Apprentices, too, lived in their masters’ households, and those masters were frequently someone other than their own father. As will be discussed below, sons often left their natal home to train with other guildsmen in their father’s craft or in other occupations. Daughters, too, could be trained outside the home. A craftsman’s wife, then, was the most important member of the household after the craftsman himself. Indeed, as Ruth Mazo Karras argues, A man could do the same kind of work whether married or not, and his legal status did not depend upon his marriage, but his ability to become a master craftsman, and his participation in artisanal masculinity, did depend heavily on it. . .the idea that a man was not fully adult until he married, and could not be a householder without a family, also pervaded the society.125

A wife could also be a crucial part of her husband’s industry and workforce, given that she was a more stable member of the household than her children. Often wives did contribute to the work of their husbands’ professions. In some places, men were prohibited from working with any women except their wives or the wife of the master, as can be seen from an ordinance of the Lincoln fullers: “Et quod nullus ejusdem officii ad perticam cum muliere laboret, nisi cum uxore magistri vel ancilla sua commen sali” [“And none shall work at the wooden bar with a woman, unless with the wife of a master or her handmaid”].126 Clearly this ordinance tries to construct the household of the husband as the only proper place for a woman to work; however, as discussed above, wives

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frequently contributed to the household economically by carrying on another profession. Again, a household was a fluid entity and households in late medieval York and Chester came in many forms, not simply or exclusively in the model presented in Chester’s “Noah’s Flood.” What makes the “ideal” model presented in this play even unlikely is the participation of all of Noah’s sons and daughter-in-laws in one profession, Noah’s divinely ordained craft of shipbuilding. Sons did not necessarily apprentice in or practice their fathers’ trades (and even those who did were likely to set up their own shops, especially once they were married).127 Indeed, if a young man was the son of a free craftsman, then there was no need for him to be apprenticed in any official capacity, for he could become free himself by patrimony, by virtue of being the son of a freeman. In York the statistics for sons who purchased the freedom by patrimony are telling. According to Swanson’s research, a total of 806 artisans’ sons became free through patrimony from 1387 to 1534; of those, only 415, or about 51.5 percent, kept their father’s trade. (It is worth noting, too, that only about 7 percent of the total were able to trade up and purchase the freedom as merchants.)128 Many of the men who chose to follow in their fathers’ footsteps did so in occupations where the tools of the craft were expensive and thus had incentive to stay in their fathers’ workshops; nearly all metalworkers’ sons took up their craft. Other incentives included good prospects for social status and wealth, of course. But crafts who could not offer their sons wealth, or who could offer wealth but questionable social reputations (such as the tanners and cordwainers) generally lost their sons to other professions, including a large proportion to the clergy or, in a handful of cases, to the legal profession.129 Craft households, it seems, were as fluid in composition and identity as the guilds themselves. What the cycle plays of York and Chester do, in part, is construct the household with a seemingly more stable, normative, and decidedly masculinist design: the patriarch as center of the household, supported by a wife and children, particularly sons. As we will see in chapter 2, the plays try to marry biblical patriarchy to contemporary guild life with frequently jarring results. And in the New Testament plays, those households are replaced by public groups of men, just as the requirements of civic service and spectacle became a significant part of a guildsman’s life and his guild’s identity. The household, though economically central to late medieval urban culture, had become officially and socially less visible and less significant than urban public structures. And on the evidence of the plays, it seems that the patriarch’s perceived control over his household was slipping, as a result. Again and again the plays address this anxiety, depicting rebellious wives, children, and servants, or showing fathers, such as Joseph, who are mere figureheads of their families. Even in the midst of idyllic

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visions of the perfectly ordered household, these repressed anxieties resurface. As I will examine in subsequent chapters, the plays act out the constant resignification of masculinity and the negotiation that urban guildsmen had to make between their public, civic roles, defined by the city, and their domestic roles, as lived out in their own households and workshops. Conclusions Given the diversity of guilds’ wealth and social status, of the experience and success of individual guild members even within the same craft, of household makeup, what can one say in general about guild life and culture in York or Chester? Even the plays they produced and performed give us multiple points of view in a performance context that was never static or stable. What one does encounter consistently through a reading of guilds’ records and their plays is an ever-present gap between the ideal and material culture, whether the ideal is held by the guildsmen themselves or by civic authorities hoping to make their citizens conform to specific social and economic roles. For instance, women were a vital part of the urban economy, but they were regularly excluded from official, public roles in the craft guilds, from participation in civic spectacle such as the plays, and at times even from the narrative of the plays themselves. The construction of guilds as supposedly independent and stable corporations of craftsmen with a single, specialized manufacturing function was itself an illusion created by civic authorities wishing to regulate production and trade for their own mercantile benefit. That mercantile ideal, however, was consistently contradicted by the daily practice of manufacturing, in which craftsmen and their families routinely practiced more than one craft. Only in the financing and performance of the plays and other civic spectacles did guildsmen come together as a seemingly single body, made visible by the fines charged by authorities to anyone who practiced outside of their trade in whatever capacity—fines that were paid to the support of these spectacles. But even then, the sense of a fixed, communal identity was policed by civic authorities who organized and authorized the plays and the searchers who collected the fines. That the guilds began to take on the identities imposed on them was an effect of the habitual nature of the plays, not a cause of them. Not only were their identities as guildsmen—as practitioners of specific and limited occupations, and as male human beings—performed through the regulating discourse of civic power and discipline, but also, as we shall see, they were performed both literally and theoretically through the drama. What is more, the supposedly stable internal structure and hierarchy of guilds—of masters leading journeymen and

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apprentices and teaching the carefully guarded secrets of their trade until they were capable of purchasing the freedom and setting up their own shops—was also an illusion, this time of the official discourse of guild ordinances, themselves required and authorized by the civic elite. Finally, even the household, the center of late medieval urban economy, was neither a fixed entity nor the patriarchal haven that the civic drama sometimes imagined it to be or yearned for. Masculine identities in the late medieval world of York and Chester were multiple, often in conflict with one another. Codified and identified as a member of a public, homosocial group, a guildsman must then forsake the household-workshop as the center of his productive culture and his identity; urged by patriarchal Christian culture to govern himself and his household, he is asked to forsake the world and its spectacle.130 The plays then both illustrate and create the double bind of normative masculine identity in late medieval English guild culture, caught between duties: domestic and civic, homosocial and familial. It is keeping in mind this notion of the contradictions of guild culture (indeed, the contradictions of the phrase “guild culture”) that I now turn to the plays themselves, first to the depiction and construction of masculinity and the domestic scene in those plays.

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CHAPTER 2 THE DOMESTIC SCENE: PATRIARCHAL FANTASIES AND ANXIETIES IN THE FAMILY AND GUILD

iven the economic importance of the household in the late Middle Ages, it makes surprisingly few appearances in the cycle plays performed by medieval artisans and merchants, and then mostly in the stories of the Old Testament and the infancy of Christ.1 In the selection of plays in York’s and Chester’s cycles, there seems to be a thematic rupture between Old Testament and New Testament concerns. Indeed, the Bible has few stories of the household, per se. But this lack in the plays is also due to the changing world of the guildsmen—or at least a constructed appearance of such a change in which the demands of public culture, a culture largely dominated by corporations of men (guilds, civic government), had begun to outstrip the demands of the domestic sphere. More obligations and responsibility in the public sphere meant less time in and control over the domestic sphere, and the seeming progress of the plays—from Old Testament episodes of the family drama to New Testament concerns with the public sphere—may also reflect and construct the anxieties of guildsmen.2 Thus the depiction of families and households in the plays is often fraught with patriarchal anxieties about their seemingly changing character. Even when a play attempts to construct a nostalgic fantasy of the household as unified socioeconomic structure—as in the Chester “Noah’s Flood” play— the fantasy is disrupted by the very aspects of urban culture that it wishes to escape. Again and again, the plays present us with dysfunctional families (Adam and Eve and their sons), unhappy or ineffective husbands (Noah, Joseph), and absentee fathers (the Innocents’ fathers, the Chester Herod, even God the Father himself ). They depict conflicts of interest between duties to authorities and to family (as in the Abraham and Isaac story), and between

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desires for public power or reputation and responsibility to family (in the Chester “Massacre of the Innocents”). Throughout, the recurring model of ideal masculinity is silent, obedient (self-)sacrifice, embodied by Abel and Isaac, and perhaps even by the infant Innocents. While Ruth Mazo Karras sees medieval masculinity in general—whether courtly, clerkly, or craftoriented—as produced through the operation of authority and power over others (women, other men, boys), I see medieval mercantile and craft masculinity as also produced by the operations of power, akin to Foucault’s “docile bodies.”3 Such masculine (self-)sacrifice is an ideal that will find its apotheosis in Christ, who is put forth by the plays as the perfect, but ultimately inimitable model of masculinity. What is more, all the subjects of sacrifice are specifically sons, suggesting on some level that obedience to God and civic duty—as represented by this devotional, civic drama itself—demands and requires the destruction of the family. Thus throughout the plays, beginning with the Creation narratives, there is a constant worry about the nature of the plays themselves, their conflicting demands, and their constant resignifying of masculinity. For Sarah Beckwith, the York Corpus Christi cycle is sacramental theater; it is also sacrificial theater, for it required the sacrifice of the guildsmen’s time, money, attention, authority, and perhaps also their domestic duties.4 The First Dysfunctional Family: Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel The story of Adam and Eve, and of their sons Cain and Abel, forms what is probably the most famous archetypal family drama in Western culture excepting only the Oedipal cycle. And like Oedipus and his family, the biblical first family has served countless interpretative purposes, appearing in cultures high and low from the story’s inception to the present. In each of its uses, the archetypal story is made to fit the purposes of its appropriators. The versions told in the York and Chester cycles are no exception; though each cycle stays relatively close to the biblical source and its conventional theological interpretations, largely eschewing a sizable body of apocryphal additions to the narrative, the plays also flesh out the stories, adding to them contemporary flourishes that place them in contexts relevant to men—especially guildsmen—and civic drama production. Chester Play 2: Adam and Eve; Cain and Abel Chester Play 2, which covers the stories of the first family from the Creation to Cain’s exile, is particularly faithful to the structure of the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s creation and their subsequent fall from grace. But the distinctiveness of Chester’s play is in the details, which add up to create

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a drama that is particularly interested in the experience of men and is exceptionally antifeminist in its treatment of women—when it bothers to deal with them at all. From the moment of man’s creation, the Chester play displays the first instance of a recurring desire for homosocial domestic intimacy between men or, in this case, between a man and his male God. Here, homosocial desire is not, pace Eve Sedgwick, constructed through competition over women, but imagined as prior to women.5 As Ruth Evans has said, the northern cycle plays “suggest the disturbing eradication of feminine difference.”6 That eradication occurs not only in the Crucifixion plays, as Evans posits, but also from the very beginning of Creation in these plays. Upon breathing life into Adam, God commands him to rise up quickly and join him: Rise up, Adam, rise up, ryse, a man full of sowle and liefe, and come with mee to paradice, a place of deyntee and delite. (ll. 107–110)7

Not only does Adam for a time exclusively share God’s company in paradise, he also shares in a private, intimate knowledge with God. In this version of the story, Adam alone is given the command not to eat from the forbidden tree, prior to the creation of Eve (ll. 117–28). This intimate fantasy is particularly compelling because it is so brief. Soon, it will be marred by a family psychodrama, first by a wife’s failure, and then by a son’s, both of which stem from Adam’s own failure to teach and guide them. And yet the episode is less brief than the biblical account. The generic and performative concerns of drama necessarily stretch this moment in time and space not only in the sense of length, but also across historical time into the present world of the guilds. Thus the plays begin with an instance of reparation and loss, not of universal paradise, but more specifically of the loss of homosocial intimacy with God. The Chester play also veers from scripture in its approach to the Demon and his temptation of Eve, and in doing so suggests interesting parallels with and anxieties about the very act of dramatic performance, thus signaling from the beginning the anxious double bind of domestic and public responsibilities and concerns about the stability of household culture in the face of men’s increasing activity in public roles. After rehearsing all the reasons why he burns with envy, the Demon announces, For I shall teach his wiffe a playe and I may have a whyle For her to disceave I hoppe I may,

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and through her brynge them both awaye ... . . soe shall they both for her delyte bee banyshed from that blysse. (ll. 179–92, emphasis mine)

Through “playe” that “delyte[s],” the Demon will attempt to “disceave” the woman and cause both Adam and Eve’s banishment from paradise. The language of “playing” cannot be mere coincidence, particularly since the Chester cycle tends to draw on it throughout, and it seems to suggest something suspicious and unsavory about the enterprise. Robert Hanning, in his article on mimesis in the plays of Lucifer’s Fall, remarks on this selfconsciousness. “The playwrights of the Corpus Christi cycles,” he writes, “perceived the analogy between Satan’s mimesis of God and their own mimetic art, and they addressed themselves in the opening plays of several cycles. . .to offering a self-conscious explanation of the significance, and the limits, of the analogy.” He goes on to argue that the plays are about “the origin and nature of drama as a peculiar feature of the fallen universe,” and that “the cycle dramatists indicate that they know the limits of their art, and thus differentiate the intent of their mimesis. . .from the subversive and delusory intent of Lucifer’s imitation of the Maker.”8 But if drama is itself a “a form peculiarly belong[ing] to God’s creatures, not to their creator,”9 and if it is part of a hierarchy of mimetic actions that include Lucifer’s “subversive. . .imitation of the Maker,” distinguished from that particular action only by “intent,” then there still exists a danger of men sliding into a more “subversive” form of play-acting, a form that not only “delyte[s]” but also ultimately “disceave[s].” It is significant, too, that the Demon takes on the form of an adder with a woman’s face to make himself more sympathetic to Eve (ll. 193–96).10 Chester is the only cycle to borrow this odd detail from Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica, and in doing so, the play depicts the Demon “untheologically” donning a disguise and playing a role rather than transforming himself.11 At the same time, underneath the costume of Eve would have been a young man or boy, possibly an apprentice or servant of the drapers performing this play, so that “Eve” is equally an act of female impersonation. The putting on of a costume and playing a role is then doubly associated with evil, temptation, weakness, and sin—Adam and Eve were both most innocent and perfect in their unselfconscious nakedness. Moreover, maleness is then perceived or presented as something “natural,” naked, and uncostumed, while femaleness is marked—here and throughout the cycle—as performed and therefore potentially deceiving. And yet, “male” can be perceived as “female”—and can become female—through

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behavior and appearance, through costuming and histrionic performance. “Male” can be and is constantly performed and resignified. If seemingly natural and divinely ordained identity is malleable and illusory, then where does that leave other social identities such as guild membership and status? As argued by Heather Swanson and R. B. Dobson— and as discussed in greater detail in chapter 1—the cycle plays functioned to create guild identity as much as they reflected it.12 The drapers, for one, might not have had an independent existence had they not been distinguished by civic government and assigned this cycle play. Certainly, York drapers often took out the freedom as tailors or as merchants, and though they were a quasi-mercantile guild, they had no hall of their own as did mercers and mariners.13 This merging into and emerging out of the York tailors’ guild—akin to the Demon’s merging in and out of the maiden-serpent and the male actor merging into Eve—can be seen throughout the records of the guilds’ involvement in the cycle drama. In the first such record involving both guilds, from the 1492 minutes of the York House Books, the city council ruled that the “kendale men Qat bryngeth wollen cloth to Qis citie to sell in grose or by retail” must “pay yerely pagiant siluer vnto the pagiant Maisters & sersours of Qe said craftes & occupacionz of drapours and Taillours as hath ben accustomed of auncient tyme heretofore.”14 In the council’s mind, then, tailors and drapers were essentially the same thing and had been since “auncient tyme.” But little more than a decade later, in two 1505 records in the same House Books, we see a slightly different situation. First, the drapers requested that “euery person oQer Tailour or hosier that Cutteth & Selleth cloth by retaille as a drapour doth shalbe yerely contributory to Qe bryngyng furth of Qe Drapour pagent” because the burden of the cost of the pageant had become onerous even to the merchant drapers. In response, the tailors asked the council for respite to bring the matter of such contributions before their entire membership.15 But in 1508 and 1529, records show that such contributions were reaffirmed, specifying that anyone who sold “Sudderon” or “brode sutheron” cloth must contribute to the drapers’ pageant.16 Clearly by this time, the drapers considered themselves a distinct guild whose occupation was being impinged upon by other crafts. Of course, they did not ask these other craftsmen to cease selling cloth—only that they contribute to the financial burden of civic duty. Thus the distinction between occupations is less a mercantile or economic one than a social and cultural one. The Chester drapers may have been similarly situated. At times their sponsorship of Play 2 was attributed to the drapers and the hosiers together. One finds this credit in the play list and text of the Early Banns (1539–40) and in the play list of Rogers’ Breviary (1608–1609).17 However, the text

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of the Banns as Rogers records them mentions only the drapers, and redundantly emphasizes their wealth: Of the Drapers you the welthis companye The creation of the worlde. Adam & Eue. Acordinge to your welthe sett oute wealthelye And howe Cayne his brother Abell his life did bereaue.18 (ll. 16–20)

Even the marginalia in the manuscript reads “The welthie Drapers playe.”19 No other guild is given this ascription, the most common epithet being “worthie” for the other merchant guilds.20 If their social identity (as distinct from that of tailors and hosiers) was thus constructed in part by their involvement in the cycle plays, then the spectacle of the Demon donning a disguise and vowing to teach the cross-dressed apprentice/Eve a “play” may unconsciously reflect the guildsmen’s anxieties about the fragility of their own precarious identity. They, too, teach their apprentices, servants, and journeymen a “play” with the promise—not necessarily fulfilled—that they will thus become more like their superiors.21 And they, too risk “sliding” into “feminine” identity and sin, and thus suffer estrangement from homosocial bonds of intimacy with other men or with God.22 Given the slipperiness of gender and identity in a performance context limited to men and, on one level, dedicated to fixing their (homosocial) public identities in terms of corporate membership and rank, it makes sense that the Chester version of the Fall should be the most virulently misogynistic, hammering home not only Eve’s culpability but also the eternal subjugation of women as a result of her failure. Though the Serpent is punished for his role in the “play,” it is upon Eve that the greatest blame falls. Immediately upon eating the apple, Adam curses Eve (l. 259) and proclaims her “mans woe” (i.e., woe-man, l. 271) instead of “virago” (l. 150) companion to vir (Latin for man) or one who takes actions like a man. After God’s punishment of both Adam and Eve, Adam begins to (re)construct masculine experience and familial relationships in deeply misogynistic ways. Having been banished from the “weale” of paradise, he first speaks only of his own banishment and he vows that his “kynde” must now always “flee womens intycemente” (ll. 348–50). In Middle English, “kind” can mean nature, species, or race as well as any number of other categories, so that Adam is essentially constructing male and female as utterly different creatures, rewriting his pre-lapsarian celebration of their sharing of one flesh (ll. 145–60). More closely related now are Eve and the devil, whom he calls “the suster and the brother” (l. 356). In opposition to the devil’s slippery “playing” of both male and female (as well as different

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species, angel and serpent), Adam—and the play with him—anxiously tries to construct woman as wholly and innately the other. Adam’s anger so effectively excises Eve that God’s and the Angel’s speeches after Adam’s are primarily concerned with man alone. This is a pattern that will be perpetuated throughout this cycle and, to a lesser extent, in York’s as well; man will be the focus, episode after episode, even in narratives concerned with events that could easily have been focused on a woman. Here, when God banishes Adam from Eden, Eve is relegated to a half-line, almost an afterthought: “Goe forthe; take Eve with thee” (l. 384). Such marginalization of the woman continues in the story of Cain and Abel, where Eve is given only three stanzas of speech out of thirty-five, and the Christian story becomes a history of men. Such a move is perhaps generally unsurprising, but in the context of guild-produced drama, it is more complexly meaningful than the general misogynistic impulse of the Fall story in much medieval narrative. Peter Travis unintentionally underscores this focus on men when he writes, “By joining the dramatization of Cain’s crime to that of Adam’s original sin, Chester efficiently underscores the parallel elements between the disobedient acts of father and son and emphasizes the continuing descent of mankind into sin.”23 The focus on men thus becomes a focus on relationships between men especially in patrimonial and other familial contexts; guild identity is thereby mapped onto domestic and familial structures. That genealogy and descent of mankind is also established by Adam’s speech (marked off in performance by the playing of minstrels) in which he thanks God for giving him the gift of two sons after thirty years of suffering (ll. 430–36). Such thanksgiving for the gift of sons will be repeated by Noah and by Abraham, and father-son relationships will continue to function in important ways—both anxious and ideal—throughout this cycle and York’s. Here, Adam attempts to counter the unholy instruction of the Demon/Serpent by assigning each of his grown sons to a specific “crafte” (l. 475) and by promising them that “I will you teach withou[t] distance”: “Learne yee this at mee, / how yee shall wynne your meate” (ll. 490–96). After Adam’s lengthy speech and a few more words from Eve regarding the negative example of her sin, Cain assures his mother dutifully and ironically that, “As my father hath taught yt me, / I will fulfill his lore” (ll. 515–16). Such language of “crafte” and instruction reflects and constructs the fantasy guild life, where a homosocial masculine community is in charge of the knowledge of a craft and its dissemination through the generations of men.24 It also represents a dream of male domestic and pedagogic intimacy; having been absent from Eve’s side when she was ill taught by the Demon, Adam now vows to teach his sons “withou[t] distance,” a promise that also nostalgically compensates for the distance of God the Father since Adam’s

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expulsion from paradise. Altogether the scene suggests a fantasy equation of guild and household with the father as master of both. In material contexts, as I have discussed in chapter 1, such unity and masculinist organization in a household was rare. Women contributed to the instruction of sons, daughters, servants, and apprentices; various members of the family participated in multiple occupations, usually leaving the home to do so; and sons often received instruction in the homes of masters of other occupations. Such idealized and masculinist pictures of family and guild structures appear again and again in both Chester and York, and more often than not, the fantasy is shattered by nightmarish threats to its security. Here, that anxiety surfaces in Cain’s ominous promise to fulfill the “lore” of his father—ominous because Cain’s reputation is always already known by the players and audience alike. The knowledge of Cain’s devastating failure suggests a fear that no matter how much a father remains “withou[t] distance” to his family, in a fallen world nothing is guaranteed. There is also possibly the fear that the lesson that Cain learns is indeed the one his father taught; his failure is the direct result of the Fall of his father and the inheritance of the sins of the father. Such an ideology reflects the constant policing and thus fixing of social identities of most occupational and mercantile guilds, where the sons of drapers were more or less assured access to power and prestige, but the sons of butchers and tanners could escape the low status of their fathers’ occupations only by explicitly not fulfilling their fathers’ “lore”—by training instead in another profession. If we read Cain’s failure to sacrifice properly to God as a failure to fulfill his father’s “lore”—rather than as a recapitulation of his father’s original sin (almost equally appropriate)—then it is at this point that the plays begin to construct masculinity as the habitual performance of sacrifice, particularly of the self, thus shaping the players as docile bodies. The first example is Cain’s unwillingness to perform such rituals of manhood. Cain and Abel have just left the natal home and have produced the first fruits of their adult labor from which they must make an offering of thanksgiving. That the play conceives of this act as a particularly masculine one is established in the earlier divinely ordered gender-specific labors of Adam and Eve: Cain and Abel toil in the earth like their father. The importance of their sacrifice as a ritual of initiation and acceptance is emphasized both by Cain’s claiming the right of patrimony to go first because he is the eldest (ll. 529–30), and also by Abel’s announcement that “my sacrafice accepted is” (l. 563). Cain’s failure to offer proper sacrifice is specifically a failure to perform proper masculinity. As God explains to the angry Cain, “yf thou doe well thou may have meede / if thou doe fowle, fowle for to speede” (ll. 582–83). The passage into manhood is a matter of deed, not being, and the key deed that enacts manhood is sacrifice.

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Unlike most other cycle plays, Chester’s narrative of Cain and Abel does not equate their ancient ritual sacrifice with medieval tithes to the church, nor are the offerings called for specifically a tenth of the fruits of the young men’s labor. Chester’s text instead depicts Cain’s offering as inadequate in quality, not quantity. He presents to God grain that has “fallen” (l. 531) and has been “eaten with beastes” (l. 534), or that has grown “nexte the waye” (l. 541: along the roadside) and is thus not “cleane corn” (l. 543). Upon making this “sacrifice,” singularly without hardship, Cain demands of God, I hope thou wilte white [quite] mee this and sende mee more of worldly blisse; ells forsooth thous doest amisse and thou bee in my debt. (ll. 549–52)

Cain’s use of economic diction—“quite” (“repay”) and “debt”—combined with the substandard goods he offers, both invoke the anxiety of city dwellers, including the civic elite, about the quality (and control) of goods on the market, particularly foodstuffs. Cain represents an archetypal urban medieval bogeyman: a tradesman who attempts to increase profits at the consumer’s expense. In Augustine’s terms, his false oblation is an attempt to increase a private good,25 but the play gives this general moral failure a more specific, local color, so that Cain’s failure to receive God’s blessing for his meager “sacrifice” can also be read as an economic parable suggesting that those who offer substandard products will also ultimately fail to gain divine approbation, either in this world or the next. There is something akin to, or anticipating, the Protestant work ethic in this parable, which is not entirely surprising given the mercantile sponsorship and the life cycle of these plays that were performed through three-quarters of the sixteenth century. Such an overlay of ideology breaks down periodization—a phenomenon scholars of medieval drama are well aware of. But also, the lesson taught here again shows the plays to be the means of the habitual iteration of masculine and guild identity and a culture of “adequate” work seemingly underwritten by God himself, a socioeconomic ideology that will also continue as part of the Protestant work ethic. Even Cain’s “shame” and “envy” (ll. 575–76) over his failure to win God’s acceptance in the face of his brother’s success is expressed in specific socioeconomic terms. In turning his anger on Abel, Cain uses language that suggests an economic competitor’s envy rather than archetypal sibling rivalry. “Say, thou caytiffe, thou congeon,” Cain spews at Abel, “weneste thous to passe mee of renowne? / Thou shalt fayle, by my crowne, / of masterye yf I may” (ll. 601–604). In a world of only four people, all related, it is hard

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to imagine that “renowne” could matter or even be conceived, but in the small market economy of medieval urban England, it could matter very much. And it can hardly be a coincidence that Cain worries that Abel has surpassed him in mastery, especially in a cycle that uses the language of guild culture again and again. Cain’s story thus serves as the habitual repetition of an object lesson for the mercantile and artisan players and their audience, showing what becomes of a man who flouts his duty to God and to authorities such as fathers, masters, and civic community—along with the price paid by the obedient members of that community, as did Abel. The play works to interpellate craftsmen especially into a socioeconomic ideology that ensures that they will be docile bodies. Cain’s punishment is thus also expressed in terms familiar to urban guild life. Because of Cain’s poor sacrifice, selfish work, and ironic greed for renown despite his substandard performance, he will now be forced into exile, appropriately made “idell and wandringe as an theyfe / and overall sett at nought” (ll. 631–32). As Cain himself puts it, “I muste bee bonde and nothinge free” (l. 639) and later, “iche man will loath my companye; / so shall I never have rest” (ll. 671–72). He has been banished from the community of men in general, but also, more specifically, he has been made someone of low status in civic culture. He is made “unfree,” someone who is not a citizen and is unable to trade free of tolls and other taxes, and who is not a member of any “companye,” utterly without access to systems of power, support, or community (as the guilds were imagined to have). But even worse than those who, in reality, managed to survive without these privileges, Cain is made “A losell aye” who is “scapit. . .of thryfte,” shut off from the means of earning a livelihood (ll. 699–700). Having produced substandard goods and having grotesquely offered them as “sacrifice,” Cain is subsequently stripped of his right and ability to produce any goods whatsoever. In that ritual stripping, he is thus unmanned, for robbed of any community or means of supporting himself he is also cut off from any possibility of being a provider, master, or patriarch. As Karras writes, Across Europe, only being an independent head of household provided a craftsman with honor, full participation in civic life, and a position from which to master others. Adulthood was not achieved simply by coming of age; full manhood required the assumption of a particular position in society, and not all craftsmen could achieve it.26

Cain may still—and does—beget progeny, but he has no socially determined masculine role, particularly as far as the mercantile producers of these plays are concerned.

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In popular belief, Cain was the founder of cities and it is the problems and fears of a city that he expresses here: he offers substandard produce for the sake of his own material profit; he is violently competitive with his fellow man; and he is reduced to a wandering and idle thief, a status he brings upon himself by his own wickedness. He is also expelled from his family. Cain realizes himself that he will have his parents’ “maleson” or curse (l. 679)—both in the sense of inheriting their original sin and in the sense of being cursed by them. While neither Adam nor Eve directly punishes Cain, they both cease to recognize his presence as they lament their childlessness (ll. 685–96), effectively disowning him. The play thus implicitly ties the ills of the city to the deterioration of the family, particularly under the mother’s influence.27 As Eve laments, “Well I wott and knowe iwysse / that verye vengeance it is. / For I to God soe did amysse, / mone I never have lykinge” (ll. 693–96, emphasis mine). Even as the play holds up Eve and Cain as models of how not to behave—in the case of Cain, directing that lesson in part to the urban craftsmen performing his story—it also expresses anxieties about the fragility of the patriarchal household and masculine identity in the midst of the city and its influences, the very milieu in which its instructions are meant to register.28 Like much of the cycle, this play offers an ambivalent reading of the urban culture that produced it. York Plays 3–7: The Creation to Cain and Abel The setting of biblical stories in contemporary contexts or giving them local color is a common technique of late medieval English drama, a means of representing the current time of grace and the sixth age of the world in the Christian reckoning, as well as a means of making the stories live for their medieval audiences.29 But the York and Chester cycles refine such contemporary references to reflect the specific urban guild cultures that produced and performed the plays. In York, this is true from the beginning of the cycle, in the play representing the creation of the world and the beginning of human time. In the “Creation” play, God’s speech act of creation, his “bringing forth” and “fostering” of the world (“Pe erthe sall [I] fostyr and furthe bryng,” Play 2, l. 65), parallels the “bringing forth” of the plays themselves from word and text to spectacle.30 What is said is then seen. Furthermore, the repetition of the vocabulary of “work” throughout the “Creation” play—and the rest of the cycle—firmly sets all the following actions in these plays simultaneously in the biblical world and in the world of the guilds. This is reflected and refracted as well in Play 3, “The Creation of Adam and Eve,” in which God creates humans specifically for his own

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companionship, to have creatures who will worship him (ll. 14–16). The diction of “work” and “skill” is again prominent in these lines: “But {et can I here no best see / Pat accordys be kynde and skyll, / And for my werke myght worschippe me” (ll. 14–16, emphasis mine). God is a master craftsman who looks for and then creates others with reason (“skyll”) like him and who will thus admire him for his work. Like the York “Building of the Ark,” which I will discuss in the next section of this chapter, this play uses a Christian originary myth to double as a local myth of origins. God’s creation of a community who “accordys” by “kynde” and “skyll” suggests the half-mythic origins of the guilds themselves. But the mythic origin of the guilds and the plays are not marked solely by God’s presence; the traditional story of the origin of sin is also wrapped up in the language and social structures of the guilds and their plays. From the start of the cycle, then, guild identity, masculinity, and the world of work are colored by ambivalence. In Play 5, “The Fall of Man,” Satan tries to insinuate himself into the family of man by identifying himself to Eve as a “frende” (l. 25), echoing God’s earlier making of Eve as Adam’s “frende and sybe” (3.40), and speaking to her in the language of the middle-class artisan and merchant world of the play’s producers. It is, of course, those men who are on stage performing these roles, including the role of Eve. After Satan has made his first attempt to seduce Eve, she counters his temptations by insisting that she and Adam have no need of the fruit: “We have lordshippe to make maistrie / Of alle Qynge Qat in erthe is wrought” (ll. 58–59, emphasis mine). The guild-related language is intensified by the economic metaphors that both Eve and Satan use; Eve says such a deed would “myspaye” God (l. 64), while Satan insists it would bring “grete wynnynge” (l. 68). While all these metaphors and this diction are commonplace elsewhere in late medieval literature, their use in the context of guild-produced plays enriches their meaning, equating the sins of God’s first creations with greed and ambition that have special resonance for a manufacturing and mercantile culture. What is more, Satan tempts Eve with promises of great reputation and public worth. The fruit will give her “worshippe” and make her a “pere” (peer) to God, claims Satan (ll. 68–70). Eve later repeats this idea to Adam in even more socioeconomic terms: the fruit will make them “als mekill of prise” as God (l. 98); Adam echoes her, agreeing to eat the fruit “to wynne Qat name” (l. 104). In a world where there are only two people, “wynnynge,” “worship,” “price,” and “name” cannot really matter—but they do matter to the guilds performing this scene. The play thus seemingly serves as a warning to guilds and guildsmen too concerned with those worldly values. However, given that many artisans, including the coopers who presented this play, were more worried about mere survival than great reputation, such a warning serves the

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interests of the mercantile culture that initiated these play: it is a persuasive, if not coercive, lesson in how to keep one’s place in a hierarchically organized society. Such connections between the biblical world and the guilds’ world are reinforced in this play, as throughout the cycle, by the repetition of the language of work, and after the Fall, Adam takes up that theme. But now the work is faulty and it is, in Adam’s opinion, Eve who is to blame. “Thy werke wille make [God] wrothe” (l. 87), Adam tells Eve, as well as “Pis werke, Eue, hast Qou wrought, / And made Qis bad bargayne” (l. 118–19). Eve is representative of the disorder that enters domestic life if the head of the household—the man or the master—is absent, as Adam was during her temptation by Satan. For antifeminists, she is emblematic of what happens when women enter too much into household business: they make “bad bargayne[s].” But she is also representative of masculine anxieties about men’s failures to run their workshops as well as their households, for Eve was probably played by a boy. Thus, Adam’s failure to guide Eve is a double fault; it is guildsman’s failure to guide his apprentice or servant and other young men of the community, and also simultaneously a failure to guide his wife. The episode dramatizes the conflicts of the double bind of guildsmen, caught between duties to home and workshop and homosocial responsibilities, generally enforced from above, in the civic arena. Although Adam’s absence does not map easily and directly onto such civic duties, the spectacle of men literally performing a civic duty (the plays themselves) as they enact the rebellion of a wife/apprentice in the husband/master’s absence is nevertheless deeply suggestive of the guildsmen’s conflicting interests. Moreover, Adam’s momentary but crucial absence at the time of Eve’s temptation is reflected a hundredfold in the consequences of their actions, for after their sin, God absents himself from them. Though he calls out to Adam, God is disembodied—Adam hears him, but cannot see him, much to Adam’s horror (l. 139). This detail amplifies the biblical source, but it has a particular poignancy in a performative context, as the role of God must now be played by an offstage voice—perhaps under or behind the pageant wagon—instead of a fully present actor.31 And at the very moment that God becomes disembodied, Adam and Eve realize their nakedness and feel shame. In fact, it is Adam who is most ashamed, or at least the most vocal about it, crying, “Oure shapped for doole me defes, / Wherewith Qay shalle be hydde?” (ll. 129–30: I am stunned by shock at our appearance; what can we conceal them [our bodies] with?) and lamenting that “we are naked and all bare” (l. 134). In other words, it seems that the male body in particular is problematic; having been absent at a crucial moment, it is now much too traumatically present. And in the fallen world, the male God, the

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Father, has become otherworldly and intangible. Being embodied, visible, spectacular, or present now bespeaks a fallen state. Drama itself, then, as part of the material and spectacular world, is also fallen, and the anxiety that Adam expresses about his naked body is also an anxiety on the part of the players about their double exposure as fallen forefather and as spectacles themselves.32 Of course later in these plays, God will take human form, that is, be reembodied in Christ. There too, the humiliating display, torture, and destruction of the naked male body is made central. Being embodied is part of God’s masculine sacrifice for humankind. What is more, his embodiment does not wholly bridge the distance that results from the Fall: as I will discuss in more detail later, God the Father continues to remain distant— an absentee father, so to speak—throughout the history told in these plays, and Christ remains aloof even in his physical presence. Embodiment, and the self-conscious awareness of it, only brings men alienation from God and from others. Ideal masculinity, then, is constructed here and throughout the plays (as we will see), as sacrifice, absence, distance, or abstraction. Given the commonplace medieval construction of femaleness as the body that incites men to lust that they would not otherwise have (particularly in clerical discourse but disseminated throughout wider culture), the concept of ideal maleness as disembodiment seems to carry these notions to their logical ends. And as we will see in the Passion plays, this conception also produces a masculinity that must deny pain and emotion—a cultural construction of masculinity that unfortunately remains with us, particularly in English and American culture, today. But the implication for drama, in particular for this “drama of masculinity” and its players, is a potentially traumatic cognitive dissonance, a double bind in which men are asked to model and embody masculine ideals dramatically and publicly, even as they are also taught that ideal masculinity is disembodied and that embodiment is a fallen state. Again and again the craftsmen-players are inculcated with the idea of their ever-present failure as men, and the drama is marked as a penitential and sacrificial space where absolution is never quite given and the ideals of masculinity are always unmet. All of these issues and their representation—in Adam’s absence and his failure to guide Eve, God’s subsequent self-distancing, and Adam’s overdetermined presence in his fallen state—are all taken up in even greater detail in Play 6, “The Expulsion.” In this play, the distance and disembodiment of God have become so pronounced that for the first time in the plays, he speaks solely through an angel. And because of that distance, Adam now sees himself as an apprentice without a master: “Gyffe I wirke wronge, who shulde me wys / Be any way?” (ll. 107–108). Again, the general philosophical and theological issues of the plays are brought to bear

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on a specific socioeconomic milieu, and the hierarchies and structures of that milieu are reinforced and reiterated by the suggestion of their terrible absence. Indeed, the words “wrought” and “wirke” and their variations are repeated more times in this play than in any since “The Creation,” forcing the Fall and its consequences directly into the artisan’s world, in his own language. The plays to this point have subtly suggested that the closest thing to paradise in this world is the ideal guildsman’s life (a fantasy we will see again in the Noah plays ), as imagined in official discourse and culture: a well-ordered domestic sphere where the wife acts only as support and partner to the husband, and apprentices and masters all do their part with love, kindness, loyalty, and worship—anything else is a “bad bargayne.” The spoilers of this fantasy are not the masters and patriarchs, but women, apprentices, “foreigns” or outsiders such as Satan, and the lower-ranking guildsmen of the artisan class. This vision is somewhat ironic given that Adam’s punishment is the need to work for sustenance. These plays, however, suggest that the fallen quality of the world leads specifically to the potential for bad or ill work, rather than the necessity of work itself. As Beckwith points out, God himself performs “work” in the Creation play, even though orthodox theology held that the creation required no such actual labor from God, only his word.33 In the fallen world, it is the way things work that has gone disastrously wrong. The masculine order and reason (“skyll,” 3.15), established by God and meant to be supervised by Adam, is lost. A sure sign of this disorder is Adam’s new emotionalism. Nearly every stanza he speaks in the “Expulsion” play begins with or includes a woeful “Allas!” or a “welaway.” He laments the effect of such emotion on his mind: “Mournynge makis me mased and madde” (l. 83). Adam shares this emotional madness largely with other (evil) male characters of the plays: Satan, Herod, Pilate, and the like. They are notably histrionic, drawing attention to their dramatic presence and appearance through much melodramatic emoting. Such characters and their performances were so famously over the top—and thus popular and memorable—that both Chaucer and Shakespeare make reference to Herod precisely as a role, in the context of actors who played him or might have emulated the style of his portrayal.34 Such excessive performance of emotion makes a man into an unholy spectacle—like Satan “playing” God prior to his own fall—and adds to the deep ambivalence about the status of spectacle and drama itself, particularly for its entirely male cast. It also suggests the inescapability of performance in the fallen world. But emotionalism is not a trait limited to the evil—many other male characters succumb to such emotions. In fact, Adam is merely the first in a genealogy of woeful and anxious fathers and husbands, culminating with the archetypal domestic man, Joseph, husband to the Virgin Mary. Such

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disorderly conduct has become the hallmark of fallen man, something he must constantly struggle against, just as he must struggle against sin. Order, reason, and self-control, then, are no longer intrinsic to men in the fallen world, but have become qualities that must be learned and also performed— reiterated habitually until internalized and understood as “natural”—as masculinity itself is something performed. As I will show in more detail in chapter 4, the central teacher and model of correct masculine behavior in these plays is Christ, and he is most striking in his silence and his unemotional acceptance of his gruesome fate. Christ as a recapitulation of Adam reverses Adam’s emotional disintegration, his falling apart.35 Divine Man offers again a model of what Man should be like, as Adam was before the Fall. The disorder of “mans maistrie” in the “Fall” and the “Expulsion” plays seems only to grow with the next generation of men, Cain and Abel, from what can be seen in the fragment of Play 7 that survives. Cain’s violence and prolixity are exaggerated versions of the distraught histrionics of Adam in the previous play, driving home the idea that the more fallen, more sinful a man is, the more spectacular and melodramatic his persona becomes. Like the language of Pilate and Herod in the New Testament plays, Cain’s language too is overloaded with alliterative curses and exclamations. For example, he berates Abel thus: We! Whythir now, in wilde waneand? Trowes Qou I thynke to trusse of towne? Goo, jape Qe, robard jangillande, Me liste no{t nowe to rouk nor rowne. (ll. 45–48)

Despite those verbal excesses, however, this Cain—in contrast to the Chester Cain—seems almost rational and pragmatic at times (though perhaps the missing scenes would have provided more instances of excess). He asks quite logically why he must make an offering to God, for “If he be moste in myghte and mayne / What nede has he?” (ll. 66–67) and argues that “Qat werke were waste / That he vs gaffe geffe hym agayne / To se” (ll. 60–62). Such questions might also be asked by the struggling artisans about their need to contribute to a civic spectacle initiated by much richer merchants. The glovers who produced this play were by no means a wealthy guild, and their ordinances, discussed in chapter 1, suggest the ways that they, like Cain, tried to shirk their ritual, public duties. If the glovers’ ordinances require two clauses warning masters that they will be fined for being “rebell unto” the searchers, or for failing to appear for a prearranged meeting, then perhaps it is because such subversive incidences were common. But if such dissent is given voice in the Cain and Abel play,

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it is important to note that it is spoken by an immoral, unrepentant, and doomed character who swiftly gets his comeuppance. Any supposed subversion of hierarchies is ultimately contained by the narrative’s end and whatever carnivalesque outlet the play offers, it is only to reinforce hegemonic structures. Through negative example, the play disciplines the players and encourages obedience to the status quo. Indeed, in both York and Chester, it is mainly negative examples of behavior that are offered in the stories of the first family. From the Creation through the story of the first murder, Abel is the sole character to show how a man should properly act, and yet he remains largely a cipher. His proper sacrifice of “Pe teynd” of his goods, as York expresses it (7.40), becomes unintentionally a self-sacrifice with his murder. While his observance of God’s decrees earns him ritual acceptance, his initiation into manhood is made moot, at least in earthly terms, by his death. Maleness, then, is defined by sacrifice, by quiescence, and ultimately by absence from this world. Contrary to the terms of poststructuralist psychoanalysis, it is maleness that is marked by lack, not femaleness. Of course, not all the pageants offer only passive masculine figures as models of behavior, though they are certainly a recurring type. The Noah plays offer a masculine image that is much more active, though still they express ambivalent attitudes about communal urban life and its civic responsibilities, as well as anxieties about the role of men in that milieu. Noah and the Guild-Family Critical attention to plays of the flood and Noah’s ark, especially (but not limited to) criticism with a focus on gender, has tended almost naturally to focus on Noah’s struggles with his recalcitrant wife (a feature of all but the N-Town version) as the most dramatically interesting or suggestive element of the play.36 Although I am interested in this episode, I will argue rather differently that the York and Chester cycles use it as only part of a larger story, one that is more about Noah than about Noah’s Wife. That story details the frustrations and fantasies of being an urban, mercantile, or artisan class guildsman.37 Chester Play 3: Noah’s Flood Chester’s “Noah’s Flood,” like many of the cycle’s plays, acts out in art and performance a fantasy of masculine domestic ideology that could not be realized in the real lives of the men performing the play. To begin, it imagines a congruence between the guild and the family that did not exist as such in the material world of late medieval England. In a play produced by what Chester’s

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Late Banns described as the “good simple waterleaders & drawers of Dee,” Noah is paradoxically cast as a prominent late medieval citizen, the head of a fruitful and prosperous mercantile family.38 When God first addresses Noah, he calls him “my servante free, / that righteous man” (ll. 17–18, emphasis mine). The word “free” is the common term for a man who has acquired and paid for the privilege of trading without having to pay the city’s tolls; that is, he has become, essentially, a free citizen of the town. In denoting Noah as “free,” the play clearly sets itself and Noah in a higher register and social milieu. Other details locate Noah in this social register as well. The description of the ark that God orders Noah to build resembles the home and shop of a well-off citizen more than a true ship. Its multiple “little chambers” (l. 21) echo the biblical account, but here they are specified to include “eatinge-places” (l. 33) and a separate “hall” (l. 51), details that the biblical account lacks. Meanwhile, the construction materials—“bindinge sliche” (l. 22), “pynne[s]” (l. 61), and “tymber” (l. 65)—also more detailed than in Genesis, suggest the common timber, wattle, and daub style of most medieval and early modern English cities.39 While the ark in the York’s shipwrights’ “Building of the Ark” play resembles a standard “clinker-built” ship, as Clifford Davidson has argued, Chester’s terms such as “hall” and “chambers,” and the similarities between house-building and shipbuilding suggest to me a less realistic, more urgently metaphorical relationship between Noah’s Ark and a guildsman’s home and workshop.40 The Chester play conflates ark and workshop, but also ark and home, and in doing so, constructs a guildsman’s fantasy of a homelife and guild-life whose boundaries are utterly the same. In this version, all the family members contribute to the building and stocking of the ark, even Noah’s later rebellious Wife. This new community, which will begin the earth again, is comprised entirely of workers, of productive craftspeople. As Travis writes, “Like living didactic icons, Noah’s family, tools in hand, realize the hardworking social ideal.”41 The play imagines the “houshould” that God has spared (l. 43) as a domestic community that “worche this shippe, chamber and hall” (l. 51) together, “men and weomen all” (l. 49). The members of that household-guild community all participate in one craft: woodworking, specifically shipbuilding. As each one works, he or she announces the tools and materials used: axe, hatchet, wooden pins, timber, chopping block, binding slitch (ll. 53–76). The technical language of sailing also provides other details (ll. 89–96), ensuring that the vessel being built, though symbolically a household or guild workshop, is also seaworthy. Since the waterleaders and drawers who performed this play were neither shipbuilders nor mariners, the realistic, contemporary details are less about advertising a specific craft than about suggesting a generalized mercantile world of trade and social importance.42 As noted, the “good simple” waterleaders and drawers had only a modest material

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share in that world, but the ideology of the play serves to mask that difference and to assure even the lowly that they have their place in God’s plan. Even the Wife’s rebellion is couched in the language and relationships of guild life. After her first refusal to do as Noah says and to board the ark, Noah, irritated, complains that the noise she makes causes everyone to think that she is the master, and thus, in fact, through her speech-acts she has become so: Good wiffe, lett be all this beare that thou makest in this place here, for all the weene that thou arte mastere— and soe thou arte, by sayncte John. (ll. 109–112, emphasis mine)

Though Noah’s complaint draws on the traditional antifeminist “woman-on-top” topos and recalls the Wife of Bath’s musings on the subject of “maistrye,” the use of the term “master” in a guild-produced play imbues the word’s and the passage’s meaning with anxious self-reflexivity. Moreover, immediately following this encounter, God orders Noah to “take thou they meanye / and in the shippe hye that yee bee” (ll. 113–14, emphasis mine). “Meny” is a word with multiple meanings, including “household” in the sense of family plus servants and retainers, as well as a “crew” of a ship, or a “company” of people, including a guild company.43 Noah’s Wife and the wives of his sons would have been played by young men and boys, perhaps apprentices or servants of the waterleaders and drawers, so that what the audience would have seen before them, only partly inflected by women’s costumes, was Noah directing a large “meny” of men and boys. In this context, Noah’s debate with his Wife over who is the rightful “master” does not belong only to antifeminist traditions, but pertains also to the hierarchical structures of the guild. Noah, as both patriarch and master, is claiming his middle-class masculine entitlement to lead both women and underlings. As Karras argues, “The goal of artisanal masculinity was domination of others (including women but mainly men) economically through ownership of an independent workshop.”44 As familiar as these structures seem—that is, the head of household and the head of the guild are one and the same, and the people he guides are both family and guild—they are more the stuff of ideological fantasy than the material reality of late medieval urban life, as I have detailed in chapter 1. However, identities constructed by language and culture can and do often seem “natural” to those who hold or define them, and their boundaries appear to the uncritical eye to be self-evident. Drama cycles and other civic spectacles and festivals played particularly significant roles in constructing these identities, constituting, disciplining, and giving visible cohesion to bodies of men that previously existed only abstractly, if at all.45

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Chester’s “Noah’s Flood” play seems to participate in that process of identity formation as well as express anxieties about guild culture and its relation to the domestic sphere. Noah and his family at first present a nostalgic vision of a coherent, cohesive guild. As Travis succinctly puts it, prior to the Wife’s rebellion, “Noah and his family are perfect.”46 Completely selfsufficient, they present an insular domestic fantasy, where just one familyguild group comprises all society and, after the Flood, there exist no competitive rivalries or even cooperative relationships with other guilds, much less any responsibilities beyond the domestic walls. Even Noah’s sons, following in their father’s occupational footsteps, express this isolationist fantasy, for in actual practice, sons were as likely to apprentice with other tradesmen and artisans as with their father.47 It is as an isolated family-guild group that Noah and his family leave the rest of the world behind. Indeed, not only do Noah and his family lack a connection to a public sphere, they are escaping from it and its evil influences. The most significant representative of the destructive element of the city, the one disruptive force that threatens the harmony of Noah’s fantasy guild-family, is his own Wife. In her act of rebellion, the Wife is distinctly associated with the city. “Withowten any fayle,” she proclaims, “I will not owt of this towne” (ll. 199–200). Her next condition is that she will not board the ship unless she has her “gossips” with her (l. 201), immediately associating the city with a female community that quickly becomes an unruly counterpart to the ordered microcosm of Noah’s patriarchal guild-family. Noah enlists his sons to help subdue their mother, and they do so in careful order from oldest to youngest, but the Wife’s “gossips” soon interrupt with their drink and their song (ll. 209–240): Gossips: The fludd comes fleetinge in full faste, one everye syde that spredeth full farre. For fere of drowninge I am agaste; good gossippe, lett us drawe nere. And lett us drinke or wee departe, for oftetymes wee have done soe. For at one draught thou drinke a quarte, and soe will I doe or I goe. Here is a pottell full of malnesaye good and stronge; yt will rejoyse both harte and tonge. Though Noe thinke us never soe longe, yett wee wyll drinke atyte. Japhet:

Mother, wee praye you all together— for we are here, your owne childer—

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come into the shippe for fear of the wedder for his love that you bought. (ll. 225–40)

The stanzas the Gossips speak are designated as the “Good Gossippes Songe” in the 1592 MS, though as David Mills points out, “It is not clear whether all or part of what follows constitutes a song, or if the reference is a cue for a song which is not specified.”48 Whether they speak or sing or do both, in all but the 1607 Harley manuscript they interrupt the ordered, processional intercessions of the three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japhet. And though it is not entirely clear how many Gossips there are, there are at least two, each one speaking a stanza alone, then chiming in together on the last stanza, where only first-person plural pronouns are used. Their boisterous togetherness, along with a possible song upon entrance and their rude interruption of Noah’s sons, provides an unruly contrast to the somber order and formality of Noah’s world. They represent the undifferentiated communal body, the “we” from which the cycle plays and official civic, mercantile culture attempt to distinguish and reify the purportedly ordered world of the guilds and their distinct, controllable identities. The women likewise represent a city and a public sphere that has become increasingly feminized, a culture that the masculine fantasy of this play and others in the cycle attempts to deny and escape. The Gossips are not specifically given a craft or other occupational association—indeed, they seem to be merely idle drunks. They are socially and morally associated with drink, if not clearly professionally. Nevertheless, the association with drink is important in specific sociohistorical terms as well. As detailed in chapter 1, in late medieval cities and towns, the retail sale of drink in small measures for immediate consumption was an occupation often practiced on the side by craftsmen and, very frequently, by their wives. This small-scale retail sale of drink was representative of the unofficial, entrepreneurial opportunities for all sorts of a city’s less-powerful denizens, especially women. What is more, sellers and dispensers of drink—particularly the alewives and female tapsters who worked from home or in official taverns—were continually under suspicion for dishonest business practices meant to increase profits at the city’s and the consumer’s expense.49 That the Gossips are associated with tavern life and possibly the trade in drink makes them a threat to the fantasy unity of the household in and of themselves, even without their encouragement of the Wife’s rebellion, for they represent the interdependent and overlapping nature of trade and manufacture in the city—the anxiety-producing possibilities of resignification and the slipperiness of identity—as well as the social and economic opportunities for women outside of the home and the patriarch’s control.

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The Gossips also represent qualities of behavior distinctly counter to what the plays imagine as appropriate masculine behavior, as distant, contained, and unemotional even in the face of great trauma or pain. And as noted above, throughout the cycles, male characters still unredeemed or ultimately unredeemable behave in exaggerated, histrionic, and melodramatic ways; they are the scene-stealers and the scenery-chewers. The Gossips share some of these qualities. They are noisy and emotional, entering the pageant singing and openly announcing their fear. They seek to dispel that fear not through entreaties to God or trust in him, but through the temporary amnesia of drink, self-consciously performing their roles as representatives of the idle, gluttonous world that God seeks to destroy, as if belonging to an interlude or a play within a play. They do not, in fact, have any real interaction with the other characters; they appear as if a spectacle of what the Wife is loathe to leave behind and what Noah cannot wait to escape.50 A few lines after the Gossips’ song, when the flood waters have risen and Noah and his family are all safely on board, Noah sighs, “yt is good for to be still” (l. 248), as if in relief from the discomfort of the histrionic display of the women and the city that spawned them. That discomfort—and the need for escape from it—suggests an ironic discomfort with the very genre of drama itself, at times loud, boisterous, histrionic, and melodramatic, and certainly public and communal. The carousing Gossips also suggest something “feminine” and therefore undesirable about such public display, thereby threatening the very masculinity the plays wish to model and construct. The conflict between public, civic duty and domestic responsibility is a concept that the York Noah plays will take up as well, and which I will discuss below. Here in Chester, that conflict is resolved, but only in fantasy form, in a nostalgic, compensatory vision of a life that never really existed. Noah and his family are allowed by God to escape the evils of the city and to recuperate the imagined patriarchal family/guild with its obedient women and children working in support of the unified household economy. God rescues that household from the city’s influences and Noah carries out that plan with the almost fetishized tools and products of the very guild culture from which he and his family came. As in most fantasies, the play wants it both ways: it wants recognition of hard work within a mercantile culture, but it also wants to escape any responsibility to and for that culture and its conflicting demands. What it wants, essentially, is a return to Eden and God’s grace—but one that is earned, not just given. Upon reaching dry land, Noah disembarks in a procession with his family and praises God and offers him the first sacrifice of the new world: Lord God in majestye that such grace hast granted mee wher all was borne, salfe to bee! Therfore nowe I am boune—

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my wyffe, my children, and my menye— with sacryfice to honour thee of beastes, fowles, as thou mayest see, and full devotyon. (ll. 261–68, emphasis mine)

Noah clearly thinks of himself as the primary beneficiary of God’s grace, as his use of the first person singular suggests; his family and his “menye” are blessed only by association. In thanks he offers a personal sacrifice that God immediately accepts and blesses: Noe, to me thou arte full able and thy sacrafice acceptable; for I have founde thee treeue and stable, one thee nowe muste I myne. (ll. 269–72, emphasis mine)

Noah’s family is left out of the conversation as the relationship between Noah and God grows intimate; they speak, in a sense, man to man. What is more, with the pun on “able” and the acceptance of Noah’s sacrifice, Noah becomes the new Abel, this time the survivor, while Cain, the traditional founder of cities, and his sinful descendants have been wiped out. By the end of God’s new commandments to humankind, he specifically and familiarly addresses only Noah: And forwarde, Noe, with thee I make and all thy seede for thy sake, of suche vengeance for to slake, for nowe I have my will. (ll. 301–304, emphasis mine)

At the end of this “forwarde” with Noah, God closes the contract and the play with his blessing, the first time he does so since the Fall. That blessing, too, is strikingly intimate: My blessinge now I give thee here, to thee, Noe, my servante deare, for vengeance shall noe more appeare. And now farewell, my darlinge dere. (ll. 325–28)

Gone is the phrase “my servante free” (l. 17) and its socioeconomic valence; in its place is “my servante deare,” echoed and intensified by the final

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phrase, “my darlinge dere.” Though the use of the language of affection is so commonplace in devotional literature as to be almost cliché, the contrast of it here with the play’s previous scenes of domestic chaos, as well as its contrast with the generally spectacular quality of the drama itself, makes it remarkable. The intimacy is also noteworthy, for in the biblical account, God’s commandments and blessings are explicitly made to Noah and his sons. The play reinvents the domestic scene of the garden of Eden, working backward from Eve’s rebellion to the brief moments when God and man dwelled alone. It is a fantasy of escape from both domestic and public life, and also from the alienation of fallen masculinity: masculine identity is bound up intimately and indivisibly into God’s presence. York Plays 8 and 9: The Building of the Ark and The Flood This masculine fantasy of homosocial intimacy with God is also to be found in York’s “Building of the Ark” play, which has roles for only God and Noah; but rather than presenting a fantasy of escape from the city and its life, it provides instead a dream of respite within the city’s culture. As a whole, the two York Noah plays provide gentler fantasies of life, tempered by an admission of its austerities, than the compensatory fantasies of Chester. Even the anxieties of York’s narrative are smaller and more domestic in scale, and played out in more psychological terms. The “Building of the Ark” in particular presents an intimate vision of God and man working side by side, a serene and idealized portrait of a master and apprentice relationship. Indeed, the play reflects a tendency in the cycle as a whole to use the language of “craft” and “work” in multiple metaphorical ways. Here, the play becomes a pedagogical tool—a dramatic conduct book—to teach how a master should instruct and look after his journeymen and apprentices. God is the artisan who has “wrought Qis world so wyde” (l. 1) and now wants to begin the work anew, with Noah as his apprentice. He addresses Noah as his “seruand sad an cleyn” (l. 33) and calls upon him to “wyrke withowten weyn / A warke to saffe Qiselfe wythale” (ll. 35–36). Note that unlike Noah of the Chester play, York’s Noah is not yet “free,” but must earn that freedom through his work. Such freedom is not merely citizenship of the city, but salvation (“to saffe Qiselfe”)—material salvation from the Flood and spiritual salvation from eternal damnation. Although work as a means of salvation or at least as a means of serving the higher purpose of the spirit made its way widely into medieval culture from Benedictine monasticism,51 it is here employed to discipline a specific body of men in the mercantile ideals of guild culture and its brand of masculinity. Noah is not a skilled worker—he must be apprenticed to God,

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the patient master who assures Noah that “All-yf Qou can litill skyll / Take it in hande, for helpe sall I” (ll. 47–48). There is almost a sense in these lines of God physically working with Noah. What is more, God shows his patience and kindness in his gentle encouragement of his apprentice, who is not only unskilled, but initially also unwilling. Noah, a slow starter because of his age, is reluctant to begin work unless a great need compels him (l. 50–52). God assures him that “Qou wyll passe from peynes smerte, / I sall Qe sokoure and the spede / And giffe Qe hele in hede and hert” (ll. 54–56). God is a model craft master, teaching the guildsmen who perform and watch the play how to handle recalcitrant apprentices. But the play is also teaching a false lesson, propaganda in support of an apprenticeship system that did not always run so ideally, especially for the apprentices, and that, in fact, was never quite so systematic or stable. Just as wealth and influence differed from guild to guild, so did the experiences of apprentices, as I have discussed in chapter 1. Indeed, the gap between the theory of the apprenticeship system and its practice was substantial. In short, the “Building of the Ark” play authorizes and naturalizes an exploitative economic practice by constructing an originary myth in which God was its first practitioner. Besides instructing the populace how the guild system should work—at least according to the ideals of the economically powerful—the play is also interested in reminding guild members that their faulty work will be noticed and punished. In keeping with the multivalent levels of work as a metaphor, God expresses humankind’s sins in craft terms. He laments, “I se suche ire emonge mankynde / Pat of Qere werkis I will take wreke” (ll. 57–58, emphasis mine), and he warns Noah, “Thy mesures and thy markis to take” (l. 64). Later, he repeats himself, reminding Noah, “Pus gyffe I Qe grathly or I gang / Pi mesures, Qat Qou do not mysse. / Luk nowe Qat Qou wirke noght wrang / Pus wittely sen I Qe wyshe” (ll. 85–88). Those measures and marks have the metaphorical quality of taking measure and count of one’s sins, but yet refer quite literally to the measures of his woodworking as he builds the ark according to God the Master’s instructions. These multiple meanings are equally at work for Noah in biblical time and for the players and audience in real time. The general public audience might hear these words in their symbolic meaning, but craftsmen performing the play at the behest of the mercantile civic government might also hear an admonition to produce quality goods, or else risk being discovered and fined by civic council appointed searchers. In the play, God is not so much a master within one’s own craft, but a higher authority, the civic government, whom one should fear only if one fails to obey his commandments.52 Noah is, of course, a model servant and student of God the Master who is, in turn, an exemplary teacher. The discourse of pedagogy continues

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throughout the play. Noah again reminds God that “of shippe-craft can I right noght, / Of Qer makyng haue I no merke,” but God tells him not to worry for “I sall Qe wysshe in all Qi werke, / And even to itt till ende be wroght” (ll. 67–71). God does exactly that, teaching Noah step by step how to construct a ship that will hold the progenitors of a new world. The instructions (ll. 73–80) are not simply the general measurements and materials of the ship, as they are in Genesis, but give a sense of real Yorkshire shipbuilding.53 Eventually Noah graduates and is able to work on his own, for by the end of God’s instructions Noah declares, “To wyrk Qis werke here in Qis feylde / Al be myselfe I will assaye” (ll. 95–96). He then shows his own mastery of the technical language of woodworking, at times echoing the lessons God has taught him, and concluding, “Pus schall I wyrke it both more and myne/Thurgh the techyng of God, maister myne” (ll. 96–104, emphasis mine). Thus the York shipbuilders performing this pageant not only play the role of Noah acknowledging God, his master, for his instruction, but they also perform an ideal version of themselves and woodworking crafts like them (or even crafts in general). The technical language invokes the material lives of the plays’ performers and audience. But the correspondence between Noah’s education and the education of craftsmen and their apprentices also does significant ideological work, persuading players and audience alike of the authority of a system that was partly illusion and did not always benefit its lower strata. Not only did apprenticeship fail to approach the idealized system suggested in this play, but also, crafts such as the shipbuilders, who produced this play, and other woodworkers like them were some of the poorest, most disenfranchised craftsmen of medieval York. Most of their “masters” hardly differed in status and financial stability from wage-laborers and servants, and of all the woodworking crafts, including the large carpenters’ craft, only the tiny joiners’ guild had representation on the York common council. Many of the practitioners of the craft would not have even bothered formally taking out the freedom of the city or joining the guild, since they subsisted on their labor rather than on trade. Even those who belonged to the guild did not necessarily have the means to “foster” apprentices, taking care of their every need; instead they would have overseen the work of the more itinerant day-laborers.54 In short, what this play “advertises” is less the reality of shipbuilding and woodworking crafts and more an idealistic fantasy that benefited mainly the civic authorities concerned with organizing and overseeing crafts and the commerce of the city, and with the collection of revenue for various civic needs, including the plays themselves. It would have been in their interest to see to it that craftsmen were properly organized in dues-paying guilds after having paid fees for the

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privilege of the freedom. And it was in the social body’s interest that all workers—whether woodworkers or otherwise—accepted the instructions and authority of their masters with humility and obedience. The authorities would have been especially eager to impart that particular lesson after the Uprising of 1381, which found sympathy among disaffected and disenfranchised urban craftsmen in York, Beverley, and Scarborough, who temporarily formed coalitions across craft designations.55 As Beckwith notes, “1381 could only have been a ghastly specter of the kinds of corporate bodies that could form around political alliances utterly at odds with the fantasies of the ruling oligarchic body.”56 The nostalgic, compensatory fantasy of this play also speaks in particular to men as men, not simply as guildsmen or citizens. The play is a dream of intimacy and familiarity, not only between God and Man, but between man and man, father and son, master and apprentice. In the midst of an interdependent, civic, public spectacle, it presents a nostalgic vision of a self-sufficient, male, homosocial household of two. Almost like a lover, Noah proclaims of God, “He wille be my beyld, Qus am I bowde” (l. 119: He will be my support, thus am I bold). And God not only works side by side with Noah, teaching him patiently, but he also cares for him; he assures Noah, “I sall Qe socoure for certeyne / Tille alle Qi care awey be kaste” (ll. 142–43). In turn, Noah declares his love for God and his gratitude for God’s diligent instruction and suggests that the audience do the same: “I lowe Qi lare both lowde and stille. . .He Qat to me Qis Crafte has kende / He wysshe vs with his worthy wille” (ll. 145–51). Again, the use of the vocabulary of work and craft turns the praise of God as divine teacher into praise of worldly masters, as well. The loving, intimate relationship of God and Noah, master and apprentice, presented here provides further internalization of the established hierarchies of guild life, at least insofar as they are imagined, if not practiced. For again the truth of apprenticeship could be and often was very different. This fantasy is in some sense also offered as compensation; if the individual experience of an apprentice does not reflect the fantasy, the corporate experience of apprenticeship should. Thus an apprentice seeing this play and realizing the gap between his inadequate experience and the model presented in the play might be led to believe that his is but an anomaly, that apprenticeship as a system still obtains the ideal. The fantasy also reflects spiritual and psychological yearnings, for the Old Testament God in the York cycle, in this play especially, is much more present and intimate with man than God the Father will be to Christ in the New Testament plays. What is more, even Christ will withdraw into silence and distance himself during his trials; because Christ is God embodied, he will be physically present, but not intimately so, not like the God who here privately and

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gently tutors Noah. The nostalgia in this play, then, is a multilayered one, but in every layer of meaning lies a desire for intimate homosocial male relationships, and an expression of their failure in guild culture, even as the official discourse and structure of guilds mimics such relationships. It is striking then, that in the following play of “The Flood,” God withdraws his presence just as Noah’s family members lend theirs and anxiety levels build. The pair of plays together are not so much about the need to escape the influence of the city, as in Chester, since the first of the two serves as propaganda for the city’s systems; rather, they sketch the anxious conflicts between men’s public duties to God and community (in the form of guild and/or civic responsibilities) and patriarchal domestic responsibilities for the family. Man can have an intimate relationship with God (or potentially with the men of his community) or he can have a well-ordered heterosocial family, but cannot have both. In fact, the play opens with Noah still alone, in a reverie of thanksgiving to God for the blessings of his own life as well as for his father’s. He thanks God for having given him “Thre semely sonnes” (l. 5)—and, oh yes, “a worthy wiffe” (l. 5) as well—and then remembers how his father, too, was granted a son, but like Abraham, late in life and only after beseeching God (ll. 15–27). In Noah’s story, his father, Lamech, “prayed to God with stabill steuene / Qat he to hym a sone shuld sende. . .And as God vouchydsaue / In worlde Qan was I borne” (ll. 19–27). Noah’s genealogy is exclusively male (as in the biblical account in Gen. 5.3–29) and Lamech’s experience is made to reflect the intimate homosocial relationship with God that Noah himself experienced in the last play. Lamech is granted privy knowledge of God’s plan for Noah and the world (ll. 33–36), just as his son Noah will be. Lamech’s intimate knowledge of God and the exclusive father-son relationship of Lamech and Noah both reflect the master-apprentice, male-only society of two created by God and Noah in the last play. But as “The Flood” plays out, this male-only reverie with its tendency to leave wives out will come back to haunt Noah. From early in the play, it is clear that Noah’s Wife has been left outside these channels of communication. After Noah’s solitary musing on God and his father, he calls upon his family, to which the First Son answers: “Fader, we are all redy heere, / Youre biddyng baynly to fulfille” (ll. 47–48). Since Noah’s response is “Goos calle youre modir” (l. 49), however, not all are present yet. Then, like the Chester Wife, though for a different reason, the wife refuses to board the ark: she thinks Noah is mad (“woode,” l. 93), since she sees no reason to leave her home for parts unknown. Only the men have knowledge of God’s plan and it is they who must finally explain it to her, but only after much histrionic behavior on her part. And it is not even Noah who tells her the full story, but the Second Son, who urges her to be glad to board the ark for “This worlde

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beis drowned, withouten drede” (l. 104). Though the sons seem to know what is happening, the Wife clearly has not heard this news before, for her immediate reaction is “Allas, Qat I Qis lare shuld lere” (l. 105). In the last play, Noah graduated from his master’s teaching, but here he has failed in teaching his own family/guild. The Wife’s use of the word “lare” (lore) links her belated education to the one that God gave Noah. But being female, she is not privileged to know the craft-lore of men. However, she is clearly part of the economic and/or manufacturing life of the household, for as she points out, still refusing to board the ark, “I haue tolis to trusse” (l. 110: I have tools to gather). Like many real women of late medieval towns, she could practice one of the side occupations (such as victualling or textile work) that women worked in as piece- and wage-workers to earn more money for the household. Or the Wife could possibly assist in her husband’s trade; though wives did not necessarily do this, it was not unheard of either.57 Either way, the men of this household, like the guilds in their official discourses, including “The Building of the Ark” play, have written the Wife out of the household “works.” Guild organization, craftlore, and work itself are constructed and reiterated, in yearly public performances of devotional nature, as the province of men. There is another valence, as well, to the Wife’s exclusion and Noah’s failure to teach her. Since a boy or a young man, possibly one of the guild’s own apprentices, would have played the role of the Wife, the contemporary audience would have seen on the pageant wagon known members of that guild. Thus the Wife, though represented as female, may also simultaneously suggest a disobedient apprentice, a counterpart to Noah-as-apprentice in the previous play. This possibility reinforces the lesson of the “good master” in the last play, for Noah has failed as both master and husband to teach well his wife/apprentice in this play. As the Wife herself says, in distinctly economic terms, “Pou shuld haue tolde me for oure seele / Whan we were to slyke bargane broght” (ll. 129–30). Noah’s feeble defense continues her economic metaphor: “For till accounte it cost Qe noght” (l. 132). On one level, their conversation refers to the economic circumstances of the household, in which the wife would have had a stake in material practice, if not in legal standing. Thus the Wife tells Noah he should have thought of “oure seele” (our well-being) and discussed his plans with her, though he sees the situation as actually costing her nothing. But again, on another level, what is constructed on the pageant stage is the guild as corporate body, a group with a collective “seele” or well-being, as expressed by official, civic discourse, and ultimately internalized and naturalized by many of the guilds themselves. But the Wife’s dissatisfaction expresses the exclusionary tactics of such community formation and reveals the uneasy relationship that many guild

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members had with this idealized system imposed from above. Her argument with Noah over the effects of his “bargane” on their “seele” reflects the frequent complaints of guilds about the costs of pageant production. Indeed, Noah’s construction of the ark itself in the previous play and its presentation in this one self-reflexively mimics the construction, maintenance, and presentation of a guild’s pageant. The ark from these pageants was in fact a spectacular unit with multiple civic uses and contexts, called out for royal entries and other events as well as for the mystery cycle.58 It thus must have required more frequent upkeep than other wagons, imposing additional expense upon the guild responsible for storing it.59 What is more, the fishmongers, who produced “The Flood” with the shipmen, did approach the council—seemingly repeatedly—with arguments over their responsibility for the play. A 1419–20 record in the York Memorandum Book shows the outcome of a dispute between the shipmen and the fishmongers over who should have to contribute to the “paginam nauis Noe” (pageant of Noah’s ship), in which the fishmongers agreed to pay 12d yearly and produce one-third of the pageant. It is clear that this had been an ongoing dispute, for the solution was agreed upon so that “the Chamber of the city council might be no longer disturbed in this regard with the Fishmongers of Ouse Bridge” (“ne camera consilij ciuitatis amplius in hac parte tubaretur cum piscenarijs pontis vse”).60 Such arguments usually arose from the financial difficulties of producing a play; even the fishmongers, who in large part consisted of wealthy mercantile traders of saltwater fish, faced this difficulty. But the complaint could have derived mainly from the poorer sellers of freshwater fish—sellers who, until a 1561 ordinance, were expected to contribute to the lavish production.61 It may indeed be their voices of complaint to the civic council that echo in the Wife’s complaint to Noah that “Pou shuld haue tolde me for oure seele / Whan we were to slyke bargane broght.” Thus even as the plays perform and reiterate guild identity and seek to mold artisans into corporate units through the yearly reiterations of plays (and other festive activity), the anxiety of the failure of these homosocial bodies nevertheless erupts in the midst of their performative fantasy. Though subtly expressed here, there is a recurrent anxiety, a double bind, in both the Chester and York cycles: how can a man balance his domestic responsibilities with the call of higher powers, whether God, guild, or city? Medieval urban men, whether merchants or artisans, were pulled in multiple directions. They perceived the city as offering opportunities and temptations to their wives, children, apprentices, and servants in equal measure, pulling them away from the household, the patriarchal center. This conflict presents itself more strongly in the Chester “Noah’s Flood” play, but it plays a small part in the York “Flood” as well. Though the Wife

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is not so obstinately tied to the city and it is not so dramatically identified with women’s commerce, it still attracts and compels her. In one of her first expressions of disobedience, she says to Noah, “I am nou{t bowne / To fonde nowe ouer Qere fellis. / Doo barnes, goo we and trusse to towne” (ll. 79–81). She specifically rejects the escape to a new, bucolic landscape (“ouer Qere fellis”— these hills), preferring her present life in “towne.” When finally on board, she laments the loss of community and kin in the deluge; in fact, still seemingly in shock, she asks, “But Noye, wher are nowe all oure kynne / And companye we knwe before” (ll. 269–70). Again, vocabulary that resonates with the terminology of the guilds highlights the fact that the “companye” is no longer simply the family (as the Chester play would have it), that the boundaries of guild and household are not coterminous, that much of their interdependent community of both kin and cohort have been lost. To some extent, the patriarchal household of the York plays, like the Chester family, has “escaped” the complex demands, responsibilities, and temptations of the city and has “rescued” woman from its influences, but here the escape is neither so desperate nor so uncomplicated. The York plays provide a more poignant sense of what has been lost. But it is only the woman who is lamenting the loss; for man the new world offers a joyful new beginning, one to which he gives birth. As the family nears the end of their sea journey, one of the sons points out to Noah that “ix monethes paste er playne / Sen we wer putte to peyne” (ll. 179–80). The combination of nine months with the phrase “put to pain” cannot but help suggest birth. In this case, it is a spiritual rebirth—and since the Flood was sometimes associated with baptism, this makes perfect theological sense.62 However, it is a birth brought forth by a man’s intimate relationship with God, also male. Like Noah himself, who in his own telling seems to have sprung forth from his father after Lamech’s entreaties of God, the new world is the offspring of God’s relationship with Noah. Once old and tired, Noah is now rejuvenated, productive, and fruitful. The play’s closing stanza continues these themes, as Noah blesses his sons, echoing God’s blessing of Adam and Eve (and God’s words to Noah in the biblical account): “multyplye youre seede,” he urges (l. 312). But he also imitates God’s words to Adam and Eve upon their banishment from Eden, for he reminds his sons that “travaylle sall {e taste / To wynne you brede and wyne” (ll. 317–18). The reminder of the burdens of the world is a less idealistic, Edenic ending than that of the Chester play, rooting the play in the world of its performance, in the material lives of the men producing it. This final stanza is significant also for Noah’s final words: “And wende we hense in haste, / In Goddis blissyng and myne” (ll. 321–22). It is the first play of the post-lapsarian world to end with God’s blessing, but God is not present himself to deliver it. Instead, it is delivered by Noah, his representative,

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who adds that the blessing is his as well. There is a strong liturgical note here, but it also draws on the idea of the world as the offspring of Noah and God: Noah is left to foster this new world on his own, without God who helped him father it. The absenteeism of God the Father will become more pronounced in the New Testament plays; here it is muted. Just as the two play series began with God and Noah working productively alone, and continued, in the second play, with the story of Noah’s father’s similarly fruitful relationship with God, so it closes with Noah and God still intimately bound together in language, with Noah being able to speak for God and to carry out his wishes to reproduce the world, to “wirke Qis werke. . .al newe” (“The Building of the Ark,” l. 24). While developing the intimate relationship between Noah and God the Father, and the putative connections between domestic and guild life, the Noah plays pay little attention to the relationship between Noah and his sons, preferring instead to concentrate on Noah’s fraught relationship with his Wife (who, on some level, may also be his apprentice). In this way, the plays implicitly dramatize the conflicting masculine roles of medieval craftsmen, torn between various duties, often forced to neglect or disavow one or more. What the Noah plays leave aside, the Abraham plays take as their focus, developing the triangulated relationships between God and man, and a man and his son, and constituting masculinity as an “absent presence” that will find its apotheosis in these cycles in the figure of Christ.63 Sacrificing Masculinity: Abraham and Isaac The story of Abraham and Isaac permeates western culture, figuring not only in Jewish and Christian arts, but in Muslim culture as well.64 It also plays a significant role in western philosophy, perhaps most famously in Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.65 And in medieval drama, it is one of the most frequently played episodes of biblical narrative, appearing in England in all four extant cycles (Chester, York, Towneley, and N-Town), as well as the single plays of Brome and Northampton. In Chester, the play’s characters were so popular that they were used again for years in the Midsummer processional.66 It was also dramatized in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and in mourning drama in Persia.67 The biblical narrative in Genesis 22 is spare, but it has many uses. It is a broadly archetypal story about the nature of the relationships between God and man and parent and child (or, more particularly, father and son), and thus it is adaptable to multiple cultures and situations. As Milla Riggio writes, the story “mythically validates what we ordinarily call ‘patriarchal culture.’”68 But how have middle-class northern Englishmen adapted the story to their particular uses? How does their version reflect and (re)inscribe their

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ideas about the nature of father, sons, and their God? The Chester play uncharacteristically remains largely on the level of the abstract and theological, controlling interpretation with the figure of the Expositor (who appears elsewhere in the cycle less obtrusively) and limiting it to typology. It also adds to the Isaac story episodes of Abraham’s life involving Lot and Melchysedeck, taking the focus away from the domestic drama of father and son. While there is some limited use of local color, the ultimate tone of the play is formal and distant, placing Abraham in the typological roles of priest and God the Father. The abstractness and generality of Chester’s play serves Riggio’s psychoanalytic interpretation well, however. The specific stage directions for Abraham to act as if he is about to cut off Isaac’s head with a sword allow Riggio to speak of the “looming, unmatchable paternal phallus” that also simultaneously symbolizes “the authority which Isaac will inherit.”69 While such general issues of fathers and sons and the formal roles a man takes in the larger culture certainly fit the masculine focus of the Chester cycle, this particular episode seems less apt to reflect the specific guild culture than others in the cycle. York Play 10: Abraham and Isaac The York play of “Abraham and Isaac,” on the other hand, develops the story in ways that are unique in English drama and that resonate with the guild culture that produced and performed it. Unlike other such plays, it presents a world that consists entirely of adult men and their conflicting relationships, domestic, spiritual, and social. Like most Abraham and Isaac plays, it seems to depict a fantasy of perfect masculine obedience and docile bodies, with men behaving according to their place in social and domestic hierarchies; nevertheless, it reveals moments of ambivalence and does so in idiosyncratic ways. From the very beginning of the play, the playwrights establish the setting as a fully masculine world. Because Abraham’s wife, Sarah, does not appear in Genesis 22, few plays give her much thought (the exception being the Northampton play, where she plays a pivotal role).70 York, though, writes Sarah out of the picture in significant ways. When Abraham speaks to the audience at the start and explains his gratitude to God for the gift of a son, he marvels “That Qus fro barenhed [God] has me broghte” (l. 5). Barrenness is not a term often associated with a man, and thus Abraham seems both mother and father; or, like Noah in the previous plays, Abraham has conceived and fostered offspring with God the Father. Abraham also speaks of the special “frenshippe” he has with God (l. 12), and though he mentions that Sarah shares that blessing with her husband, she is quickly forgotten in the following stanzas, to be mentioned again only briefly

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before disappearing altogether. The play thus constructs its simultaneous spaces—the domestic space of its subject, the spiritual space of its story, and the playing space of its material culture—as wholly masculine, homosocial space. Furthermore, it overlays the male domestic drama of its subject with the membership of the guild playing it (the parchment-makers and bookbinders), once again creating a fantasy of contiguous boundaries of family, guild, and devotional practice, here all thoroughly homosocial. But the play also serves to test those boundaries and homosocial bonds, through God’s test of Abraham, ultimately expressing anxiety about where masculinity most firmly resides—in family, guild, or God. The York play develops that test and the motivations for it in a way unlike any other version. The playwright creates an Abraham similar to Job, who may possibly love God for the blessings He has provided, rather than for Himself alone. Abraham thanks God for being a “stynter of stryve,” who “In a worlde wherso we wonne /. . .sendes vs richeys ryve” (ll. 22–24). Abraham’s world, like that of the guildsmen, is one where economic success is seen as a material sign of God’s blessing. Describing God’s gift of Isaac, Abraham says, “Gyff I were blythe, who wolde me blame?” (l. 48). York’s Isaac is particularly dear to Abraham because unlike other Isaacs, he is a full-grown man, a “wight hymselfe to welde,” who will be a “beelde” (support) to Abraham now that his own “wightnes [is] wente” (ll. 57–59). Isaac is poised to take his father’s place, to take over his responsibilities, to be his father’s and his family’s support. However imagined the idea of a unified household economy may be, it is that fantasy that creates the conflict within Abraham between his love and need for his son, and his love and need for God, to whom he “awe. . .gretely. . .to yeelde” (l. 53). The conflict, then, is between domestic desires and larger social, public duties, between familial and homosocial male relationships. Even Abraham’s professions of love and duty make it unclear whom he loves best. When he states “I lowe hym Qat Qis lane has lent” (l. 60: I love him that this gift has lent), he clearly means God. But when he says “I love hym as my liff, / With all myn herte and will” (l. 63), the antecedent for “hym” could be either the gift, Isaac, or the giver, God. The ambiguity of the line is reinforced shortly thereafter when the Angel identifies Isaac as “Whom Qou loues our alle thyng” (l. 70). It is perhaps no surprise that Abraham is torn between his love of his son and his loyalty to a God who, for all the special “frenchippe” he shows to Abraham, is essentially distant and abstract. Unlike Adam’s God, who walked in the Garden of Eden, or Noah’s God, who stood side by side with him in the building of the ark, the God of the new generations has become aloof, sending the Angel as a representative, functionary, and messenger. This is a distinct change from the biblical narrative, where God himself both demands the sacrifice of Isaac and stays Abraham’s hand at the crucial

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moment. And it is a change that will continue to resonate throughout the cycle—just as God is only present by proxy at Isaac’s sacrifice, the typological prefigurement of the Crucifixion, he will be painfully distant from Christ at his. Like the real fathers and masters who portrayed him and his family, Abraham is forced to choose between a formal relationship with an authority that rewards him with “richeys” (l. 22) and a close one with a family that gives him “beelde” (support, l. 59). The connection between the biblical world and the material one is made most clearly by Isaac’s age, “Thyrty {ere and more sumdele” (l. 82). The age depends most immediately on the Christological and typological aspects of Isaac’s sacrifice, for thirty is the age at which Christ traditionally began his ministry, but it also resonates with the everyday lives of the guildsmen. In general, men who set up their own households (or took over their fathers’) in medieval English cities did not do so until they were married, generally in their mid-twenties, but as late as their late twenties or thirties.71 Isaac is poised to become his own man in economic as well as cultural terms, and thus as Riggio argues, the play also represents a ritual passage into manhood, a sacred rite that, according to anthropologist Victor Turner, typically involves a “place of dying” where the youth must “die from childhood” in order to pass into adulthood.72 In other plays, Isaac is only a small child, making this reading dubiously appropriate; but his age in York certainly suggests a time of passage into adulthood and, in particular, manhood. As in the story of Cain and Abel, appropriate, adult masculine behavior is identified with sacrifice, especially of the self, as well as with willing obedience. While women characters such as Noah’s Wife can rebel and still be redeemed and rehabilitated, male characters of the plays must do as they are told or suffer the consequences—and sometimes they must obey despite the consequences. Sacrifice marks the passage into manhood. That (self-)sacrifice and obedience is explicitly connected with work in this play, and thus with the guild culture that produced it. Before Isaac knows the true nature of the sacrifice, he takes on his father’s role as family and household head and announces to the servants: “Euen as God ordand has, / To wyrke we will begynne” (ll. 111–12). Indeed, Isaac begins this work both as the sacrifice itself and as the one passing into patriarchal manhood.73 What is more, the chains of command through which the order for the work of the sacrifice has gone—from God to Abraham, then to Isaac, and now to the servants—dramatizes and reinforces a culture of hierarchies, especially among men. It also emphasizes, perhaps unwittingly, that every man, even a grown man, is the son or underling of someone, for all men are subject to God. It is this deconstructive eternal regression that lends some anxiety to the play—where does a patriarch’s power rest if he himself must answer to another patriarch? Even Abraham,

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the first great patriarch, the father of thousands of generations, cannot escape the work of his duty to God the Father, and that duty seems to mean sacrificing the very family from which his patriarchal position derives. Such lessons in appropriate masculine behavior and its internal conflicts are extended to the audience, as well, and the text self-reflexively recognizes the play as the vehicle of those lessons. Abraham echoes Isaac’s words when he says, “For als God commaunded so wirke will we, / Vntill his tales vs bus take hede” (ll. 127–28, emphasis mine). The performing guildsmen also, ideally, take heed of the very “tales” they are presenting and thus work as the civic authorities (on behalf of the Crown and God) have ordained: as a single, unified guild. Thus Abraham and Isaac serve not only as general models of Christian obedience, but also as specifically masculine models of obedience to socioeconomic systems of “wirke” and identity. But that system, too, demands sacrifice of both self and family. If the sacrifice of one’s only legitimate son and heir is the “wirke” that authority demands, then that “wirke” directly conflicts with domestic, patriarchal desires. Though ultimately God restores Abraham as patriarch, it is only by removing the necessity of the sacrifice, the “wirke.” Perhaps because of this inherent conflict of desires, neither Abraham nor Isaac is perfectly or immediately obedient to God’s demands. And their reluctance perhaps mirrors the “performance anxiety” of many of the guilds. As the company travels to the site of the sacrifice, Isaac argues rationally that there is no need to climb all the way to the top of the hill since God can see everything everywhere: Abraham: Isaac:

My sone, Qis wode behoues Qe bere Till Qou come high vppon yone hill. Fadir, Qat may do no dere, Goddis commaundement to fullfyll, For fra all wathes he will vs were Wharso we wende to wirke his wille. (ll. 151–56)

If we imagine that Abraham and company likely represented their “travel” to the mountain by walking around the pageant wagon, and that the wagon represented the mountain itself, then Isaac’s reluctance to do excessive “wirke” is also a young guildsman’s reluctance to mount the pageant wagon. And if we read the sacrifice as a coming-of-age ritual, then Isaac and the guildsman who plays him show a reluctance to make that transition into an adult world of public and formal duties. But

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moments of resistance such as this are few and subtle in the play and ultimately ineffective, as Isaac, along with Abraham, acquiesces to God’s plan, just as the guilds give in to civic authority and public expectation. As Isaac says, even after being told the truth of the sacrifice: “And I sall noght grouche Qeragayne, / To wirke his wille I am wele payed” (ll. 191–92, emphasis mine). His economic language—for the Middle English word “payed” means both “satisfied, pleased” and “rendered in payment”—suggests a material necessity to the sacrifice and to the formal lives of the guilds, the plays included.74 Besides teaching appropriate masculine obedience to authority, hierarchy, and duty, the “Abraham and Isaac” play also instructs men in their expected emotional behavior. Isaac, having accepted his role as human sacrifice, asks Abraham to “mourne noght for me” (l. 196) since he carries out God’s will. Abraham reluctantly agrees, gathering himself together and saying, “My lord God will I noght gaynesaye / Nor neuer make mornys nor mone” (ll. 199–200). To mourn is to insult God and to deny the wisdom and justice of His ways. Mourning is a weakness not unlike sin and Abraham struggles to resist giving into it throughout the play. Mourning, the outward expression of emotions, and any melodramatic or histrionic behavior are marked in these plays as unacceptable for men—a paradoxical lesson considering that it is delivered through the public performance of such emotions. There seems at the heart of this ideology a discomfort with the very genre of drama and with spectacle in general, and an aversion to explicitly affective strains of devotion, often associated with women.75 What the York cycle offers here in the “Abraham and Isaac” play, and what both cycles will present in the Passion sequences, is an emotionally repressed model of masculinity that is still with us today. The play may show Abraham struggle with emotion—and not always successfully—but the lesson taught is that men should strive to succeed in that struggle, that mourning and other expressions of loss are an insult to God, and that they make an unwholesome spectacle of men. Men’s business, the play seems to say, is not in mourning and emotion, or sentimental attachment to family, but in impassive duty to the social, religious, and economic contracts between men. It is Isaac, the figure of Christ, who provides the seemingly positive example here, advising Abraham to tie him down so that his own instincts for self-preservation will not get in the way of their task (ll. 213–18). He does this, he says, so that “Here sall no fawte be foune / To make youre forward faylle / for {e are alde and alle vnwelde” (ll. 219–21, emphasis mine). The youthful Isaac takes over the business, even of his own death, because his father is old and weak, and he makes sure that Abraham meets his contractual obligation, his “forwarde” with God. Indeed, Isaac continues to speak of obligations to God in terms that suggest the mercantile world of the guildsmen. After the Angel has stayed

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Abraham’s arm and Abraham has given his thanks, Isaac professes his gratitude as well. He proclaims, “to lowe Qat lorde I halde grete skyll / That tylle his men{e Qus has mente” (ll. 323–24, emphasis mine: I hold great reason/skill to love that lord, who has thus shown [good] intentions to his meny). Again, “men{e” (or “meny”), used over and over again in the Chester and York cycles, is a word with multiple meanings, including a guild company.76 While Isaac speaks on one level to all the audience (all God’s meny) of faith in God, whose ways we must trust, the guildrelated language also suggests the gratitude that the lower ranks of guildsmen should show to their masters and civic authorities. The doubleness of Isaac’s gratitude is reinforced by the Angel’s reminder that God gives “mekill mede / For thys goode will Qat Qou in ware” (ll. 335–36). Though “meed” can and often does have metaphorical and spiritual value, it is also rooted in the material world, as the slipperiness of the word throughout Piers Plowman demonstrates.77 A middle-class Christian ideology that will particularly take hold in the early modern and modern eras is emerging here, one utterly at home in the mercantile world of the civic authorities and powerful guilds: those men who enjoy material and other rewards in life are those who have earned God’s favor. But for men those rewards come only with great cost and great sacrifice—or at least the willingness to make such sacrifice. Even as Isaac speaks his words of gratitude, one might wonder what his reward is. His obedience is central to the typological significance of the play and, as Woolf argues, is also more dramatically important than Abraham’s—yet he receives no reward other than the continuation of his life.78 It is Abraham who becomes the renowned patriarch, father of many, while Isaac is merely a vehicle of that blessing. Indeed, at the end of the York play, Abraham asserts to Isaac that “It is my wille Qat Qou be wedde” (l. 359) and Isaac, of course, obeys (ll. 369–70). Isaac’s self-sacrifice, made so that his father’s “forward” with God would not fail (l. 220), is rewarded with further demands of obedience for his father’s sake. Likewise, in the guildsmen’s world, the work of children, servants, apprentices, and journeymen benefited the higher ranks without necessarily guaranteeing a reward for their long work well into adulthood. If Isaac has indeed “died from childhood” or experienced “a rite of passage from childhood to manhood that validates the son’s inheritance of his father’s kingdom,” then what distinguishes childhood from manhood?79 If every man still has a father to whom he must be obedient—ultimately God the Father—then what constitutes manhood? If, as Karras argues, manhood in craft culture means to be in a position of power over other men, then is a man who has that power but is also subject to other men a liminal figure between manhood and childhood?80 Or is his identity thus fluid—sometimes one thing and

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sometimes the other, constantly resignified through the performance of daily life? The only answer that this play seems to provide is that manhood consists of sacrifice and self-negation; manhood, then, is an absence, like the absent God the Father who sends his angel to deliver his terrible demands. The patriarchs, husbands, and fathers thus depicted in the York and Chester cycles all have their own conflicts with family and obedience to God. All of them, however, ultimately retain their dignity and some measure of authority; even Adam in his expulsion is at the worst a man to be shown sober pity, and, moreover, he is granted compensatory authority over Eve. But in the New Testament plays, the only representative of domesticated masculinity is Joseph, who is initially and most memorably presented as fearful, weak, and impotent, not only sexually, but also as a leader of his family. The York plays, at least, ultimately provide Joseph the opportunity to behave as a model father; they contrast his active paternal care with the absentee fathers of the “Slaughter of the Innocents.” The Chester cycle, on the other hand, compounds the image of ineffective fatherhood with its depiction of Herod, who ironically kills his own son in his attempt to secure his power and throne. New Testament fathers are more inept and full of anxiety and conflicts of interest than their Old Testament counterparts for reasons reflecting conflicts the guildsmen themselves faced or at least perceived. When we reach the New Testament plays, domestic patriarchy seems to meet its own death with the death of its first-born Innocents, becoming a nostalgic fantasy of the past, of the Old Law. The time of Christ is also a time of masculine confusion, of an anxietyproducing resignification of masculinity.81 Joseph and His Troubles in York and Chester Both the York and Chester cycles depict the apocryphal story of Joseph’s doubts about Mary. In these plays and other versions, Joseph is depicted as an impotent old man who knows that Mary’s pregnancy is obviously not his doing, convinced that it is the result of an affair and not divine will. Typically Joseph chides himself for marrying so young a woman and complains at length about marriage and its inevitable humiliations. As both Ruth Mellinkoff and Pamela Sheingorn have shown, this image of Joseph as either old, impotent, marginal, seemingly cuckolded, or all of the above, is a conventional motif that saturates late medieval art, literature, and popular culture; one need only browse through the cards under “Joseph the Carpenter” in the Princeton Index of Christian Art to see picture after picture of Joseph hunched over with a staff or with white hair and a gray beard.82 Yet, as common as the motif is, the appropriation of it for the Chester and York cycles nevertheless reinforces the cycles’ general

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concerns with masculinity. In the context of public performances by Chester and York guildsmen—especially by the Chester wrights, carpenters like Joseph himself—the otherwise conventional tale accrues multiple layers of meaning. The episode of Joseph’s doubt in each cycle (re)produces masculine guild culture in complex and indirect ways. The December-May marriage each depicts does not directly reflect real mercantile or artisan class marriages; spouses in this class generally tended to be within one or two years of each others’ ages.83 Instead, the fabliau-influenced marriage of old, impotent Joseph to young Mary speaks in general to issues of male social responsibility and power. Shannon McSheffrey shows that among London’s mercantile class in the Middle Ages and early modern period, one of the responsibilities of the aldermen, wardens, and other men of influence and position was to police the sexual behavior and guard the reputations of the young, both male and female.84 Not only were they concerned for their own relations, but also for members of their wards, apprentices in their guilds, and the children of their neighbors and colleagues. In an urban setting where the young, both men and women, had ample opportunity to encounter the opposite sex, the duty of the patriarchs to watch over and control their behavior required vigilance, discretion, and unsoiled reputations of their own.85 Thus when Joseph thinks that Mary has committed adultery, his imagined inability to control his own wife’s behavior, and to protect her reputation and his, is a failure of his masculine social duty at the most basic level—a social failure that intertwined with his personal failure as a husband and a man. Such a connection between sexual and social (im)potence was widely made in the late Middle Ages; as Vern Bullough writes, “Failure to perform. . .was a threat not only to a man’s maleness but to society. Potency came to be not only the way in which a male defined himself, but how he was defined by society, and impotence was grounds for marital annulment or divorce.”86 So in the Chester version, in a reversal of what might be the expected gender roles (but based partly on Luke 1.56), Mary has been away visiting Elizabeth for three months, while Joseph sits at home, fretting—or so Mary fears—that she has done “amysse” (6.118). It is Mary who is mobile in the world (or the city) and Joseph who waits in the domestic sphere; the conventional gendering of domestic and public space in later periods does not necessarily apply to the Middle Ages. But what happens next persuades him that he has not done his masculine domestic duty. When Mary arrives home three months pregnant, Joseph blames her “feeblye” nature (l. 142), but more grievously blames himself. “Well I wist an ould man and a maye / might not accord by noe waye,” he says (ll.125–26). Thus he decides to drop the matter quietly and not publicly blame her—lest he thus cause her death and his own humiliation—for

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it was his social and domestic duty in the first place to guard against these things. The York version (Play 13, “Joseph’s Trouble about Mary”) even more adamantly blames Joseph. In his opening monologue, he laments the situation and concludes, “Pe lawe standis harde agayne me: / To dede I mon be broght” (ll. 49–50). No matter where else the blame may fall, Joseph still “mon not scape withouten schame” (l. 54). As convention dictates, the shame belongs most fully to the cuckold, and so Joseph is ostracized from the society whose responsibilities he has failed: the play opens with him walking alone “full werily be Qis waye” (l. 2), as if a wanderer, and when he suggests that he might leave Mary quietly, it is “Into som wodes wilde” (l. 67) that he will go. When he confronts Mary and her maidens—whom he sees as her accomplices in some female community united against him and the (male) social order—he laments the injury to his reputation and claims he might as well be dead: Rekkeles I raffe, refte is my rede. I dare loke no man in Qe face, Derfely for dole why ne were I dede; Me lathis my liff. (ll. 146–49) [I rave to no avail, my wits are taken away. I dare look no man in the face, Wretched because of sorrow, why am I not dead? I hate my life.]

Though the core of this domestic drama is biblical, elaboration and the contemporary performance contexts enrich the story with more particular meaning. Joseph may be adamant that the child cannot be his, but in the York version, he still generously maintains that “for myne awne I wolde it fede” (l. 185). This seemingly minor detail is especially relevant to the lives of medieval craftsmen. Through the apprenticeship system, as well as the less formal hiring of servants and casual workers, late medieval guildsmen raised and trained the sons—and sometimes daughters—of other men. In York only about 50 percent of sons apprenticed in their fathers’ guilds.87 In London, not even wealth necessarily persuaded sons to stay in their fathers’ crafts: “In the Mercers’ guild between 1391 and 1464, only 15 percent of the 1,047 members had fathers in the guild.”88 Though the guildsmen who took on apprentices received their labor for free, in the beginning that labor was also untrained, leaving the masters responsible for that training, as well as for their lodging, education, and general welfare.89 As mentioned already, they also policed their apprentices’ social and sexual behavior; while they were

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under their masters’ roofs, apprentices were restricted by curfews, could not engage in questionable pastimes, and were not allowed to be married or engaged.90 Such regulations required enforcement by masters, wardens, and aldermen. After all the training and care, it was not unusual for apprentices who came to the cities from towns and villages in the country to return there to use their newly acquired skills for running the family farm or craft, sometimes even leaving before their contracts were fulfilled.91 And in many cases in York and other provincial cities, former apprentices simply never took out the freedom in the craft of their training.92 The failure to fulfill contractual obligations was considered “rebellious” behavior and punishable by law, but leaving the guild or the city upon an apprenticeship’s end was not.93 Even in the latter case, however, one cannot rule out the possibility of the masters feeling resentment and anxiety about the disloyalty of such apprentices. When wills from York and London show artisans or their widows occasionally leaving money and tools to workers and apprentices rather than their children or spouses, it suggests that those workers are being rewarded for loyal and exemplary behavior.94 Given all this, men were particular about whom they took on as apprentices.95 Thus the York Joseph, himself a carpenter and representative of craftsmen, says of Mary’s child “for myne awne I wolde it fede” (l. 185), but at the same time demands “Perefore Qe fadir tell me, Marie” (l. 187). This then is the context in which Joseph’s fears about paternity appear, fears with which the men producing, performing, and watching these plays might easily identify. Of course, Joseph’s apparent cuckolding and his impotence also obviously perform issues of male sexual identity and potency. The Middle Ages typically associated the body with the feminine, but that is not to say that here Joseph is feminized. Joseph’s impotence in the “troubles” plays— the only episodes in these cycles to address directly a primary sexual characteristic other than Mary’s virginity—may be an emasculation, but to be “un-maled” is not to be “fe-maled.” Oddly enough, in the Chester version of this conventional tale, one can see glimpses of how the story might have arisen in order to protect Joseph’s masculine reputation. In this version, though Joseph is physically unable to make love to Mary, he might still just possibly wish to: “[T ]hough I would / I might not playe noe playe” (ll. 135–36, emphasis mine), he says. Despite the marriage debt’s honored status in canon law, this is still an unusual and perhaps slightly shocking admission. (No one would dare characterize the Virgin as a woman who might want to have intercourse but cannot.) The hypothetical “Though I would” associates Joseph with the normative idea of heterosexual male desire—there is no hint of an “unnatural” lack—thus constructing masculinity as desire rather than action, and deflecting attention from the vulnerable, failure-prone and anxiety-inducing body. Again, the plays

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seem to shrink from masculinity as embodied, even as they construct such representations through the most bodily of narrative forms. The body on display here is not only Joseph’s, and the anxieties are not limited to his sexual performance. In Chester, the wrights, or carpenters, performed the “Annunciation and Nativity” play, and in representing Joseph, a carpenter himself, as old, impotent, complaining, and anxious, they certainly were not presenting an advertisement for their craft. Rather, the correspondence between the occupations of player and character also suggests a correspondence in anxieties: the play is about their own performative fears as well as Joseph’s. Twice Joseph refers to sexual performance as “play”: “For many yeares might I not playe” (l. 127) and “I might not playe noe playe” (l. 136). V.A. Kolve delineates the many meanings of the word “play” and its relation to “game,” and he mentions that both words were used to mean amorous sport.96 Here in this episode of Joseph’s doubts, all those meanings come together. The equation of masculine sexual performance with dramatic performance recognizes the fact that the plays are specifically masculine territory, not just in deed, but also in idea and conception. The ambivalence associated with each is similar, as well. As Kolve notes, “anyone who breaks the rules spoils the game, makes it a poor and foolish thing. . .Records exist of fines paid by guilds and individuals for playing badly or incorrectly, to the shame and displeasure of the community.”97 Not only does Joseph’s inability to perform sexually suggest an inability to perform more public masculine duties (such as protecting his and Mary’s reputations), it also allows the carpenter acting his role on stage to confess to an anxiety about being able to perform the public, masculine duty of the play itself. Moreover, that duty may not necessarily have been taken as willingly and joyfully as we might suppose. As discussed in chapter 1, in York the creation of distinct guilds for each craft was largely the work of the city council as a way not only of regulating and controlling industry, but also of imposing dues and fines to raise money for civic projects, such as the cycle plays. If such pressure was exerted from above in Chester as well as York, then the performance anxiety associated here with the plays may be partly in reaction to what others expect of the craftsmen in terms of their public life. They may not want to be in the public eye in the first place but have been given responsibility there by those more powerful. There is ambivalence about spectacle in these plays, and that ambivalence reflects an uncertainty about masculinity itself. If “to play” is equated with masculine potency, as it is here, then masculinity itself becomes something performed or played—a show or a game—and so, not essential, not stable, not in earnest—something easily appropriated, usurped, or lost. In the Chester cycle, Joseph’s impotence as well as the generalized weakness and ineptness attributed to his advanced age are not qualities confined to the “troubles” episode. They characterize him throughout his

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appearances. In the “Shepherds” play (Play 7), for instance, even as the play focuses on Joseph’s interaction with the visitors, it continues to present him as a comical and generally ineffective old man. And in the eight lines that Mary is given (compared to Joseph’s twenty-four), half of her speech concerns Joseph and how he was married to her only to guard her virginity (ll. 512–15). Joseph is given a masculine social role but no domestic intimacy. This lack is unintentionally emphasized in Joseph’s following speech, where he attempts to explain his role in traditional marital terms: Good men, Moyses take in mynde: as he was made through God allmight ordayned lawes us to bynde which that wee should keepe of right; man and woman for to bynde lawefully, them both to light; to fructifye, as men may fynde, that tyme was wedded every wight. Therfore wedded to her I was as lawe would, her for to lere for noyse nor slander nor trespasse, and through that deede the devill to dere, as tould mee Gabriell, full of grace. (ll. 516–28)

Joseph speaks of marriage as something “both to light”—that is, to delight both—and as the means “to fructifye,” to multiply. “Therfore,” he says, he was wedded to Mary. But of course, he has none of those intimate roles in this marriage. At best, he is left with only the social role of teaching or leading her (“her for to lere”), which here seems a compensation for the lack of a more intimate, domestic role. Joseph’s impotence marks him as sexually other, and his rationalizations encourage questions about the nature and construction of masculinity. What constitutes a man’s identity? Where is he most manly—in a homosocial “company” (such as the guild) or in the heterosexual/social marriage? Can these competing systems, the social and sexual, public and private, be balanced? Though Joseph fully takes on his husbandly duties, it is in a formal sense only; his social role lacks the intimate structure upon which it should be based, by his own description of the laws of marriage. He is a figurehead of a husband, a man merely playing a public role for the shepherds who come to pay homage, much like the guildsmen performing these public plays for their audience. The only place where Joseph’s formal role as a father is more positively enacted is in the York “Nativity” and “Flight into Egypt” plays

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(Plays 14 and 18), where Joseph generally serves as a model of fatherhood by taking on a more active caretaker role than in previous pageants. And yet even there, his masculinity is defined by the social and public role as family (and guild) representative. As he says late in Play 18, though perhaps somewhat grudgingly, “God it wote I muste care for all” (l. 164). By the very end of the “Flight into Egypt,” Joseph has fully risen to the occasion, calming the hysterical Mary—who seems much more like the fretful Mrs. Noah than her usual formal, serene persona—and proclaiming his unflappable faith in God. Indeed, the play ends with a picture of a masculine and patriarchal fortitude, granted by the grace of God; Joseph proclaims, Are was I wayke, nowe am I wight. My lymes to welde ay at my wille. I loue my maker most of myght That such grace has graunte me tille, Nowe schall no hatyll do vs harme, I haue oure helpe here in myn arme. He wille vs fende Wherso we lende Fro tene and tray. Late vs goo with goode chere— Farewele and haue gud day— God blisse vs all in fere. (ll. 219–30)

Christ’s birth has caused a rebirth for Joseph. The last lines of the play belong to Mary, who gives simple thanks for this protection: “Amen, as he beste may” (l. 231), but the lasting image in performance is of a newly strengthened and masculine Joseph, who vows to protect his family from any “hatylll” (or “hathel,” l. 223)—typically an alliterative romance word for noble, knight, or man.98 Such vocabulary loads the passage with associations of virility and heroism, as well as a very English vernacular flavor. But instead of a knight’s shield or sword, Joseph holds in his arms an infant son (l. 224), forming an intimate father and son portrait. The knightly associations are partly domesticated by the child (in contrast to the terrible, murderous knights to come in the “Slaughter of the Innocents”), but they are not entirely lost; instead they restore a less ambiguously masculine image to Joseph and to fatherhood. Such martial metaphors also suggest, again, the more public and civic roles expected of men. Furthermore, this positioning of father and son at the center of the drama, with Mary fretting at its edges, also displaces the expected image of Madonna and Child. Thus, instead of a serene, feminine domesticity, the play presents us with a martial, masculine, public family.99

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Although Joseph ultimately triumphs in the “Flight into Egypt,” presenting a picture of a rejuvenated man and a model foster father who takes on himself the care of a child, much as the guildsmen ideally would have fostered the servants and apprentices in their care, material reality generally failed to meet such ideals. In the next section I will show how anxieties about the double bind of domestic and public duties of men is expressed indirectly through the story of the “Massacre of the Innocents.” There, absentee fathers and Herod, a father overly concerned with his public persona, cause their children to suffer death at the hands of men little concerned with the cares of the domestic sphere. Chester particularly explores the conflicts of interest between domestic and public spheres, and in its “Innocents” play, which it combines with the “Flight into Egypt,” even Joseph fails to be an exemplary father and patriarch. Absentee Fathers: Chester’s “Massacre of the Innocents” The York “Slaughter of the Innocents” follows immediately after the “Flight into Egypt,” and in doing so, expressly contrasts the image of the domestic Joseph holding and protecting the infant Jesus with the grotesque spectacle of Herod’s men violently seizing infants from their mothers’ arms to kill them. It also indirectly juxtaposes the active Joseph with the absent fathers of the Innocents, subtly suggesting that the well-being of children, particularly boys, depends upon the involvement of their fathers, fosterfathers, and other male caretakers. York, in its characteristic discourse of pedagogy, tries to model some ideal images of masculinity as well as provide cautionary and negative examples. Chester, on the other hand, provides no positive, adult, male role-models in its telling of the “Slaughter,” but it does interestingly address the conflicts of interest between public and domestic duties, as well as related anxieties about masculine identity. Reserving the York Herod and his men for the next chapter, I want to focus on Chester here (Play 10), for its violent tensions show the fraught intertwining of worlds both public and private that I have artificially separated in this chapter and the next. As such, the Chester “Massacre” play will serve as a useful transition from the discussion of the heterosocial domestic sphere to that of homosocial bodies, both public and private. In the Latin liturgical dramatizations of the Innocents, the focus is on the laments of the mothers; formal but nevertheless moving, they are usually represented by one figure, identified typologically in Matthew 2.18 as Rachel mourning for her sons ( Jeremiah 31.15). But in the vernacular plays, it is Herod who commands attention—sometimes comically, sometimes horrifyingly—and in the Chester version in particular, he becomes the dominating figure of the play. He is also the crux of the play’s anxieties

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about masculine identity and the conflicts of masculine public and domestic interests. As is usual in the cycle drama, his entry explodes into a hypermasculine display of bombast and ego. He proclaims himself superior to all other men of power and wealth (“Princes, prelates of price, / barronnes in blamner and byse [ermine and rich linen],” ll. 1–2) and claims that “all this world under me lyes / to spare—and eke to spill!” (ll. 7–8).100 And yet he fears a “mysbegotten maremassett” of a child (l. 15) who threatens his “heritage” (l. 27), “right” (l. 32), and “soveraintye” (l. 35). These are the worries of a king made ironic, given that Herod’s “right” to the throne came to him through Rome’s conquest and not by any true “heritage.” But the fear of bastardy is also an archetypal, patriarchal fear—as the “Joseph’s Troubles” episodes show—for no man can ever truly know if his son is his own, nor can he ever really prove that his own child is not a “mysbegotten maremassett.”101 Herod’s concerns do not end there; he is also particularly afraid, as the Messenger puts it, that the “shrewe [who] would have his crowne” would thus also “bereave him of his renowne” (ll. 62–63, emphasis mine). He is concerned not only with his personal lineage, but with his public reputation, which is intimately tied up with reproductive and political virility. Thus, in a grotesquely exaggerated way, Herod’s anxieties announce the masculine concerns of the rest of this play. The parodic knights who make up Herod’s retinue and whom he summons to do his dirty work extend the play’s interest in public duty and reputation, likewise tying it comically and ironically to masculine potency and virility. What is more, their grotesque exploits suggest a public sphere that is violently at odds with the domestic one. Their humorous names— Sir Grimbald, Sir Lancherdeep, and Sir Waradrake—recall no one so much as Sir Thopas, hardly a paragon of chivalric masculinity, but the knights nevertheless proudly proclaim these names and their concomitant public identities upon their entrance. Herod then commands them not only to “be men of mayne” (l. 140: men of might), but to prove “manfully” (l. 141) what sex the infants are before slaying them. It takes one to know one, apparently. Their attempts to identify the sex of the infants are a parody of the Three Kings’ inspection of the Christ child in Play 9 in all his “lymmes,” “members,” and other things “towchinge manhoode and deitie” (ll. 59–63).102 There, the ideally “sad and wise” masculinity of the Magi is a reflection of the perfect, complete masculinity of Christ.103 But here, the supposed “manliness” of the knights is undercut, not only by the irony of knights “bravely” facing off against infants, but also by the sheer abjectness of their victims, who are reduced to nothing more than “dyrtie-arses” (l. 143), the “vileness of [the knights’] speech of course instantly belying their care for the standards of chivalry.”104 If the male infants are nothing but shit-besmeared asses, then the “manly” knights who

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must seek out and kill them are soiled by the connection. The knights indeed recognize this correspondence and seek to distance themselves from it. First they refuse the job, proclaiming that “to slaye a shitten-arsed shrowe” is beneath them (l. 157). Only “knightes of great degree” (l. 160) are worthy enemies—“rybbottes” (rascals) are specifically not “in this rowe,” or lineage (l. 159). But Herod persuades them by emphasizing that they would be killing “a thousand, and yett moo” infants (l. 171), all to save Herod from “that stall [thief ] / that would my kingdome clayme and call, / and my welth alsoe welde” (ll. 182–84). Once the task is seen to be of the appropriate “manly” size and the purpose is rightly understood—to protect Herod’s “rightful” inheritance from the “shitten-arsed,” bastard usurper—then the knights take it up: “soe shall we soone that shrewe distroye / and keepe him in the rowte” (ll. 191–92)—i.e., in the crowd, in his place, unthreatening to the crown. When the knights agree to “defend” Herod’s public reputation and status, their bragging becomes especially outrageous and parodic of chivalric conventions. They talk of how their ferocious reputations precede them, bragging of their “dintes” that people “so dreade” (ll. 203–204) and how “stowtly with strokes” they will “destroye” the infants (l. 210). They naturalize and normalize their ability and inclination to fight, comparing it to animal instincts: “Fayne would I feight my fill / as fayne as facoune would flye” (ll. 205–206). They absurdly compare this fight against the infants to a battle against “the kinge of Scottes and all his hoste” (l. 218) and boast of having killed “more then an hundreth thousand / both on water and on land” (ll. 230–31). Thus they guarantee that this “false gedlinge” (l. 237: bastard) will not escape them either. Illegitimacy stands no chance against their virile masculinity. As Karras argues, knightly masculinity was defined largely by violence and by relationships between men. This play, then, seems to be directly challenging and offering a satirical critique of such definitions of masculinity.105 But it is in their “brave” fight against the mothers of the infants that the underlying issues of gender and sexuality really rise to the surface in the play. The knights hurl the usual gendered insults at the women, calling them “dame Parnell” (l. 337)—a typical name for a “loose” woman—as well as “queanes” (l. 290) or prostitutes. The women, meanwhile, fight back with the overdetermined markers of their sex—a distaff (l. 303) and a bundle of cloth (l. 355)—insulting the knights in equally gendered ways.106 The women call into question their masculinity, sexuality, reputations, and lineage, just as the knights had previously impugned Christ. The First Woman insults the First Knight’s lineage and thus his status and identity, by suggesting that his mother was a common alewife.107 But more to the point, both women insult the knights’ masculinity, sexuality, and

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humanity, by calling them “biche” (l. 297) and “stallon” (l. 314).108 The latter means “a man of lascivious life,” semantically similar to the modern slang “stud,” or a man kept or valued only for sexual prowess.109 By turning him into a sexual object, “stallon” effectively effeminizes the Second Knight as much as the term bitch does his fellow. Both terms also dehumanize the knights, thus marking them as even lower creatures than woman. The terms also significantly embody the knights, following the plays’ general trend to construct ideal masculinity as disembodied and distant and failed masculinity as all too physically present. The knights do not provide the only object lessons in unmasculine behavior, however; the distant masculinity that most of the rest of this cycle and York offer as an ideal seems also to come in for anxious critique in this episode. All versions of the “Slaughter” show the women and their children left to defend themselves without any sign of the children’s fathers. They, too, have failed to protect their wives and children and have abandoned the care and order of the domestic sphere. No episode draws particular attention to the absence of those fathers, but Chester draws indirect attention with the additional death of Herod’s own infant son. Herod is so caught up in worries about his loss of power and status at the hands of a supposed usurper that he forgets to take measures to guard his own son, his heir, who has been left in the care of a nursemaid. And so, when Herod himself dies thereafter, the throne is left empty. Such interdependent but conflicting interests in the public and domestic spheres were at issue for the men performing the play, as well. The passage in which Herod learns of his son’s demise and realizes his own immanent death is worth quoting in full: Second Woman:

Loe, lord, looke and see— the child that thou tooke to me, men of thy owne meanye110 have slayne yt—here the bine.

Herod:

Fye, hoore, fye! God give the pyne! Why didst thou not say that child was myne? But yt is vengeance, as drinke I wyne, And that is now well seene.

Second Woman:

Yea, lord, they see well aright thy sonne was like to be a knight, for in gould harnesse he was dight, paynted woundrous gay. Yett was I never so sore afright, when the theire speares through him thright; lord, so little was my might when they beganne to fraye.

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Herod:

Hee was right sycker in silke araye, in gould and pyrrie that was so gaye They might well knowe by this daye he was a kinges sonne. What the divell is this to saye? Whye weare thy wyttes soe farre awaye? Could thow not speake? Could thou not praye, and say yt was my sonne? Alas, what the divell is this to meane? Alas, my dayes binne now donne! I wott I must dye soone. Booteles is me to make mone, for dampned I must bee. My legges roten and my armes, that nowe I see of fiendes swarmes— I have donne so many harmes— from hell comminge after mee. I have donne so much woo and never good syth I might goo; therfore I se nowe comminge my foe to fetch me to hell. I bequeath here in this place my soule to be with Sathanas. (ll. 393–430)

The end of Herod’s precious lineage is emphasized by the will-and-testament language of “I bequeath. . .my soule to be with Sathanas,”111 but the passage and the play as a whole are about more than patriarchal family lines. In one manuscript, the woman says that men of Herod’s own “contrey” murdered his son, but it is telling that in the other four manuscripts the woman uses the word “meanye” to refer to the knights.112 In Herod’s case, he neglects his domestic “meanye”—his household—and as a result, his public, social, and political “meanye” becomes its destruction. The masculine neglect of the domestic is doubly emphasized by Herod’s own death. It is telling that death comes upon him suddenly and in the midst of his complaint that the nurse did not protect his son. Just as he is berating her with fruitless questions—“Could thow not speake? Could thou not praye / and say yt was my sonne?”—he is seized by death and gasps in surprise: “Alas, what the divell is this to meane?” His own blame for his son’s death, his own lack of parental concern, which he has displaced onto a feminine figure, is reinforced by this juxtaposition of events. It is significant, too, that the demon who comes to drag Herod to hell promises him a place there among the dishonest alewives: “By my lewtye, / that

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filles there measures falselye / shall beare this lord companye; / the gett none other grace” (ll. 450–53). Like his knights before him, Herod’s status and identity are impugned eternally by an association with the lowliest, most mistrusted occupation, one generally dominated by poor women, not powerful men. It is also an occupation generally associated with the ills of a city, as I have discussed above. Thus Herod is fittingly condemned to spend eternity with a most “public” company. The portion of the play from Herod’s son’s death to his own demise makes another connection with the guildsmen performing the play that Alan Justice would have seen as “trade symbolism,” but which is perhaps more complicated than simple self-promotion.113 Twice it is mentioned that Herod’s son was dressed in gold and Herod laments that this fact did not make his status clearly recognizable and thus save him. The goldsmiths and masons shared responsibility for this play in Chester, and a sumptuous set and costumes bedecked in gold would likely have made the goldsmiths’ status clear and advertised their wares and talents. However, the association of such richness with the court of Herod, his fatal folly, and his reliance on fetishized material goods and signs to protect him and his family, undercuts any purely positive “guild propaganda.”114 In fact, such a connection suggests some discomfort with this display of wealth, some anxiety over the duties associated with status, and an awareness of their possible conflict with domestic life and its priorities. Civic responsibilities were an important part of the raison d’être for the formal organization of many guilds. But the craftsmen had businesses and households to run and families to feed, and for the poorer craftsmen, the expense of their play could become an onerous burden. It may have been just such financial burdens that lead the relatively wealthy Chester goldsmiths to share this production with the masons—generally an itinerant occupation not often organized as a guild.115 Two manuscripts, in fact, ascribe the play to the goldsmiths only, possibly suggesting that the masons were not always involved. What’s more, in 1531, the wealthy mercantile vintners and dyers, who already shared a carriage, agreed to share it as well with the goldsmiths and masons.116 While a generally wealthy guild such as the goldsmiths might have been more invested than most in the civic pride associated with the cycle plays, even it may have had poorer members for whom the financial commitment was a burden; hence the desire to share the costs of storing and reassembling the carriage. In fact, the York goldsmiths and masons also shared a Herod play, and there it was the goldsmiths who petitioned to be relieved of part of their burden. In that case, the goldsmiths were responsible for two plays, one presenting Herod, his court, and his adult son, and one showing Herod questioning the Three Kings. The masons originally presented the “pageant of Fergus,”

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subsequently removed from the cycle. In 1431–32, they were given the “Herod” half of the goldsmiths’ combined plays when they complained about their “Fergus” play and when the goldsmiths simultaneously asked to be relieved of one of their plays because “times [had] changed for them and they [had] been made poorer in goods than usual.”117 Clearly, producing a play could be a burden even for a guild such as the goldsmiths. Perhaps that is why here and throughout the Chester cycle, the word “play” itself is imbued with a signifying ambivalence. Twice the Second Knight refers to the murder of the infants as a “play.” First he says “Dame, thy sonne, in good faye, / hee must of me learne a playe: / hee must hopp, or I goe awaye, / upon my speare ende” (ll. 321–24) and later, “Dame, shewe me thy child there; / hee must hopp uppon my speare. / And hit any pintell [penis] beare, / I must teach him a playe” (ll. 361–64). In both cases, given the directions to “hop” upon the spear, the word “play” is used more in the sense of a game than a dramatic production. But “game” and “play,” in all their forms, were intimately related ideas for the playwrights and producers of these dramas and expressed a vital part of the drama’s meaning.118 Furthermore, the knight here invokes “play” at the height of a “special effects” spectacle, when Herod’s men must run their spears through the bodies of the “infants” seized from their mothers’ arms. In other words, “play” is associated with both the spectacular and the grotesque, with what draws our eye and makes us avert it; and because the slaughter prefigures the Crucifixion, “play” is also associated with what is paradoxically both terrible and triumphant. Thus “play” signifies both attraction and repulsion, pride in performance and performance anxiety. And particularly significant here is the knight’s insistence that if the infant “any pintell [i.e., penis] beare” then he must “teach him a playe.” The knight’s words draw attention to the connections between the drama and masculinity and between grotesque spectacle and the male body, connections that will be repeatedly reinforced with Christ’s trials and Crucifixion. For the men producing and performing something both terrible and triumphant, at once a financial burden and a thing of great civic pride, “play” is a masculine realm of complex ambivalence and divided loyalties between domestic and public responsibilities. And masculinity itself is here something embodied and staged, and yet that which must ideally resist being reified and “played.” The idea that the knights who murder the infants are teaching them a play also suggests a perverse version of an intimate father-son or master-apprentice relationship, one ultimately missing from this play. Even Joseph, husband of Mary, who might have served as an exemplary figure of fatherhood (as he does for the main part in the York “Flight into Egypt”) offers here an imperfect alternative. Each time the Angel arrives to guide him and his

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family, he is apparently asleep. Twice the Angel must command him to “arise” (ll. 257, 457). This unfortunately parallels Herod’s knights, who are also slumbering when summoned by Herod’s messenger early in the play. And when the family flees to Egypt, the insecure Joseph seems to require the Angel’s guardianship, for he says, “Have we companye of thee, / we will hye one our waye” (ll. 267–68: if we have your company, we will hasten on our way). Though he is available for the protection of his family—in contrast to the absent fathers of the innocents and the self-absorbed Herod—he does not seem to participate actively in any fathering or fostering of his family. Somewhat marginalized in York’s plays, he is made mostly superfluous here. Finally, there is one more father who is absent or at least distant from the actions of this play, and that is God the Father. Theologically speaking, he is, of course, present in Christ, but the cycle plays tend to emphasize the humanity of Christ over his divinity, eschewing most of his miracles and concentrating on his humiliation, torture, and death. In doing so, they mark the difference between God the Father and God the Son and the thereby relative absence of the Father in the New Testament plays. In the Old Testament plays, God often speaks, whether as a voice from the heavens or as embodied by a player, as in the staging of the Creation plays or in his instructions to Noah. But from the Annunciation on in both cycles, he is only represented by his emissary, an angel, and in this particular play, such delegation of duty is ironically paralleled by Herod’s sending his knights to do his work. Moreover, the typological meaning of the play as a figure of the Crucifixion also reinforces the distance and inaccessibility of God the Father; just as the infants’ fathers are absent at their sons’ murders, so too is God at his own son’s death. Clearly archetypal issues of fatherhood and masculinity are embedded in the Christian mythology itself. The Chester “Massacre of the Innocents” invents relatively little of its action. Even the death of Herod’s son, followed by his own death, comes from The Golden Legend, The Stanzaic Life of Christ, and accounts that originate with the Jewish historian Josephus.119 The Chester difference has to do, above all, with its dramatic self-reflexiveness, and the heightened attention it pays to masculine sexuality, male public roles and reputations, and the duties of fatherhood. For York as well as Chester, it also has to do with the context of performance by men who often had to juggle conflicting demands of public and domestic duty and who may well have felt ambivalence about the very play they were performing. Through the performance of an inherited Christian story, these guildsmen acted out their struggle to balance the responsibilities of the domestic sphere with their new and changing roles in the civic arena, and they thus constituted masculinity as that conflict. The idea of a truly private, bourgeois domestic space, or of that space being culturally and symbolically “feminine,” are largely anachronistic

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notions for the Middle Ages. Men especially moved from domestic to public/civic spaces continually, their identities and roles resignified by the contexts of their space and social relations. That constant resignification, as expressed and produced by the cycle plays and guild discourse, seems especially troubling to mercantile and artisanal urban men, who are at once public and domestic (even in their guild identities, as work-space and home-space certainly did overlap, even if workers and family did not always do so), often at once civic leaders and civic subjects, and also simultaneously patriarchs and homosocial brethren. The plays, then, suggest the potential for a Butlerian “gender trouble,” but ultimately it is the conservative, normative thrust of the plays that seems to have the greatest influence over the course of the generations in which the cycles were performed.120 Indeed, through the repetition of literal performance, normative gendered identity is also symbolically performed and reified. Yet, the slipperiness of men’s roles as domestic or public men nevertheless remains, causing much of the anxiety I detail in the next chapter, on the public, homosocial sphere.

CHAPTER 3 MALE HOMOSOCIAL COMMUNITIES AND PUBLIC LIFE

ocieties of men crowd the pageant wagons in the York and Chester cycles, and the first homosocial body that freely constitutes itself in the drama is Lucifer and his cohort.1 By enacting the Fall of the angels, the producers and performers make an ambivalent statement about the nature of homosocial society, about the kind of society the guilds themselves constituted. That such a statement occurs at the opening of each cycle deepens the self-reflexive irony, particularly in the Chester cycle where the vocabulary of play and performance abounds. The Old Testament plays that follow focus almost exclusively on the domestic scene, as if in reaction against the kind of society Satan wants. But with the birth of Christ, male homosocial groups abound and in Christ’s adult life they become dominant. Women and mixed groups do, of course, make important appearances, but they are few and far between. What the viewer more frequently sees are communities of men. Given the “predominance of females in late medieval towns,” the dominance of males in the plays makes a pointed ideological statement.2 The plays construct the world of the guilds, of civic leadership, and of civic political and devotional culture as specifically masculine. Such constructions are not without their anxieties. As we shall see, even in the midst of idealized depictions of homosocial communities, the plays also remind the audience of the exclusionary tactics of community and identity formation, particularly (as Carolyn Dinshaw has shown) where sex and gender are concerned, of the arbitrary and fluid nature of a group’s boundaries, and of the possibilities of betrayal, even from within.3 Satan’s all-male cohort merely sets the tone of distrust in homosocial community.

S

Lucifer and the Fall of the Angels For Augustine, Lucifer’s rebellion against God and heaven was a lapse toward his own private good, rather than toward the “higher and beatific

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good which was common to all.”4 The Fall of Lucifer episodes of Chester and York are less interested in the subjectivity of Lucifer, however, than in the constitution and operation of societies, particularly all-male corporations. In each of the cycles’ opening pageants, God’s first creative act is to bring to life the nine orders of angels with one command (Chester 1.43–44; York 1.23–24), bringing forth an instant society. In the experience of the audience, God is hardly onstage alone before he is surrounded by a full company of angels who remain visible throughout the performance and who mimic the companies of guildsmen who produced and performed the cycles and participated as bodies in processions and other civic events. As John D. Cox writes, “What the Creation and Fall of the Angels also enacts is the founding event of the communities for which it was played.”5 And even as Lucifer rebels, he recruits other angels to join him, cleaving the one society into two. Lucifer forms a social body that is “not-community” in Cox’s terms, but “insofar as community was social, not-community was social, too.”6 Therein lies the need to police constantly the boundaries of what was an acceptable (homo)social body and what was not. Human history in these plays may begin with an individual man and his family, but the history of creation, of being itself, begins with a society—on stage a male, homosocial one that reflects and reifies the very culture performing the plays. But the seemingly simple lesson of Satan’s Fall—obey God and other authority and thrive, or disobey and suffer the consequences—is much more complex and specific in the context of these plays’ production. Both York’s and Chester’s plays produce often ambivalent readings of homosocial bodies, hierarchy, authority, and public spectacle, if considered within the contexts of guild culture. In both cities, the tanners (or barkers) were responsible for the opening plays of the cycles. In some respects, the assignment was probably a practical decision: the play required a good amount of expensive spectacle and the tanners were wealthy enough to handle the expense. They also would have had easy access to leather for the many costumes required, especially for the bad angels’ transformation into demons. But the fact that tanners performed this play in both cities suggests deeper connections. For one thing, because they worked with strong solutions in which leather had to be soaked, they had the misfortune of having a lingering and noxious smell. Such an odor possibly made them a witty choice to stage hell and its occupants, popularly associated with the smell of sulfur. But their association with Lucifer and his cohort did not end with their smell. Though wealthy, tanners were nevertheless disliked and distrusted, and in York, they were constantly in trouble with the city council for their fights with the cordwainers over whether the latter could tan their own leather. Trouble erupted between the two guilds in 1428, forcing the

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council to create a “leather seld,” a committee consisting of two tanners and two cordwainers, as well as two girdlers and two curriers, who were commissioned to examine all leather for sale. The tanners did not like this decision in the least and reacted with physical violence; as a result, their rights of search were suspended. In the end, however, the tanners must have wielded relatively more power than the cordwainers, for in 1430, the tanners’ rights were restored. Even so, the York council managed effectively to manipulate the two guilds’ animosities for each other in order to limit the success and power of both, especially the tanners.7 Certainly they were excluded from meaningful participation in civic government; they were given no representation on the common council—not even as a “minor” guild—despite their great numbers and significant wealth.8 Their power and prestige were so limited, in fact, that York “tanners who could afford to do so were likely to try to buy their children into another craft,” to give them a better social position.9 It is conceivable that the Chester tanners were similarly disenfranchised. Such exclusion, as discussed in chapter 1, reflects the stranglehold of the merchants on civic government and major trade. The tanners’ access to raw materials, their potential to control the market of animal by-products, and the possibility that they might dominate trade, kept them under the watch and discipline of the civic elite who took care to protect their own mercantile interests. In the plays of Lucifer’s Fall, then, the object lessons about the consequences of rebellion, of not “keeping one’s seat,” are more likely directed at the tanners from the civic elite who assigned them to the play, rather than being lessons freely chosen by the tanners themselves. Though the ceremonial significance given to the tanners in assigning them to the opening plays of their respective cycles may have been a kind of compensation for their lack of real social or political power, ironically such prominent roles, like Lucifer’s beauty and light, may have added to their perception of themselves as important and distinct economic bodies and created the very troublesome behavior that civic authorities wished to contain. Chester Play 1: The Fall of Lucifer The Chester version of “The Fall of Lucifer” is particularly self-reflexive, and because of the limits of space, I will discuss only it in detail. In Chester, not only does the homosocial milieu of Heaven indirectly reflect the guild culture that performs the play, the act of performance itself is a subject of the play. Robert Hanning has argued that the play’s warning against “parlous playe” (l. 207) suggests that the playwrights “perceived the analogy between Satan’s mimesis of God and their own mimetic art,” but

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that they also “differentiate[d] the intent of their mimesis. . .from the subversive and delusory intent of Lucifer’s imitation of the Maker.”10 Martin Stevens, meanwhile, disputes Hanning’s “equation of play simply with low-mimetic action, when in actuality, everything that happens in the cycle is play.”11 Though both critics address directly the self-reflexive qualities of these plays, neither connects that self-reference specifically to the guild community that produced and performed it—who were themselves the imitators and impersonators—referring instead to anonymous “playwrights” and “dramatists.” But the story of Lucifer’s Fall is full of opportunities for connections with the guilds in general, and sometimes the troublesome tanners in particular, and Chester makes use of those connections. Lucifer, so named in Isaiah 14.12, means “morning star,” and he is traditionally depicted as a “light-bearer.” All the plays refer to him as such, but only Chester gives him a companion named “Lightborne” and focuses such energy and attention on this aspect of his character. In Chester, Lucifer’s light-bearing is an almost praiseworthy activity, rather than merely an accidental quality of his person, as it is in other versions. In Towneley, Lucifer gives off a general brightness, while in York he brags of his overall beauty. But “bearer of light thou hast made me” (l. 102) the Chester Lucifer says in praise of God; and during his rebellion, he claims, “Of all heaven I beare the lighte / though God hymselfe and he were here” (ll. 128–29). Such an activity links Lucifer to the masters of guilds who would have carried their companies’ torches in the Corpus Christi procession and other such civic rituals. The tanners might even have been first, as Lucifer was among the angels; they were so in Chester’s Midsummer Show procession, for instance, whose order followed roughly the order of the companies’ plays.12 A guild’s or a guild member’s place in procession, and whether or not he was one of the “light-bearers,” could be an issue of contention. Zina Peterson discusses in detail the accounts of the York cordwainers’ brawls with the weavers and with civic officials during Corpus Christi processions, resulting in their refusal to bear their torches throughout the 1480s and 1490s.13 Thus the tanners may have been given their place at the beginning of the cycle and at the front of the processions not simply in deference to their wealth, but as a means of keeping a very large and therefore potentially troublesome group in line, and of giving them the illusion of status and power. And yet the play also continuously warns them of the consequences of pride, of not knowing their place, and of making unlawful spectacles of themselves. Chester alone creates a true drama of Lucifer’s rebellion.14 Rather than making his rebellion an innate quality of his person, it gives Lucifer some time to plan and talk about his proposed act of sitting in God’s

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empty throne before doing so and thus gives the other angels time to try to convince him of his folly. Each order of angels has a different argument in favor of Lucifer knowing and maintaining his subservient position to God; the argument the Principalities give is particularly curious. They plead, Yf that ye in thrall you bringe, then shall you have a wicked fall; and alsoe your ofspringe, away with you they shall all. (ll. 150–54, emphasis mine)

Lucifer certainly would not have offspring, but the players and audience might, and their offspring could either suffer or succeed because of their families’ economic and social worth. As already mentioned, tanners’ sons seem often to have been reluctant to follow their fathers into the craft.15 Again, the message of the play is perhaps meant to be directed toward and internalized by the performing guild as much as the audience. By performing a lesson about the consequences of disobedience to authority, they enact their own submission to the hierarchies in which they have been placed. The regular reiteration of this normative ideology over generations would have also served to reify the tanners—and by extension, all guilds’ social status—and their functions as men. The self-reflexive nature of the cycles can also be seen in this play in its ambivalent attitude toward spectacle and public performance, even as it reveals this discomfort through performance. We have already seen some of this in the context of the domestic plays, but such ambivalence establishes itself from the start in the plays of Lucifer’s Fall. In the Chester cycle, at the moment of Lucifer’s rebellion, when he initiates his “parlous playe” and sits in God’s throne, he speaks in a declamatory style that we will hear again and again from the mouths of the tyrants of the cycles. “Behoulde,” he exclaims more than once (ll. 178, 181, and 188). It is performative language that draws attention to itself and its speaker’s acts; a character commands “behold!” and the audience automatically responds, turning him into the object of their collective gaze and them into his disciplined subjects. From the start, the cycle marks spectacle as potentially sinful—though where acceptable spectacle becomes excessive is not always clear. The Dominations tell Lucifer that he has “begone a parlous playe” (l. 207), and that the consequences of such a “daunce” (l. 209) will be sorrow and woe. But at what point did the peril actually begin? Lucifer’s language, after all, imitates the exhortative, formal style of God. As Stevens argues, everything is play—these are plays about dramatic performance—so what determines the boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable spectacle?

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The ambivalence here seems to mark an anxiety of the function of display, performance, spectacle, festival, and public life. And no wonder, since at the heart of the Christian narrative is the grotesque public spectacle of Christ’s death, and at the heart of civic life in York and Chester were the often onerous burdens of sacramental drama and procession memorializing that spectacular sacrifice. The plays seem equally ambivalent about the display of the masculine body, marking it as a foul moment of sin, either on the part of the exhibitionist or those who turn such a body into an exhibition. And yet, the guildsmen performing these plays are themselves made into spectacle, by their own hands and on the orders of their superiors. Again, what distinguishes one act of display from another? Lucifer is a case in point. In his rebellion, he draws specific attention to his (masculine) body: “Behoulde my bodye, handes and head—/ the mighte of God is marked in mee” (ll. 188–89). Of course, the might of God to punish will also be marked upon Lucifer’s body, as it is transformed into something hideous and malformed with a “stinckinge face” (l. 237). Again the stink may have reminded the audience of the tanners performing the play, suggesting that their odor, too, along with their undesirable social position, comes as the result of God’s punishment. Here in the play, they too imitate God and provide spectacular masculine bodies that demand to be looked at, but it is a spectacle authorized by the governing bodies, disciplined and contained, like the ordered display that the good angels provide, by the power of homosocial hierarchical structures. That hierarchical structure is at the crux of relationships between men in the plays, beginning, as we have seen, with the relationship between God and his creatures. When Lucifer usurps God’s throne, God voices his disappointment in terms of an almost personal betrayal of masculine friendship, but it is a friendship where one party is most certainly in charge. “I made thee my frende; thou arte my foe!” God proclaims angrily, adding, “Why haste thou tresspassed thus to me?” (ll. 224–25). The dissolution of their bond is reflected in the new discord between Lucifer and Lightborne, now simply identified as First and Second Devil. Where once Lightborne was Lucifer’s faithful follower—in a low comic imitation of the fealty the angels show to God—they now bicker like an unhappy married couple, like Noah and his Wife before the flood. If the play is about masculine relationships, then the lesson is that such relationships rest on and require hierarchy; to maintain all the bonds, Lucifer needed only stay in his own seat, his own place as determined by God. Indeed, in hell, the devils also form a homosocial group, but order and hierarchy are largely missing. All that is left is an undifferentiated bunch of “fellowes” (l. 262), where Lucifer is the First Devil only because it was his pride that led them there.

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It does not seem a far leap to see this mass of figures—and indeed, the whole play and its lessons—as a veiled warning against the kind of “undifferentiated” unions of craftsmen that the riots of 1381 threatened to bring.16 As John Cox has also argued, though in a different context, it is not a subversive outlet that the devils supply, but rather an object lesson in how rebellion will be contained and defeated.17 The process of performing the plays themselves is part of that containment, delineating and ordering guildsmen into their respective social identities. In contrast to a domestic patriarchy, in which the father was the head of the household, civic rule by homosocial groups might seem arbitrary, particularly in terms of who was deemed worthy to lead. The tanners had wealth, and therefore economic clout, but they were continually denied access to civic government over hundreds of years. It is no wonder, then, that while enfranchising some and disenfranchising others, the civic elite commissioned the bringing forth of plays that implicitly presented hierarchy as something appointed by God. Though the pageants that open both the York and Chester cycles are openly ambivalent about the nature of homosocial communities and their potential for either good or ill, not all plays are so obviously at odds. As noted above, few of the Old Testament plays provide narratives about groups of men, but once the plays arrive at the Nativity and beyond, homosocial communities dominate. At Christ’s birth, the cycles replace the patriarchs of the Old Testament stories with symbolic brotherhoods of adult men constituted around the figure of Christ. In the construction of Christian history as presented by the northern cycle plays, the moment of Christ’s birth is not only a shift from the Old Law to the New, but also a shift from a domestic, patrilinear masculine order to a public, homosocial one. The first of these homosocial bodies, the shepherds and the Magi who travel to honor and worship the infant Christ, are the cycles’ attempts at an alternative to the bad angels, as well as an alternative to the domestic sphere that dominated the Old Testament plays. These groups of men come to worship God, not to usurp his place or compete with him.18 The humans compensate for what Lucifer and his followers failed to be and do. But even these plays are not without ambivalence about homosocial community; the repressed always returns. The Shepherds and the Magi It is the Chester cycle that most explicitly shows us the problems associated with homosocial bodies and their desires, and so, given the limits of space, I will largely concentrate on it.19 In their focus on fraternity and community, the Chester plays concerning the shepherds and the Three Kings—like

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both cycles as a whole—construct a guild fantasy of the “social body” while simultaneously revealing the exclusionary tactics of such communitybuilding, along with its concomitant anxieties.20 These shepherds and Magi, like the guilds who produced and performed them, define themselves in part by an exorcism of the unwanted; and they do not always have an idealized relation to the larger social body. Chester Play 7: The Shepherds Shepherds were not, of course, urban guildsmen, but their dramatic narrative in the Chester cycle nevertheless plays out and produces the homosocial groups performing their story. Shepherds are part of an idealized pastoral landscape that is as much the product of centuries of accumulated artistic and theological metaphor as it is a portrait of the material conditions of real medieval peasant lives.21 The Chester shepherds, in fact, show little tendency to lament the weather or their poverty in the way their counterparts in other plays do.22 These represent instead a more idyllic fantasy: a community free of civic regulation and responsibilities, that has been realized for the sake of mutual support—much like the origins the guilds imagined for their own supposedly traditional communities.23 The First Shepherd enters alone, but he quickly realizes “noe fellowshippe here have I. . .therfore after one faste wyll I crye” (ll. 41–43) and summons the Second Shepherd. Together they call on the Third Shepherd, and each professes different skills pertaining specifically to their occupation. They thank God who “hath gathered us together” (l. 97) and share a lavish meal, each doling out “his liverye” (l. 106). The vocabulary here and throughout the play reminds us of its guild sponsorship and reconstructs that communal body. “Fellowshippe,” though a common medieval word for companionship, is also interchangeable in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with “company,” “fraternity,” and “guild.” And “liverye,” though in the dialogue meaning simply an allowance or portion of food, also brings to mind the ceremonial costumes of the guilds’ masters and wardens.24 The fact that these “shepherds” are played by guildsmen, their identities known as such to the audience, adds such resonance to their words. Even though they are not themselves guildsmen, the shepherds are certainly self-conscious about their profession, and in the opening scenes, they brag about their husbandry skills. The First Shepherd claims a special knowledge of herbal medicines (ll. 17–40), while the Second asserts, “Yt is no shame for mee to shewe / how I was set for to sowe” (ll. 49–50). That both of these skills could also be associated with feminine domesticity is emphasized by the Third Shepherd, who tells us that he has taken his wife’s pan to boil his sheep ointment (ll. 73–74). But he is also afraid of his wife

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finding out and fears her “clowts” (l. 89). He turns to his fellows as an escape from her anger: “Now wyll I caste my ware hereby / And hye fast that I were at Hankeynn” (ll. 91–92: Now will I cast my wares aside and hurry fast to be with Hankin [one of the shepherds]). The Third Shepherd’s complaints are drawn from conventional antifeminist rhetoric, so the passage is easily overlooked. But what the play accomplishes by excluding women with these complaints and appropriating to shepherds traditionally “feminine” skills for their profession is a pastoral and natural world that is all male, without need for women. The shepherds follow this representation of their “domestic” skills with an outrageously lavish feast, consisting of twenty-odd delicacies, much of it apparently pilfered from their wives’ stores of food (ll. 109–111, 123–24). The “noble supper” (l. 124) they have in this homosocial pastoral space represents not only a rejection of the domestic space but a return to Eden and its plenty, with male companionship substituted for Eve’s.25 Moreover, given that worries about food supply and fairness of prices were continuous in English cities throughout the period, and victuallers were frequently women, the scene also represents an escape from the city and its “feminine” problems.26 The shepherds (or guildsmen) no longer need women, the city, or victualling professions to supply them with labor, community, or plentiful sustenance. Theirs is a self-contained, self-sustaining, male community. But not all men are included in the fantasy. At its moment of greatest complacency, Trowle, apparently the hired servant of the other shepherds, angry and rebellious, enters the picture and calls attention to the exclusionary tactics of community-building, whether that community be the shepherds within the narrative or the guilds and the greater Christian community outside. Trowle has been guarding the sheep alone while the others enjoy their feast. Afterward, when they call for him with a horn, he angrily responds to that summons, refusing their leftover food, demanding his wages, and aggressively challenging them to a wrestling match.27 After beating and humiliating each of them in turn, he withdraws to wander alone and is only reunited with the group—somewhat more peacefully—when the star appears and they are led to Christ. Trowle is estranged and alienated from the shepherds’ homosocial male world, and once summoned to that world, to which he should belong, he threatens its very masculinity. Trowle’s rebellion strongly suggests that in the homosocial but heterosexual world of the shepherds (and the guilds), the exclusion of women opens the door for the sexual or social other who must be contained, controlled, or kept at bay.28 Trowle’s marginalization from the social body is seen clearly in the fact that he wanders alone with only his dog as company. And it seems that the dog is a more appropriate “fellow” for Trowle and his transgressive body than are men, for Trowle

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says he would greet any intruder on his solitude thus: “Yf any man come mee bye / And would wytt which waye beste were, / My legge I lifte up wheras I lye / And wishe him the waye easte and west-where” (ll. 180–82).29 He ignores the summoning horn of the other shepherds, defying rank and privilege, saying “For kinge ne duke. . .ryse I will not” (ll. 186–87). As his language increases in defiance and insubordination, it also takes on the alliterative bombast of a “flyting,” connecting his foul bodily excrescence to vitriolic spewing of the verbal kind: “Thow fowle filth, though thow flyt / I defye thee” (l. 197). He continues this scurrilous abuse as he violently refuses the leftover feast the shepherds offer him: Fye on your loynes and your liverye, Your liverastes, livers and longes, Your sose, your sowse, your saverraye, Your sittinge without any songes! (ll. 202–205)

Again, a punning reference to “liverye” is made. What is more, as Kolve puts it, “in cursing the items of the feast, he simultaneously pronounces a curse on their own bodies and organs”—their livers, lungs, and, tellingly, their loins.30 In thus literalizing the metaphor of the social body and the charity it offers its “lower” members, Trowle also threatens the masculinity of the fellowship, particularly the real council members who would have worn the livery and dispensed such charity. But it is in the unique wrestling match that Trowle’s threat to the shepherd’s individual, masculine, bodily integrity, and to their communal stability, becomes most clear—and thus the underlying sexual anxieties of the play begin to surface. Almost all of Trowle’s chest-thumping threats are graphically physical. His first significant challenge to the strutting shepherds specifically attacks their sexual integrity: he exclaims, “But warre lest your golyons glent!” (l. 247: Beware lest your balls drop off !). Losing the wrestling match may entail literal as well as figurative emasculation. Trowle also offers vaguely sodomitic insults, telling the Second and Third Shepherds: “Both your backes here to mee bendes. . .Hould your arses and your hinder loynes” (ll. 270, 272). And, of course, there is the spectacle of the wrestling match itself, a display of male bodies (and their privileges) literally turned upside-down. The Third Shepherd marks it unmistakably: “Ofte wee may bee in [i.e., on top], thought wee be now under” (l. 298). And the First Shepherd laments in equally suggestive terms that “All agaynst our wills hee hase his [will]” (l. 390, emphasis mine). The play knows and demonstrates that masculine homosocial order and authority in this society are strongly connected to sexual identity and bodily integrity.31 Such

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a connection is made not only in this individual play, but also throughout the cycle, especially in the plays surrounding Christ’s birth, as in the emphasis on Joseph’s impotence, or in the Magi’s inspection of Christ’s perfect masculine body, as I will discuss in the next section. Only after Trowle has defeated the shepherds, “owt shad” (l. 269) them—or has isolated them, one by one, destroying their idealized community and their homosocial masculine identity—does he accept their food as his winnings, saying “My liverye nowe will I lach” (i.e., take, l. 281). With Trowle’s constant use of the word “liverye” to mean “portion,” and his claiming his due portion at the end of the wrestling match, the guildsmen producing and performing this play dramatize their fears concerning the arbitrariness and instability of status and identity that are not only sexual, but also social. Trowle is capable of turning the world upside-down. In that way, oddly, Trowle is like Christ, for Christ, too, represents a significant shift in the world’s order. But if this is so, then the violence and virulence of Trowle’s upheaval express tremendous social discomfort with the change that Christ himself demands. With the birth of Christ in the plays comes a shift from a patrilinear to a homosocial masculine order—a shift reflecting the changing world of the guildsmen, which requires more than usual civic and public responsibility and defines status in cultural and socioeconomic terms, rather than in supposedly stable genealogical and domestic ones. Trowle in part represents those arbitrarily left out of the social body—the failure to realize a true Christian community—but he is also a “safe” target onto which the play-producers can displace their anxieties about the communal impulses essential to Christianity and the civic order. His unwholesomeness and transgressive nature make him an appropriate scapegoat. Unlike the scapegoat of legend, however, Trowle will be reincorporated into the “fellowship” of man, the tensions between him and the other shepherds will be dissolved, and they will all be united in the presence of the Christ child, much as Mervyn James agues that the guilds are united as one social body in the Corpus Christi processionals.32 Or so it merely seems. Upon hearing the Angel’s “Gloria” and seeing the star, the loner Trowle exclaims, “I would have amonge” (l. 369: I would be part of it) and he leads the others in song. But it soon becomes clear that the earlier tensions of the play have simply shifted. Though Trowle is now “amonge” the other shepherds, they all suddenly have “boys” to replace him as servant; this homosocial community reestablishes hierarchies in ways similar to a guild household and its apprentices and servants (and unlike the material conditions of real shepherds’ lives). Trowle now claims rank and position in this “fellowship”; when offering his gift to Christ, he prays: “I mee dresse / my state on felloweshippe that I doe not

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lose” (ll. 588–89: I present myself so that I do not lose my position in the fellowship). Again, the word “felloweshippe” here, as earlier in the play, suggests the guild company. The hierarchical structure of this community is further emphasized by the self-conscious order in which the shepherds and boys present their gifts. They decide that age will determine rank. But both the Third Shepherd and his Boy announce that they are the last to present their offerings (ll. 585, 607), when actually Trowle and his Boy come last—the two of them are seemingly afterthoughts. Though reincorporated into the homosocial body, and though he may claim status over these other “boys,” Trowle still holds a low place in the community. When the shepherds take on new religious vocations, becoming preachers and wandering hermits, Trowle significantly chooses the solitary calling of an anchorite, who will “in. . .prayers wach and wake” (l. 668), just as he did on the hill with the sheep. His still marginal status is now contained and sanctified within the socially acceptable structures of the Church, and he remains strikingly alone. And just as hierarchies are not completely wiped away in the ideal “fellowship” with Christ, masculine anxieties too are not completely expunged. The gathering of the shepherds before the Holy Family is largely a male one. It is with Joseph that the shepherds speak and with whom they most identify, forming an extended homosocial community.33 But Joseph is given only a masculine social role with no domestic, private, or intimate role, and so his impotence marks him as the sexual other, though in a different way from Trowle. Again, what finally constitutes a masculine identity? Where is a man most manly—in a homosocial “fellowship” or in a heterosexual/social marriage? Can these competing systems, the social and sexual, public and private, be balanced? The play opens with the shepherds pointedly rejecting their wives (their literal, feminine family) for their professions (their symbolic, masculine brotherhood), and never do we see a reintegration of that domestic world. Indeed, one assumes they must more fully reject their wives in taking on their new religious vocations. And though the Holy Family seems in some ways to replace the families the shepherds left behind, there is clearly a shift in the role that men now play. With the birth of Christ in the Chester cycle comes a bundle of masculine anxieties about status and identity in the family and the community. The “Shepherds” play offers as compensation a nostalgic pastoral fantasy, incorporating an escapist vision of the homosocial body. But the underlying anxieties in that vision nevertheless erupt. I am aware, of course, that the play is also intensely funny. Trowle and the shepherds are first of all figures of laughter, not of anxiety or fear. But humor is a mechanism useful for expressing taboo and other anxiety-producing

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subjects because it provides the release of laughter to relieve the tension. What is funny to a culture is also meaningful, and here we are asked to laugh at shepherds enjoying masculine “fellowship,” being verbally and physically assaulted by one of their underlings, and finding a kindred spirit in an impotent old man—all while the Son of God is born nearby. Through laughter, these men—friends and neighbors of the medieval audience—acted out the fantasies and anxieties of their own lives. And in the following Magi episode—here in Chester as well as in the York cycle—the “humorous” exclusion of the (sexual) other becomes decidedly darker. There, Herod is the other who, once excluded from the homosocial body of the three Magi, violently and traumatically refuses to remain repressed. Chester Plays 8 and 9: The Three Kings and The Offering of the Three Kings; York Play 16: Herod and the Magi In the tumultuous world of Chester’s shepherds, the ceremonial presentation of the shepherds’ gifts to the Christ child is one attempt— successful or not—to smooth over the tension and competition of the earlier parts of the play; the following plays about the Three Kings are yet another, more ambitious attempt to restore order. Formal in their behavior from beginning to end of their appearance, the Magi in Chester Plays 8 and 9 seem to right what is wrong in the shepherds’ play; they appear to be the true, ideal homosocial body. But they are a mythic, inimitable fantasy for the urban guildsmen portraying them, and like the Chester shepherds—indeed, like any community—they are constituted through exclusion as much as inclusion. The Magi’s exclusionary tactics are as hierarchical, as gendered, and ultimately as traumatic as the shepherds’. York’s Magi provide a similar exotic, inimitable homosocial community, and they, too, show signs of excluding others from membership. Chester’s episode is the more elaborate of the two plays, however, so I have used it as my model. What York shows, Chester also does, and then some. I will, however, refer to York’s Play 16, “Herod and the Magi” (produced jointly by the masons and goldsmiths), where appropriate in this section, and I will also discuss it in more detail in the following section on Herod and his men. In a sense, the Magi of both cycles embody the ceremony and ritual of civic spectacle itself. In Chester, they seem to correct the recent disruptions of decorum by the shepherds, “rude and vnbroken fellowes,” and to assert an orderly Christian community.34 Every action performed and every word spoken by the kings of both York and Chester is done with formality,

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precision, order, and balance, unlike the parodic attempts of the Chester shepherds to imitate the angel’s similar erudition and formality (7.386–457). The Chester Magi plays are by far the most elaborate and learned of all. The kings speak throughout in regular turn and with usually the same number of lines; moreover, they often reiterate each other in the call-and-response style of liturgy. All of these qualities are apparent in the following passage in Play 8, in which the kings ask for a sign from God to show them what to do and where to go: First King:

Lord, what tyme ys yt thy will Balahams prophecye to fullfill thou give us grace, both lowd and styll, and by some signe us shewe. Second King: Yea, Lord, though wee bee unworthye, one thy men thou have mercye; and of thy birthe thou certefye her to thy knightes three.35 Third King: Lord god, leader of Israell, that dye would for mankyndes heale, thow come to us, and not conceale, but bee our counselour. (8.49–60, emphasis mine)

The supplicating repetition of “Lord” by all three kings and the request for counsel in exchange for fealty gives this passage its liturgical or prayer-like quality, but those aspects also construct the kings as God’s retinue of “knightes” (8.56). Similarly, the York kings declare to God, “Qou marc us Qi men” (16.313). Such a political gathering of men makes a certain amount of sense, since they are earthly kings pledging themselves to the King of Kings. Moreover, that retinue is also self-consciously a body of God’s men—“thy men” (Chester 8.54, York 16.313). The kings attempt to extend this membership in God’s retinue—and the polite formality that goes with it—to Herod, whom they treat with respect because of his rank. In York, the kings diplomatically agree that they must approach Herod and gain “his wille and his warande” (16.123) to travel through his land, since “Herowde is kyng of this lande / And has his lawes her for to leede” (16.119–20). Herod, for his part, assumes a false face of hospitality, so that “no sembelant be sene / But frendshippe faire and still, / Till we witte what Qei mene, / Whedir it be gud or ill” (16.149–52). Meanwhile, in Chester, even after all of Herod’s melodramatic rants and threats against the Christ child, the kings (unrealistically) bid him farewell with respect, obedience, and the same “three-part

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harmony” with which they addressed God; even Herod himself momentarily follows suit: First King:

By your leve, syr, and have good daye, tyll we come agayne this waye. Second King: Syr, as soone as ever wee maye; and as we seene, soe shall wee saye. Third King: And of his riches and his araye from you wee shall not layne. Herod: Farewell, lordes, in good faye; but hye you fast agayne. (8:374–81)

But as in York, Herod’s temporary formality and calm is belied by the rage that seethes beneath the surface of his politesse and erupts the moment the kings exit (in the very next line). And such rage—as I will show below— in turn belies the fantasy of formal brotherhood that the Magi represent. That fantasy brotherhood may be the product of the guild culture producing these plays—particularly of the mercantile class of guilds such as the Chester vintners who performed Play 8—but it is at once a fantasy and an anxiety because its formality and its perfection are materially inimitable for the men who portray it. The kings themselves are unapproachable figures of an ideal masculinity, just as Christ is, and will be, especially in the plays of his adult life. Together Christ and the kings form a homosocial group that really cannot be joined by anyone else. This inimitability seems a central masculine anxiety of Christian culture as expressed in the guild drama, one that will become more pronounced in the Passion plays. Christ, of course, is God as well as man, making him an unobtainable masculine ideal; but the kings, too, inhabit a world apart from the men performing them. Intrinsic to their identity and to the drama of their story is their otherness—they have traveled from distant lands (simply “ab oriente” in the Vulgate, Matthew 2.1) to honor Christ as their king, despite being kings themselves. This otherness of both class and culture is marked in the Chester plays by the French the kings speak as a lingua franca with Herod (8.153–60). That the French is not translated in the play text, as all the Latin is, suggests that what is important is not what is said, but rather how it is said—in courtly French. This kind of seemingly foreign detail is also present in the form of the dromedaries, upon which they ride to find Christ (8.102). Such beasts were, by the time of the plays, conventional mounts for the kings and were derived from accounts in the Legenda Aurea and the Stanzaic Life of Christ.36 Their specific mention in the play text (Second King: “Yea, syrs, I read us everyechone / dromodaryes to ryde

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upon,” 8.101–102) necessitates their appearance on stage as part of the exotic spectacle, compounding the kings’ otherness. What also sets the kings apart from nearly all the male figures in the nativity sequence of plays, as well as from most of the “good” figures throughout the cycle, is that they are not connected in any way to the domestic sphere or to family (other than their genealogical relation to Balaam). Like the York shepherds, they are free from conflicts between their public and private identities and there is nothing they need to escape from initially to become Christians or to form their homosocial community. It is this quality that particularly sets them apart from the Chester shepherds (who, as we have seen, escape their wives and the domestic sphere for their pastoral, homosocial world) as well as from the men performing the plays, who had to juggle the public, civic demands of guild duties with their domestic lives. The wealthy, powerful vintners and mercers of Chester’s plays, and the goldsmiths of York’s, would have especially been burdened with guild-related and civic responsibilities. Unlike these men, however, the kings seemingly come out of nowhere at the beginning of their respective plays, and at the end of each narrative, they disappear to return to their exotic lands, “Ilkone till oure contré” (York 16.390). And unlike the other rulers of these plays, Octavian and Herod, they seem to have no public responsibilities of leadership, either. In the Chester “Massacre of the Innocents,” Herod’s overweening fear concerning his public status allows the destruction of his family. But the kings have no such conflicts. They move at will, appearing and disappearing almost magically. Such freedom makes them an idealized fantasy of an unapproachable other for the middle-class, mercantile, familial, and civic-minded men who performed the Magi plays. The players and producers may fantasize about being so idealized a group of men themselves, but any group forms itself by constructing boundaries, necessarily excluding those who do not belong. The Magi plays reveal these mechanisms of exclusion, not only in their idealized, kingly community, but also in the mercantile guild culture performing them. The visitation of the Magi and the presentation of their gifts is, on the surface, a ceremony of inclusion and initiation, in which the Christian community is created and Christ is initiated into the human condition. That condition is especially marked by the Chester kings’ repeated equation of myrrh with suffering and death (9.82–88, 95–96, 103, and 111–12), which also makes it clear that the kings and Christ are not simply creating a universal Christian or human community, but a specifically masculine one. The myrrh with which they intend to anoint Christ is meant to anoint him in all his “lymmes,” “members,” and other things “towchinge manhoode and deitie” (9.59–63, emphasis mine). As Leo

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Steinberg has shown, the inspection and anointing of Christ’s genitals by the Magi to show the child’s fully human masculinity is a recurring image in the visual arts.37 The Chester play suggests a comparable interest and adds to it by pointedly contrasting the virile masculinity of Christ and his inspectors with Joseph, who remains a figure of age and impotence throughout the Chester cycle. Masculinity is here naturalized and conflated with virility, with the Magi supremely qualified to determine a child’s membership in that fellowship. Meanwhile, Joseph is not a full member of the homosocial community being constructed here. In Chester, he may have a few more words with the Magi than does Mary (three stanzas to her two, 9.185–224) and he may speak with them of personal matters—particularly his impotence and his guardianship of Mary—as if man to man. But that impotence marks him as a man of “fayled might and postie” (9.210) in contrast to Christ’s masculine wholeness, as anointed by the Magi, and his “strenght and his powere,” described by Mary just before Joseph speaks (9.197). While the shepherds in Chester Play 7 formed a homosocial community based on empathy with the old and tired Joseph, the male society being formed here is between God/Christ and the kings as his retinue. As Mary and Joseph say, Mary:

Joseph:

When tyme is come entyre to prove his strenght and his powere, to him you shall bee leeffe and deare— that darre I undertake. You kynges all comely of kynd, full faythfully you shall yt fynd— this menskie that God will have in mynd and quyte you well your meede. (9.196–203)

The language here—being “leeffe and deare” to a lord who should in turn “quyte you well your meede”—is the language of romance and the court, pertaining to a social and political world of virile men and their lords. Again, as in the previous Chester play, Joseph is merely a figurehead of a patriarch placed there to guard Mary’s virginity and reputation, while the public (and virile) homosocial community takes the place of the domestic, patrilinear one. In York, he fares even worse: only Mary has any lines to speak, one stanza in which she introduces the kings to Christ and steps back to passively “witnesse full wele / All Qat is saide and done” (16.355–56). Joseph is not the only man excluded from full membership in this homosocial community, nor are sexual impotence and age the only reasons a man may be excluded. Herod, too, suffers that fate, and not just because of his rage. In Chester, after the kings’ visitation to Christ, the Angel warns

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them not to return to Herod’s court; in particular, the Angel advises them to flee “Herodes felowshippe” (9.228), a detail not exactly in Matthew’s gospel, the language of the guilds conflating their contemporary world with the biblical world. Here, God’s own messenger suggests that not all homosocial communities, not all guilds, are worthy. In contrast, the York Magi present an image of the ideal fellowship, each king praising its perfection in the vocabulary of guilds. The Second King asks God to grant them “goode companye” (16.76, emphasis mine), while the Third King proclaims that he has “felaws fonne,” thus “faQfully to fullfille” his “yarnyng” (16.87–88: fellows found, to fulfill faithfully his yearning). And finally, the First King declares, “of felashippe are we fayne, / Now sall we wende forth all in feere [in company]” (16.109–110, emphasis mine). In contrast to the kings’ fellowship, Herod’s egomania and megalomania in Chester Play 8 have already shown his inability to function as a proper ruler, and in the “Innocents” play (Play 10) his version of a kingly retinue—the knights who act upon his orders, simultaneously ridiculous and murderous—will reinforce the unworthiness of his brand of “fellowship.” Even those who appear to be part of a system of power may in fact be deemed unacceptable by those constituting another, better system. Such an ideology is certainly one that the elite and mercantile vintners and mercers performing the two Chester Magi plays, or the goldsmiths of York’s play, would have been more than willing to accept. Like Trowle in the Chester “Shepherds” play, Herod’s character draws attention to the exclusionary tactics of community building. Herod may be “evil” and thus rightfully excluded, but the resonance with Trowle—who is merely a sinful, “natural” man and ultimately somewhat recuperated (at least in contrast to Herod)—allows a more complex reading of Herod’s exclusion. The ritual formality of the kings, which echoes the attempt of the cycle as a whole to smooth over the tensions and to create a unified social body, still cannot wholly suppress the other who has been excluded. As if in particular defiance of the Magi’s exclusive brotherhood and his rejection from it, Herod rants for fifty-two lines (Play 8), exclaiming an egomaniacal “I” twenty-seven times, as in the following small sample: Herod:

I kinge of kinges, non soe keene; I soveraigne syre, as well is seene; I tyrant that maye both take and teene castell, towre and towne! I weld this world withouten weene; I beate all those unbuxone binne; I drive the devills all bydeene deepe in hell adowne. (8. 169–76)

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The rhetorical effect is made even bolder by the anaphora, as well. Perhaps he has been rejected, his rant seems to say, but it does not matter to him, since he is all-powerful (or so he claims). Herod’s anxious and childish claim to supreme power, like Trowle’s boasts and insubordination, overcompensates for his exclusion: he does not need anyone, anyway! The limits of a homosocial group such as the kings—or the guilds—are defined not only by who is excluded, but also by the relative instability of such ever-shifting group formations. In a sense, neither Trowle nor Herod need rebel or rant, since the communities of the shepherds and the Magi are both temporary; their inability to sustain a stable community is yet another limit that resonates with the real guilds who performed the plays. Like the Chester shepherds, the Magi of both cycles disperse after giving their gifts to Christ. The Chester kings suggest that, like the apostles and teachers to come, they will spread the word of Christ throughout far lands; they go “to walke our land about / and of his byrth that wee maye moote / both to great and smale” (9.253–55). And similar to everything they have said and done up to this point, their farewells are very formal, each King speaking in turn and saying no more or less than the others. But significantly, the First King thanks the others for their “companye” (9.243). This company, moreover, has been pointedly summoned by a higher power: “Hee that made us to meete on playne” (9.244). Like many of the guilds, this community did not necessarily come together of its own free will for its own benefit but was created by forces outside of itself. And the Third King, the last to speak, ends with this ritualistic group farewell: “Kynges to, give me your hand; / Farewell, and have good daye” (9.262–63). Given that Chester Play 9 ends the actual first day of the cycle’s performance, this farewell is not just to the Magi, the community within the play, but to the community gathered in real time and space by the spectacle of the drama. That festival audience is only temporary and will last only as long as the spectacle holds them there. The guild community itself—the men who performed this play and others—exists only in ritual time and space, called together by the higher power of civic government to perform a specific role, and must likewise disperse at its end. It is the cycle of civic spectacle, ritual, and power that artificially creates the guildsmen’s social and political identities and that distinguishes each guild as a separate (homo)social body. Though the dispersal of the kings at the end of each cycle’s Magi episode recognizes on some level the arbitrary and unstable nature of (homo)social structures, it would seem that the Magi plays have indeed fully soothed any “rude” tensions and that order has been restored through ceremony and ritual. However, Herod’s rage is left unresolved and uncontained, and it is soon to erupt in his massacre of the Innocents. The Magi’s rejection of his “felowshippe”—their failure to return—is in

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part what sets off the massacre. This cause and effect is suggested in Matthew’s Gospel (2.16), but it is spelled out in the drama, particularly in Chester. In Play 10, Herod fumes: And those false traytours that mee beheight to have commen agayne this same nighte by another way have taken ther flight; this waye darst the not take. Therfore that boye, by God almight, shall be slayne soone in your sight, and—though it be agaynst the right— a thousand for his sake. (10.17–24, emphasis mine)

Clearly Herod has a sense that the kings owe him loyalty, that they have made a promise that they have broken, and so, as a direct result of that treason, he will have to take matters into his own bloody hands. But even before Herod makes this speech in Play 10, by the end of his appearance in Play 8, or at the latest by the time the Angel gives instructions to the Magi to flee Herod’s “felowshippe”—and from their prior knowledge of the story—the Chester audience and players know exactly what is coming next, what is starting off the next day of performance, after the false tranquility of the night. Such knowledge would lend a deep and disturbing irony to the peaceful ending of Day One and Play 9, as well as to any sense of the Magi as the perfect homosocial body. The Magi’s legacy, however inadvertent, is the massacre of the Innocents. The trauma of the massacre as the indirect result of the Magi’s exclusion of Herod serves in the Chester cycle as a companion for the “play” violence of Trowle’s wrestling in “The Shepherds” play. Herod’s truly bloody violence puts Trowle’s rebellion in a more serious light, throwing his threats of bodily harm into relief as having been real possibilities. It is no mere coincidence that both Trowle’s violence and that of Herod and his knights are all directed toward male bodies and male body parts. Likewise, Trowle’s apparent recuperation invites a more complex view of Herod— by which I mean, the play recognizes on some level that rage like Herod’s might have been contained and assuaged, as was Trowle’s. Herod, Trowle, and the relative traumas they enact are thus specific by-products of the exclusionary tactics of masculine community-building. Furthermore, both of these narratives—the shepherds and Trowle, the Magi and Herod— enact the kinds of tensions and disruptions inherent in (not assuaged by) civic and guild structures and their spectacles. The Magi plays are meant to set things right, to reassert authority and order; in a parodic, comic way, so

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too is the ceremonial presentation of gifts at the end of the “Shepherds” play. But all these attempts to smooth the rough edges through ceremony only call attention to the exclusivity and hierarchy of that order and to the trauma and violence necessary to it, either as a result or as a means of its constitution. That the trauma resulting from the Three Kings’ (homo)social constitution is the archetypal, sacrificial massacre of specifically male infants—which prefigures the sacrifice of Christ and his own masculine body—points to an anxiety about the violence inherent in both Christian mythos (as represented by the content of the plays) and contemporary Christian society, particularly masculine, public, homosocial culture (as embodied by the spectacle of the players, the guildsmen themselves). Herod and His Men In the last chapter, I discussed the Chester “Massacre of the Innocents” play in terms of the conflicts of interest between domestic and public concerns that it presents for Herod and, indirectly, for the guildsmen performing his narrative. Now I would like to concentrate on Herod as a public figure, for whom domestic concerns have value only in the market of reputation and power. I would like to look at the way in which Herod compensates, parodicly and violently, for his exclusion from the homosocial bonds of the Magi, either by constructing a fantasy of himself as an autonomous being free from social contracts and constraints, or by gathering around him a sycophantic homosocial community that encourages his violence against his perceived enemies. It may seem that I have given Herod undue attention in these two chapters, but he is indeed a major figure—appearing in more than one play in each cycle, he is widely reiterated and recalled by Chaucer in the fourteenth century, John Paston II in the fifteenth, and Shakespeare in the sixteenth.38 Moreover, he is a palimpsest of the multiple kinds of anxieties expressed through these plays, about men’s roles in the family and in society at large, about a man’s personal virility, or about spectacle and the public display of the male body. Because he is an evil character little developed in the biblical narrative, his depiction is less constrained by theological and devotional necessities, making him a useful and malleable figure to fit many purposes. York Play 16: Herod and the Magi and Play 19: The Slaughter of the Innocents Herod’s character is generally associated with egomania—an obsessive “I”—and certainly there is much truth to that, as we have seen. But when

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Herod’s pageant opens the York “Herod and the Magi” play, it is with a full complement of soldiers, counselors, and Herod’s adult son, all of whom comprise a sycophantic male society upon which Herod’s neurotic egomania depends. He is never without that society in this play or in “The Slaughter of the Innocents.” And though Herod is the undeniable leader, like Lucifer, he is inextricably associated throughout his appearances with a gang of men. The twisted social bond between Herod and his men is so strong that the First Soldier even expresses the supposed threat of Christ (or anyone else, for that matter) in terms of an individual “traytoure vntrewe” who refuses loyalty to Herod and the group (16.25–26). The same-sex community surrounding Herod includes his own son, though there is no sign or mention of the young man’s mother. Like Noah, who seemed to have sprung from his father Lamech alone, Herod’s son is purely his father’s progeny. And just as Herod entered the play praising his own beauty, so he praises his son’s outward appearance, too, calling him “semely” (16.44) and “fettis of face” (16.49: handsome). But even though Herod constructs his son as a reflection of himself—in a parody, perhaps, of God the Father and Son—the son needs to be as sycophantic as the soldiers, if not more so. He, too, calls anyone who disobeys Herod a traitor, but this time the threat of punishment is leveled at the soldiers. Herod asks his son what he thinks of the soldiers, and the son replies, “Fadir, if Qai like noght to listyn youre lawes, / As traytoures ontrewe ye sall teche Qem a trace” (16.46–47). Like the bickering demons of hell, this homosocial “community” is hardly harmonious. Moreover, it perhaps suggests an anxiety on the part of the guildsmen that the instability and malleability of homosocial power structures has infected the domestic scene as well. Herod himself has been placed in power by the Romans and has not inherited his position through birth. Thus for his son, courting influence, including that of his own father, may seem like the only way to gain access to power for himself. Of course, as I have shown in chapter 1, access to power among the guildsmen was not freely available to all, but the perceived change over time in means of access—from a inheritance-based society to a homosocial oligarchy whose members’ status seemed arbitrary—might nevertheless have caused some discomfort for those guildsmen invested in older models of status and power that were supposedly more stable. The wealthier goldsmiths may have been invested in such a model, and as the “Herod” play originally belonged to them, it may be their interests that are reflected here. In the fifteenth century, they had counted among their members some outstandingly wealthy and socially successful men. One goldsmith, Richard Wartere, bequeathed over £500 at his death—an extraordinary sum for an artisan—and held the office of mayor twice; in all, five goldsmiths became mayor of York.39 One of those mayors was William

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Snaweshill, whose residence just off the play route on Stonegate included a sizable and well-furnished hall, and whose grandson acquired the status of landed gentleman.40 Such men would have likely adhered to notions of patrimonial inheritance of status and position. And yet, though the goldsmiths were wealthy as a group, not every individual member shared that success, and some who started out wealthy and powerful were reduced to poverty in difficult times. The guild as a whole lost some of its financial, if not social, clout by the early sixteenth century. Moreover, not all goldsmiths were successful even at the craft’s peak. John Colan, whose fifteenth-century inventory still survives, had an estate worth only £15 17s 2d at his death.41 Men such as Colan are reminders that membership in a wealthy or socially important guild did not guarantee a man the same wealth or status, and that the appearance of a guild’s substance in civic spectacle and government masked the very material differences between its members. Such struggle, of individual members and the guild as a whole, likely led them to share one of their two pageants with the masons. The masons were largely an itinerant collection of day-laborers, probably formed as a guild only at the behest of the civic council in order to provide another group to sponsor a pageant. Relatively few masons took out the freedom in York and became full citizens. For instance, Swanson shows that of the 216 masons mentioned in the fabric roles as having been employed by the York Minster, only 48 appear in the Register of Freemen.42 Occasionally a master or two made a comfortable living and achieved a certain amount of reputation and respect from the constant building and rebuilding in York; however, often that wealth and success came from the practice of other crafts in addition to masonry. One of the wealthiest masons in York, Hugh Grantham, found his financial success in the victualling trade, not in masonry.43 In general those who practiced masonry alone were a poor and disenfranchised group. For them, as for the recently poorer goldsmiths, the seeming arbitrariness of access to power— and the swiftness, in this play, with which contrary voices are labeled “traytoures”—might have accounted for their lack of power and success. The multivalent quality of this play and others, especially with regard to its ambivalence about male homosocial society, reflects the fluid identities and social practices of the men who produced and performed it. In representing an unsavory homosocial group, they might not be expressing ambivalence about their own guild culture, but about a more aristocratic all-male society as depicted in the play. As has been noticed by the York cycle’s editors, Herod’s soldiers are a “gross and ironic” parody of romance literature and chivalric conventions.44 In expressing anxieties about male homosocial bodies through a parody of romance conventions, the guildsmen

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seem to locate their fears in an aristocratic milieu and literature—especially given that Herod is a king—thus implicitly constructing their own homosocial community against that tradition and anxiously distinguishing themselves from it.45 But ambivalence about their own social structures nevertheless creeps into the “Slaughter of the Innocents” play (York Play 19). There, Herod and his men seem more like a despicable guild, rather than a chivalric lord and his retinue. As in the “Herod and the Magi” play, Herod’s men come loyally to his defense, but this time it is not couched in the language of romance. Instead, when the First Counselor threatens anyone who should disobey Herod, he says, “We shulde sone wirke Qam woo” (19.31). Given the well-established theme of “work” in the York cycle and its reflections of guild culture, this line cannot but resonate in similar ways as well. What is more, at three different points in the play, the word “maister” (19.170) or “maystrie” (19.56, 262) is used, each time in reference to Christ, the “fandelyng” (19.157: foundling) who threatens to surpass Herod in authority and power. The guild responsible for this play throughout its history, the girdlers—later joined by the nailers—were once themselves powerful figures who suffered a loss of that status; though they had mercantile status in the thirteenth century, by 1517 they were not even counted as a “minor” guild in the revised York constitution.46 They might have sympathized on some level with a man of established position who felt threatened by a young upstart, since the girdlers were themselves ultimately unable to fend off competition, some of it from newer trades and guilds, and some of it from mercers, chapmen, and haberdashers who usurped the girdlers’ mercantile functions. As a result, their “social and economic importance dwindled.”47 While I do not mean to say that Herod himself, as a character, or his actions toward Christ and the Innocents, would have been viewed as sympathetic by any medieval Christian, his anxieties might nevertheless strike a vaguely empathetic chord with the guildsmen who performed him. The same can be said of virtually every appearance Herod the Great makes in both the York and Chester cycles. Certainly Herod is a figure “good to think with,” for he encourages an interrogation by the guildsmen of their values and ideology, particularly of their assumptions about class, status, and virtue.48 But the lesson that an overweening attention to social status costs one’s own soul is most likely to have been directed at and internalized by the poorer and less powerful guilds such as the girdlers and masons, or the less successful goldsmiths. Chester Play 8: The Three Kings Such insecurity about social status is related not only to social position and political power, but also to the guildsmen’s identity as men, to their sense

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of their masculine virility. Even Herod, King of the Jews, experiences the vulnerability and instability of masculine power, especially in his appearances in the Chester cycle. All Herods in medieval drama rage and spew vitriol, but the Chester playwright highlights the very gendered aspects of his fears and insecurities. The Chester vintners who produced and performed Play 8, in which Herod figures prominently, were likely a wealthy and politically powerful mercantile guild, capable of producing a play of great pomp and show, but one that also speaks to the anxieties concerning power, lineage, and inheritance that come with positions of public leadership. Although the play’s purpose is ultimately to ridicule Herod, it nevertheless reveals the anxieties inherent in (homo)social systems based on seemingly arbitrary notions of reputation, status, and social standing. Chester’s Herod is especially concerned about his lineage and Christ’s legitimacy as “king of kings.” Theologically speaking the audience is meant to understand that Herod’s rule is earthly and Christ’s is heavenly, and therefore no dynastic threat to Herod. Nevertheless, Herod’s anxieties touch upon many of the same issues that are of concern to the guildsmen. From the very beginning, one of the three kings links lineage with power when he proclaims to Herod that “Infant querenues de grand parent / et roy de celi et terre” (ll. 159–60, emphasis mine: We seek a child of high lineage, and king of heaven and earth). Immediately Herod is made “unfayne” (unhappy) by this statement (ll. 161–62) and lineage, power, and their concomitant hierarchies become his obsessions for the rest of the play. In his first long speech, Herod blasphemously but also comically overcompensates for his fears by presenting himself as larger than life and outside the material hierarchies of power. “Kinge of kinges” (l. 169) and “kinge of all mankynde” (l. 177) he calls himself and tries to stake out territory safely above and beyond earthly order and time: “I am the greatest above degree / that is, or was, or ever shalbe” (ll. 181–82). His appropriation of language pertaining only to God is, of course, blasphemous, but it also reveals the anxieties of this play about the structure of hierarchy: only God is “above degree” and free from the ineluctable procession of time that replaces kings and fathers with their heirs and sons, legitimate or not. It would be easy to dismiss Herod’s raging as the ignorance and egomania of an “evil” character, were it not for the fact that he reprises (in exaggerated ways) themes already addressed through Joseph’s frailties and doubts. Unlike Joseph, however, Herod attacks Christ directly, expressing himself with rage instead of mere apprehension. And in his attacks, he sticks to the terms of earthly hierarchy that give him his position and power: he cannot believe that “a boye, a growme of lowe degree / should raygne above my ryalltee” (ll. 202–203); more than once he calls Christ a

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“gedling” (ll. 307, 326: bastard) and also a “vile congion” (l. 328: outlaw). 49 And he pointedly states that he will manfully defend his realm against a “boyes boast” (ll. 361–63). All of this name-calling is an attempt to characterize Christ as lower and weaker, and to construct himself as the legitimate, potent, and fully masculine ruler. Moreover, his insistence of power over a boy places his construction of masculine virility in terms of craft masculinity as Karras would define it—that is, with manhood defined against boyhood.50 Herod’s constant recourse to lineage, meanwhile, is both ironic and complex. In the course of the play the audience learns that Herod is not a born Jew, but a converted one, and that it was the Romans, not the Jews, who made him king (ll. 277–79). After the exit of the Magi, Herod frantically asks one of his learned Doctors if what the Magi have said about the newborn “king of heaven and earth” is true and commands him to find in the prophets that it is not (ll. 259–60). What the Doctor finds— and tells Herod—is that Herod’s false claim to rulership is one of the signs by which the true king of the Jews—Christ—will be known (ll. 269–82). There is an ambivalence at play here too: illegitimacy, so feared both in this play and that of Joseph’s doubts, nevertheless becomes a necessary tool to construct and define legitimacy. Herod’s reaction to the text’s claim that he is the illegitimate usurper is to insist on his legitimacy in paradoxical terms: he speaks of the “tytle and right” to rule by the Romans’ “hye conquest” but then claims that it comes to him through “heritage” and “hye parentage” (ll. 285–7), echoing the “grand parent” from which Christ is said to descend. That echo begs a question: in what technical or legal way is Christ legitimate? He has, in fact, been conceived out of wedlock, and though Joseph weds Mary, he is not the true father of Jesus. By late medieval terms (as opposed to Jewish matrilineal descent), the explanation of Christ’s legitimacy is no less problematic than Herod’s proof of his own right to rule. If Joseph had not already spoken some of these same doubts, we might dismiss them here as the ranting of an evil character. But by now the theme is a recurring one. Putting such issues in the mouths of comic or evil characters may mitigate their immediate force, but bastardy is no less a real concern for the men producing and performing the plays than it is for kings, nobles, and rulers such as Herod. How does one know who a child’s father is? How can legitimacy be tested? Furthermore, from what does social status, “tytle and right,” arise? From economic power? From “hye conquest”? Or from “hye parentage”? These plays point to the conflicts between Christian ideologies and worldly ones, as well as to problems internal to patriarchy itself. How is a man supposed to reconcile this aspect of the Christian story with patriarchal concerns about lineage and hierarchy? And if nobility of the spirit is more likely to come from humble beginnings, what does that mean for the wealthy

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vintners? Christ’s birth speaks directly to these masculine anxieties, upsetting the standard systems of hierarchy and rule. Likewise, in the guildsmen’s world, the market economy was bringing about a perceived change in the order of things. They faced a world where those in power had to continuously police and regulate access to that power through arbitrary systems of status and voice—for instance, through the 1517 revision of York’s constitution. Such policing and control are equally the concerns of Herod. Moreover, for Herod, obsession over lineage and legacy are as connected, if not more, to bodily performance and virility as they are to political and social status. Herod never expresses any explicit anxieties about physical impotence—Play 10, indeed, presents a son to confirm his virility—but from the moment the Three Kings enter his court and announce their intentions to find the “Infant. . .de grand parent” (l. 159), Herod begins gesticulating wildly with either a staff or a sword. Following on Joseph’s complaints that he “might playe noe playe” (6.136), Herod’s gestures and props are particularly suggestive. Every surviving manuscript has stage directions denoting these properties and occasionally directing Herod to cast one down or break it. That these actions are specified in the manuscripts is significant, since in general such directions are few.51 There is a long tradition in the visual arts of depicting Herod with a staff or sword, and sometimes it points down, but to my knowledge it is never broken or cast aside.52 The staff and the sword are emblems not only of stately power, but of phallic power too, and it is significant that Herod frequently drops or breaks them. He particularly tends to lose physical control in this way when his social and political control is most threatened. At one such point, the Doctor has just finished reciting a list of signs of Christ’s birth and divinity, ending with Isaiah’s prophecy that “kinges. . ./ and folkes of strange natyons and from sundrye coasts” would come “that prince’s birth to magnify, which of might is moste” (ll. 320–22, emphasis mine). Furious, threatened, and impotent, Herod once again “cast[s] downe the sword” (l. 326+SD) and launches into a violent, verbal attack on Christ.53 He vows to find and destroy the child, proclaiming “I shall hewe that harlott with my bright brond so keene / into peeces smale” (ll. 335–36). The speech reaches a poetic and histrionic boiling point here with its excessive alliteration and hissing consonance. It also pointedly overcompensates for Herod’s political impotence: the sword just cast down in frustration is now a “bright brond so keene.” Herod continues to show his lack of masculine composure when he sweats so profusely from anxiety (l. 195) that just over ten lines later the stage directions call for him to shrug off his gown, which must be replaced with a fresh one.54 Another such costume change is called for after Herod

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has sworn that he will “manfullye. . .maynteane” his realm against “a boyes boast” (ll. 361–63, 365+SD).55 This gown, too, is a symbol of public power and thus an extension of his masculine identity and virility. It may also suggest the liveries worn by the most powerful guildsmen, members of the civic government, some of whom certainly belonged to the vintners guild producing this particular play. Moreover, it is literally worn by the guildsman performing the role, and becomes, like the sword and staff, an emblem of the spectacle he and his fellows are producing—all of which properties are somehow damaged or made impotent by their associations with Herod and are shown to be no more than elements of “play,” neither essential nor natural to masculine identity or power. As in numerous other plays that I have discussed, a deep-rooted anxiety about such public “dis-play” is revealed. The deflation of Herod’s public reputation and power begins to affect his masculine self-confidence. For the guildsmen performing these plays, public and private personas are anxiously wrapped up in one another. Their masculine identities are shown to be tenuously maintained or performed in public, temporary, and largely homosocial contexts. Though Herod’s anxious egotism is an individual affliction, it is nevertheless related to his public reputation and sociopolitical identity. And though he dominates the plays in which he appears, he is never without a gathering of sycophantic men, even in his otherwise most intimate moments. Such public crowds, largely of men, will continue to dominate the cycles, especially in the trials and Passion of Christ. These groups of men also play significant roles in the ministry of Christ, the subject of the next section. Homosocial Bodies in Conflict: The Disciples and the Conspiracy In the plays that Woolf categorizes as “between the Nativity and the Passion,” the York and Chester mystery plays move decidedly away from narrow, domestic, and intimate settings into crowded cities and nonfamilial social groups.56 Though a handful of women—particularly Mary and Martha, as well as the “Woman Taken in Adultery”—play important roles in these episodes, the scenes are still largely filled by men. Indeed, even when the idea of the city is constructed in the “Entry into Jerusalem” episode of each cycle, it consists exclusively of men, as I will discuss below. And like the actual cities in which these plays were performed, that idealized construction of the city nevertheless reveals the fractures between and among the sociopolitical groups that inhabit it. In the ministry plays in particular, Christ and his (male) disciples are at odds with the (male) ruling factions of the cities where they work, while betrayal lurks within the

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disciples’ own group. In the selection, juxtaposition, and characteristic interpretation of these particular episodes from the life of Christ, the guildsmen of York and Chester dramatize their own sociopolitical tensions and their anxieties about homosocial culture. Chester Play 13: The Healing of the Blind Man and the Raising of Lazarus I begin with Chester because it dramatizes more of Christ’s active work than does York; and I begin with Play 13 because it is the first ministry play to depict a busy urban setting, where the events of the rest of the cycle will remain. Indeed, Chester immediately presents us with a crowd of people and a cast almost unbelievably large for a pageant production. There are seventeen speaking parts and Christ is always part of a group or a crowd, entering the play with Peter and John and possibly with the rest of the apostles, as well. From beginning to end, the play teems with the activity of the city. The play also establishes the various social subcultures of the city. Much has been made of the incarnational theology of Christ’s opening speech, taken exclusively from parts of the Gospel of John (8.12, 32, 10.11, 16, and 30), with its emphasis on the divinity, rather than the humanity, of Christ.57 But I think it is equally important that Christ’s first English word in the speech, the very first word he speaks directly to his disciples, is “Brethren” (l. 1)— a word that will be repeated throughout plays 13–15, three more times in this speech alone.58 It is a multivalent word with multiple uses, but it resonates in one way at least with the guilds, for “brethren,” “brother,” and “brotherhood” were frequently used in guild ordinances to designate their membership, particularly the journeymen. For example, a 1468 record of the Chester bowers and fletchers says, This script & composicion made by all the maistres & brederin of the craft of fflecchers & Bowers Within the Cite of Chester[. . .]And that euery person that shall be made . brothire in any of the seid Craftz . shall paye atte his entre . to the sustentacion of the [Corpus Christi] light & othire charges Xxvj s viij d & that noo person be recyuyd . to the seid brethirhode in noon othire wyse.59

In a guild-produced play, then, Christ could have been easily seen by the players and audience as a master guildsman leading journeymen and apprentices to do the “workes” (l. 23) of healing and other ministry. Christ is a man with a profession, a service craft, and the disciples are following him in it; he teaches them and they are instructed to “printe these sayinges in [their] mynd and harte; recorde them and keepe them in memorye” (ll. 29–30).

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Along with the language and idealized images of guild life, the play uses the language of family, domesticity, and community throughout, although it is far from simply or naively ideal in its constructions of homosocial communities, however much it might seem so at first. Addressing the disciples as “brethren,” Christ also tells them that they are his “familie” (l. 33). Soon after, a blind man and his boy arrive begging charity from the disciples, the boy telling them that the blind man is their “owne neighbour” and their “owne kind” (l. 39), while the blind man describes himself as a “neighbour borne in this cittie” (l. 42). Since the man would have been played by one of the glovers performing the entire pageant, his claim to social and civic relation with the “disciples” is literally true on that level. His situation even seems to instruct the players and audience in an ethic of care for one’s own community members. The disciples see it selfconsciously as an object lesson, for Peter says to Christ, “Maister, instruct us in this case” (l. 44). That Peter uses the word “maister” is significant, too, though it is a logical translation of the Vulgate “Rabbi” ( John 9.2). Even when authorized by the plays’ sources, the use of “master” here and throughout the cycle invokes the guilds’ masters and their responsibilities (in the ideal) to teach and look after their own. Indeed, Christ explains his duty vis-à-vis the blind man as “my Father’s workes. . .[to] worke right” (l. 61), invoking the recurring language of labor and placing it in a homosocial domestic context not unlike the perfectly imagined guild household. All together, the passage suggests an idealized blurring of the lines between guild, family, and neighborly community, but rewritten as a homosocial community with all tensions and competition wiped away by civic duty and ethical care for other members of the community. That fantasy is short-lived, however. Once the blind man is healed and regains his sight, he begins to preach of his miraculous cure. He thus gains the attention of the wider community, represented by two characters who address each other as “neighbour” (ll. 82, 86), but whose behavior is hardly neighborly. They bring him to the Pharisees as evidence of Christ’s rebelliousness allegedly shown in his healing, and thus working, on the Sabbath (ll. 116–23). The blind man sought Christ’s help on the grounds that they are “neighbours” and of the same “kind,” yet other “neighbours” use the blind man and turn his healing against Christ. It is a pattern that will be repeated throughout the ministry plays here and in York, and it suggests, on one level, the rivalries between guilds engaged in disputes over what kinds of work they had the right to do and when. But it also seems like a dispute between a guild and the ruling elite, the mercantile civic council, whose many tasks included the adjudication of infractions against their regulations or disputes between guilds. In this resemblance to the lives of guildsmen, the play expresses anxieties about homosocial public corporations and their concomitant

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exclusionary tactics. The blind man tells the Pharisees that he wishes them to become Christ’s disciples (ll. 203–205), but they protest that they are Moses’ disciples and do not know where Christ comes from (ll. 205–209). In other words, he is not of their “own kinde” or their “neighbor,” but a stranger, a “foreign” or an “alien,” not a citizen. But the blind man excludes, too, for he proclaims that “God wyll not sinners here” (l. 214) and that only God could “worke such thinges” as the miraculous restoration of his sight (l. 224). Through the blind man’s disputes with the Pharisees and their anxious iterations of their distinct identities, Christ’s disciples and the Pharisees suggest two contentious guilds, particularly when the Pharisees question Christ’s “maistrye” (l. 235) and Christ asserts that he “workes. . .verelye / in my Fathers name” (ll. 240–41). Group identity, familial connections, citizenship, and boundaries are all tested and defined in these passages, just as they would have been among guilds, or between civic authorities and their charges. What is to prevent their own government, or their own social groups, from being as spiritually blind as these men? Chester Play 14: Christ at the House of Simon the Leper; The Entry into Jerusalem; Christ and the Moneylenders; and Judas’s Plot In comparison to the previous play, the shoemakers’ play of four key episodes in the life of Christ is extraordinary in its barely disguised enactment of tensions between homosocial groups. The combination of narratives and settings, as well as the huge cast, together suggest the many spheres and people of a medieval town and its complicated social structures. The four narratives move from an intimate, domestic, heterosocial scene to increasing public and political disorder. Such disorder may specifically reflect the lives of the shoemakers (also known as corvisors and cordwainers) who were seen by many as troublemakers.60 In York, though they were generally wealthy, like their rivals the tanners, they were kept from holding any social or political status and given no representation on the common council.61 Despite the material rewards, sons of York cordwainers were seemingly reluctant to follow their fathers into their crafts.62 Their Chester counterparts may have been equally low in status. Prior to the scenes of public disorder, however, the shoemakers’ play opens in a seemingly peaceful heterosocial domestic space, in Bethany with Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, at the home of Simon the Leper. Though a heterosocial company, it is the man, Simon, who invites Christ into his house, for Christ’s presence gives him comfort (ll. 17–24). And Christ’s male disciples follow, expressing a kind of chivalric loyalty: “Lord, all

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readye shall we be / in life and death to goe with thee” (ll. 9–10). Martha and Mary both welcome Christ in a joyful and ritualistic way that serves as a feminine, domestic counterpart to the public welcome by Jerusalem’s male citizens upon Christ’s entry into that city. Neither woman uses the term “master” to address Christ, as the male disciples do, calling him “lord” instead, drawing on aristocratic and theological language, but also suggesting the hierarchies of the patriarchal household, rather than the guild. Both women’s speeches use affectionate language but also rhetorical devices such as anaphora, balancing the intimacy with more formal celebration: Martha:

Mary:

Welcome, my lovely lord and leere Welcome, my deareworth darlinge deare. ... . Welcome, my lovely lord of leale; Welcome, my harte; welcome, my heale; Welcome, all my worldes weale, my boote and all my blys. (ll. 33–34; 41–43)

Mary’s tender act of washing and anointing Christ’s feet is also at once intimate and ritualistic, and she draws attention to the domesticity of the scene by begging Christ, “wayve me not from thy wonne” (l. 52, emphasis mine: send me not from your dwelling). But the domestic bliss of this brief scene is quickly replaced by the cares of the world, brought on by the men in the company. Simon worries that Mary’s wicked reputation will bring Christ the “worldes shame” (l. 60) and damage “his fame” (l. 64), while Judas complains of the waste of the oil that is “so much of pryce” (l. 68), the cost of which might have been given to the poor (ll. 65–72). As Travis points out, such economic themes continue throughout this pageant.63 Coming from the mouth of a character the audience knows to be hypocritical and traitorous, it suggests a deep ambivalence about the money-oriented culture to which the artisans and merchants belong.64 Christ, on the other hand, praises Mary for the intimate good deed she has done him (ll. 105–112). But the intimacy of Mary’s attentions is soon replaced by the very public anointing of Christ upon his entry into Jerusalem, an episode that constructs and enacts a homosocial and hierarchical public sphere. The pressure of the ineluctable march forward of the plays, and their emphasis on Christ’s trials and Passion, never let Christ rest for long in familial or domestic settings. Constructing a Christ in their own image, the guildsmen create a godhead whom homosocial, public responsibilities constantly turn away from the heterosocial domestic realm.

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As if to signal that move from a heterosocial domestic sphere to a homosocial civic milieu, Christ addresses Peter and Philip as “my brethren free” (l. 137). As I have already discussed, in a guild-produced play the multivalent word “free” cannot help but suggest those men who have purchased the freedom of the city. The shoemakers, though likely politically disenfranchised, would nevertheless have counted many freemen among them. Peter in turn addresses Christ as “Maister” (l. 145), as the disciples have done throughout the cycle—a shift away from Martha’s and Mary’s “lovely lord.” The sphere in which the disciples now move is again a masculine one of guild hierarchies and civic duty. Indeed, when Christ arrives in Jerusalem on the ass that Peter and Philip have procured, the “Janitor” who provided it runs to tell “all this cittie. . . of his comynge” (ll. 163–64, emphasis mine), but it is soon clear that the “cives” of the stage directions (l. 168+SD) are “good men evrye one” (l. 169, emphasis mine) and “Fellowes” (l. 181). What is more, all the parts are played by the guildsmen, so that for the contemporary audience, “all this cittie” is represented only by a small segment of it: the all-male “Fellowes” of an occupational guild. Numerous critics have noted the self-reflexiveness of “Entry into Jerusalem” scenes in both York and Chester, in particular the way the contemporary city and the city of Jerusalem become one.65 For Beckwith, the doubleness of York’s “Entry” pageant is key to the penitential aspect of the York cycle as a whole, for the citizens welcome Christ to his death, and thus the contemporary citizens wittingly reenact that death again and again each year.66 But what critics fail to notice is the exclusively masculine character of the citizens represented. In fact, the word “cives” or “citizen” itself largely designates men (and only those with the means to purchase or inherit the freedom), though there was occasionally a woman made free.67 What this episode does, both here and in York (which I will discuss in more detail below), is construct a specifically homosocial Christian community. The “Entry into Jerusalem” self-reflexively represents not only the lay devotional culture of the cycle plays, but also the masculine devotional culture. Chester even extends that representation across status lines, including two parts for “Primus Puer” and “Secundus Puer,” the first of whom says to his “Fellowes” that he has heard the news of the entry from his father (l. 201). Again, the masculinity of the community is emphasized, as is its reiteration of that homosociality through the generations of characters and the guildsmen who play them. If Chester Play 14 stopped at the Entry episode, it might seem that the troublesome shoemakers had represented a fantasy of their ideal city, one that was at least inclusive of all freemen. Or perhaps they had been allowed by the civic council the opportunity to portray the (masculine) city at large as a way of buying their acquiescence. But the seemingly ideal

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picture of the civic world grows considerably more complicated in the next segment, unique to this cycle, where the disenfranchised shoemakers dramatize Christ’s act of throwing the merchants out of the temple. The episode is brief but telling. In the first place, it changes the biblical “moneylenders” to merchants who have turned the temple into “a place of marchandize” (l. 228). And when Christ enters the temple, he does so “cum flagello” (l. 224+SD: with a whip), which he uses to drive the merchants out (l. 260+SD). Because specific props are not often mentioned in the cycle plays—though the stage directions in Chester are the most detailed—this item stands out, especially in context of the play’s sponsors. Since shoemakers, or cordwainers, worked in cordovan leather, they may have made whips as well. Certainly they could have made the one for this play. As small a detail as it is, it suggests a certain subversive glee on the part of the less powerful shoemakers in being able to threaten merchants with violence and thus drive them from their trade. In their mundane lives, they had little power or status in the city, and at other times of the festive year they had to make “homages” to the merchant drapers.68 Not only are the merchants humiliated and forced from their trade, but in this play they are characterized as evil fellows akin to Herod and other ranting tyrants of the plays. They cry out with excessive emotion (“Owt, owt, woe is mee!” l. 233) and then ironically accuse Christ of being excessive in display (“bould durst hee not bee / to make such araye,” ll. 239–40) and speech (“Jesus, with thy janglinge,” l. 245). What is more, they anxiously chide Jesus for his pretensions to authority over them, and they do so in the language of guilds and sociopolitical power. Says the Second Merchant, What signes nowe shewest thou here that preeves such power to shend our ware in such manere, maisterlye through thy mayne? (ll. 249–52, emphasis mine)

To their chagrin, Jesus echoes that language and claims his rightful “might and. . .maistrye” (l. 244) over the space and sphere which they now falsely occupy. The merchants, in turn, seek recourse in their own corrupt sphere of influence: political power. As Christ expels them all with his whip, one of them runs off crying “Cayphas I shall tell” (l. 260), echoing the meddling “neighbors” of the last play. Though homosocial groups in the plays can suggest ideal communities (for instance, the Magi), in episodes such as the present one, the “social body” constructed is hardly consistently positive or harmonious. Such an unflattering characterization of the (homo)social body and its wealthy,

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powerful members does not cease with the ejection of the merchants from the temple. As they align themselves with Caiaphas and plant a seed of the conspiracy, another player, Judas, begins his own plot. In doing so, Judas transfers his loyalty from one homosocial group to another, betraying one to the other. Thus his character also speaks to anxieties about homosocial bodies, their identity and their boundaries. Like the merchants, Judas is too concerned with material goods, a trait that is first revealed in the beginning of the play when he complains that the oil Mary uses on Christ’s feet is worth “three hundreth penyes” (l. 70). The play suggests an explanation for Judas’s betrayal of Christ for thirty silver pieces: as Christ’s treasurer, Judas was in the habit of embezzling a tenth of everything (a parody of tithing), so that the sale of the oil for three hundred “penyes” would have netted him thirty (ll. 265–96). This is a traditional explanation that appears in sources such as Peter Comestor’s Historia Scholastica and in the Stanzaic Life of Christ, as well as in the York and Towneley analogues.69 But in portraying Judas as greatly “wroth” that his “maister Jesu” has “suffered to destroye / more then all his good thrye” (ll. 266–75: allowed goods to be destroyed that are three times more valuable than all his possessions70), the play also links him with the angry merchants who have just exited the temple and the play. And like those merchants, Judas runs directly to Caiaphas: Syr Cayphas and his companye conspyrne Jesus to anoye. There speech anon I will espye, with falsshood for to fowle him. (ll. 297–300, emphasis mine)

There is no question that Judas’s intentions are purely “fowle”; the parallel with the merchants thus serves to make them seem equally as “fowle” in retrospect. But it also constructs a character that is uncomfortably familiar to the audience. As Woolf writes, “People can relax with the comfortable feeling that they are not Cain or Herod, but they cannot be so certain that they are not Judas.”71 Such uncomfortable identification with Judas is intensified when Judas vows that his “maister shalbe quytte / my greeffe an hundrethfould” and thus turns to Caiaphas “and his companye” (ll. 295–97, emphasis mine) for relief. Judas then becomes a figure for the anxiety of shifting identity that saturates the plays. What is proper masculinity in a mercantile or artisanal context? How can a guildsman be sure, in his own business concerns and relationships, that he has not become a Judas? The rest of this complex play concerns Judas’s meeting with the Pharisees; even they are wary of him, distrusting his sudden change in allegiance. They require as surety that he “plight” his “trueth” that he will

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“serve [them] aright / to betraye [his] maister through [his] might” (ll. 401–403). And as if to underscore the unmanliness of this “bargayne” (l. 386), Judas tells the Pharisees, once Jesus is identified by the kiss, “Takes him manlye, as you maye, / and lead him sleelye awaye / whither your likinge ys” (ll. 414–16, emphasis mine). The “and” here seems to function as “or,” for Judas is giving them a choice of their “likinge”: they can take Jesus manfully (that is, openly) or else “sleelye” (secretly) as they have been operating thus far. The “manly” way is open and public, at least as guild culture wishes to shape it. But not all secret meetings of men are necessarily unmanly or cowardly, for the next play opens with the secret meeting of Christ and his apostles for the Last Supper. Unlike the Conspiracy, however, they are not deciding the fate of a man who is not present, nor are they in any position of civic power. They have, in fact, been driven to their secrecy. Chester Play 15: The Last Supper and the Betrayal of Christ The meeting of Christ and his disciples for the Last Supper contrasts with much of the activity of the groups of the last play, offering an alternative (homo)social body. Where the suspicious Pharisees must ensure that Judas plights his “trueth” in the last play, here Jesus addresses his apostles in the first line as his “Brethren all, to me right deare” (l. 1). Mistrust characterizes the Pharisees, while trust and loyalty characterize the apostles. But that trust is limited to their inner circle, for this body of men must meet in secret, arranging for their meeting place in “the cittie” (l. 17) through a system of messengers and codes (ll. 17–32). Their secrecy is the result of their imminent danger at the hands of the Pharisees, who choose secrecy as their means of operation. But both instances of secrecy nevertheless are, in the present moment, counteracted and contradicted by the public performance of the plays, which wrests the guildsmen into their spectacular and homosocial identities and resists any form of group identity they might form for themselves. Though the “Last Supper” play offers a positive vision of the homosocial body, it belies the representation of that private group by means of a public, regulated performance. What the two plays provide then is contrasting visions of the kinds of homosocial bodies that the guilds themselves might become: an anxious nightmare of corrupt oligarchic rule in the shoemakers’ play and a fantasy of harmonious, intimate community in the bakers’ play. And yet the fantasy of the latter is only permissible in the highly visible public sphere. The bakers’ play even suggests a fantasy of docile egalitarianism to counter the oligarchic corruption of the merchants and Pharisees. Jesus and his apostles engage in a foot-washing ceremony in which every member of

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the group, Jesus included, ritualistically subordinates himself to every other member (ll. 137–60+SD). This is an event that both Chester and York choose to enact, despite its potentially undramatic qualities (especially if carried on too long), which suggests that both cycles are interested in spectacularly displaying ideal communities and homosocial bodies to counter their equally anxious depictions. (Towneley, too, dramatizes this, but much more briskly.) Chester particularly emphasizes this episode by insisting that the ceremony be completed in performance with everyone washing each other’s feet.72 The Chester bakers’ version of the Last Supper certainly seems to support Mervyn James’s arguments that civic ceremony created harmony, if only momentarily. Like most victualling crafts, bakers did not have much social status in late medieval towns, although the York bakers may have started off with more status and wealth than they ultimately had during the height of the cycle plays. The first surviving ordinances of the York bakers, from the late fourteenth century, suggest that theirs was a fairly exclusive craft.73 But by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, like most other victualling guilds, they were relegated to a low position in the social hierarchy, represented only as a minor craft in the 1517 common council.74 Meanwhile, the Chester bakers were also often at odds with other victuallers or with the royal and civic regulations that governed trade and production of foodstuffs.75 In the play, however, they present a vision of social harmony, not only portraying the serenity of the last supper, but also, according to the Late Banns, sharing the occasion with the audience by “cast[ing] godes loues abroade.”76 Thus through their enactment of the first Eucharist, they engage in and help reinforce a vision of Christ’s body as the social body by including the heterosocial audience as well, and not just the performing guilds.77 They also, simultaneously, enact an idea of the guilds as microcosmic formations of that social body. However, as in the Gospels (Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, and John 13), danger and betrayal already lurk in this otherwise idyllic gathering, in the form of Peter and Judas. And those dark elements are portrayed here in ways subtly relating to the anxieties of guildsmen. For instance, when Christ predicts Peter’s denial, he tells the apostle, “or the cocke have crowen thrye / thou shalt forsake my companye” (ll. 189–90, emphasis mine); in other words Peter will be a traitor to Christ’s guild. And given that Judas describes Caiaphas and the Pharisees in Play 14 as a “companye” also (14.297), the two plays expressly show that, like an individual man, a group of men is capable of sin as well as charity. Judas is an even darker example of this ambivalence. In juxtaposing his secretive betrayal of Christ to the Conspiracy with the intimacy of the Last Supper (where Judas also appears), both the Chester and York cycles show

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the permeability of group boundaries and display a mistrust in the possibility of maintaining loyalty within groups. Though the critic John Cox argues that evil in the cycle plays is continuously expressed as “notcommunity,” it seems more accurate at this point in the cycles to say that communities themselves can be evil and that the plays express a distinct ambivalence about community formation, especially when that community is constituted secretly or in private domestic space, such as the home of the merchant who provides the “fayre parlour” (l. 29) for the Last Supper.78 In the world of the play and its players, homosocial groups must be formed publicly and their boundaries repeatedly policed and reproduced on the public stage. That ambivalence can be found in the scenes of Christ in Gethsemane as well, both in York and here in Chester. Though it remains mostly faithful to the biblical texts (Matthew 26, Mark 14, Luke 22, John 17–18), the Chester play suggests multivalent levels of meaning in its performance context. We are now confronted with two conflicting homosocial groups: Jesus with his apostles and the Pharisees with their soldiers, the boundaries between the two traversed by the traitorous Judas. In Christ’s community, the two apostles who have the largest roles (that is, who speak and act individually) are Judas the traitor and Peter, who will deny Christ. Both act in ways that also suggest ambivalence about the possibility of true community. Judas, in particular, mocks or parodies the kind of homosocial intimacy that many of the plays long for. Not only does he give Jesus the biblical kiss (Matthew 26.49, Mark 14.45, and Luke 22.47), but he accompanies it with a startling and disingenuous expression of affection and homosocial desire, unauthorized by the biblical accounts: A, sweete maister, kysse thou mee, for yt is longe syth I thee see, and togeather we will flee and steale from them awaye. (ll. 309–12)

Peter, on the other hand, defends Christ with more genuine feeling, confronting and attacking the soldier Malchus with language and fervor that recall the mothers of the Innocents, but in doing so he loses his proper manly demeanor: Theefe, and thou be so bould my maister soe for to hould, thous shalt be quytte an hundrethfold, and onward take thou that!

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Be thous so bould, as thrive I, to hould my maister here in hye, full deare thous shalt hit abye but thou thee heathen dight. Thy eare shall of, by Goddes grace, or thou passe from this place (ll. 323–32)

Besides acting as emotionally as unfavorable characters, Peter also wields a sword (like Herod and his soldiers who massacred the Innocents), and as Christ tells him, famously, “Whosoever with the sword smiteth gladlye / with sword shall perish hastelye” (ll. 340–41). Peter has the potential to become as evil as those soldiers or as his fellow apostle Judas, whose language he echoes in vowing to “quytte” the soldier “an hundrethfold.” Indeed, he does sin grievously against his “maister,” by later denying him three times. It is wholly theologically appropriate for the plays to present all men as having the potential to sin, but in the choice of narratives played, in their juxtaposition, and in the language that expresses them, the Chester cycle adds an additional layer, suggesting that every group of men, every social body, has the potential for evil as well. It is an ironic, perhaps even anxious, position for a communal and public drama, but it is one that York will express as well. Indeed, York dramatizes many of the same episodes of Christ’s ministry as does Chester, with many of the same themes at work, but with characteristic differences in text and context. Where York is significantly different I will discuss it, beginning with one scene from its “Entry into Jerusalem” play. York Play 25: The Entry into Jerusalem York’s “Entry” play proceeds much like Chester’s, even in being combined with aspects of Christ’s ministry, and representing in miniature the “citezens. . .Of Qis cyté” (ll. 102–103), and thus depicting only its male guild culture. Its unique contribution to the story is the porter’s confrontations with Philip and Peter when they request a donkey for Christ. For the most part, the scene serves as a low-comedy counterpoint to the rest of the generally formal play. The porter’s comic stubbornness and his doubting the worthiness of the two apostles contrasts with the joyful, ceremonial welcome that the citizens give Christ. The scene also reflects actual guild life and speaks to the rivalries between guilds that existed despite the supposedly unifying performance of the plays. For instance, when the apostles find the ass and her foal, they assume that the animals are for “comen” use (l. 57) and

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they can therefore take them readily for their “maistir” (l. 59): The beestis are comen, wele I knawe, Therefore vs nedis to aske lesse leue; And oure maistir kepis Qe lawe We may Qame take tyter, I preue. (ll. 57–60)

But they are quickly confronted by a porter, rattled by their presumption, who asks them, Saie, what are {e Qat makis here maistrie, To loose Qes bestis withoute leverie? Yow semes to bolde, sen noght Qat {e Hase here to do. . . ... . What man is Qat {e maistir call Swilke privelege dare to hym clayme? (ll. 64–67, 78–79, emphasis mine)

Fights over land and other assets in the common usage were frequent in York at this time and they often involved guilds who raised animals. The butchers especially were cited for the misuse of common grazing land; their frequent fights with the other guilds over jurisdiction and rights might be reflected in this brief altercation.79 But even without specific guilds or battles in mind, the playwright is clearly making a statement about the greater prestige and rights of some guilds and guildsmen (those who wear “leverie,” or livery) over others, even within plays that could represent the city as a unified whole. Despite or perhaps because of the centrality of the pageant to the cycle and its self-reflexive representation of the city, the “Entry” pageant speaks to the division and disenfranchisement of that city. Indeed, the play comes roughly at the center of the cycle’s structure; perhaps not coincidentally, it also reaches the midpoint of the playing route after approximately half the playing time for a complete cycle of twelve stations and forty-eight plays, thus marking the cycle’s temporal and physical centers at once.80 And yet, rather than being a play of unity, it is a performance full of conflict and ambivalence, as are the plays that proceed and follow it. York Play 26: The Conspiracy Like “The Entry into Jerusalem,” “The Conspiracy” dramatizes issues of contemporary sociopolitical relevance, as well as devotional importance.

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The play consists of two “acts”: Annas and Caiaphas petitioning Pilate, and Judas offering his traitorous services. The common denominator of both acts is Pilate, here characterized as a rational but fallible man, even though in a later episode he will more closely resemble tyrannical characters such as Herod.81 It is through him and his interactions with the Pharisees and Judas that the play expresses some of its most conflicted ideas about appropriate masculine behavior and public duty. The Pilate of this play is neither a tyrant nor an entirely good man. He has a certain amount of pride in his power, but he does not claim any outrageous or supernatural gifts. And for the first half of the play, he opposes Annas and Caiaphas, telling them that their claims and desires are too extreme. He also attempts to teach them appropriate masculine behavior; for example, from the very beginning of the play he demands, “why are {e barely Qus brathe? / Bees rewly and ray fourth your reasoune /. . .Beware Qat we wax no{t to wrothe” (ll. 37–40). Ruling one’s emotions and using reason are Pilate’s—and the cycle’s—ideals for men. Such a lesson could be imparted to human beings in general, but what is presented on stage is a group of men played by men from a largely male-dominated culture. Again and again Pilate gives the Pharisees such warnings and instructions: “{oure rankoure is raykand full rawe” (l. 93) and “Forsothe, {e are ouer-cruell to knawe” (l. 95) are but two examples. More significant, soon after his instructions not to “wax. . .to wrothe” (l. 40), he argues “His [i.e., Christ’s] maistreys schulde moue {ou youre mode for to amende” (l. 63). Jesus has demonstrated master skills at his craft (of healing) and the Pharisees should have no reason to be angry, for Jesus practices nothing unlawfully. Pilate’s admonitions thus suggest what appropriate behavior is for men in general, and for guildsmen in particular. However rational Pilate may be, he does eventually relent in the Pharisees’ petition. But the point that turns him to their side also teaches a lesson in the obligations of men. When Pilate hears that Christ claims to be a “kyng” (l. 115), he accepts that boundaries have been crossed and infractions committed. Like other worldly rulers in the cycle plays, he fails to see that Christ’s kingdom is not a threat to earthly rulers, and thus he declares, as hotly as any of the Pharisees, “Qat wrecche fro oure wretthe schal not wryng” (l. 119). Pilate’s interest ultimately lies in maintaining the status quo, including the way men are stationed in life. In the most obvious reading, this scene represents a conflict between aristocrat and commoner, but given Pilate’s resemblance to a medieval civic leader of a “comely companye” (ll. 185–86), it also suggests the mercantile government of York closing their ranks and keeping most artisans—such as the cutlers producing this play—out of any real representation or power. Thus the narrative teaches all men to keep their place, constructing masculinity as belonging to

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(self-)controlled, docile bodies that should not “wax. . .to wrothe” or shake up the supposedly stable and natural hierarchies of their culture. In contrast to Pilate’s complex character, Judas is a wholly negative example of masculine behavior, but also connected to the world of work and trade. When Judas enters the play, he first encounters a porter who immediately recognizes Judas’s character, calling him a “bribour” (l. 169) and a “lurdayne [who] his liffelod hadd loste” (l. 175: a wretch [who] has lost his livelihood). The latter insult connects Judas not only to Cain, but also to any marginal figure outside of the guild’s world of work and occupational identity. In fact, the porter also calls him a “strange theffe” (l. 166). Beadle glosses “strange” as “strong, extreme. . .flagrant, bold,” but it could equally be a variant of “straunge” (strange), an adjective meaning “foreign, unknown, alien, an outsider.”82 Such a usage fits well in this passage, where Judas’s marginal social and economic status are emphasized. Having already made up his mind to betray Christ (ll. 127–54), Judas has removed himself from any social systems or group identity. He is indeed a stranger. Even the men to whom he now pledges himself distrust him. Pilate judges him for turning in a man to whom he should be loyal, questioning “why Qis knave [Judas] Qus cursidly contryued” (l. 241). And even the soldiers of Annas and Caiaphas find Judas distasteful, accurately calling him a “traytoure” and a “wikkid man” (ll. 264–65). Having betrayed his own “maistir” (l. 243) and his own homosocial community, Judas is thus excluded and alienated from all such society. But he is not simply some foreign other to the medieval audience. Throughout his dealings with the conspirators, his language continuously rests on economic metaphors, which establishes him unmistakably as one who profits from trade and, as in Chester, is unnervingly similar to the players and audience themselves. In approaching the Pharisees and answering their questions about his business, he says “Of werke sir Qat hath wretthid {ou I wotte what I meene / But I wolde make a marchaundyse youre myscheffe to marre” (ll. 214–15: Of work, sir, that has enraged you, I know what I know / But I would make a bargain to end the threat to you). But worse than the money-changers in the temple, who were “selland Qer store” (l. 82), is what Judas offers: “For if {e will bargayne or by / Jesus Qis tyme will I selle {ou” (ll. 219–20). Judas’s “marchaundyse” is his own “maistir,” Jesus. Clearly Judas is an object lesson in how a mercantile man should not behave, but his closeness to the world of guildsmen also suggests deep anxieties within that world. While ideally humans should not be the stuff of “marchaundyse,” the regulation of labor and laboring identity, and the performance of that identity in daily life and civic events such as these plays, nevertheless produces commodities of men, making their identities coterminous with the products they make or the services they provide.

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Furthermore, as in Chester, Judas moves from the conspiracy’s public, governing homosocial body to the apostles’ domestic, marginalized male community in the “Last Supper” play, and in doing so, emphasizes the arbitrary nature of social identities, and the possibilities of covert alliances. The ease with which supposedly stable loyalties can be betrayed and identities blurred, and the resemblance of Judas to merchants and other tradesmen, makes him an embodiment of social anxiety, recalling the tactics that successfully excluded Trowle and Herod from social bodies, and demonstrating yet more ways in which those tactics can and do fail. To whom does Judas belong? How does one know if a Judas is among one’s own (homo)social group? York Play 27: The Last Supper The unequal power relations, distrust, and conflict of the “Conspiracy” play seem to be immediately and effectively contradicted by the homosocial intimacy and egalitarian spirit of the “Last Supper.” But in this play, too, the traitor Judas lurks, and he will soon be exorcised for his betrayal. Though he brings his alienation upon himself, the identification of Judas as a traitor at the Last Supper nevertheless emphasizes the exclusionary tactics of any community, and its constant need to police and perform its identity through public memorial and (re)iteration. Like much of the rest of the cycle, the community of the Last Supper is expressed in terms suggestive of guild culture and its fantasies and anxieties. In the opening passage, Jesus describes the tradition of men offering a “lambe at Paas” to those in their “awne posté” (i.e., under their power) and in their “meyné” (ll. 10–12), a word for a company or group as well as a household. The word appears most frequently in the Chester cycle, but in this particular York episode, it is used six different times, emphasizing the ideal correspondence between the company of men gathering in the narrative and the company of men performing them in this play about homosocial community and intimacy. That intimacy is underlined by the ceremonial washing of feet performed by Jesus and the apostles, which is also here connected with a deep longing for intimacy with Christ as God. When Peter balks at having Jesus wash his feet, Jesus tells him that unless he submits he will get “no parte in blisse” (l. 52). Aghast, Peter begs his “maistir swete”: “Owte of Qat blisse Qat I noght be” (ll. 53–54). The guild language of “maistir” and “meyné” creates a multivalent atmosphere of longing. It suggests not only a desire for homosocial intimacy with God, but also a fantasy of the perfect homosocial community of men where all take care of each other, where it is possible “Ilkone for to bede othir belde” (l. 68: Each one to give the other support) and where Peter is given the

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responsibility of being a “comforte” to “Qis meyné” when Christ is “gone away” (ll. 122–23). The community dramatized in the Last Supper also ideally reflects the performance of the plays themselves on the feast of Corpus Christi, wherein the entire social body joins together to celebrate God’s sharing of His body with the community.83 But as I have been discussing and will continue to elaborate, such visions of corporate wholeness are fantasies, and even in their ideal expression, their concomitant anxieties erupt. The desire for this fantasy—for an egalitarian, homosocial society constituted on the margins of society—would be appropriate coming from the bakers who, like most victuallers, often struggled for social respectability, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.84 The suitability of the play assignment, then, is not just that the bakers could make the bread of the Eucharist; they may have been drawn to the play for more intangible reasons, too. But such an idealized society is soon belied by Peter’s denial of Christ and is already ironically juxtaposed with Judas’s greater betrayal in the previous play. Those betrayals are even couched in the vocabulary of the guilds and their world, just as the play’s more positive moments are. Thomas expresses shock that “Oure maistir sais his awne meyné / Has betrayed hym to synfull seede” (ll. 94–95, emphasis mine). Moreover, John mourns, “Allas, oure playe is paste / Pis false forward is feste” (ll. 100–101), suggesting not only the precious little time the apostles have left with Christ but also the distance that the guild players have from such intimacy with Him in their own time. Even as they imitate the closeness of the apostles, in an attempt to bring Christ into their own world, they underscore the bittersweet nostalgia of such attempts and the fact that the time of Christ as Man is always already past, no matter how true their “playe.” The play is always a memorial, always elegiac, despite the theology of resurrection. Emblematic of that distance, Judas constructs himself as fully outside of the apostles’ social group. He speaks in an aside, not engaged with his “fellaws”: Now is tyme to me to gang, For here begynnes noye all of newe. My fellaws momellis Qame emang Pat I schulde alle Qis bargayne brewe— And certis Qai schall no{t wene it wrang. (ll. 104–108)

And though he refers to the apostles as “my fellaws,” just after that, he says he can tell the Pharisees where to find Christ because he knows where Christ goes “with his meyné ilkone” (l. 113), thus distinguishing Jesus and

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his followers as a company to which he does not belong. And Jesus predicts Peter’s denial as a similar rejection, saying Peter will claim he “knew me [Jesus] neuere / Nor no meyné of myne” (ll. 136–37). Peter will ultimately become Christ’s surrogate, a “comforte” to the “meyné,” but for a brief time he turns his back on that same “meyné,” just as Judas does. Again, no one in these plays can be certain they are not Judas. The homosocial group of the apostles is not simply a “good” body of men in contrast to the “bad” Pharisees and other conspirators. The figure of Judas, who travels between both groups, speaks to the arbitrary and malleable nature of social identity, the potential for disruptive resignification, and the possibilities of betrayal from within. Likewise, guild identities and loyalties could be blurred. The story of Judas’s betrayal complicates fantasies of a stable, sustainable homosocial community, for his actions will set in motion the events that take Jesus from the apostles, destabilize their community, and send them off separately to deliver Christ’s “commaundementis in ilke contré” (l. 155). Those events begin to play out in the following episode, “The Agony in the Garden and the Betrayal,” which provides the perfect narrative to address issues of homosocial (dis)loyalty. The York cycle makes great use of it for that purpose. York Play 28: The Agony in the Garden and the Betrayal The very first speech in the “Agony” play, spoken by Jesus, establishes its interest in homosocial communities and masculine experience. He opens by addressing his disciples in a way that also serves to address the men performing the roles and also the audience at large: “Beholde, my discipulis Qat deyne is and dere / My flesshe dyderis and daris for doute of my dede” (ll. 1–2). Christ’s affectionate speech toward his disciples, along with his avowed vulnerability, establishes the intimacy of these men, and reinforces the group identity (“discipulis. . .deyne. . .and dere”) of the disciples as well as of the guildsmen performing them. In other words, the play announces its focus on groups of men. In what follows, Jesus also establishes the actions of the rest of the play as pertaining to masculine experience, for his “enemyes. . .[are] neghand full nere. . .to marre [his] manhede” (l. 3–4). The word “manhede” is repeated six times in the first half of the play, which depicts only Christ and his apostles. Though the word most immediately means “the human condition, nature, or body of Christ after His incarnation,” and alternates frequently with “flesshe” (see l. 2 quoted above), by the early fourteenth century, the word had taken on a distinctly gendered meaning of “manly virtue, character, or dignity; manliness.”85 Context determines nuance, and here, in a dramatic world that is fully masculine—especially in the Conspiracy and Trial

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plays—and performed by the largely masculine guilds, the word evokes its gendered meaning as well as its incarnational one. The human Jesus is also a masculine Jesus.86 The play establishes his trials as masculine ordeals, so that the behavior he models during those ordeals, particularly his public behavior, is directed in particular at men. The first demand Jesus makes in preparation for these ordeals is for “a stounde stille in Qis same steede” (l. 8), a moment of quiet. Like the Chester Noah’s relieved exclamation that “yt is good for to be still” (Chester 3:248), stillness is associated with a man facing a test of his spiritual strength; indeed, it will become the characteristic quality of Christ’s behavior throughout his Passion. The apostles, however, have trouble imitating this behavior. Though Peter says, “at thy bidding full baynly schall we abide” (l. 13), the apostles do not actually grant Jesus that peace right away, for they are in need of guidance and reassurance, of the sort that any apprentice would need from his “maistir.” John asks for a prayer “for my felows and me all in feere” (ll. 39–40), suggesting that the need is communal, and Jacob asks Jesus to request “som solace of socoure” from God the Father (l. 42). Jesus presumably gives them the Lord’s Prayer, as in Luke 11.2–4, but a leaf is missing from the manuscript at this point. The play picks up with a lone Jesus praying to his Father who is the “bote of all bale” (l. 55) to him just as he is to the apostles. And like Jesus’ desire for stillness, God the Father himself is silent; even his will is wrought “euermore both myldely and still” (l. 62, emphasis mine). Jesus prays for his Father to give him equal spiritual strength: “Instore me and strenghe with a stille steuen. . .Pou menske my manhed with mode. . .For my jorneys of my manhed / I swete now both watir and bloode” (ll. 45–50). He asks for the strength of a quiet voice and will (“mode”) to face the journeys of his “manhood.” If Jesus is an ideal human, he is also an ideal man, one who will face tribulation alone with the strength of stillness, an ideal of masculine behavior that the plays will habitually reiterate throughout Christ’s trials and Passion. But though Christ accepts God’s will, “bothe myldely and still” (l. 62), and takes on the duty that his Father has given him—as an exemplary man should—he is still part of a homosocial community from which he hopes to derive support. But that community fails him. In contrast to his distant father, Jesus is still present in the world, going to his disciples “kyndely to comforte Qam” (l. 65). The word “kyndely” suggests not only “with concern,” but also “as one of their own kind,” and “as in his nature.” Comfort in Christ’s world, and in the world of the guilds, is naturalized as coming from peers, not distant seniors and benefactors. The guilds, by implication, are to look to themselves, their own kind, and not to civic leaders, for their “comforts,” whether social or economic. But the play also

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suggests the failure of that homosocial comfort. When Jesus finds the disciples asleep, he is most disappointed that they are not there to provide him support in return: “wille {e leue me Qus lightly and latte me allone. . .To whom may I meue me and make now my mone?” (ll. 68–70), he asks plaintively. Without the disciples’ comfort, he is very much alone, for when he turns to his Father again, God sends His emissary, the Angel, not His own person, for the Father is “in heuen. . .moste. . .vppon highte” (l. 115), distant from the material world. At the same time, the apostles continue to fail him—as they do in the Bible—until Jesus proclaims of them all: “Pan schall {e forsake me ilkone / And saie neuere {e sawe me with sight” (ll. 133–34, emphasis mine). With a distant Father and inconstant friends, Jesus is utterly isolated, even alienated, and he recognizes that his journey will be a solitary one. It is not only the disruptive, marginalized, or evil characters such as Trowle, Herod, Satan, Cain, or Judas who work largely alone. In the constantly reiterated disappointment in homosocial society, and in Christ’s now solitary mission, the plays seem to be positing an almost proto-Romantic idea of alienated individualism as the nature of humanity, especially masculinity. As his enemies draw near, Jesus sternly confronts his unfaithful peers, predicting their unmanly behavior that will leave him alone: {a, but when tyme is betydde Qanne men schalle me take, For all {oure hartely hetyng {e schall hyde {ou in hy. Lyke schepe Qat were scharid away schall {e schake, Per schall none of {ou be balde to byde me Qan by. (ll. 139–42)

The apostles are not nearly as “balde” (bold) as they should be to face their enemies and to stand by Jesus. They behave like sheep, not men, and act “for ferde” (l. 149) as Peter will do when he denies Christ (ll. 147–52). While Jesus chastises the apostles for their failures, the members of the conspiracy and their henchmen arrive, and once again two homosocial groups are dramatically juxtaposed. But now the apostles are not so distinct from the conspiracy. They may not intentionally cause Jesus harm, but they nevertheless do so through their own weaknesses. And Judas, who acts intentionally, was once one of them. Such recurring disappointment in the apostles—in homosocial community itself—would likely have resonated with the cordwainers producing the play. As discussed earlier in reference to their fellow shoemakers in Chester, the cordwainers were a troublesome group of men for the civic powers, and their reward for such behavior was complete disenfranchisement in York: they had no representation after the 1517 rewriting of the civic constitution.87 Whatever sense of unity they

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may have had as a group—though they were a huge and amorphous guild—might have come from their shared sense of exclusion and disrespect. As Zina Peterson has shown, their repeated altercations on Corpus Christi with the equally low-status weavers may have arisen from the cordwainers’ having been positioned to the left of the weavers in procession, signifying lesser status.88 In other words, they rebelled as a group only because they were insulted as a group. Certainly the cordwainers had an uneasy relationship with the merchant powers of York, and the representations in the rest of the play, of both the conspiracy members and of Christ, speak to such tensions. Though literally religious leaders, the Pharisees are also subtly depicted as powerful guildsmen. Twice Caiaphas invokes the recurring vocabulary of “werke” (l. 160, l. 208), both times to justify the betrayal and murder of Christ as “worthy” work. In the second instance, Caiaphas’s ability to do this work is couched in terms of his political and social power. He speaks to the gathered members of the conspiracy: “Nowe sirs sen {e say my poure is most beste / And hase all Qis werke Qus to wirke at my will / Now certayne I thinke not to rest” (ll. 207–209, emphasis mine). Unlike Christ, who will now work alone and with great stillness, Caiaphas is unable “to rest” and works in collusion with others to excise Christ permanently from their midst. “Work” and the homosocial communities that produce and regulate it, then, both have the potential for evil as well as good. Masters, too, can be good or evil, and in this pageant the people most often addressed as “maistir” are Annas and Caiaphas. Twice the address comes from Judas (ll. 248, 250), who once addressed Christ as his master. The slipperiness of the term and of the loyalties of those who use it suggests an ambivalence about the arbitrary nature of power and status in the guilds’ world, an ambivalence with which the cordwainers could certainly have identified. The arbitrary qualities of social status in the guilds’ world are emphasized by other ironic uses of address and name-calling, as well. Caiaphas and Annas both call Judas a “gentill” man (ll. 185, 194) and determine that Jesus’ most traitorous act is that he “callis hymselffe a sire” (l. 202), when to them he is a “losell” (l. 204), a wretch or knave who, significantly, shirks lawful work. Of course, any player or audience member would immediately see the inappropriateness of all such remarks, but the play leaves open the question of how one is to know who is truly “gentill” in their own world, who deserves to be called “sire,” and who is actually a “losell,” as well as what constitutes lawful work. Certainly such issues would have provoked some anxiety among the merchants and artisans of late medieval England. If “work” is conventionally represented as physical labor (and more specifically agricultural labor), to what traditional estate—those who work, fight, or pray?—do merchants and artisanal service providers belong? Are they

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“gentill” or “losell[s]”? As Brian Gastle puts it (in interestingly gendered terms), “The birth of urban merchants in England gave rise to a form of postpartum depression, for while these merchants controlled an array of resources, their power was not institutionalized in the same way as that of the aristocracy or of the clergy.”89 Meanwhile Christ, though ultimately obedient to his Father’s will and accepting of the self-sacrificing role he must play, nevertheless shows a certain subtle defiance. After Judas gives him the kiss of betrayal, and even as Christ identifies himself to the soldiers who will lead him away, meek and obedient, he also blinds everyone present with a great light. “Allas, we are lost for leme of Qis light” (l. 258), says the Third Soldier, while the Third Jew admits, “I saugh neuer such a si{t / Me meruayles what it may mene” (ll. 268–69). It is almost certainly only a strange coincidence that the guild that frequently refused to bear their torches in the Corpus Christi procession here performs Christ’s own defiant light and power in the face of those who would control him, but one can imagine some sense of subversive satisfaction on the part of the cordwainers who were involved. Perhaps it even inspired their continued rebellions during the Corpus Christi processions of the 1480s and 1490s; thus, the play perhaps intended to effect social harmony might instead produce the very rebellion it wished to contain.90 Such a subversive moment is brief, however, and only symbolic. It did nothing to change the material circumstances of cordwainers in York. What is more, any subversive element is largely subsumed into a lesson in masculine behavior that espouses an acquiescent stillness even in the face of threats—a lesson that the civic powers would have been glad for the cordwainers to have learned. The Christian message of turning the other cheek is thus subsumed into and habitually performed in a drama in which the hierarchies and identities of urban masculinity are constructed and made seemingly natural for the participating men. The cycle plays intervened in the lives of the guildsmen to shape and normalize their identities as men and guild members, particularly as players in the public sphere. At the same time, however, the plays thus far have largely dramatized the failures of both homosocial communities and the domestic sphere even as they naturalize their existence. The resignification of masculine roles in home and public space throughout the plays thus produces shifting subjects and docile bodies open to power’s manipulation. Even when the plays attempt to teach a lesson in appropriate behavior or to depict an ideal male community—the Magi or the disciples at the Last Supper—the necessarily exclusionary tactics of such community formation, and their sometimes violent or deadly consequences, are ultimately revealed.91 From the rebellious angels to the fearful apostles, homosocial

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communities continuously fail to live up to God’s expectations of them. Such a dismal view of homosociality suggests considerable anxiety on the part of the all-male guilds that produced and performed these plays. Beckwith has insisted on the penitential aspects of these plays (particularly the York cycle), and it seems that the penance enacted is a partly selfreflexive and ironically self-perpetuating recognition of the failure of community, particularly the homosocial community of the guilds.92 The depiction of Christ’s trials and Passion only furthers this bleak vision of homosocial groups and the public sphere. There Christ is continually surrounded and tormented by groups of men, some of whom, such as the men who do the “work” of nailing him to the cross in the York Crucifixion play, clearly resemble a craft guild in most unflattering terms.93 The only consistently positive model of masculine behavior in the remaining plays is Christ. He faces his ordeals alone, thus turning away from any hope of the redemptive power of community. And for the most part, he also faces them silently and with forbearance. As I will argue in the next chapter, the dramatic Christ thus suggests one model of masculinity that is still with us today—one that values silent, solitary self-sacrifice and emotional distance— and it is one that undermines the very communal identities (the guilds and/or the collective “Body of Christ”) that the cycle wants to effect.

CHAPTER 4 ACTING LIKE A MAN: THE SOLITARY CHRIST AND MASCULINITY

hrist is understandably the central figure of the cycle plays; he is also the one recurring male character who is presented in domestic and public settings, in homosocial company, and in solitude, some of which I have discussed. He is the touchstone of male experience in these cycles, representing in one person many of the ideals and anxieties of masculinity that the other pageants have addressed. If he is, on the one hand, an exemplary model of masculinity, he is also a troubling one, for a man who is God as well as human is ultimately inimitable. Christ’s exemplarity and inimitability, as well as the limits of dramatic performance, create a Christ very different from the suffering Man of Sorrows of art and other devotional literature, much of which appealed to, was created for, or was patronized by women; all of which suggests a Christ who is a contested site of social and gendered representation and identity despite the communitarian ideals of the church as body of Christ. Though intending to bring the biblical world and Christ into the contemporary world of guildsmen, the drama paradoxically creates a Christ who is much more distant from the viewing subject than the Christ of other devotional works. Indeed, the Christ of drama is a figure of masculine alienation, divided from the company he shares within the dramatic narrative, and from the drama’s male sponsors and participants who long deeply for union with him. Like the guildsmen who perform him, Christ is made visibly present but also emotionally distant in this most public of art forms, wherein intimacy is sacrificed for the construction of masculine corporate identities.

C

Jesus as Man What makes Jesus particularly masculine, especially given that much recent criticism, following the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, is more apt to

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see Jesus as a feminine figure?1 Certainly, as Bynum and others have shown, there were strong traditions in devotional writing and the visual arts, produced by and for both men and women, that characterized Christ as feminine (as “feminine” is conventionally understood for late medieval culture). But as Bynum herself admits, not all affective devotion stressed feminine imagery. She cites the fourteenth-century mystic Ruysbroeck who studiously avoided such metaphors, an absence that Bynum says suggests an implicit critique of the tradition.2 And I fail to see such maternal or feminine imagery at work in the drama of Chester and York; nor do I see an emphasis on affective devotion to Christ’s suffering. Like Ruysbroeck, the York and Chester cycles may be offering a masculinist rebuttal to the feminized Christ. Scholars should not necessarily assume that every portrayal of the Crucifixion in late medieval culture participated in affective piety; rather, it seems it is time to attend to the variety of depictions of Christ, and to the contested nature of the body of Christ, as representation and as metaphor for Christian community. Different Christs are created for various ideological, aesthetic, and generic purposes; the York and Chester cycles differ from affective traditions of Christ in part because of the medium of drama. Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich, and others can use metaphors and imagery of a maternal Christ in writing— but in drama, where Jesus is portrayed by familiar men, his conventional maleness must have been inescapable. What is more, the familiarity of his face—indeed, all the faces on the pageant wagons in York and Chester— might have had a continuously alienating effect on the audience, drawing them out of any meditation on Christ’s suffering.3 And though Christ’s wounds could be symbolically depicted as vaginas in the visual arts, the theatrical, painted-on “wounds” of a man standing on a public stage, at a distance from his audience, would probably not immediately call to mind female sexual organs or menstrual blood, nor operate symbolically in such a way.4 This is not to say that the medieval audience could only perceive or participate in the plays literally or concretely. When special effects “blood” pours from Christ’s side in the Chester “Last Judgment” (24.428+SD), the man performing the role and creating the effect would have been one of the city’s weavers producing the pageant; thus, rather than a feminized body, what his neighbors, friends, family and fellows might have perceived was a ritualistic and highly stylized moment suggesting the self-sacrificing, and thus self-negating, nature of medieval masculinity.5 Similarly, while Aelred of Rievaulx can use complex imagery of John suckling at Christ’s breast during the Last Supper, to enact such an image in drama would have been shockingly indecorous.6 Instead, on the pageant wagon stage, the moment becomes one of homosocial intimacy, an idealized version of guild life itself.

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Alongside devotional traditions of a feminine Christ there is an alternative one of Christ as an exemplary male, and, pace Bynum, I think it is in that vein that the York and Chester dramas work. Certainly Leo Steinberg has convincingly shown such a tradition in late medieval and early modern visual arts.7 While the drama does not and cannot realistically represent the sexed body of Christ the way that the paintings in Steinberg’s book do, it does, however, address Christ’s masculinity as a socially determined, performative role. In short, I would argue that the drama is not merely lacking a feminine imagery for Christ but is also actively depicting Jesus as a figure of contemporary masculinity, seizing the figure of Christ for its own male-oriented purposes. But in a drama of competing, self-contradicting spheres of influence, conflicting ways of “becoming a man,” and possibilities of betrayal and failure, a single model of masculinity is likely to be muted in its effect. Indeed, the drama tacitly acknowledges that there are multiple masculinities from which to choose in the late medieval, urban world and offers Christ as an ideal but deeply fraught model. Nowhere is the opposition between models of masculinity more clear than in York Play 33, “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgment.” In the previous chapter, I discussed the York “Last Supper” play’s use of the word “manhede” to signify not only Christ’s humanity but also his masculinity. Here it is unambiguously used throughout to mean masculinity. Near the very beginning of the play, after Pilate has made a typically bombastic speech calling for silence from the audience (l. 3) and proclaiming his sovereign power (l. 4–5), Annas and Caiaphas praise and flatter Pilate in order to convince him to convict Christ. They appeal especially to his martial and political strength, equating it with masculine virility: “{aa, in faythe {e haue force for to fere hym, / Thurgh youre manhede and myght bes he marred” (ll. 29–30: Yes, in faith, you have power to intimidate him, / Through your manhood and might is he destroyed). Of course, this claim would have struck the contemporary audience as ironic, for it is through Christ’s power that such evil figures will be overcome and destroyed. Moreover, the irony suggests that it is through Christ’s manhood as well as his might that he will triumph. Later in the play, in one of the most dramatic moments in trial plays that are largely an abstract opposition of speech and silence, the conflict of masculine wills manifests itself visibly in the “battle of the banners.” When Pilate’s brutal soldiers bring Jesus before the court, Christ silently causes Annas and Caiaphas to prostrate themselves and the soldiers to dip the shafts of their banners as if bowing to Him (ll. 160–95). Dismayed, Pilate berates his soldiers, and the Fourth Soldier suggests that Pilate “Latte bryng the biggest men Qat abide in Qis land / Propirly in youre presence Qer pousté to preve” (ll. 205–206, emphasis mine). The “Preco” or Beadle immediately

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rushes out to procure “right bigg men” (l. 217), and proclaims the new soldiers the “biggest bernes Qat bildis in Qis burgh” (l. 228) and the “myghtiest men with manhode demened” (l. 231: endowed with manhood). When Caiaphas warns these new soldiers, “{e lusty ledis. . .Schappe {ou to Qer schaftis Qat so schenely her schyne” (ll. 240–41: Take hold of these shafts that so brightly here shine), or when Annas threatens, “Whoso schakis with schames he shendes” (l. 245: Whoever trembles, disgraces himself with shame), it is hard not to see the banners as phallic and the test of the soldiers’ manhood in sexual terms. Perhaps, given the visual artists’ interest in Christ’s sexualized male body (according to Steinberg), there is some element of sexual suggestiveness here. But even without it, what is certainly clear is that the solitary Christ has silently pitted himself against and defeated a raucous homosocial body of men representative of violent, martial masculinity and the discipline and punishment of law. By the very end of the play, the masculine terms are still in clear use, for Pilate praises the soldiers—who have since scourged Christ—as a “manly men{e” (l. 484). Those closing words also bring the issue of masculinity into the language and world of the guilds, suggesting a deep ambivalence about a manhood defined in terms of homosocial relations. Christ’s opposition to this model of masculinity—a solitary man against a group; a silent and still man against frenzied enemies—does not make Christ a figure of femininity. The behavior that so many critics describe as “passive,” and that some then label “feminine” (a deeply problematic equation of terms in and of itself), actually reflects a model of masculinity found, among other places, in conduct books aimed at mercantile classes in the late Middle Ages, as I will show in the next section of this chapter.8 That model of silent, self-sacrificing, Christian stoicism is a type of masculinity still with us today. Such masculinity also carries with it a certain distance and detachment for the man who lives up to it—a quality that the dramatic Christ shares. Thus through him masculinity is defined as self-negation, as absence. But such a model of masculinity complicates and conflicts with the very communitarian, homosocial culture creating and being created by the drama. At its root, the bourgeois masculinity that Christ represents is an inimitable ideal that reveals the contradictions and fissures in the urban guild culture that promulgates such an ideal. Taking it like a Man: Christ and Defiant Silence The era of the great drama cycles—the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—was also an era of increasing lay literacy in the upper and middle classes, and this growth stimulated the demand for books. Urban laymen, particularly merchants, made up part of this buying public, and one of the genres they

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seemed especially interested in was conduct literature. Claire Sponsler shows merchants, grocers, and even a freemason owning such literature and cites Jonathon Nicholls, who argues that “the majority of the extant manuscripts of the English poems more often imply that it was to the merchant/trader class that they appealed rather than to the children of the land-owning class.”9 Sponsler discusses two fifteenth-century conduct poems in particular in relation to drama—“How the Wise Man Taught His Son” and “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter” (ca. 1430). She sees in the conduct books’ emphasis on “nurture,” on learned behavior, a concomitant anxiety about the proliferation of models, some of them false or misleading. And she argues that the drama enacts that anxiety, showing that “imitation can prove much too powerful to be conscripted”; that the fears of medieval critics of theater, such as the writer of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, might have some virtue; that theater does indeed teach its audience how to “playe the vice.”10 As the reference to “vice” suggests, Sponsler is primarily interested in the relation of conduct literature to morality plays and does not address these texts vis-à-vis the biblical drama, though the anxiety over a proliferation of models is also present in the cycle plays, as I have been arguing here. Moreover, in her discussion of the conduct poems, Sponsler is largely interested in tracing anxieties regarding the feminine body, so our accounts differ in significant ways. Regarding “Wise Man,” she writes that because “the male is seen as by nature reasonable and controllable, linked innately with rationality,” the son has little work to do to discipline himself and is instead taught mainly how to discipline others.11 The daughter in “Good Wife,” on the other hand, is “rigorously instructed in how to regulate her bodily behavior.”12 I would point out, however, that the son is warned to control his tongue. The first warning comes early in the poem; indeed it is the first in a long list of behavior and circumstances the son should avoid: And sonne, where Qat euere Qou go, Be not to tale-wijs bi no wey, Pin owne tunge may be Qi foo; Perfore be waar what Qou doist say Where, & to whom, be ony wey, Take good hede if Qou do seie ou{t, For Qou my{te seie a word to-day Pat vij {eer after may be for-Qou{t. (ll. 25–32)13

This lesson is important enough that it is embedded in other lessons as well. For example, in admonishing his son to avoid “yuel qwestis” (l. 50: improper

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inquests), the father tells him, “Pou were betere be deef & dombe” (l. 53), and in advising meekness even in success, the father warns, “And booste not myche, it is but waast; / Bi boostynge, men mowe foolis knowe” (ll. 123–24). The dramatic Christ not only exemplifies these lessons, he reiterates and normalizes them, becoming simultaneously the Wise Father who serves as model and the Good Son who imitates that model, just as he is both God and Man for the believing audience. And in each pageant in York and Chester he is played by a different mercantile or artisan class man, who is both the intended consumer-student of conduct literature and the kind of man who might be responsible for the instruction of younger men, so that the audience sees an immediate replication of the model behavior and its discipline. Furthermore, in collapsing the roles of teacher and student, father and son, master and apprentice, the play furthers the ideological illusion that all guildsmen are natural inheritors of the culture and are guaranteed their patrimony, even while their labor and bodies are manipulated—in producing the plays and in producing goods—largely for the benefit of the civic authorities. For the poorer artisans, who might have lacked either the literacy or the money to be consumers of books, the drama is then their only exposure to this ideology of masculine behavior; it is the means through which they are disciplined in it themselves. What better model with which to shape them than Christ? The model the guildsmen are offered is a model of self-sacrifice, of self-erasure, of absence—in other words, of compliance with normative ideals of masculinity—in the name of fortitude. Christ is an early exemplar of the Foucauldian “docile body.”14 It is hard to ignore the extraordinary silence of Jesus in the mystery plays, particularly in York. In York Play 31, “Christ Before Herod,” he never speaks a single word, and in the other trial and Passion plays he speaks once or twice at most, usually for a single stanza. In Chester he is similarly laconic, usually speaking less than 10 percent of a play’s lines. Every critic who discusses the Passion of Christ in the plays comments on this fact. For the most part, these critics see the silence in theological terms.15 More recently, Ruth Evans has understood the silence as “latent power and authority” that derive from the tradition of Christ as warrior-hero.16 But Christ’s silence also works on a level more immediate to the sponsoring guildsmen. As mentioned, Christ not only imitates the admonitions of the conduct books to hold his “owne tunge” and remain “deef & dombe”—indeed, the Chester Herod even describes him as “dombe and deafe” (Play 16, “The Trial and Flagellation,” l. 189)—but also delivers those admonitions himself. In the midst of the frenzied trial plays of York, Christ’s few words are about language itself and the need to moderate it. In Play 30, “Christ Before Pilate 1,” Jesus speaks only four

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lines, late in the play, in response to Pilate’s questions about His identity. They have the following exchange: Pilatus:

Jesus:

And Qerfore as a chiftene Y charge Qe Iff Qou be Criste Qat Qou telle me, And God sone Qou grughe not to gruante Qe, For Qis is Qe matere Qat Y mene. Pou saiste so Qiselue. I am sothly Qe same Here wonnyng in worlde to wirke al Qi will. My fadir is faithfull to felle all Qi fame; Withouten trespas or tene am I taken Qe till. (ll. 473–80, emphasis mine)

Christ gives no new information, but only rephrases what Pilate has already said, drawing attention to Pilate’s active tongue. Though forcibly placed on trial “Withouten trespas or tene,” he manages nevertheless to avoid—or at least subvert—an “yuel qwestis,” as the Wise Man has advised.17 In his second appearance before Pilate, Christ again speaks only once, in response to Pilate’s order, but ironically speaks to warn against the dangers of speech: Euery man has a mouthe Qat made is on molde In wele and in woo to welde at his will, If he gouerne it gudly like as God wolde For his spirituale speche hym thar not to spill. And what gome so gouerne it ill, Full vnhendly and ill sall he happe (33.300–305, emphasis mine)

Such words could have come directly from a conduct poem such as “Wise Man,” particularly in its references to good and ill self-governance. Christ himself is the ideal urban male subject who fashions himself not by models of good governance, but as a model himself, as a mirror to all, but especially to “euery man” and “what gome so.” Through the reiteration of yearly performance, the players habitualize and naturalize the lesson, even as they dissonantly experience themselves as falling short of that lesson for performing and speaking publicly through the play itself. As the plays would have it, there is a “latent power and authority” (to borrow Evans’s words) in Christ’s obedience to the ideology of conduct.18 The plays use this appealing image of masculine power exhibited by Christ’s rectitude to shape the players themselves into docile bodies. In Christ’s silence and in the words he does speak—which amount to a devaluing of speech—there seems a defiant quality, while the actions of the plays suggest a strength willfully held in check. In both

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cycles, he refuses to show deference to Pilate, the Pharisees, or Herod. In York Play 30, the soldiers and Pilate’s son chastise Christ for not bowing before Pilate. “This lotterelle liste noght my lorde to lowte,” says the First Soldier (l. 381: This scoundrel does not care to bow to my lord19), so the Second Soldier decides Jesus is in need of “a lessoune to lerne of oure lare” (l. 386: our lore), now ironically suggesting the behavioral lessons of the conduct books. This exchange prompts Pilate’s son to scold Jesus for being “vngentill” (l. 389: ungentle) and incapable of acting “curtayse” (l. 390), and to ask him scathingly, “Why falles Qou no{t flatte here, foule falle Qe, / For ferde of my fadir so free?” (ll. 392–93). The son, too, uses the language of courtesy literature, but he seems to have failed to learn its lessons himself; Pilate, on the other hand, treats Christ with respect to this point and tells him “Be no{t abasshed but boldely boune to Qe barre” (l. 399: Don’t be frightened, but go boldly to the bar). Though Pilate mistakes Christ’s silence as fear, his command is also an implicit stage direction, suggesting the stoic strength that Christ must exhibit throughout these trials and even, as much as is possible, in his torture and execution. The process of these plays constructs, here and throughout the trial and Passion plays, a masculinist model of Christ that also serves the purpose of habituating the men performing to a model of silent forbearance. That forbearance can be seen throughout the plays in the mapping of Christ’s bodily behavior. Implicit stage directions requiring his rectitude occur throughout the York and Chester Passion sequences. In the Chester “Trial and Flagellation,” Herod proclaims, “Such a stalwarde never before me stood, / so stowt and stern is hee” (ll. 181–82).20 For Herod the description is ironic, since he has also just called Christ “wood” or crazy (l. 179), but for the audience the idea of Christ as a “stalwart,” a brave and valiant man who stands his ground stoutly and sternly, is evident truth. Indeed, Christ himself tells Pilate in the same play that if this world were His realm, He would “stryve” with Pilate “nowe here / and lead with. . .such powere / should pryve [Pilate] of [his] praye” (ll. 269–70). However, Christ says, “my might in this manere / will I not prove” (ll. 271–72). He will prove it instead with his resurrection; his power is deferred but not relinquished, for even those who torture and kill him are working according to his plan. Christ in the Chester cycle, according to Travis, “always acts, as it were, from above: he is Christus rex—aloof, commanding, and perhaps severe.”21 And in York as well, as Evans notes, the plays seem to be drawing as much, if not more, on an older tradition of Christ as warrior-hero, as on contemporary images of the Man of Sorrows.22 But, of course, the men performing the plays have no recourse to such “latent power” and deferral, no actual choice not to “prove” their “might.” For them the play offers an illusion of deferred

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power—or at least reward in the afterlife—in exchange for their own docility in the present. That docility (or rectitude, as it is performed) appears in contradistinction to Christ’s more histrionic opponents. Indeed, both Christ’s silence and the few words he does speak seem calculated to whip his enemies into violent frenzies. In York Play 31, Herod is so angered by Christ’s refusal to entertain him with some “farles” (“ferlies” or tricks) and “games” (ll. 118–19) that he loses all control of his sense and his speech. Herod begins relatively politely, addressing Christ in a code-switching mix of French and English: “Siey, beene-venew in bone fay, / Ne plesew & a parle remoy?” (ll. 145–46: Say, bienvenue in bon foi / Ne please you a parler a moi?23). But after Christ’s continual refusal to speak and play along with Herod’s humiliating games, Herod is reduced to nonsensical babbling: We schalle haue gaudiss full goode and games or we goo. Howe likis Qa? Wele lorde? Saie. What, deuyll, neuere a dele? I faute in my reuerant in otill moy, I am of fauour, loo, fairer be ferre. Kyte oute yugilment. Vta! Oy! Oy! Be any witte Qat Y watte it will waxe werre. (ll. 237–41)

The short bursts of expression—“How likes thou? Well lord? Say”—illustrate Herod’s growing frustration that ultimately reduces him to mad paralinguistic utterances such as “Uta! Oy! Oy!” Christ’s playing the fool turns Herod’s words into actual foolishness. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes, “Herod’s descent into raucous fury ensures that nothing further he says can hold that weight of authority. . .to which he is so passionately attached.”24 Thus the lessons of fortitude (or rather, docility) that the players receive are reinforced by the depiction of excessive language as merely so much humiliating noise.That one of the guildsmen had to play Herod in his infantilizing frustration serves to remind that player of the work he must do to discipline his own male tongue; that he makes such publicly foolish utterances himself in his performance demonstrates his failure to discipline his own barbarous tongue, a failure that could potentially mark him as excluded from community and masculinity as Herod is. Herod (and the guildsman who played him) is not the only one of Christ’s enemies to be manipulated thus into “unmanly” behavior. Much of the violence of the plays comes directly in response to Christ’s “stalwart” refusal to react in any way. The soldiers and Jews of both York and Chester comment constantly on Christ’s fortitude. For example, in York Play 33,

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“Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgment,” the soldiers are so stunned by Christ’s utter silence that they comment on it twice in succession: Second Miles: Fra oure skelpes not scatheles he skyppes. Third Miles: {itt hym list not lyft vp his lippis And pray vs to haue pety on his paunch. Fourth Miles: To haue petie of his paunche he propheres no prayere. (ll. 369–72)

The soldiers’ response to such amazement is to increase the brutality of their attack as if to force at least involuntary sound out of Christ. Says the Fourth Soldier, “I am straunge in striffe for to stere {ou” and the First Soldier concludes, “Pus with choppes Qis churll sall we chastye” (ll. 376–77). These are the same soldiers whom earlier Christ had caused to lose control of their banners, and thus their bodies, so that their brutality also seems to be an attempt to do the same to Christ. While their sheer force does cause him to lose consciousness twice (ll. 364, 383), he never does anything that he has not already willingly accepted as his duty. He remains a willfully well-governed, self-fashioned man. Even Caiaphas, early on, recognizes the quality of self-control and manipulation to Christ’s performance. In York’s “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas” (Play 29), Caiaphas is the first to remark upon Christ’s strange silence. “His langage is lorne!” (l. 278: He has lost the power to speak!), exclaims Caiaphas. But shortly thereafter he realizes the silence is a choice and warns, “and liste hym be nyse for Qe nones / And heres howe we haste to rehete hym” (ll. 284–85, emphasis mine); in other words: if he chooses to act foolish now, then watch how quickly we will attack/rebuke him. If both sides are self-consciously aware of the other’s tactics—and make the audience aware, as well—then the action becomes a contest of wit and will. Christ refuses to play the games his enemies torment him with, but he leads them right into his own more significant game. Though the enemies seem to win, they only succeed in enacting Christ’s will and ensuring his success. Moreover, some of the guildsmen enacting this scene must thus publicly perform the “unmanly,” humiliating, losing behavior of Caiaphas and Annas, although the player in the role of Christ thus has the enviable triumphant position. Again, they are all habituated into desiring the silence and forbearance of Christ in their own behavior. The “latent power and authority” of Christ’s silence in the trial and Passion plays is made explicit in the plays of his triumph, the “Harrowing of Hell” and the “Resurrection,” which, along with the “Last Judgment,” are as important to the spectacle and tone of the cycles as the trial and

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Passion episodes.25 In the “Harrowing” and “Resurrection” plays, in both York and Chester, Christ still remains largely silent, but He is now more clearly the “warrior-hero” that Evans says he evokes in his Passion.26 The silence is thus more fully associated with might. The Chester “Harrowing of Hell” (Play 17) and the York “Resurrection” (Play 38) are particularly instructive. The Christ of Chester’s “Harrowing” play is clearly a male character and a figure of authority who is addressed by masculine terms such as “lord” (l. 1) and “king” (l. 200). Indeed, in David’s words, Christ is a warrior-king, “That lord the which almightie ys, / in warre no power like to his, / of all blys ys gretest kynge” (ll. 198–200). Even to the demons, Christ is “styffe and stronge” (echoing Herod’s “stowt and sterne” in the “Trial” play, 16.182) and “maysterlyke” (ll. 121–22), connecting his power to guild culture. What is more, Jesus is once again surrounded by activity and speech, while He remains mostly silent. The patriarchs praise and thank Christ in formal stanzas reminiscent of the welcoming words of the citizens in the “Entry into Jerusalem” episode—thus recapitulating the guildsmen’s act of welcoming Christ to his death—while Satan and the Demons run around in a panic, crying “Owt, owt! Alas, Alas!” (ll. 141–42), just one example of their emotional outbursts, once more drawing attention to the unmanly spectacle most of these players make of themselves. But Christ speaks rarely, and mainly to order the gates of Hell open: Open up hell-gates anonne, ye prynces of pyne everychon, that Godes Sonnes may in gonne, and the kinge of blys. (ll. 153–56) Open up hell-yates yett I saye, ye prynces of pyne that be present, and lett the kinge of blys this waye that he may fulfill his intent. (ll. 193–66)

His words are words of power, a speech-act that produces what he commands, words chosen carefully and spoken succinctly to impart the greatest impact, just as his few words during his trial and Passion were. Like the York Christ who willfully lays himself down on the cross without any fear (35.75–76), the Chester Christ is a man of little speech but purposeful action, with a specific “intent” to “fulfill,” as the civic authorities might have wished all guildsmen to be. Likewise, the resurrected Christ in York is a silently powerful figure. Most of the play is filled with unproductive, unmanly, activity. Caiaphas

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and Annas fret over the possibility of a resurrection, or at least the trick of one; the soldiers guarding the tomb brag about their prowess and then later worry about their failure and subsequent punishment; and the women mourn the loss of their beloved, failing to have faith in his resurrection. In the midst of all this noise, Christ rises. On the page it is easy to miss—as my students generally do—but properly staged it is an arresting moment. As Pamela Sheingorn shows, the dramaturgy would likely have recalled depictions in the visual arts in which Christ “plants his foot on one of the sleeping soldiers as a stepping stone.”27 These illustrations, she argues, “stress a mood of triumph” for the “theme of treading on one’s enemies occurs repeatedly in the Old Testament and is associated with Christ in the New.”28 In the 1998 production of the York plays at Toronto, this iconography was used, as was a gold-painted, sunburst-shaped mask for Christ to emphasize his divine triumph over the human flesh the soldiers had tried to beat into submission. The crowd at that point in the cycle was large and full of inattentive people, but the strange silence caught everyone’s attention— in a way the previous activity had not—and held it rapt. A sublime Christ walked through the crowds, which parted without being told. It was a thrilling dramatic moment, indeed, but it also illustrated the disciplining habits of the cycle, which frequently make use of characters exiting and entering through the crowds, and which shape even the members of the audience to their purposes. Again, the silence of Christ in these moments only reinforces the implicit authority it held during his Passion. In contrast, in both Towneley and N-Town, the resurrected Christ pauses to speak a lengthy monologue in which he calls attention to his wounds and suffering in language related to visual depictions of the Man of Sorrows or the Image of Pity.29 York has no such monologue, and Chester’s is of a very different character, emphasizing the mystical Body of Christ of transubstantiation and his divine role as the giver of life (ll. 154–85). Clearly the York and Chester cycles, because of their production and performance by a masculine culture, are interested in creating a different image of the resurrected Christ: triumphant, victorious, even virile, not perpetually suffering for man’s sins.30 Of course, such an ideology—of demonstrating the power latent in silence, and fortitude in tribulation for the sake of deferred or reserved power—would have conveniently served the mercantile governments of York and Chester, the prime movers behind the cycles. Christ may seem defiant in his silent response to his enemies, but his behavior enacts bourgeois manners as urged in conduct poems such as “How the Wise Man Taught His Son.” The plays thus suggest at least one disciplining ideology at work, for which the intended audience was in part the guilds performing

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them. Those guilds in charge of the various plays of Christ’s Passion and resurrection in both cities were largely minor artisan guilds, some of which (as we have seen) may have been divided, identified, and organized expressly for the production of the plays.31 Moreover, many of them argued with other guilds over respective financial responsibilities for the pageants or complained to the civic council that they lacked the funds to support their own play.32 Given such discord, the governing merchants may have thought the silence of Christ to be indeed exemplary and may have purposely assigned potentially troublemaking guilds to perform that silence and its histrionic enemies. Christ’s silence and fortitude in the face of such “yuel qwestis” and his subsequent torture and death purposefully create a very different character from the Christ of lyric poetry and private devotional texts. Unlike those Christs, the dramatic Jesus is aloof, disconnected from the societies that swirl around him in constant activity, and he does not invite the audience or the players to identify with him. Indeed, from the cross in the York “Crucifixion” he asks the “men Qat walkis by waye or strete” (35.253) to “fully feele nowe. . .Yf any mournyng may be meete, / Or myscheue mesured vnto myne” (35.256–58). Although he asks them to “feele,” it is so that they recognize that nothing that they have experienced comes close to the pain he has suffered, nor can this representation effectively portray it. His pain, like God himself, is ineffable. Such alienation, as opposed to identification, is endemic to the York and Chester cycles and participates in the construction of normative masculinity as equally aloof and distant from affective ties. “Our mayster ys from us gonne”: Christ as the Distant Man While the moment of the resurrection in the York and Chester cycles is a triumphant and thrilling one, it nevertheless emphasizes the “apartness” of Christ. Like his Father before him in the Old Testament plays, he makes contact with his people—his “meynee,” as they are often called—but he still remains aloof from them. Such distance is made explicit in the “apparition” stories and in his ascension, where longing is the overwhelming theme and tone and Christ is, in Beckwith’s words, an “absent presence.”33 Beckwith reads the theater of resurrection in theological and sacramental terms, arguing that “it is in the drama of appearances and disappearances, exits and entrances, absences and presences, signification and reference in theatrical forms of life that the question central to sacramentality itself is asked: How do we encounter the glorified God who has withdrawn himself from our sight?”34 I wish to add to Beckwith’s reading. In the

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“strenuous and difficult encounters. . .[with] the strangeness”35 of the resurrected Christ in the apparition plays, the difficulties are not only theological but social and cultural as well. These plays enact masculinity itself—particularly a public, (homo)social masculinity—as an “absent presence” and ask how a man may be fully masculine and yet also present in public and domestic life. The plays and episodes dealing with the pilgrims to Emmaus, Thomas and his doubts, and Christ’s ascension are particularly instructive. In all of these plays, though the disciples proceed from “tristia to gaudium” in their recognition of the truth of the resurrection, there is still an overwhelming sense of loss and longing, even while Christ is still present among them.36 The Chester pilgrims Cleophas and Luke are particularly upset by their encounter with Christ. The moment of recognition, as in York, is also the moment of Christ’s disappearance (19.124+SD), causing the disciples to mourn his absence rather than express joy in his resurrection. Like many of the unredeemed or evil characters, they cry out with unrestrained emotion: Lucas: Cleophas:

What! Where ys hee that sate us bye? Alas, he ys awaye. Alas, alas, alas, alas! This was Jesus in this place. By breakinge the bread I knew his face but nothing there before. (ll. 126–31)

They lament, “our mayster ys from us gonne” (l. 138), a fact that they will have to tell their “brethren everychon” (l. 137). They particularly “make. . .monne” (l. 140) that they sat with him and yet had no knowledge of his presence “tyll he was passed awaye” (l. 143). Such a lament reflects the condition of all contemporary Christians, none of whom have been privileged to know Christ until well after he “was passed awaye,” and the drama almost intensifies this devotional angst, for the playing of Jesus on the stage by men familiar to the audience must have only reminded them of the presence they lacked. The players and audience are reminded that they are blessed because they “leeve and never see” (l. 255), but their lack must have been as palpable as the disciples’ longing to touch and hold Christ in their presence. This longing also says something more particular about the contemporary male condition, especially since it is couched in the language of “master[s]” and “brethren” throughout Chester Play 19. Christ and the disciples at once suggest the ideal guild and its limits, for Christ is a distant master who, as much a part of a masculine hierarchy as his apprentices are, must obey the will of his own master, his father. As in

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the story of Abraham and Isaac, all men, Christ included, constantly look to their fathers and masters for guidance, only to be abandoned or sacrificed as those masters look to their masters. Only God the Father has none superior to him, and he remains distant throughout the Passion and resurrection plays. In the York version of “Emmaus,” the disciples’ sense of loss and alienation at the moment of recognition is similar to Chester’s and is couched in the language of the guilds. Even when Jesus is present with them, because they fail to recognize him, they lament: “For mornyng of oure maistir Qus morne wee, / As wightis Qat are wilsome Qus walke we” (ll. 85–86). Without a master they are lonely and desolate (“wilsome”) even in the presence of each other and a pilgrim like them. And at the moment of recognition and Christ’s re-disappearance, the First Pilgrim exclaims, “Ow, I trowe some torfoyr [disaster] is betidde vs! / Saie, where is Qis man?” (ll. 160–61). To recognize Christ’s presence is a disaster for it only brings with it a recognition of his subsequent absence. The play also ends with the most literally self-reflexive moment of an already selfconscious cycle: “Here may we notte melle more at Qis tyde, / For prossesse of plaies Qat precis in plight” (ll. 191–92, emphasis mine). As in Chester, the players and audience are reminded that they are like the pilgrims to Emmaus one hundred times removed, even more distant from God’s presence in the world. The lines are also a statement of the guildsmen’s tangled and conflicting responsibilities: they, too, may no longer concern themselves (“melle”) with this intimate scene, because of the procession of plays that presses upon them “in plight,” in urgency. Though literally referring to the pageants that still waited behind Play 40 to be played in their turn, the lines also suggest the central and sometimes overwhelming responsibility the cycles formed in guildsmen’s public lives, creating distance between them and their domestic lives, even as they are publicly present to all who see them perform. Thus the line also speaks self-reflexively to the condition of men and medieval masculinity, which must be resistant to display and spectacle and must withdraw from overly affective ties. The plays of Thomas’s doubts also enact a self-reflexive dialectic of masculine presence and absence. Chester combines the episode with the appearances to the other disciples, including the two pilgrims to Emmaus discussed above, while York combines it only with the appearance to the core apostles. York Play 41 opens in woe—“Allas, to woo Qat we were wrought” (l. 1), says Peter—and though it ends with Christ’s blessing of his “men{e” (l. 198), the apostles are unsettled throughout, as they will continue to be in the following “Ascension” play. Indeed, Christ’s fleeting and intangible appearances nearly drive them to distraction. He appears at first in a dazzling light, one moment “Shynand so bright” (l. 22) and the

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next “vanysshed Qus. . .oute of [their] sight” (ll. 23–24). The light’s mysterious appearance and disappearance, says John, “makith vs madde” (l. 26). And before there is time to enact the apostles’ joy, Christ departs and Thomas enters, beginning the mourning and doubt all over again. He, too, is “mased and madde” (l. 98) with the loss of his “maistir moste of myght” (l. 104), and though the other apostles try to convince him of Christ’s resurrection, he contends with them, exclaiming, “What saie {e men? Allas, for tene, / I trowe {e mang” (ll. 131–32: I believe you [are] confused ) and “youre witte it wantis” (l. 167). Thomas ultimately sees and touches Christ and rejoices, but the intimacy is brief, lasting only for the exchange of four stanzas. After a play that shifts constantly between joy and loss, presence and absence, Christ closes the pageant with the conventional lesson: “Blissed be they euere / Pat trowis haly in my rising right, / And saw it neuere” (ll. 190–92). In dramatizing this scene, the York and Chester plays enact a central paradox of the drama: the attempt to portray Christ’s presence in the medieval world, in particular in guild culture, ultimately reminds the players and audience only of their distance from him and from each other. For, after giving the conventional lesson of believing without seeing, Christ then blesses and tells the “brethren” to go forth “ouereall in ilke a contré clere” to preach of his rising (ll. 193–97). Not only is Christ’s presence fleeting, but they are all now to separate and go forth individually, as Christ did before them, distant from their homes, communities, and each other. Their constitution as a social group and their identities as members of a social body are equally insubstantial and impermanent. Again and again, the apparition plays open in states of mourning and loss, and even with Christ’s presence, they never entirely seem to shake that feeling of distance. One would expect it to be resolved in the “Ascension” plays, in the fulfillment of Christ’s mission and God’s will to save humankind from sin. And yet, here too, the tone is melancholic. In Chester, even as Christ is still among the apostles, James pines, “when us lyst beste to have him here, / anonne hee ys awaye” (20:31–32) and Christ recognizes that they are all greatly “sore in longinge” (l. 8). Once again the homosocial community cannot be sustained, for the apostles must disperse into “eych countree / to the worldes end” to preach Christ’s word (ll. 71–72). York’s “Ascension” play develops this tone further, assigning the longing to Christ, as well as to the apostles and Mary, all of whose “hartis hase heuynes” (l. 162). After brief opening speeches from Peter, John, and Mary, in which the men especially show themselves already full of “missing of [their] maistir” (l. 9) even before the ascension, Christ delivers a formal speech of eighteen stanzas, the first third addressed to “Almyghty God, my fadir free” (l. 33). The word “free,” while still meaning

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“generous” and “noble,” also sets the speech in the context of masculine civic life, and the rest of the prayer sounds as much like a petition of a mercantile son to his materially powerful father as like the words of one part of the godhead to the other. Jesus asserts that he has done his father’s “bidding” (l. 34) and has made known and glorified his father’s “name” (l. 35). Now Jesus asks that God grant him his “bone” (l. 38: boon): to have endless life dwelling with his father (ll. 39–40). It is a profoundly simple wish, moving in its evocation of a son’s desire to know his distant father. Indeed, simply “To knawe Qe, fadir,” says Jesus, is life that has no end (ll. 41–42). Through Christ, the cycles not only offer an ideal of masculine behavior, but also enact an archetypal psychological drama of distant father-figures and longing sons, one that must have resonated for medieval guildsmen as much as it might for men today. A Man’s Place The ambivalence about the efficacy of drama to bring Christ into a “presence” with the community is also wrapped up in anxieties about that community itself, particularly guild culture, public life, and homosocial groups. Moreover, if Christ is the epitome of masculinity, then the ideal is the solitary man who acts largely in defiance of organized, public bodies of men who would control him and turn him into an object of spectacle. Such an ideal works in contrast to the communal and spectacular impulses of the drama itself and suggests an underlying anxiety about its very performance. As the last chapter showed, the cycles demonstrate again and again a discomfort with homosocial groups, reflective of the guilds’ uneasiness with their own formation and organization as corporations. Such discomfort reaches its peak in the Passion and resurrection plays as Christ is constantly surrounded by groups of men intent on doing him mortal harm, men who are often identified by the guild language so frequent throughout the cycles. For instance, the York soldiers in the “Road to Calvary” plays described themselves as a “companye” (Play 34, ll. 40, 347), while the Jews in the Chester “Trial and Flagellation” (Play 16) and “Crucifixion” (Play 16-A) plays are a “companye” (16.16+37), a “fellowshippe” (16.138) or “fellow[s]” (16.81, 85, 89, 131, 136, 201, and 209), or a “meanye” (16A.423). Even Satan and his demons in Chester’s “Harrowing of Hell” (Play 17) are a “fellowshippe” (17.123). The apostles are the only body of men in Christ’s life with any positive value, although by the end of the plays they disperse to spread the Gospel throughout the world. Moreover, Judas came from their ranks, signifying the potential of any group to produce evil. But the clearest example of the homosocial guild group’s potential for evil is in the dramatization of the “Crucifixion,” particularly as written and

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performed in York. A number of critics have commented on the ways in which the soldiers who do the “werke” (35.25) of the Crucifixion resemble a craft guild.38 As Kathleen Ashley summarizes the arguments, “Most critics have made sense of these dramatic actions by arguing that the audience would be lured into identifying with the soldiers [because the soldiers resemble men such as them] and then realize their implication in sin.”39 But as Ashley shows, tremendous contradictions arise “out of the plays’ representation of the world of work, its workplace politics and its ethic of diligence and ingenuity” when the workmen who see themselves as skilled artisans, with no one “more wighter” or more robust than they (35.202), perform the brutal task of nailing and raising Christ on a cross, and do so with little skill.40 “The effect of this semiotic conflict,” Ashley writes, “is to force an exploration of the idea of work itself. . .In Lévi-Strauss’ terms, the dramatizations are ‘good to think with’ for they allow members of the York audience to be reflexive about their own socioeconomic or political arrangements.”41 The social arrangements in the “Crucifixion” play that the audience and players might be reflexive about include its homosociality. Ashley does not comment on the all-male cast of the play, although Ruth Evans does.42 But Evans does not connect that homosocial gathering to the guilds. As I see it, the York “Crucifixion” is self-reflexive not only about the nature of work, but also about the nature of guild organization and homosocial community. It is “good to think with” because, like many plays before it, it interrogates the exclusionary and violent tactics of gendered community formation, and this time the person excluded is Christ. The play opens with the First Soldier informing his fellows of their task at hand. They have been given this assignment by the “lordis and leders of owre lawe” (l. 4), just as the cycle plays have been assigned to the guilds by their own leaders, again forging uneasy connections between the players and the play’s narrative. Once their task is established, they set out eagerly to “boldely do Qis dede” and “late kille Qis traitoure strange” (35.31–32). Though Christ has been called a “traitoure” throughout the trial plays, in the context of men concerned that “oure wirkyng be noght wronge” (33.26), the epithet suggests a betrayal that is not only political but also socioeconomic. This is especially true given that Jesus is a “traitoure strange,” which describes him as a forceful disrupter of social hierarchies and institutions. But he is, of course, only a traitor from the point of view of the soldiers and the men for whom they work. From the point of view of the audience, Jesus is the true worker of God’s will. And he is not passively excluded from this homosocial community; he rather chooses to stand apart, for he willingly assists in his own fatal banishment when he lays himself down (33.75–76). Given this willingness and the fact that for most of the play Christ is not visible to the crowds (for he is nailed on the cross

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while it lies on either the bed of the pageant wagon or on the ground) there is a sense that Christ rejects such a visible homosocial community in order to perform his own work independently. After all, as he says from the cross, “What Qei wirke wotte Qai noght” (33.261). Since Jesus is inarguably the hero of the cycle plays, through him (and the figural types before him, such as Noah) the plays valorize an independent masculine work ethic over a communal one. Thus they implicitly express the guilds’ ambivalence concerning the corporate organization that has been largely imposed on them. The depiction of Christ as emotionally reticent may serve the purposes of power and its desire for docile bodies in the potentially disruptive public sphere of guild culture, but Christ’s distance as resistance to group hegemony also paradoxically contradicts and subverts the civic government’s urges to collect, group, associate, and hierarchize their citizens. As shown throughout my argument, the cycle plays express a near constant discomfort with the public, homosocial sphere; in its place they hold up as a model of masculinity a solitary man, Jesus, who stands in opposition to such civic corporations. And like many of the men in the plays, he also longs for an intimate connection with God and for peace with his family—in this case, both represented by one person: God the Father. In portraying these desires, the plays repeat the ideology of conduct poems such as “How the Wise Man Taught His Son.” In that poem, the first thing the wise man tells his son is to pray to God each morning, before he does anything else (ll. 18–21). The second point is to guard one’s tongue (ll. 25–32), as discussed above. Next, the father warns his son to be always busy, to resist idleness (ll. 33–40). But apparently not all business is good, for the father’s next advice is: Desire noon office for to beere, For Qan it wole noon oQir bee, Pou muste Qi nei{boris displese & dere, Or ellis Qou muste Qi silf forswere (ll. 42–45)

Public office—of which pageant master was one position—alienates a man from his neighbors and himself. The model man must instead look after himself and his household, as the rest of the poem details. Thus, before dying, Jesus in both cycles commends his mother, Mary, to the care of John (York Play 36, “The Death of Christ,” ll. 153–56; Chester Play 16-A, “The Crucifixion,” ll. 325–29), and in York, John reaffirms his commitment to the Virgin Mary at Christ’s “Ascension” (Play 42, ll. 193–214). And finally, at the end of the York cycle and the symbolic end of time, when Christ returns to earth to judge all souls, he calls the good souls “my blissid

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childre” or “mi chosen childir” (Play 47, ll. 277, 309, 365). Though the endearment is common in devotional literature, in the context of these plays’ male fantasies and anxieties about the household and social relations, to end with the image of the redeemed souls as the children of Christ, a loving father who has sacrificed himself for them (ll. 245–76) is indeed significant. In the end, it seems, man’s place is in the home. Conclusions The figure of Christ brings together the fraught, conflicting, paradoxical impulses of the plays and their conceptions of masculinity as expressed throughout the cycles. In the plays’ attempts to bring Christ and the patriarchs into the medieval world, particularly into guild culture, they serve paradoxically to remind the players and audience of their distance from these people, their God, and each other. Likewise the plays shape guildsmen into public figures but make masculinity an “absent presence,” spectacularly visible but emotionally distant. The public responsibilities created by the plays—by shaping and reinforcing guild identity, by requiring the guilds’ participation—seem, to the guildsmen, to conflict with and even prevent the fulfillment of domestic responsibilities, while the homosocial bonds of guild brotherhood seem to preclude heterosocial ones. If craft manhood forms itself in opposition to boyhood, as Karras argues, and if guild masculinity depends on hierarchy, then are all such men still simultaneously boys who must answer to a father (or, in Christ’s case, the Father)?43 If masculinity must, according to the plays’ model of Christ, eschew the spectacular and the histrionic, then in what ways are the guildsmen’s performances at all “manly”? These are the questions the plays ask and largely leave unanswered. In attempting to map out a masculine Christ and a masculine drama, the York and Chester cycles have instead created a “drama of masculinity.” That is, the plays underscore the contingent, shifting, performative nature of masculinity. In the late medieval world, masculinity consisted of many roles, some in conflict with each other, few capable of being performed simultaneously, and many unclear in their boundaries no matter how much replayed over the centuries. Above all, the plays demonstrate and reiterate that multiplicity and confusion. Even as they attempt to discipline masculine bodies and shape individual and corporate identity, they also paradoxically reveal masculinity as something performed or played, as a show or a game, and therefore unessential, unstable, and not in earnest: something easily appropriated, usurped, or lost.

NOTES

Introduction 1. For the reader new to this subject, the particular dramas under discussion were one– to three–day long cycles of biblical episodes performed in the streets of York and Chester by their merchant and craft guilds. The earliest documentary evidence of York’s cycle is from 1376, while Chester’s first is from 1422. York’s annual productions ceased in the 1560s, but Chester’s last performance of its more occasional cycle was not until 1575. Clearly these were Tudor or early modern plays as much as they were medieval plays, but I have chosen to refer to them as “medieval” because their impetus lies in pre-Reformation devotional and festive culture. The standard texts of the plays, from which all citations in this book come, are: The Chester Mystery Cycle, 2 Vols., ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, EETS s.s. 3 and 9 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), and The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982). The best general introductions to these plays (and to other forms of medieval drama) can be found in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and in A New History of Early English Drama, ed. John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 2. To my knowledge, I am the first to assert that York and Chester belong to their own subgenre of religious drama because of their self-conscious interest in masculinity. Indeed, very little attention has been paid to the construction of masculinity in the cycles, with the exception of an article by Ruth Evans, “Body Politics: Engendering Medieval Cycle Drama,” Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 112–39, discussed below. The study of masculinity in the Middle Ages in general, however, is widespread. Ruth Mazo Karras has produced the only book-length monograph concerning medieval masculinities, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), in which she explores social constructions of masculinity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in three distinct classes of men: knights, university clerics, and craftsmen. Karras’s chapter on craftsmen lays some of the historical and cultural groundwork for my more specific arguments about craft- and

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merchant-produced drama, and I will turn to her book frequently. However, because Karras’s study uses London as representative of English guilds, and broadly speaks about a “shared” guild culture across Europe, many of her assertions about guild structure and culture actually do not apply to York and Chester, where guild life was much less systematic than generally assumed—as I will discuss in chapter 1. In addition to Karras’s work, five notable volumes of essays on masculinity in medieval studies are Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994),Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997), Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (London and New York: Longman, 1999), Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999), and Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004). There is also Michael Mangan’s Staging Masculinity: History, Gender, Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) in which he devotes a chapter to medieval drama, more specifically, the Anglo-Norman and Latin church drama Ordo Repraesentationis Adae, the Brome version of The Sacrifice of Isaac, the morality plays The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Everyman, and Robin Hood folk plays. In seeking to write a history of masculinity on the English stage, Mangan makes broad generalizations and, unfortunately, repeats long overturned ideas about the “development” of vernacular drama from the church to the street, the supposed control of the Church over all drama, and the “didactic” nature of medieval drama. 3. My use of the term “homosocial” here and throughout this book is of course indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theories in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). But Sedgwick was explicitly interested in the “erotic and individualistic bias of literature itself ” (a claim hard to make about medieval cycle drama) and not the “crucially important male homosocial bonds that are less glamorous to talk about—such as the institutional, bureaucratic, and military” (p. 19). Medieval and early modern guilds surely belong to this “less glamorous” company. She is also primarily interested in homosocial desire as it is triangulated through normative heterosexual desire for a female object, whereas the guildsmen with whom I am concerned largely express homosocial desire through a mutual longing for the presence of God, especially in the form of Jesus, God-as-man. Moreover, like most early new historicist and cultural studies projects on gender and sexuality, Sedgwick’s book begins with the Renaissance. It then moves on to the nineteenth century. But Sedgwick herself wanted to see her ideas become “a usable part of any reader’s repertoire of approaches to her or his personal experience and future reading” (p. 17, emphasis mine). Thus Sedgwick’s theories are presaged in the cultural model my book articulates, although the texture and shape of that model’s appearance in medieval culture is different from the largely nineteenth century literature Sedgwick describes.

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4. In using the language of performance to describe the processes that produce masculinity in these plays, I am being more than literal, although clearly actual dramatic performance is involved. I am also invoking Judith Butler’s theory of the “performativity” of gender as it is produced and performed through the habitual repetitions of everyday life ( Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [New York: Routledge, 1990]). Though Butler is primarily interested in “troubling” the idea of “ ‘Women’ as the Subject of Feminism” (the first subtitle of her first chapter), the “indeterminacy of gender” of course also applies equally to masculinity ( pp. 1, vii, respectively). Thus this study in part draws on Butler’s notion of the “performativity” of gender to address masculinity in late medieval urban guild culture. However, for Butler “performativity” and the possibility of the “resignification” of gender are potentially positive, subversive, and powerful; in my analysis of the cycle drama, I find a much more conservative view, and a masculinist culture made anxious by the possibilities of the instability of gender. 5. Mervyn James, “Ritual, Drama, and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town,” Past and Present 90 (1983): 3–29. 6. Ruth Evans, “Body Politics: Engendering Medieval Cycle Drama,” pp. 114–15. 7. Evans, “Body Politics,” p. 121. 8. For the gender demographics, see Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) p. 7. 9. The Coventry plays actually have more claim to belonging in this book than N-Town and Wakefield do, since the surviving Coventry plays were guild-produced biblical episodes possibly having belonged to a complete cycle. And I would argue that they, too, are a “drama of masculinity.” But unfortunately, because of the limits of time and space, I have had to leave Coventry out for now and to focus on the complete guild-produced cycles. 10. For laudable recent studies of drama as part of a specific cultural matrix, see especially Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God: Social Relations and Symbolic Act in the York Corpus Christi Plays (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001), and Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of Saints (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Regarding anthologies, David Bevington’s Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), which creates a hybrid biblical “cycle” from the four complete sets of plays and various individual plays, is still the most commonly used text in courses on medieval drama. Greg Walker’s Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) an alternative to Bevington’s book, nevertheless creates a similar hybrid cycle, although it uses York most frequently so at least gives the sense of the unique characteristics of one cycle. Still, it splices plays from Chester and Wakefield into the thread and describes them all as “civic religious drama” (p. 3, emphasis mine). Walker does, however, separate the N-Town “Mary Play” from the others. 11. Lawrence Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2001).

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12. Gail McMurray Gibson, Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) p. 1. 13. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, p. 173. 14. Gibson, Theater of Devotion, p. 1; Barbara D. Palmer, “ ‘Towneley Plays’ or ‘Wakefield Cycle’ Revisited,” Comparative Drama 21 (1988): 318–48. 15. Gibson, Theater of Devotion, p. 1. 16. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, pp. 187–88. See also Alexandra F. Johnston, “Cycle Drama in the Sixteenth Century: Texts and Contexts,” Early Drama to 1600, Acta, Vol. XIII, 1985, p. 5 [1–15]. 17. Gibson, Theater of Devotion, p. 137. 18. York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, ed. Richard Beadle and Pamela King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 21. 19. Such a positive figural representation is also found in continental traditions. See Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 133. 20. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion. 21. Gibson, The Theater of Devotion; Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene; The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford B. Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). 22. Palmer, “Towneley Plays,” pp. 318–48. 23. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, p. 174. 24. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, pp. 180–81. 25. Johnston says the same, “Cycle Drama in the Sixteenth Century,” p. 4. 26. Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles (Princeton: Princeton University Press) pp. 90–94. 27. For a detailed analysis of the agrarian and labor politics of the Wakefield plays, see the unpublished dissertation of Robert Talbot, The Wakefield Master, Robin Hood, and the Agrarian Struggle of the Later Middle Ages (Duke University, 1995). 28. This last opinion is shared by Woolf, p. 143. 29. Theresa Coletti, “Reading REED: History and the Records of the Early English Drama” in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) pp. 252–53 [248–84]. See also Michael Kobialka, This is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle Ages (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999, 2003), p. 6, where he writes that the “changes in our understanding of the nature of archival research, performance, and the social or gendered body prompt multiple questions.” Coletti is particularly concerned that much medieval drama scholarship has remained too positivist in its concern with “contexts” to the foregrounded texts of the cycles. Though she made this argument fifteen years ago, and works like Gibson’s Theater of Devotion, Beckwith’s Signifying God, and Beckwith’s earlier work, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), have now done much to change the state of drama studies, there is much more to be done.

NOTES

169

30. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977) pp. 142–48; Michel Foucault, “What is an Author,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 113–38. 31. See Clopper’s article, “Lay and Clerical Impact on Civic Religious Drama and Ceremony,” Contexts for Early English Drama, ed. Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989) pp. 103–137, as well as Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 206–213. 32. Clopper, “Lay and Clerical Impact,” p. 116. 33. Richard Beadle, “The York Cycle,” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 90. 34. David Mills, “The Chester Cycle,” in Cambridge Companion, p. 110. 35. Mills, Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays (University of Toronto Press, 1998) p. 182. 36. Mills, Recycling the Cycle, p. 182. 37. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973) pp. 3–32. In considering the “performativity” of masculinity and the importance of symbolic acts in the construction of social and individual identity, I am influenced by Geertz (in particular, The Interpretation of Cultures [New York: Basic, 1973]), and Victor Turner (especially From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play [New York: PAJ Publications, 1982]), as well as by the theories of Judith Butler in Gender Trouble. 38. See also Coletti, “Reading REED,” p. 252. 39. Beckwith, Signifying God, pp. 59–71. 40. The phrase is Michel Foucault’s, and it is a useful one to describe the sociocultural production of masculinity in the drama. See Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) pp. 135–69. My own approach to cultural studies and new historicist practices is, for the most part, more indebted to Raymond Williams than Foucault. See especially Culture and Society, 1780–1950, rev. edn. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. edn. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 41. Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 72.

Chapter 1 Men in the Household, Guild, and City 1. See Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

170

NOTES

2. The most significant printed sources are: Lawrence Clopper, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Chester (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, ed., Records of Early English Drama: York (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Maud Sellers, ed.,The York Memorandum Book: Vol. 1 (1376–1419) (Durham: Surtees Society, 1912) and The York Memorandum Book: Vol. 2 (1388–1492) (Durham: Surtees Society, 1915); Joyce W. Percy, ed., York Memorandum Book B/Y (1371–1596) (Durham: Surtees Society, 1973); Toulmin Smith, Lucy Toulmin Smith, and Lujo Brentano, ed., English Gilds: The Original Ordinances of More Than One Hundred Early English Gilds, EETS o.s. 40 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1870, repr. 1892, 1924); David Mills, Recycling the Cycle; E. K. Chambers, The Medieval Stage, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1903); and Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans. 3. Stella Kramer, The English Craft Gilds: Studies in Their Progress and Decline (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927). 4. E.g., see Swanson, Artisans, for such a study. 5. Swanson, Artisans, p. 6. See also Martha C. Howell, Women, Production and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), especially pp. 137, 178–79. 6. Howell, Women, p. 9. 7. Statutes of the Realm (London, 1810–28), i, p. 379, quoted in Swanson, Artisans, p. 4 and Kramer, English Craft Gilds, p. 1. 8. Ruth Mazo Karras argues, in her book From Boys to Men, that this binary distinction was mainly operative for chivalric men (pp. 11, 20–66), and that craft men largely distinguished themselves as not boys (pp. 12, 109–150). To some extent I agree, but I also believe, as the rest of my book will show, that the drama was one attempt to construct a guild culture that excluded women. 9. York Memorandum Book A/Y, 1, p. 106, quoted in Swanson, Artisans, p. 74. 10. Swanson, Artisans, p. 42; Howell, Women, pp. 15–16. See also Brian W. Gastle, “ ‘As if She Were Single’: Working Wives and the Late Medieval English Femme Sole,” in The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in Late Medieval England, ed. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) pp. 41–64. 11. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 42–43; York Memorandum Book A/Y, 1, p. 112. 12. Swanson, Artisans, p. 7. 13. Swanson, p. 23. 14. Swanson, p. 27. 15. Swanson, p. 19. 16. J. M. Bennett, “The Village Ale-Wife: Women and Brewing in Fourteenth Century England,” in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986) pp. 20–26 [pp. 18–36]; P. J. P. Goldberg, “Women in Fifteenth-Century Town Life,” in Towns and Townspeople in the Fifteenth Century, ed. John A. F. Thomson (Gloucester, England, and Wolfboro, NH: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1988) p. 116 [pp. 107–128].

NOTES

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17. Goldberg, “Women in Fifteenth Century Town Life,” p. 116. 18. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Brown Meech and Allen, EETS o.s. 212, pp. 6, 9. 19. Goldberg, “Women in Fifteenth Century Town Life,” p. 116. 20. Goldberg, “Fifteenth Century Town Life,” pp. 116–17. 21. Goldberg, “Fifteenth Century Town Life,” p. 117. 22. Lumiansky and Mills, ed., Chester Mystery Cycle, Vol. 1, EETS s.s. 3; Goldberg also cites this passage, p. 117. 23. Goldberg, “Fifteenth Century Town Life,” 118. 24. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 30–31. 25. Swanson, p. 31. 26 Swanson, p. 31. 27. Swanson, p. 35. 28. Goldberg, “Fifteenth Century Town Life,” p. 121; Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) pp. 87–88. 29. The Little Red Book of Bristol, ed. Francis Bikley, 2 vols., (Bristol: W.C. Hemmons, 1900), 2, p. 127, quoted in Swanson, Artisans, pp. 35–36. 30. York Memorandum Book, A/Y, 1, p. 243; translated and cited by Swanson, Artisans, p. 36. 31. Goldberg, “Fifteenth-Century Town Life,” pp. 112–13. 32. Goldberg, “Fifteenth-Century Town Life,” p. 114. 33. Howell, Women, p. 20. 34. Swanson, Artisans, p. 107, emphasis hers. 35. Goldberg, “Fifteenth-Century Town Life,” p. 107. 36. Sylvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of London (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948) p. 12. See also Swanson, Artisans, p. 6. 37. Swanson, Artisans, p. 6. 38. Swanson, Artisans, p. 2. 39. This is the crux of Swanson’s argument in Artisans, but see especially her introduction, p. 3. 40. Heather Swanson, “The Illusion of Economic Structure: Craft Guilds in Late Medieval English Towns,” Past and Present 121 (1988) p. 29 [pp. 29–48]. 41. R. B. Dobson, “Craft Guilds and City: The Historical Origins of the York Mystery Plays Reassessed” in The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe, Alan E. Knight, ed. (Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1997) p. 94 [pp. 91–106]. 42. Dobson, “Craft Guilds,” p. 95. 43. See, for example, Charles Gross, The Gild Merchant: A Contribution to British Municipal History, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1890); and Antony Black’s modern survey in Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 44. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 31; quoted in Dobson, “Craft Guilds,” p. 96. 45. Dobson, “Craft Guilds,” p. 97.

172

NOTES

46. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 38. 47. Smith, et al., English Gilds, p. 29. 48. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 38. One reason that Swanson uses the term “mystery” is that it was a term frequently used in Norwich ordinances. Their regulations also use the term “craft” and make a distinction between it and a “mystery.” A 1449 ordinance quoted by Swanson, p. 38, makes provision for occupations with small numbers in this way: “forasmoche as ther is not at this day sufficient nombre of persones in the said mysteris to be cleped a crafte, and also because the said mysteris have not her before be had in dew coreccion and rewle,” then specialized occupations are to be united to their parent craft; for example, “to smyths craft thies mysterys, bladsmyths, loksmyths and lorymers.” It seems that for the Norwich writers of these regulations, “mystery” was a term for an occupation in a material sense— what one did for a living—but “craft” was the term for the organized, administrative body. 49. York Memorandum Book A/Y, 2, pp. 277–83; see also Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 38. 50. Swanson, Artisans, p. 111. 51. Swanson, Artisans, p. 113. 52. York Memorandum Book A/Y, 1, p. 69. 53. York Memorandum Book A/Y, 1, p. 185–86. Also partially quoted in Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 38. 54. 37 Edward III cap. 6, Statutes of the Realm, i, p. 379, quoted in Swanson, “Illusion,” pp. 33, 38. 55. Swanson, Artisans, p. 112. 56. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 38. 57. Swanson, “Illusions,” p. 43, emphasis mine. 58. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 40–43. 59. Swanson, Artisans, p. 118. 60. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 44; and Johnston, “Cycle Drama in the Sixteenth Century,” p. 9. See also Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God, Chapter 3. Beckwith cites these sources as well and summarizes many of the same arguments, but for different purposes. 61. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 43. 62. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 44; and Dobson, “Craft Guilds,” pp. 103–104. 63. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 43. See also Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 50. 64. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 43. 65. Also noted by Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 51. 66. All Chaucer citations come from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987). 67. Swanson, Artisans, p. 117. 68. Swanson, Artisans, p. 117. 69. Swanson, Artisans, p. 107. See also R. B. Dobson, “Admission to the freedom of the city of York in the later Middle Ages,” Economic History Review, 2nd Ser., 26 (1973), pp. 1–22. 70. Swanson, “Illusion,” pp. 32–33. See also Susan Reynolds, English Medieval Towns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 136–37. The single

NOTES

71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97.

173

most important and informative work on the merchants and their companies of medieval London is still Sylvia Thrupp’s The Merchant Class of London (cited above, n.38). For the structures and culture of London’s guilds in the early modern period, see Rappaport’s Worlds Within Worlds (cited above, n.1). Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 33; Dobson, “Admissions,” pp. 16–19. Swanson, Artisans, p. 5. Similar changes occurred in other provincial cities at roughly the same time. In Norwich, shopkeepers were universally required to take out the freedom beginning in 1415. See Swanson, Artisans, p. 110. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 107–109; patrimony and apprenticeship will be discussed later in this chapter. Swanson, Artisans, p. 109. Swanson, Artisans, p. 110. E.g., Swanson, Artisans, p. 103. Swanson, Artisans, p. 110; also, “Illusion,” pp. 32–33. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 47. Swanson, Artisans, p. 120. See the introduction to the REED: York volumes, as well as Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 49. Swanson, Artisans, p. 149. R. B. Dobson, “The Risings in York, Beverly and Scarborough, 1380–1381,” in The English Rising of 1381, R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 112–42. Swanson, Artisans, p. 122. Swanson, Artisans, p. 123. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 123–24. Mills, Recycling the Cycle, p. 49, emphasis mine. Mills, Recycling, p. 49. REED: Chester, p. 34; quoted in Mills, Recycling, p. 122. REED: Chester, p. 38; quoted in Mills,Recycling, p. 122. Mills, Recycling, p. 146. Mills, Recycling, p. 151. Mills, Recycling, p. 149. Most of what follows is a discussion of the public and civic duties of York guildsmen, with little specifically said about Chester. Again, the documentary evidence and historiographies of the guilds’ structures and relations to civic government are by far richer and more plentiful for York than for Chester. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish; see especially “Docile Bodes,” pp. 135–69, and “Panopticism,” pp. 195–308. Smith, et al., English Gilds, pp. 182, 184. Swanson, “Illusion,” p. 43. Rodney Hilton, English and French Towns in Feudal Society: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) p. 101; quoted in Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 48.

174

NOTES

98. York Memorandum Book (YMB ) B/Y, p. 179. 99. YMB B/Y, p. 179. 100. Alexandra F. Johnston, “Cycle Drama in the Sixteenth Century: Texts and Contexts,” p. 9. 101. YMB B/Y, p. 179, emphasis mine. 102. YMB B/Y, pp. 179–80. 103. YMB B/Y, p. 180. 104. Swanson, Artisans, p. 121. See also D. M. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) p. 68. Both are cited in Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 49. 105. Swanson, Artisans, p. 121. 106. Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 49. 107. YMB B/Y, p. 180. 108. Swanson, Artisans, p. 25. 109. Swanson, Artisans, p. 122. 110. Swanson, Artisans, p. 79. 111. Smith, et al., English Gilds, pp. 182, 186. 112. Swanson, Artisans, p. 119; YMB A/Y, 1, p. 91. 113. REED: York, p. 256. 114. Swanson, Artisans, p. 120. 115. YMB B/Y, p. 179. 116. Swanson, Artisans, p. 36. 117. Cf. any ordinances in York Memorandum Book A/Y, i; York Memorandum Book A/Y, ii; and York Memorandum Book B/Y. 118. Swanson, Artisans, p. 73; YMB A/Y, 1, pp. 105–106. 119. Swanson, Artisans, p. 115. See also “Illusions,” pp. 44–46. 120. Swanson, Artisans, p. 115; see also R. B. Dobson, “Admission to the freedom,” p. 19. 121. YMB B/Y, p. 183. 122. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 75–76. 123. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 8, 128. 124. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 7–8. See also Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, pp. 204–209. 125. Karras, From Boys to Men, p. 145. 126. Smith, et al., English Gilds, p. 180. 127. This is true of Coventry, at least. See Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, pp. 84–86. 128. Swanson, Artisans, p. 165. 129. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 165–68. 130. For a more positive reading of guild culture and its discourses, which focuses on a single London guild, the Carpenters’ Company, and defines it as a “communitarian society. . .a common good located in the recognition of brotherhood” (p. 105), see Mark Addison Amos, “The Naked and the Dead: The Carpenters’ Company and Lay Spirituality in Late Medieval England” in The Middle Ages at Work, ed. Robertson and Uebel, pp. 91–110.

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Chapter 2 The Domestic Scene: Patriarchal Fantasies and Anxieties in the Family and Guild 1. See Swanson, Artisans, Introduction, as well as Howell, Women, Introduction, especially p. 9, and Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 48. 2. I should note here that in discussing men’s responsibilities to the domestic sphere and to their public roles as guildsmen, I am not invoking the nineteenth century idea of “spheres of influence,” whereby the domestic space was considered “feminine” in contrast to the “masculine” public sphere. Rather, as discussed in the last chapter, medieval households, market places, and loci of occupational practice were all, in their material culture, very much heterosocial, and the construction of whole occupations as the exclusive purview of men was largely a function of civic and official discourses (in guild regulations and in civic spectacles like the plays). Clearly the imagined space of occupational identity is being constructed in this culture as masculine, but the domestic space is not in turn being delineated as primarily feminine. Instead, as my analysis of the plays will show, medieval urban guildsmen perceived themselves as caught in a double bind of conflicts between domestic and civic responsibilities, in both cases of which they were expected to hold sway. 3. Karras, From Boys to Men; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 135–94. 4. Beckwith, Signifying God, pp. 59–71. 5. See Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 21–22. 6. Evans, “Body Politics,” p. 121. 7. All quotations of Chester’s plays come from the Lumiansky and Mills EETS edition of the play. See Introduction, n.1. 8. Robert Hanning, “ ‘You Have Begun a Parlous Pleye’: The Nature and Limits of Dramatic Mimesis as a Theme in Four Middle English ‘Fall of Lucifer’ Cycle Plays,” in The Drama of the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays, ed. Clifford Davidson, C. J. Gianakaris, and John H. Stroupe (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1982) p. 141. 9. Hanning, “Parlous Pleye,” p. 147 [140–68]. 10. For the full history of this woman-faced serpent, see H. A. Kelly, “The Metamorphoses of the Eden Serpent during the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” Viator 2 (1971): 30l–327. 11. The comment about the disguise being untheological belongs to Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 115. 12. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 106, 120; R. B. Dobson, “Craft Guilds and City,” p. 103. 13. Swanson, Artisans, 49. 14. REED: York, p. 166. 15. REED: York, p. 201. 16. REED: York, pp. 205, 249. 17. REED: Chester, pp. 31, 24, 249. 18. REED: Chester, p. 242, emphasis mine on “welthis,” “welthe,” and “wealthelye.”

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19. REED: Chester, p. 242, emphasis mine. 20. REED: Chester, pp. 242–46. 21. As Karras writes, “Though apprenticeship could be a means to social mobility, more often it served to perpetuate the social hierarchy. In English towns crafts put more emphasis than elsewhere on the apprentice’s background. . . [in London] unfree birth disqualified a candidate for apprenticeship” (From Boys to Men, pp. 119–20). 22. Thomas Laqueur developed the term “sliding sex” to describe medieval and early modern notions of sexual identity as a continuum. See his work, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 1–25. 23. Peter W. Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 92, emphasis mine. 24. See my Introduction’s notes for my use of the term “homosocial” and its relation to Sedgwick’s use in Between Men, p. 166 n3, above. 25. Travis, Dramatic Design, p. 93. 26. Karras, From Boys to Men, p. 110. 27. As Travis notes, only the Chester cycle “emphasizes the tragic destruction of familial unity by having Cain return to his parents to report his crime,”Dramatic Design, p. 98. 28. My reading of the significance of Cain to urban craftsmen is not meant to deny his traditional associations with peasant plowman. Rather, I am arguing that the Chester play adds at least one other layer to the traditional image, one that is relevant to the urban men producing and performing the play. 29. See V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966) pp. 101–123. 30. All citations of the York plays are from The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1982). 31. In post-Reformation Chester, God’s part was consistently played by an off-stage voice, if we are to believe the Late Banns (see REED: Chester, p. 247). However, it must not have always been so, given that Chester’s “Fall of Lucifer” requires God to be present at first, but then absent when Lucifer usurps His empty throne. 32. See Hanning, “Parlous Pleye,” p. 141, on drama as particular to the fallen world, as discussed and cited above. 33. Beckwith, Signifying God, pp. 42–43. 34. Hamlet famously warns his players not to “out-Herod Herod” (3.2.11; citation refers to Norton Critical Edition, ed. Cyrus Hoy [New York, London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1992, 1963]), while Chaucer’s Absolon of “The Miller’s Tale” has played “Herodes on a scaffold hye” (l. 281, The Riverside Chaucer). 35. See Kolve,Corpus Christi, p. 59, for the theological source of the idea of recapitulation. 36. Almost every full-length literary study of any one or all of the mystery cycles gives some attention to the Noah episodes, particularly his combat with his wife. These include Woolf, Mystery Plays, pp. 132–45, as well as

NOTES

37.

38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

177

Kolve, Corpus Christi, pp. 147–51; Travis, Dramatic Design, pp. 98–103; and Stevens, Four Cycles, pp. 276, 287–88. Articles on the Noah episodes are no different. See, for example, Ruth Evans, “Feminist Re-Enactments: Gender and the Towneley Uxor Noe,” A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck, Juliette Dor, ed. (Liege, France: University of Liege, 1992) pp. 142–54. For a more detailed reading of the Noah plays in York and Chester, see Christina M. Fitzgerald, “Manning the Ark in York and Chester,” Exemplaria 15.2 (2003): 351–84. REED: Chester, p. 242, emphasis mine. Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 160–69, 202–205. Clifford Davidson, Technology, Guilds, and Early English Drama (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1996) and From Creation to Doom: The York Cycle of Mystery Plays (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1984) p. 49. Travis, Dramatic Design, p. 100. For the now classic argument that the cycle plays served as a means of craft advertisement, see Alan D. Justice, “Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle,” Theatre Journal 31 (1979): 47–58. For a complication of that view, see Kathleen Ashley, “Sponsorship, Reflexivity and Resistance: Cultural Readings of the York Cycle Plays” in The Performance of Middle English Culture: Essays on Chaucer and the Drama in Honor of Martin Stevens, ed. James J. Paxson, Lawrence M. Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998) pp. 25–38. Middle English Dictionary and Middle English Compendium, electronic edition, ed. Frances McSparran (University of Michigan Digital Library), http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/m/med. Based on print MED, ed. Hans Kurath and Sherman M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952, 2000). Karras, From Boys to Men, p. 109. See Chapter 1. Travis, Dramatic Design, p. 100. See Swanson, Artisans, pp. 166–67. David Mills, ed., The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1992) p. 68. Goldberg, “Women in Fifteenth-Century Town Life,” pp. 117–18. It is worth noting that Travis believes that the entire episode of the wife’s rebellion and the Gossips’ song is a sixteenth-century addition to the play. He bases his argument partly on the philological evidence of Oscar Brownstein, and partly on his own view of the dramatic inconsistencies in character—especially of the Wife—at these moments (Travis, Dramatic Design, pp. 67, 100). This theory does not undermine my arguments that the Gossips represent the evils of city life. Without that episode, the Noah narrative is even more a fantasy of an ideal household-guild in the midst of

178

51.

52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

NOTES

a cycle full of masculine domestic and public anxieties, such as Joseph’s anxieties about his sexual impotence and his status as father. Furthermore, even if the Wife’s rebellion and her Gossips were added later to the play, such an addition suggests that the performers and producers may have actively constructed the new version of the play to reflect the anxieties and fantasies of their domestic and civic lives. Barbara I. Gusick, “Christ as a Worker in the Towneley Conspiracy,” in Essays in Medieval Studies: Proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association 9 (1992) pp. 1–8; also available online at http://www.luc.edu/ publications/medieval/vol9/9ch1.html. See also George Ovitt, Jr., The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987) pp. 90–106. For a related but different interpretation of the language of work in this play, see Sarah Beckwith, Signifying God, Chapter 3. I came upon Beckwith’s interpretation of this play after having already formulated my own. Beckwith and I come to similar conclusions—using the same historical and secondary sources—about the socioeconomic organization of work in medieval York, but apply it differently to the Noah plays under discussion. Richard Beadle and Pamela King, ed., The York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) p. 15. For a full discussion of the financial and social status of the woodworking crafts in York, see Heather Swanson, Artisans, Chapter 7: The Building Industry. For a discussion of the guilds represented on the common council as either “major” or “minor” crafts, see pp. 123–24. R. B. Dobson, “The Risings in York, Beverley, and Scarborough, 1380–1,” p. 130; also quoted in Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 214, n22. Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 214, n27. See my chapter 1. Stevens, Four Cycles, pp. 55–56. Although we know that the shipwrights performed “The Building of the Ark” and the fishmongers and mariners were responsible for “The Flood,” York records do not tell who was responsible for storing the ark pageant, which surely must have been shared by the two plays. REED: York, pp. 33–34 (Latin), 719 (translation). REED: York, pp. 333–34. See Kolve, Corpus Christi, pp. 68–70, on the various interpretative associations of the flood story. The phrase “absent presence,” in reference to Christ in the drama, is Sarah Beckwith’s, Signifying God, p. 72. Milla C. Riggio, “The Terrible Mourning of Abraham,” Mediaevalia: A Journal of Medieval Studies 18 (1995, for 1992): 283–319. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941, rpt. 1954). David Mills, Recycling the Cycle, p. 92. Riggio, “Mourning,” p. 283. Riggio, “Mourning,” p. 285.

NOTES

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69. Riggio, “Mourning,” p. 291. 70. See Riggio’s “Mourning” article for a full critical treatment of this play and Sarah’s role. 71. Swanson, Artisans, p. 7; citing Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City, pp. 84–85. See also Karras, From Boys to Men, p. 146. 72. Riggio, “Mourning,” p. 287, citing Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York, 1987) p. 174. 73. Even the typological significance of the age thirty is associated with work, since it is traditionally the age Christ began his work. 74. MED. 75. The critical literature regarding “affective devotion” is too numerous to list here, but for an excellent introduction to its recent history, see the unpublished dissertation of Sarah McNamer, “Reading the Literature of Compassion: A Study in the History of Feeling,” University of California, Los Angeles, 1998. 76. MED. 77. William Langland, Piers the Plowman, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (London: Athlone Press; Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988 rev. ed.). 78. Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 148. 79. Victor Turner, quoted in Riggio, “Mourning,” p. 287; Riggio, “Mourning,” p. 285. 80. Karras, From Boys to Men, p. 109. 81. For Judith Butler, the resignifying potential of gender is liberating, transformative, and positive, but for the conservative culture of these plays, as I read them, such instability is nightmarish and anxiety-provoking. Butler, Gender Trouble: “Perhaps trouble [i.e., the indeterminacy of gender] need not carry such a negative valence. . .. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it,” p. vii. 82. Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 1, 79–82, 142–44, 222–27, and corresponding illustrations in vol. 2; Pamela Sheingorn, “Joseph the Carpenter’s Failure at Familial Discipline” in Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebration of the EightyFifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 156–67; Index of Christian Art, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA, consulted November 10, 2004. 83. Swanson, Artisans, p. 7; Phythian-Adams, pp. 84–85. 84. Shannon McSheffrey, “Men and Masculinity in Late Medieval London Civic Culture: Governance, Patriarchy, and Reputation,” in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999) pp. 243–78. 85. See Hanawalt, Growing Up, pp. 120–24.

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86. Vern Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) p. 41 [pp. 31–46]. 87. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 166–67. 88. Hanawalt, Growing Up, p. 132. 89. Swanson, Artisans, p. 115. 90. Hanawalt, Growing Up, p. 135; Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, pp. 236–37; Thrupp, Merchant Class, pp. 164–69; Karras, From Boys to Men, p. 122. 91. Hanawalt, Growing Up, p. 138; Rappaport, Worlds, pp. 314–15. 92. Swanson, Artisans, p. 36. 93. Hanawalt, Growing Up, pp. 163–64. 94. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 31, 32, 35–36, 74; Hanawalt, Growing Up, pp. 169–70. Note: for London it was only three percent of the 3,330 wills registered in Husting Court (Hanawalt, pp. 169–70). 95. Hanawalt, Growing Up, p. 131. 96. Kolve, Corpus Christi, p. 13n and pp. 8–32. 97. Kolve, Corpus Christi, p. 20. 98. MED. 99. It is worth noting that in Early Modern Spain, as the cult of Joseph grew, his image there also went through a transformation from an elderly cuckold to a young, virile, and active father. As Charlene Villaseñor-Black showed in a paper delivered at UCLA in May, 2001, the Spanish Joseph was frequently shown holding baby Jesus, displacing Mary as the central figure in the Holy Family. Such an image, Villaseñor-Black argued, reflected prescriptive literature of the period that stressed the greater importance of the father in developing the proper character of children. Furthermore, this change in image was one reaction against a variety of social changes that seemed to threaten the traditional patriarchal family, changes that were similar to the ones perceived by the guildsmen producing the York and Chester plays. 100. The phrase “under me” only appears in the Bodley and Harley 2124 manuscripts; Lumiansky and Mills, p. 185n. 101. Of course, another element of these anxieties is, in Kolve’s words, the common idea of “the humble overthrowing the mighty [and] the young overthrowing the old,” an idea which is “a profound part of the meaning of the Nativity” (Kolve, Corpus Christi, p. 157). Such themes also suggest the Bakhtinian concept of the “carnivalesque” or the Turnerian “liminoid” and “antistructure,” as Martin Stevens argues in his article, “Herod as Carnival King in the Medieval Biblical Drama,” Mediaevalia 18 (1995, for 1992): 43–66. While the order of the world in this and other “Slaughter” plays may undoubtedly be turned symbolically and momentarily upside-down in some aspects, it is my contention that for guilds and their specific interests, such reversals are never quite so clear-cut. Rather, this play—like the cycles as a whole—anxiously negotiates confusing hierarchies of economic class, social status, and gender, always ambivalent about who or what should triumph and why.

NOTES

181

102. On the inspection of Christ’s genitals by the Magi in the visual arts, see Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). See the next chapter for a discussion of the Magi episodes. 103. For the injunction of conduct books for adult men to be “sad and wise,” see Hanawalt, Growing Up, p. 199. 104. Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 205. 105. Karras, From Boys to Men, pp. 20–66. 106. For a feminist reading of slander in the play that concentrates on the mothers’ characters, see Denise Ryan, “Woman Weaponry: Language and Power in the Chester Slaughter of the Innocents” Studies in Philology 98:1 (Winter 2001): 76–92. Her article is a response, in part, to Theresa Coletti’s earlier feminist approach, “ ‘Ther Be But Women’: Gender Conflict and Gender Identity in the Middle English Innocents Plays,” Mediaevalia 18 (1995): 245–61. 107. For a reading that sees the play as a battle between women’s work and men’s work, see Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) pp. 140–46. 108. The Huntington manuscript has “dogge” here, but the other four all have “biche”; Lumiansky and Mills, p. 196n. 109. MED. 110. The Huntington manuscript reads “contrey” here, but all of the remaining four manuscripts read “meanye”; Lumiansky and Mills, p. 200n. 111. Also noticed by Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 210. 112. Lumiansky and Mills, p. 200n. 113. Justice, “Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle,” pp. 47–58. 114. Richard Homan, “Ritual Aspects of the York Cycle,” Theatre Journal 33 (1981): 314–15 [303–315]; quoted in Ashley, “Sponsorship,” p. 16. 115. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 90–91. See also L. F. Salzman, Building in England Down to 1540 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952) pp. 39–43. 116. Mills, Recycling the Cycle, p. 117. 117. REED: York, pp. 47–48, 732 (translation). The Latin of the goldsmiths’ complaint reads: “Iamque mundus alteratus est super ipsos & ipsi plus solito in bonis pauperiores sunt effecti” (REED: York, p. 47). 118. Kolve, Corpus Christi, pp. 8–32. 119. Mills, Chester Mystery Cycle, p. 176. 120. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. vii.

Chapter 3

Male Homosocial Communities and Public Life

1. See my Introduction and its notes for my use of the term “homosocial” and its relation to Sedgwick’s use in Between Men, p. 166 n3. 2. Swanson, Artisans, p. 7.

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3. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); see especially the introduction, where she posits the focus of her book thus: “how do communities, then and now, form themselves in relation to sex?” (p. 1). 4. Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 1950), p. 380; quoted in Travis, Dramatic Design, p. 92. 5. John D. Cox, “The Devil and Society in the English Mystery Play,” Comparative Drama 28:4 (Winter 1994–95) p. 412, emphasis mine [ pp. 407–438]. 6. Cox, “Devil and Society,” p. 430. 7. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 55–56. 8. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 123–24. 9. Swanson, Artisans, p. 168. 10. Hanning, “Parlous Pleye,” p. 141. 11. Martin Stevens, Four Cycles, p. 305, emphasis mine. 12. Mills, Recycling the Cycle, p. 88. 13. Zina Peterson, “ ‘As Tuching the Beyring of Their Torchez’: The Unwholesome Rebellion of York’s Cordwainers at the Rite of Corpus Christi,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 22 (1996): 96–108. 14. This prompted Woolf to find it the least theologically correct, least symbolic, and therefore least successful of all the versions (Mystery Plays, p. 105). 15. Swanson, Artisans, p. 168. 16. See Chapter 1. 17. Cox, “Devil and Society,” pp. 407–438. 18. The plays specifically under discussion in the following section are Chester Plays 7 (“The Shepherds”), 8 (“The Three Kings”), and 9 (“The Offerings of the Three Kings”), and York Play 16 (“Herod and the Magi”). 19. A fuller version of this argument can be found in my article “Of Magi and Men: Christ’s Nativity and Masculine Community in the Chester Drama Cycle,” in Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Susan C. Karant Nunn (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003) pp. 145–62. 20. In my insistence that the Nativity sequences are concerned specifically with the issues of masculine society, I am arguing with Travis (in Dramatic Design) who sees a more universal vision in the Nativity plays of Chester. He writes, “their major dramatic emphasis is upon the emergence of a new social order, a ‘communitas’ of moral equals which graciously embraces all within the drama and within the audience who willingly assent to the comedy’s spiritual norms” (p. 111, emphasis mine). 21. See Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 22. A fact also noticed by Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 182, although she would be unlikely to agree with my interpretation of this play as a pastoral or idyllic fantasy. She remarks that “the mystery plays. . .drew surprisingly little upon this idealisation of simple virtue” (p. 182). She notes instead in the Chester play the chronological shift back to the time before the Annunciation and thus interprets the shepherds in the early part of the play as belonging to a fallen world in need of Christ and his redemption (p. 185).

NOTES

183

23. For a discussion of guilds’ foundation myths, see Swanson, “Illusion,” pp. 31–32. I use “traditional” here in the sense of Max Weber’s definition of traditional authoritative institutions and structures, where “legitimacy is claimed for it and believed in on the basis that the sanctity of the order and the attendant powers of control as they have been handed down from the past ‘have always existed’ ” (Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons [New York: Free Press, 1957], p. 341). Furthermore, the fantasy here belongs to the men performing the play more than to their characters. As Max Harris, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, pointed out to me after I delivered a version of this part of my argument at the 2001 Medieval Academy of America/Medieval Association of the Pacific/Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies joint conference, the coming together of the shepherds for mutual, homosocial support may reflect ordinary reality— shepherds were not necessarily as isolated as popular belief would have it. However, it is the guildsmen’s appropriation of this idyllic, pastoral landscape for their own ideological purposes that I am most interested in. 24. MED. 25. Contrary to my reading, more than one critic sees this feast as grotesque rather than simply fanciful or exaggerated, including Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 187, and Robert Adams, “The Egregious Feasts of the Chester and Towneley Shepherds,” The Chaucer Review, 21:2 (1986): 96–107. I, on the other hand, tend to agree more with Kolve, who compares the meal with the festival joy and extravagance of a Christmas feast (Corpus Christi, pp. 160, 164). A recent performance of the play by Toronto’s Poculi Ludique Societas troupe also depicted the feast as comical and joyous (December 2003). 26. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 10–11. 27. This wrestling match is unique among the extant shepherds’ plays, and only the two Wakefield Pastores involve similar raucous subplots. York, Coventry, and N-Town are all much more simple and formal in plot and tone. 28. The December 2003 production of this play by Toronto’s Poculi Ludique Societas provided an interesting twist on Trowle’s sexual threat: the adaptors made the character female and cast a woman. 29. In the PLS transformation of Trowle from male to female, these lines and actions were delivered as a sexual invitation, ending with the actress’s legs spread wide open as she reclined on the ground. 30. Kolve, Corpus Christi, p. 156. 31. The PLS production’s female Trowle made the sexual insults and the world turned upside-down theme even clearer. Perhaps the adaptors chose to do this precisely to bring out the sexual innuendo for a modern audience who might miss the nuances of Middle English. 32. James, “Ritual, Drama and Social Body,” pp. 3–29. 33. As Margery M. Morgan notes, Joseph in this play is “unusually communicative” (Morgan, “High Fraud: Paradox and Double-Plot in the English Shepherds’ Plays,” Speculum, 39:4 [Oct., 1964]: 685 [pp. 676–89]).

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34. This phrase is taken from an official Chester civic record describing the butchers and bakers involved in a riot during a bull-baiting spectacle held for the mayor and council. See the British Library Harley 2125 MS account as reprinted in REED: Chester, pp. 221–22. 35. Only the Huntington and Bodley manuscripts give “knightes” here, while the other three (British Museum Additional 10305, Harley 2013, and Harley 2124) provide the expected “kinges.” However, Huntington is the earliest (1591), and Lumiansky and Mills accept it as authoritative, p. 158n. 36. David Mills, Chester Mystery Cycle, p. 155n. See also Travis, Dramatic Design, pp. 54, 131. 37. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, pp. 133–35, 173–75. 38. Chaucer, “The Miller’s Tale,” l. 281, The Riverside Chaucer; John Paston II to J. Whetley, The Paston Letters, ed. Norman Davis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963, rev. 1983, reissued 1999) p. 243; Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.2.11, Norton Critical Edition. 39. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 158, 168. 40. The residence has been restored by the York Archeological Trust under the name “Barley Hall” and is open for public viewing. Pictures and information are on the world wide web at http://www.barleyhall.org.uk/ (accessed January 17, 2007). 41. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 78–79. 42. Swanson, Artisan, p. 92. 43. Swanson, Artisans, p. 92. 44. Beadle and King, York Mystery Plays, p. 88. 45. Thus Karras rightly discusses the masculinities of knights and craftsmen in separate chapters of From Boys to Men (Chapters 2 and 4). 46. Swanson, Artisans, p. 64. It is not clear what status—social or economic—the girdlers ever held in Chester. The extant records show that they shared responsibility for the “Resurrection” play with the skinners, cardmakers, and pointers, suggesting that there, too, they had little economic means (REED: Chester, pp. 32, 37). 47. Swanson, Artisans, p. 64. 48. The phrase “good to think with” comes from Lévi-Strauss, as quoted by Ashley in “Sponsorship,” p. 21. 49. Harley 2124 is the only manuscript to spell the word “gedling”—all other manuscripts show “godlinge.” “Congion” is the spelling of the British Library Additional 10305 and Harley 2124 manuscripts. Huntington reads “coninge,” Harley 2013 reads “connyon,” and Bodley 175 reads “conge” (Lumiansky and Mills, pp. 169n and 170n). 50. Karras, From Boys to Men, pp. 12, 109–150. 51. Given Chester’s late manuscripts, it is possible that these directions were added later as part of the antiquarian preservation of a later performance. Even so, such additions suggest strongly the way Herod’s character was read by contemporary audiences. 52. See the work of Miriam Anne Skey, particularly her articles “The Iconography of Herod in the Fleury Playbook and in the Visual Arts,” The Fleury

NOTES

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75.

76. 77.

185

Playbook: Essays and Studies, ed. Thomas P. Campbell and Clifford Davidson (1985) pp. 120–43; and “The Iconography of Herod the Great in Medieval Art,” Early Drama, Art, and Music Newsletter 3:1 (November 1980): 4–10. In following manuscripts: Huntington 2 (Hm), BL Additional 10305 (A), Harley 2013 (R), and Bodley 175 (B). Not in Harley 2124 (H). Lumiansky and Mills, p. 170n. To the left of ll. 209–210 in MSS A, R, B. Lumiansky and Mills, p. 165n. “Staffe and another gowne” in B; “Jacet gladium” in H; “Cast up” in remaining MSS. Lumiansky and Mills, p. 172n. Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 212. Stevens, Four Cycles, p. 280; Travis, Dramatic Design, p. 145. Stevens, Four Cycles, p. 281. REED: Chester, p. 12. Again, see Zina Peterson, “As Tuching the Beyring of Their Torchez,” pp. 96–108. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 123–24. Swanson, Artisans, p. 168. Travis, Dramatic Design, p. 164. Only in John is Judas specified; both Matthew 26.8 and Mark 14.4 vaguely suggest the indignation of more than one disciple. This is especially true for critics discussing the York “Entry,” which is by far more elaborate than Chester’s. See, for example, Stevens, Four Cycles, pp. 50–51. Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 100. See Chapter 1. For detailed discussion of the ceremonial homages, see REED: Chester, pp. li–lii, and Mills, Recycling the Cycle, pp. 73–78. Lumiansky and Mills, Chester Mystery Cycle, vol. 2, p. 205. David Mills’s translation,Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition, p. 248. Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 240. This is a point also noted by Travis, Dramatic Design, p. 176. Swanson, Artisans, p. 13; Maud Sellers, ed.,The York Memorandum Book: Vol. I (1376–1419) (Durham, Eng.: Surtees Society, 1912) p. 168. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 123–24. For a detailed discussion of their altercation with the butchers during an early seventeenth-century bull-baiting, as well as their problems with regulatory laws, see Mills, Recycling the Cycle, pp. 70–71, where he quotes from the Chester City Archives CR 60/83 (Add), Mayors List. See also the account from the British Library Harley 2125 MS, printed in REED: Chester, pp. 331–32. REED: Chester, p. 245. For elaborations of this idea, see Peter W. Travis, “The Social Body of the Dramatic Christ in Medieval England,” Early Drama to 1600, Acta vol. 13 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1987) pp. 17–36; and Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture, and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

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78. John Cox, “The Devil and Society,” pp. 430–31. 79. Swanson, Artisans, p. 15. 80. I discovered these details by using the “York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator,” designed by D.G. Jerz of Seton Hill University and available at http://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/PSim/index.html, accessed January 17, 2007. 81. See Robert A. Brawer, “The Characterization of Pilate in the York Cycle Play,” Studies in Philology 69 (1972): 289–303. For a review of the “good Pilate” and “evil Pilate” traditions in general, see Arnold Williams, The Characterization of Pilate in the Towneley Plays (East Lansing, 1950) pp. 1–9. Though some of what I say here dovetails with Brawer’s interpretation, he does not address Pilate as an example of masculine behavior or as resembling civic or guild leadership. 82. Beadle, The York Plays, Glossary, p. 523; MED. 83. The institution of the first Eucharist is actually missing from York’s Last Supper because a leaf is missing from the manuscript, perhaps removed during the Reformation. See Beadle’s textual note in The York Plays, pp. 230–31. The importance of the connection between the feast of Corpus Christi and the plays was first formulated by Kolve in The Play Called Corpus Christi. There he argued for the connection between all the cycles and the feast, although we now understand that only the York cycle was consistently associated with the feast day. See Mills, Recycling the Cycle, Chapter 6, for a discussion of Chester’s celebrations of Corpus Christi and the plays’ move to Whitsun. Other important works on the connections between the feast, drama, and the social body include James, “Ritual, Drama and Social Body,” and Beckwith, Christ’s Body. A full account of the Corpus Christi feast and its ceremonies can be found in Miri Rubin’s Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 84. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 123–24. 85. MED, both citations. 86. For the argument that Christ’s flesh is often consciously masculine in the visual arts, see Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ. In contrast, Caroline Walker Bynum sees Christ and his body as generally feminine in late medieval devotional art. See her reply to Steinberg, “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” first printed in Renaissance Quarterly 39.3 (Autumn, 1986): 399–439, and reprinted in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991) pp. 79–118; see also her book Jesus as Mother: Studies in Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982). I will take up the issues of Christ’s gender in the plays in more detail in the following chapter. 87. Swanson, Artisans, pp. 123–24. 88. Peterson, “As Tuchying the Beyring of Their Torchez,” pp. 96–108. 89. Gastle, “As if She Were Single,” p. 42. 90. Again, see Peterson pp. 96–108.

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187

91. Again, see Dinshaw, Getting Medieval. 92. Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 90. For a view of a London guild counter to my pessimistic reading, see Amos, “The Naked and the Dead,” in The Middle Ages at Work, pp. 91–110. 93. See Kathleen Ashley, “Sponsorship, Reflexivity and Resistance,” pp. 25–38.

Chapter 4 Acting Like a Man: The Solitary Christ and Masculinity 1. See especially Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother and “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg.” For readings influenced by Bynum, see Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and Beckwith’s work, especially Christ’s Body and “Making the World in York and the York Cycle,” Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 254–76. 2. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 134–35. Also, for a discussion of the homoerotic potential of Christ’s body in the York Passion sequence, and of the heterosexist tendencies of criticism that sees Christ’s “penetrated” and desirable body as necessarily feminine, see Garret P. J. Epp, “Ecce Homo,” Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) pp. 236–52. 3. I am reminded of the countless pageants and plays I performed in my Catholic grade school, where the casting of some obsequious teacher’s pet as Jesus always irked me. The smugness of one particular “Christ” distracted me so much in my performance as Veronica that I nearly missed my cue to wipe his face. In that particular instance, I was probably uncharitably wishing more suffering for our “Christ.” Such situationspecific reactions cannot be discounted for the audience and players of medieval drama. 4. For the image of wound-as-vagina, see Lucy Freeman Sandler, “Jean Pucelle and the Lost Miniatures of the Belleville Breviary,” Art Bulletin 66 (1984) fig. 17 [73–96]; cited in Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, p. 152n. 5. On “The Ritual Aesthetics of the Passion” in the Chester cycle, see Travis, Dramatic Design, pp. 174–91. 6. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, pp. 122–23. 7. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ. 8. For the “feminine” passive Christ, see Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, p. 149, and Peter W. Travis, “The Semiotics of Christ’s Body in the English Cycles,” Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama, ed. Richard Emmerson (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990) p. 71 [67–78]. In contrast see Ruth Evans, “Body politics,” p. 117, which I have discussed in the introduction.

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9. Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, p. 54; Jonathan Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books and the Gawain-Poet (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Brewer, 1985) p. 71. 10. Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, p. 74; Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (London: Richard Jones, 1583), cited by Sponsler, p.75. For her discussion of the Treatise of Miraclis Pleyinge, see pp. 75–78. 11. Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, p. 59. 12. Sponsler, Drama and Resistance, p. 61. 13. All citations of “How the Wise Man Taught His Son” are from the edition printed in The Babees Book, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society O.S. 32 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969; London: N. Trubner & Co., 1868). 14. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 135–69. 15. Alexandra F. Johnston, “ ‘At the Still Point of the Turning World’: Augustinian Roots of Medieval Dramaturgy,” European Medieval Drama 2, ed. Sydney Higgins (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1998) p. 3 [pp. 1–19]; Woolf, Mystery Plays, p. 257; Clifford Davidson, From Creation to Doomsday: The York Cycle of Mystery Plays (New York: AMS Press, 1984), pp. 109–110. 16. Evans, “Body Politics,” pp. 119–20, emphasis hers. Stevens, in Four Cycles, p. 282, and Travis, in Dramatic Design, p. 162, have similar interpretations of the laconic Chester Christ. 17. On the play’s echoes of contemporary English trials, see Pamela M. King, “Contemporary Cultural Models for the Trial Plays in the York Cycle,” Drama and Community: People and Plays in Medieval Europe, ed. Alan Hindley (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1999) pp. 200–216. King sees Christ’s silence and his interlocutors’ verbosity as “opposed markers of power” (p. 203). See also Elza C. Tiner, “English Law in the York Trial Plays,” The Early Drama, Art, and Music Review 18:2 (Spring 1996): 103–112. 18. Evans, “Body Politic,” p. 119. 19. Beadle and King’s translation, York Mystery Plays, p. 169. 20. The Huntington manuscript reads “scalward” here, but Harley 2013 and Bodley 175 both read “stalwarde.” The text’s editors note: “Both the nonce-forms, scalwarde HmA and stanold H, could derive from stalwarde by error. . .But it is equally possible that HmA or H transmit an exemplar error and that RBC represent the independent attempts by two scribes to find a formal, meaningful alternative,” Lumianksy and Mills, Vol. 2, p. 232n. 21. Travis, Dramatic Design, p. 162. 22. Evans, “Body Politics,” p. 120. 23. Beadle and King’s transliteration, York Mystery Plays, p. 181. 24. Jeffery Jerome Cohen, “ ‘Kyte oute yugilment’: An Introduction to Medieval Noise,” Exemplaria 16.2 (2004): 1–8. 25. Indeed, Beckwith sees the York pageants as “a criticism of the separation of passion from resurrection” in much contemporary devotional practice. See Signifying God, p. 89. 26. Evans, “Body Politics,” p. 120.

NOTES

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27. Pamela Sheingorn, “The Moment of Resurrection in the Corpus Christi Plays,” Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval & Renaissance Culture 11 (1982): 118 [51–90]. 28. Sheingorn, “Moment of Resurrection,” p. 118. See also Kolve, Corpus Christi, p. 196–97. 29. Also noted in Sheingorn, “Moment of Resurrection,” pp. 120–21. 30. Because the Towneley Resurrection is a variant of York’s, some critics have assumed that York’s play also included a complaint monologue that was later removed. For the first expression of this theory, see W. W. Greg, “Bibliographical and Textual Problems of the English Miracle Cycles,” The Library, Ser. 3, vol. 5, 1914, p. 285, cited by Sheingorn, “Moment of Resurrection,” p. 128n. Woolf disagrees with Greg; see Mystery Plays, p. 406n. All of these monologues, however, including Chester’s, are later interpolations from lyric tradition, suggesting that Towneley’s could have easily been added after the play was borrowed from York. Whether York had such a complaint and removed it, or never had one at all, the result still produces a greater emphasis on Christ’s triumph than his sorrow. See also J. W. Robinson, “The Late Medieval Cult of Jesus and the Mystery Plays,” PMLA 80:5 (1965): 508–514. 31. See Chapter 1. 32. For instance, after 1422, multiple guilds were responsible for the play now known as “Trial Before Pilate: The Judgment,” because four different pageants were combined at that time. These guilds argued to such an extent that they had to be put under the control of merchant supervisors. The disputing guilds included the saucemakers, tilemakers, turners, hayresters and bollers, and millers, many of whom only appear in the records in these pageant-related disputes. REED: York, pp. 48–50. 33. Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 72. 34. Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 73. 35. Beckwith, Signifying God, p. 88. 36. Davidson, From Creation to Doomsday, p. 135. 37. The stanza in which this line appears is in only three manuscripts (Harley 2013, Bodley 175, and Harley 2124), and is printed in Lumiansky and Mills’s notes, Chester Mystery Cycle, Vol. 2, p. 285. 38. In the process there has been some misreading and overreading of the assignment of the pinners to the play—misunderstandings that should be sorted out. The source of much of the confusion is Justice’s famous article, “Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle.” In it, Justice defined pinners as the makers of the wooden pegs in carpentry joints, and therefore appropriately assigned to a play that concerns a wooden cross. However, pinners did not make wooden pegs or joints—joiners did. Pinners, who were also called wiredrawers in York, made small wire pins (among other such delicate metal objects) of the sort a tailor might use. See Swanson, Artisans, pp. 71–72. Anne Higgins is the critic to follow Justice mostly closely and thus unfortunately overread the “figural significance” of pinners in the performance of incompetent woodworkers. See Higgins,

190

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

NOTES

“Work and Plays: Guild Casting in the Corpus Christi Drama,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7 (1995): 88–89 [76–97]. And Martin Stevens, in an offhand comment, mistakes their pin-making craft for something more akin to the nailers, as well as to the joiners, when he writes, “Clearly, they were associated in some way with the nailing process itself and perhaps also with the boring of holes into the Cross” (Stevens, Four Cycles, p. 30). But pinners did not make nails, either. Nails were made of iron; pinners largely worked with thin copper wire (Swanson, Artisans, pp. 71–72). This recurring mistake also finds its way into anthologies of drama and of medieval literature, such as the introduction to the York Crucifixion in the Longman Anthology of Literature, Vol. 1A, ed. Christopher Baswell and Anne Howland Schotter, general ed. David Damrosch (New York: Longman, 2003) p. 506. Kathleen Ashley, “Sponsorship, Reflexivity and Resistance,” p. 20. Ashley, “Sponsorship,” p. 20. Ashley, “Sponsorship,” p. 21. Evans, “Body Politic,” p. 121. Karras, From Boys to Men, pp. 12, 109–150.

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INDEX

Abel, 41, 75 in Chester plays, 42–51 in York plays, 56–7 Abraham, 12, 41, 47, 159 in Brome play, 72 in Chester plays, 73 in Muslim culture, 72 in Northampton play, 72–3 in York plays, 73–9 Adam, 41, 71, 79 in Chester plays, 42–51 in York plays, 51–6 Aelred of Rievaulx, 146 affective piety and Christ, 1, 11, 145, 146 as not operating in York plays or Chester plays, 1, 11, 77, 145, 146 and women, 1, 11, 77, 145, 146 see also Christ, and affective piety Alan, Thomas, 22 alewife, figure of, 16, 61, 88, 90, 88, 90–1 “aliens,” 25, 125 Amos, Mark Addison, 174 n130, 187 n92 angels fallen, 10, 95–101, 143 as messengers of God, 54, 74, 77–8, 79, 84, 93, 105 antifeminism, 6, 43, 53, 59, 103 apostles and disciples of Christ as group: in Chester plays, 125–33, 158–9, 160, 161; in York plays, 137–9, 139–43, 159–61

Jacob, in York plays, 140 James, in Chester plays, 160 John, 146: in Chester plays, 163; in York plays, 138, 160, 163 Judas Iscariot, 11, 141, 161: in Chester plays, 126, 129–33; in York plays, 134–7, 138 Peter: in Chester plays, 127, 131–3; in York plays, 133–4, 137–8, 141, 159, 160 Philip: in Chester plays, 127; in York plays, 133–4 Thomas, in York plays, 159–60 apprentices and apprenticeship, 15, 18, 25, 34–5, 36, 37, 44, 46, 47–8, 53, 55, 59, 60, 64–9, 70, 78, 80, 81–2, 105, 125 ark, Noah’s see Noah see also under York plays, individual pageants; Chester plays, individual pageants artisans, as class, 1, 7, 20, 25, 26–7, 31, 52–3, 55, 56, 67, 142, 157 Ashley, Kathleen, 162, 177 n42, 187 n93 Augustine, Saint, of Hippo, 49, 95 bakers, in Winchester, 15 Barry, Isabella, 17 Barthes, Roland, 7 Beadle, Richard, 165 n1, 168 n18, 169 n33 Beckwith, Sarah, 55, 67, 127, 144 and “sacramental theater,” theory of, 10, 42

202

INDEX

Bennett, J. M., 170 n16 Bernard, Saint, of Clairvaux, 146 Beverly, city of, 23, 25, 27 Bevington, David, 167 n10 Black, Anthony, 171 n43 Bonoyne, Giles, 15 Brawer, Robert A., 186 n81 brewing, 15–16 Bristol, weavers in, 17 Brome “Abraham and Isaac” play, 72 Browne, John, 34 building occupations, 20, 35–6, 37, 58–9, 65–7 Bullough, Vern, 80 butchers, 48 Butler, Judith, 9, 94 “performativity” of gender defined, 167 n4 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 145–7 Cain, 41, 75, 129, 136, 141 in Chester plays, 42–51, 56 in York plays, 56–7 “carriage” (Chester), 91 Chambers, E. K., 170 n2 Chaucer, Geoffrey “The Miller’s Prologue and Tale,” 24, 55, 115 “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” 59 Chester, city of assembly of, 28 civic structure of, 27–8, 32 fluidity of occupations in, 36, 37, 61, 97 freedom of, 127, 160–1 mayor of, 27–8, 32 status and power in, 98–9, 105, 112, 119, 125, 128, 131, 157 Chester Corpus Christi procession, 28, 98, 100 Chester guilds as all male, 1, 5, 14, 15, 21, 29, 95, 127, 164

apprenticeship in, 35, 44, 46, 47–8, 59, 60, 125 culture and ideology of, 11, 46, 48–51, 58–61, 95, 112, 150, 164 as homosocial, 2, 94, 95–144, 164 and the household/domestic sphere, 7, 35–9, 41–51, 57–64, 79–94, 110, 164 and social and class tensions, 1, 7, 97, 98–101, 105, 112, 125, 157 socioeconomic structures of, 9, 27–8, 29–32, 48, 59, 80, 98–9, 105, 164 records, documents, and discourse of, 7, 13, 27, 35, 38, 45–6, 94 Chester guilds, individually bakers, 130, 131 barkers (tanners), 96, 97, 98–101 cardmakers, 184 n46 drapers, 44, 45–6, 48, 128 dyers, 91 girdlers, 184 n46 goldsmiths, 91 hosiers, 45 masons, 91 mercers, 110, 112 pointers, 184 n46 shoemakers (cordwainers or corvisors), 125, 127–8, 130, 141 skinners, 184 n46 smiths, 8 tailors, 46 vintners, 91, 109, 110, 112, 119, 122 waterleaders and drawers, 58–9 weavers, 146 wrights, 80, 83 Chester Midsummer procession, 72, 98 Chester plays as all male, 1, 3, 5, 7, 29, 37–8, 83, 100–1, 127, 164 as civic duty, 33, 37–8, 42, 83, 91–2, 100, 164

INDEX

as conflicted about masculinity, 11–12, 37–8, 41–51, 57–64, 79–94, 95–144, 146, 155, 145–64 as controlled by mayor and city government, 8, 28, 113, 156, 164 and costs to guilds, 33, 91–2, 96, 100, 157 as creating gender norms, 13, 19, 20, 29, 35–9, 41–51, 57–64, 79–94, 100–1, 107, 155, 157 as critique of unmasculine behavior, 1, 48–51, 62, 86–94, 100–1, 103–5, 109, 121–2, 128, 132–3, 155, 157 dates of, 165 n1 as devotional practice, 2, 100, 127 and domestic sphere, 10, 19, 35–6, 37–8, 41–51, 57–64, 79–94, 105, 106, 109, 110, 124, 125–6, 164 Early Banns of, 28, 45 as expressing social conflicts, 10, 42, 61, 86–94, 97, 98–9, 100–1, 103–7, 112, 114–15, 119–20, 124–5, 127–9, 132, 157 as expressing urban or civic culture, 2, 7, 8, 10, 28, 42, 49, 51, 57, 60–1, 62, 91, 93–5, 98–9, 100–1, 102, 107, 113, 122, 123–5, 125–33, 156, 164 as fantasy or idealization of masculinity, 1, 9, 10, 20, 37, 41–2, 47–8, 57–9, 61, 62–4, 101, 102, 107–13, 115, 123, 124, 127, 130–3, 146, 155, 158 as guild-produced and guilddefining, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10–11, 13, 29, 38, 45–8, 58–61, 62, 80, 83, 95–144, 156–7, 158, 164 and homosocial community, 10–11, 37–8, 41, 42, 46, 47–8, 59, 86–94, 95–144, 146, 158–9, 161–2, 164

203

Late Banns of, 58, 131, 176 n31 manuscripts of, 8, 61, 91 as nostalgia, 1, 41, 48, 60, 62, 79, 94, 106 as producing culture, 5, 7, 9, 13, 19, 29, 35–9, 59–61, 93–4, 100–1, 113, 119, 123, 164 and public sphere, 10–11, 37–8, 41–2, 60, 61, 83, 84–94, 100–1, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 113, 114–15, 118–22, 123–5, 125–33, 164 and questions of authorship, 7–8 and Rogers’ Breviary, 45 staging methods of, 4, 91, 96, 108–9, 113–14, 121, 146 vocabulary of guilds in, 46, 50, 91, 93, 102, 104–5, 106, 112, 113, 123, 124–5, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132–3, 158, 160–1 see also under Chester plays, individual pageants and under individual sponsoring guilds and individual character entries Chester plays, individual pageants “Abraham, Lot, and Melchysedeck” (Play 4), 73 “Adam and Eve; Cain and Abel” (Play 2), 42–51 “The Annunciation and Nativity” (Play 6), 4, 80–1, 83 “Antichrist” (Play 23), 8 “The Ascension” (Play 20), 160–1 “Christ at the House of Simon the Leper, the Entry into Jerusalem, Christ and the Moneylenders, and Judas’s Plot” (Play 14), 122, 123, 125–30, 131, 155 “The Crucifixion (Play 16-A), 161, 163 “Emmaus” (Play 19), 158–9 “The Fall of Lucifer” (Play 1), 95–101

204

INDEX

Chester plays, individual pageants––continued “The Harrowing of Hell” (Play 17), 16, 155, 161 “The Healing of the Blind Man and the Raising of Lazarus” (Play 13), 123–5 “The Last Judgment” (Play 24), 146 “The Last Supper, and the Betrayal of Christ” (Play 15), 123, 130–3 “The Massacre of the Innocents” (Play 10), 42, 79, 86–94, 110, 112, 114, 115, 121 “Noah’s Flood” (Play 3), 35–6, 37, 41, 57–64, 70, 71, 140 “The Offering of the Three Kings” (Play 9), 87, 107–15 “The Purification of the Virgin Mary and Christ’s Appearance Before the Doctors” (Play 11), 3 “The Shepherds” (Play 7), 102–7, 108, 111, 112, 114 “The Temptation of Christ, and the Woman Taken in Adultery” (Play 12), 122 “The Three Kings” (Play 8), 107–15, 118–22 “The Trial and Flagellation” (Play 16), 150, 152, 155, 161 Christ, 1, 10–12, 41, 67, 72, 75, 77, 79, 145–64 as “absent presence” (Beckwith), 72, 157–8, 159, 160, 164 and affective piety, 1, 11, 145, 146, 157 betrayal of, 11, 124, 126, 130–7, 138, 139–43 body of (in all senses), 54, 67, 100, 110–11, 115, 131, 138, 144, 145, 146, 148, 156 distance and isolation of, 11, 54, 141, 144, 145, 148, 157, 159, 161, 162, 164 emotional reticence of, 1, 11, 54, 56, 87, 133, 140, 144, 145, 148, 150, 152–4, 156, 163–4

in homosocial communities, 11, 110–11, 122–44, 147–8, 162, 164 humanity of, 110–11, 138, 140, 147 infancy of, 41, 85–6, 93, 101, 105, 106, 108, 118 inimitability of, 42, 109, 145, 148, 157 latent power of, 143, 147–8, 150, 151–2, 154, 155, 156 longing for presence of, 11, 125–6, 137–8, 145, 157, 158–60, 161, 164 ministry of, 122–30 as model of masculinity, 1, 10, 11–12, 42, 56, 109, 111, 128, 140, 143, 144, 145–64 Passion of, 2, 4, 11, 54, 75, 77, 92, 93, 100, 109, 122, 126, 140, 144, 150, 152, 154–7, 159, 161–3 post-resurrection appearances of, 11, 157–61 resurrection of, 2, 11, 152, 156 as self-sacrificing male, 10, 42, 56, 115, 144, 146, 148, 150, 162, 164 sexuality of, 110–11, 147–8 silence and stillness of, 1, 56, 67, 140, 142, 144, 147–8, 150–7 symbolic gendering of, 145–8 see also under York plays, individual pageants; Chester Plays, individual pageants clergy as profession, 37 Clopper, Lawrence, 3, 4, 6, 7–8 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 153, 166 n2 Colan, John, 117 Coletti, Theresa, 5, 7, 181 n106 Comester, Peter, 44, 129 conduct texts, 147–52, 156, 163 Coventry, 23, 32 plays, 33, 167 n9 weavers in, 17 Cox, John D., 96, 101, 132 craft, definition of, see guild, definition of Crosby, William, 17 Cullum, P. H., 166 n2

INDEX

Davidson, Clifford, 58 devil, the, see Satan Dobson, R. B., 21, 24, 45 “drama of masculinity” defined, 1–3, 7, 12, 54, 164 Dyer, Christopher, 177 n38 Edward III, king of England, 14 Epp, Garret P. J., 187 n2 Evans, Ruth, 2–3, 43, 150, 152, 162 Eve, 12, 16, 41, 64, 71, 79 association with spinning, 16 in Chester plays, 42–51 in York plays, 51–6 family, see masculinity and the family; masculinity and fatherhood; masculinity and sons “fem(m)e sole,” 15 Fitzgerald, Christina M., 177 n37 Flood, the see Noah; see also under York plays, individual pageants; Chester plays, individual pageants “foreigns,” 25, 26, 125 Foucault, Michel, 7, 29 and “docile bodies,” theory of, 12, 29, 42, 48, 50, 73, 136, 143, 150, 151, 163 “franchise,” 25–6 “freedom” of a city definition of, 25 significance of, 25–6, 34, 58, 64, 66, 127, 160–1 see also York, city of, freedom Gastle, Brian W., 142 Geertz, Clifford, 169 n37 Gibson, Gail McMurray, 4, 5 Gillyot, John, 22 Glassen, John, 22 God the Father as absent, 41, 43, 47–8, 53–4, 71, 72, 74–5, 79, 93, 140, 157, 159, 161, 163–4

205

blessing given by, 63, 71 as first guild master, 65–7 intimacy with, 10, 43, 47, 63–72, 73, 163 longing for presence of, 11, 67, 137, 161, 163–4 obedience to, 10, 42, 48–51, 57, 63–4, 75–9, 96, 98–9, 100, 143, 161 prayers addressed to, 2, 68, 108, 140, 161, 163 Goldberg, P. J. P., 16, 19 Golden Legend, The, (Legenda Aurea), 93, 109 Gossips, the, in Chester plays, 60–2 Grantham, Hugh, 117 Gray, Thomas, 32 Greg, W. W., 189 n30 Grindal, Edmund, archbishop of York, 28 Gross, Charles, 171 n43 guild definition of, 20–1, 29 see under York guilds; York guilds, individually; Chester guilds; Chester guilds, individually; London, guilds see also under additional entries for individual cities guild diction and terminology “artifice” or “artificium,” 21 “brother” or “brotherhood” or “brethren” (various spellings), 123–4, 130, 158, 160 “company” (various spellings), 46, 50, 71, 91, 93, 112, 113, 129, 131, 135, 161 “craft(e),” 21 “fellowship” (various spellings), 102, 105–6, 112, 161 “fraternity,” 22, 102 “livery,” 20, 25, 102, 104–5, 134 “master” or “mastery” (various spellings), 49, 50, 52, 56, 59, 118, 124–5, 128, 129, 130,

206

INDEX

guild diction and terminology––continued 132–3, 134, 135, 136, 137–8, 142, 158, 159, 160 “meny” (various spellings), 59, 63, 78, 90, 137–9, 148, 161 “mystery,” 14, 22 Gusick, Barbara I., 178 n51 Hadley, D. M., 166 n2 Hanning, Robert, 44, 97–8 Herod Antipas in Chester plays, 150, 152 in York plays, 56, 150, 153 Herod the Great, 55, 79, 128, 129, 133, 137, 141 in Chester plays, 41, 79, 86–94, 107–15, 118–22 in York plays, 107–18 Higgins, Anne, 189–90 n38 Hilton, Rodney, 173 n97 Historia Scholastica, 44, 129 Holbek, William, 22 Homan, Richard, 181 n114 homosocial community anxieties about, 10, 11–12, 37–8, 46, 69–70, 94, 95, 100–1, 102–7, 109, 112–15, 117–18, 119, 124–5, 126, 129, 131–4, 137–9, 140–1, 143–4, 147–8, 160, 161, 162, 163–4 arbitrary boundaries of, 10, 46, 59, 95, 101, 102, 103–5, 107, 112, 113, 117, 119, 124–5, 129, 131–4, 137–9, 142, 162, 164 as defined by exclusion, 10, 69–70, 95, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 110, 111–12, 114–15, 125, 136, 137–9, 142, 143, 162 as defined by guilds, 2, 94, 95, 102, 117, 142, 144, 162, 164 as defined by York and Chester plays, 2, 10, 59, 64–70, 73–9, 95–144, 162, 164 see also masculinity, and homosocial community

“homosocial desire” (Sedgwick) defined, 166 n3 Howell, Martha C., 14, 19 “How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter,” 149–50 “How the Wise Man Taught His Son,” 149–51, 156, 163 hucksters, 15 Hull, city of, weavers in, 17 Innocents, the, 41, 42, 79, 132, 133 in Chester plays, 86–94, 113–15 in York plays, 115–18 Isaac, 41, 42, 159 in Brome play, 72 in Chester plays, 73 in Muslim culture, 72 in Northampton play, 72–3 in York plays, 73–9 Jacob the apostle, see apostles and disciples of Christ James, Mervyn and social body, theory of, 2, 102, 103–4, 105, 131 James the apostle, see apostles and disciples of Christ Jerz, D. G., 186 n80 Jesus, see Christ John of Ruysbroeck, 146 Johnston, Alexandra F., 30, 168 n16, 168 n25, 170 n2 John the apostle, see apostles and disciples of Christ Joseph the carpenter, 41, 55 in Chester plays, 4, 79–86, 92–3, 105, 106, 111, 119, 120 in York plays, 79–86 Josephus (Jewish historian), 93 Judas Iscariot, see apostles and disciples of Christ Julian of Norwich, The Shewings, 146 Justice, Alan, 91 Karras, Ruth Mazo, 36, 42, 88, 120, 164 Kastan, David Scott, 165 n1

INDEX

Kelly, H. A., 175 n10 Kempe, Margery, The Book of Margery Kempe, 5, 15 Kierkegaard, Søren, 72 King, Pamela, 168 n18, 188 n17 Kobialka, Michael, 168 n29 Kolve, V. A., 83 Kramer, Stella, 14 Kyllyngham, city of, guilds in, 32 Lambe, William, 30 Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 78 Laqueur, Thomas, 176 n22 Last Supper, the, depictions of, 11, 130–3, 137–9, 143, 146 Lees, Clare A., 166 n2 legal professions, 37 Legenda Aurea, (The Golden Legend), 93, 109 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 162 Lewis, Katherine J., 166 n2 “liberties,” 25 Lincoln, city of, guilds in, 29, 32, 36 literacy, lay, 148–9 Little Red Book of Bristol, The, 171 n29 London, 19–20, 32, 80 guilds, 13, 20, 25, 81 Lucifer, see Satan Lumiansky, R. M., 165 n1 Lynn, city of, 15 Magi, 101, 128, 143 in Chester plays, 87, 101–2, 105, 107–15, 120 in York plays, 107–18 Mangan, Michael, 166 n2 mariners, 58 Marshall, Christopher, 22 Mary and Martha, 122 in Chester plays, 125–6 Mary, Mother of God, see the Virgin Mary masculinity as absence, 10, 12, 53–4, 57, 72, 79, 86, 89, 93, 138, 140–1, 148, 150, 159–60, 161, 164

207

and alienation or isolation, 1, 9, 50, 54, 64, 103, 105, 106, 136, 140–1, 145, 147, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163–4 anxiety about, 1, 2, 7, 9, 20, 24, 37–8, 39, 68–72, 75–6, 79, 81–94, 99–101, 103–5, 106, 109, 113, 115, 118–19, 122, 124–5, 126, 129, 130–4, 136–7, 137–9, 140–1, 143–4, 145, 147–8, 149, 156, 161, 162, 164 and artisans or craftsmen, 36, 42, 50, 59, 94, 120, 129, 150 and the body, 53–4, 82–4, 89, 92, 100, 103–5, 106, 110, 114–15, 121–2, 146, 147–8, 149, 152–3, 154, 164 and boys, 42, 44, 53, 59, 86–94, 105–6, 120, 127, 164 and class, 1, 6–7, 12, 24, 78, 98–9, 101, 105, 118, 127–8, 135, 141–3, 150 and clerics, 42 conflicting expectations of, 2, 9, 12, 24, 37–8, 39, 42, 46, 51, 53, 54, 57, 62, 68–72, 73–9, 84, 86–94, 95–144, 145, 147–8, 149–50, 159–60, 163–4 and courtly culture, 42, 85, 108–9, 111, 117–18, 125–6 and devotional practices and beliefs, 3, 7, 77, 78, 127, 138 and drama, spectacle, and display (anxieties about), 1, 2, 12, 24, 39, 42, 43–6, 53–4, 55, 62, 64, 76, 77, 83–4, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97–101, 108, 113, 114–15, 121–2, 128, 130, 138, 147–8, 149, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161–4 and economics, 1, 7, 49–51, 52–3, 64–8, 78, 105, 117, 121, 126, 129, 134, 136 as emotional reticence, 1, 10, 12, 42, 55–6, 62, 77, 85, 87, 128, 132–3, 135, 140, 143, 145, 148, 150, 152–4, 155, 157, 159, 163–4

208

INDEX

masculinity––continued and the family, 10, 36, 37–8, 39, 41–94, 101, 105, 106, 110, 111, 115, 124, 163–4 and fatherhood, 36, 41, 47–51, 60, 68, 72–9, 81–2, 85–94, 99, 106, 116, 140, 149–50, 158–60, 161, 164 and guild identity (see also under individual guilds), 2, 7, 12, 24, 30, 38–9, 45–50, 52–3, 58–60, 64–8, 74, 75–6, 90, 95, 96, 97–9, 101, 102, 104, 106, 109, 113, 115, 117, 124–5, 127, 130, 137–8, 143, 150, 157, 160, 162, 164 and hierarchy and domination over others, 59, 78, 87–94, 96, 101, 103–6, 114–15, 128, 147–8, 164 and homosocial community (see also homosocial community entry), 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10–12, 37–9, 46–7, 50, 59–60, 70, 74, 86–94, 95–144, 145, 148, 160, 162, 164 and homosocial intimacy, 10, 43, 46–8, 63–8, 71–2, 73–9, 100, 103, 106, 124, 125–6, 130–1, 132, 137–40, 145, 146, 160, 163 and the household/domestic sphere, 1–3, 7, 9–10, 19, 35–9, 41–94, 101, 102–3, 105, 106, 110, 111, 115, 116, 124–5, 125–6, 132, 143, 145, 149–50, 163–4 and identity, 2, 7, 9, 12, 24, 30, 39, 102–3, 117, 123, 124–5, 162, 164 and knights (images of), 85, 87–94, 108, 112, 117–18, 147–8 and legitimacy, 76, 87–8, 119–20 and merchants, 58, 64, 94, 109, 128–9, 132, 135 and normative gender roles, 1, 2, 9, 10, 35–9, 42, 48, 50, 57, 75–9,

82, 86, 93–4, 95, 96, 99, 124, 135–6, 145, 149–53, 157, 163–4 as not femininity, 14, 42, 44–7, 54, 59, 103, 106, 127, 145 and patriarchy, 10, 36, 37–8, 39, 41–94, 96, 99, 101, 105, 111, 115–16, 119, 120, 126, 127, 158–9, 164 and performance (on stage), 1, 9, 38–9, 44, 52, 53, 55, 69, 83, 94, 95, 96, 100, 102, 128, 138, 146, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160, 164 and public/civic culture, 1, 7, 10, 24, 30, 37–9, 42, 50, 53, 60, 62, 64–72, 76, 84–94, 95, 98–9, 100–1, 104, 105, 106, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 117, 119, 124, 125–34, 135–6, 143, 145, 150, 157, 159, 161, 162, 163–4 as sacrifice, 10, 42, 48–51, 54, 57, 63, 75–9, 100, 115, 146, 148, 150, 164 and sexuality, 2, 79, 80, 81–4, 87–9, 92–3, 103–5, 106, 110, 111, 115, 119, 121–2, 146, 147–8 as shaped by drama, 1, 2, 5–6, 7, 12, 24, 30, 37–9, 41–94, 95–144, 145–64 as silence and stillness, 42, 140, 142, 143, 147–8, 149–52, 154, 155, 157 as social performance, 9, 12, 38–9, 45, 55–6, 78–9, 80, 83–4, 93–4, 99, 106, 113, 122, 127, 143, 147, 150, 153, 157, 163–4 and sons, 36, 37–8, 47–51, 60, 72–9, 81–2, 85–6, 89–92, 99, 116, 140, 149–50, 158–9, 161, 164 as subjectivity, 2, 7, 9, 12, 75, 93–4, 99, 136 and theory of social body, 2, 102, 103–4, 105, 131–3, 137, 145

INDEX

and urban culture, 1, 2, 7, 51, 60, 64–8, 93–4, 103, 124–5, 125–30, 133–4, 135–6, 148, 151 vocabulary of: “manfully” (various spellings), 87, 122; “manhood” (various spellings), 87, 110, 139, 140, 147, 148; “manly” (various spellings), 130, 148 and work, 7, 9, 19, 48–51, 58–9, 62, 64–8, 75, 123, 124–5, 136–7, 142, 162 McNamer, Sarah, 179 n75 McSheffrey, Shannon, 80 Mellinkoff, Ruth, 79 merchants, as class, 1, 7, 20, 25, 26–7, 29, 30–1, 32, 58–9, 97, 109, 118, 128, 135, 142–3, 157 metalworking occupations, 37 Mills, David, 8, 27–8, 61 Morgan, Margery M., 183 n33 Murray, Jacqueline, 166 n2 Newcastle “Noah’s Ark” play, 5 Newton, Agnes, 15 Nicholls, Jonathan, 149 Noah, 12, 41, 47, 55, 93, 100 in Chester plays, 35–7, 57–64, 140 in York plays, 64–72, 73 Noah’s sons in Chester plays, 57–64 in York plays, 68–72 Noah’s Wife, 75, 85, 100 in Chester plays, 35–7, 57–64 in Newcastle Noah play, 5 in N-Town plays, 5, 57 in Towneley manuscript plays, 6 in York plays, 57, 68–72 Nonhouse, Isabella, 17 Northampton “Abraham and Isaac” play, 72, 73 Norwich, city of, 23 guilds and plays, 6 pelters in, 22 weavers in, 17 N-Town plays, 3–5, 6, 72, 156

209

Octavian, Emperor, in Chester plays, 4, 110 Ovitt, George, Jr., 178 n51 pageant master (York), 30, 163 pageant silver (York), 30 pageant wagon (York), 4, 12, 30, 53, 70, 79, 76, 95, 146, 163, 146, 163 Palliser, D. M., 174 n104 Palmer, Barbara D., 168 n14, 168 n22 parish guilds, 5, 22 Passion of Christ, depictions of, see Christ, Passion of; see also York plays, individual pageants; Chester plays, individual pageants Paston, John, II, 115 Paston Letters, The, 115 patriarchy, see masculinity, and patriarchy Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, see Uprising of 1381 pelters, in Norwich, 22 “performativity” of gender (Butler) defined, 167 n4 Peterson, Zina, 142 Peter the apostle, see apostles and disciples of Christ Pharisees (Annas and Caiaphas) in Chester plays, 124, 129–30, 132 in York plays, 134–7, 147–8, 156 Philip the apostle, see apostles and disciples of Christ Phythian-Adams, Charles, 171 n28, 174 n124 and n127 Pilate, 55 in York plays, 56, 135–7, 147–8, 151–2 Poculi Ludique Societas troupe (Toronto), 183 n25, 183 n28, 183 n29, 183 n31 Princeton Index of Christian Art, 79 privy council, 28 Rappaport, Steve, 169 n1, 172–3 n70, 180 n90 and n91

210

INDEX

“redemption,” 25, 34 religious guilds, 5, 22, 30–1 Reynolds, Susan, 172 n70 Riggio, Milla, 72, 73, 75 Robinson, J. W., 189 n30 Rogerson, Margaret, 170 n2 Rubin, Miri, 186 n83 Ryan, Denise, 181 n106 Salzman, L. F., 181 n115 Sandler, Lucy Freeman, 187 n4 Sarah, Abraham’s wife, 73 Satan, 141 as adder with woman’s face, 44–5 in Chester plays, 43–4, 95–101, 155, 161 and Fall of the angels, 11, 95–101 as serpent or adder, 44–5, 46 in Towneley plays, 98 in York plays, 52–3, 55, 95–7, 98 Savage, Sir John, 28 Scarborough, city of, 27 searchers, 17, 22, 56, 65, 97 as agents of civic government, 23–4, 31–2, 38 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 43, 166 n3 servants, household, 18–19, 36, 78, 105 Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, 55, 115 Sheingorn, Pamela, 79, 156 shepherds, 101 in Chester plays, 102–7, 108, 110, 111, 137 in Towneley manuscript plays, 6 in York plays, 110 shipbuilders, 58 shipbuilding, 35–6, 37, 58–9, 66–7 Shipley, William, 17 Simon the Leper, in Chester plays, 125–6 Skey, Miriam Anne, 184 n52 Snaweshill, William, 116–17 “social body” (James), 2, 102, 103–4, 105, 131–3, 137 Sponsler, Claire, 149, 181 n107 Stanzaic Life of Christ, The, 93, 109, 129 Statutes of the Realm regulating guilds 1363 statute, 14, 23

1436 statute, 23 Steinberg, Leo, 111, 147, 148 Stevens, Martin, 6, 98, 99 Stubbes, Philip, The Anatomy of Abuses, 149, 188 n10 Swanson, Heather, 14, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 34, 37, 45, 117 Talbot, Robert, 168 n27 tanners, 48 tapsters, 16, 61 taverns and taverners, 16, 24 textile occupations, 16–17, 20, 69 Thomas the apostle, see apostles and disciples of Christ Three Kings, the, see Magi Thrupp, Sylvia L., 171 n36 Tiner, Elza C., 188 n17 tipplers, 16 Toche, Robert, 34 Towneley manuscript plays, 3, 4, 5–6, 72, 98, 129, 131, 156 Towthorpe, John, 22 Travis, Peter, 47, 58, 60, 152 Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, 149 Trowle, servant to Chester shepherds, 103–6, 112–14, 137, 141, 183 n28, 183 n29, 183 n31 Turner, Victor, 75, 169 n37 typology, 73, 75, 77, 78, 86, 92–3, 115, 179 n73 Uprising of 1381, 10, 27, 67, 101 Uxor Noah, see Noah’s Wife victualling occupations, 15–16, 24, 32, 61, 69, 103, 117, 131, 138 Villaseñor-Black, Charlene, 180 n99 Virgin Mary, the Annunciation to, 4–5, 93 Assumption of, 5 in Chester plays, 80, 111, 163 death of, 5 in N-Town plays, 4–5 Purification of, 3 sexuality of, 82, 83, 84

INDEX

and Visitation to Elizabeth, 4–5 in York plays, 81–2, 84–6, 111, 160, 163 Wakefield plays, see Towneley manuscript plays Walker, Greg, 167 n10 Wartere, Richard, 116 weavers in Bristol, 17 in Coventry, 17 in Hull, 17 in Norwich, 17 Wheeler, Bonnie, 166 n2 widows, 15, 17 Williams, Arnold, 186 n81 Williams, Raymond, 169 n40 Williamson, Margaret, 15 wills, 15, 17, 82 Winchester, bakers in, 15 women and absence from drama, 2–3, 10, 43, 47, 73–4, 95, 103–4, 106 and devotional practices, 1, 5, 11, 77, 145, 146 and domestic sphere, 36–7, 48, 52–3, 80, 103 and guilds, 2, 14–20, 61, 69 and parish or religious guilds, 5 and participation in drama, 5 and public sphere, 19, 61 and the “freedom,” 127 and urban culture, 3, 14–20, 36, 61–2, 80, 103 and work or economics, 5, 14–20, 36–7, 48, 52–3, 61, 69, 103 depiction of in plays, 4–5, 6, 16, 44, 46, 51, 59, 60–2, 68–72, 75, 80, 84–6, 88–94, 95, 156; see also under individual characters see also widows; “fem(m)e sole;” wills; servants, household; affective piety; alewife, figure of; victualling professions Woolf, Rosemary, 78, 129 wool production, 16–18

211

York Archeological Trust, 184 n40 York, city of 1517 constitution of, 27, 31, 118, 121, 131, 141 civic structure of, 17, 19, 20–7, 30–2 common council in (a.k.a. the fortyeight or commonalty), 26, 27, 31, 32, 66, 97, 125, 131, 141 council of twelve in, 26, 32 council of twenty-four in, 26, 29, 32 fines and fees, charge and use of, 24, 29, 30–1, 33, 35, 38, 65, 66–7, 70, 83 fluidity of occupations in, 24–6, 36, 37, 66–7, 96–7, 117, 139 freedom of, 17, 19, 25–6, 34, 64, 66–7, 127 mayor of, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 32, 116–17 public office, costs of, 32, 163 Register of Freemen, 17, 26, 117 searchers in, 17, 22, 23–4, 65, 97 status and power in, 20, 26, 30–2, 66, 96–7, 98, 116–17, 118, 121, 125, 131, 134, 135, 138, 142 and Uprising of 1381, 27, 67 and wool aulnage, 17 York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator, 186 n80 York Corpus Christi procession, 2, 26, 98, 100, 105, 142, 143 York guilds as all male, 1, 5, 14, 15, 21, 29, 64–9, 95, 133–4, 135, 140, 162, 164 apprenticeship in, 34–5, 37, 53, 55, 64–9, 70, 78, 81–2, 125 culture and ideology of, 11, 22, 26–7, 64–9, 74, 78, 95, 112, 118, 150, 162, 164 as homosocial, 2, 94, 95–144, 162–4 and the household/domestic sphere, 7, 35–9, 41–2, 51–7, 64–72, 73–9, 93–4, 110, 116, 163–4

212

INDEX

York guilds––continued records, documents, and discourse of, 7, 13, 17, 22–3, 29–32, 34, 35, 38, 55, 56, 69, 94 as regulated by civic government, 24, 25–6, 29–31, 33, 38, 65, 66, 96–7, 136, 150, 157, 163–4 religious component of, 22, 29, 33 and social and class tensions, 1, 2, 7, 20, 22, 26–7, 31, 32, 96–7, 98, 116–18, 125, 133–4, 135, 141–3, 157 socioeconomic structures of, 9, 20–7, 28–33, 52–3, 65, 66, 69, 75, 80, 81–2, 96–7, 116–18, 162, 163–4 York guilds, individually apothecaries, 27 armourers, 27 bakers, 27, 131, 138 barbers, 27 bowers, 27 bowstringmakers, 24 butchers, 24, 27, 134 carpenters, 22, 27, 66 chandlers, 27 chapmen, 118 coopers, 22–3, 52–3 cordwainers, 27, 37, 96–7, 98, 125, 141–3 curriers, 97 cutlers, 135 drapers, 17, 20, 27, 45–6 dyers, 15, 17, 27 fishmongers, 15, 27, 70 founders, 15, 34, 35 fullers, 24, 27 girdlers, 22, 97, 118 (as girdlers and nailers) glaziers, 27 glovers, 27, 29–32, 34, 35, 56 goldsmiths, 20, 27, 91–2, 107, 110, 112, 116, 118 grocers, 27 haberdashers, 118 hayresters and bollers, 189 n32

hosiers, 27, 45 innholders, 27 ironmongers, 27 joiners, 27, 66, 189–90 n38 mariners/shipmen, 45, 70 masons, 27, 91–2, 107, 117, 118 mercers, 20, 27, 30, 45, 118 millers, 189 n32 nailers, 118, 189–90 n38 pewterers, 20 pinners, 189–90 n38 plasterers and tilers, 24, 35 saddlers, 27, 33 saucemakers, 24, 189 n32 shearmen, 24 skinners, 27 smiths, 27 tailors, 27, 45 tanners, 27, 37, 96–7, 125 tilemakers, 189 n32 turners, 189 n32 vestmentmakers, 27 vintners, 27 weavers, 17–18, 27, 34, 98, 142 York House Books, 33, 45 York Memorandum Book, 22, 34, 70 York plays as all male, 1, 2–3, 5, 7, 29, 64–8, 73, 95, 133–4, 135, 139–40, 162, 164 as civic duty, 30, 31, 32–3, 35, 37, 42, 53, 56, 66, 77, 91–2, 100, 164 as conflicted about masculinity, 11–12, 24, 37–8, 41–2, 51–7, 64–72, 73–9, 85–6, 93–4, 95–144, 145–64 as controlled by civic council, 24, 30, 33, 38, 45, 66–7, 83, 97, 98, 117, 143, 156, 162, 164 and costs to guilds, 33, 42, 45, 56, 66–7, 70, 91–2, 96, 100, 117, 157, 159, 163 as creating gender norms, 13, 19, 20, 24, 29, 37–8, 41, 42, 75–9, 82,

INDEX

85, 94, 135–7, 143, 144, 150–2, 157 as critique of unmasculine behavior, 1, 55–6, 57, 77, 81, 86, 136–7, 140–1, 147, 151–2, 153, 155–6, 157 dates of, 165 n1 as devotional practice, 2, 100, 127, 134, 138 and domestic sphere, 10, 19, 37–8, 41–94, 101, 110, 116, 143, 163–4 as expressing social conflicts, 10, 24, 42, 56–7, 70, 74, 76, 97, 98, 116–17, 133–5, 136–7, 139, 141–3, 147–8, 157 as expressing urban or civic culture, 2, 6–8, 10, 24, 33, 42, 51, 56, 64–72, 94, 95, 98, 100, 122, 133–7, 140, 143, 156, 159–60, 163–4 as fantasy or idealization of masculinity, 1, 2–3, 9, 10, 20, 24, 37–8, 41, 48, 54, 55–6, 64–8, 71–2, 73–9, 85, 86, 101, 107, 110, 115, 135, 137–9, 140, 143, 150–2, 154, 162–4 funding sources of, 24, 30–1, 33, 35, 38, 66, 70, 83 as guild-produced and guilddefining, 2, 3, 7, 9, 10–11, 13, 24, 29–30, 38, 45, 48, 51–3, 54–5, 64–72, 74, 80, 95–144, 156–7, 159–60, 162–4 and homosocial community, 10–11, 37–8, 41, 64–8, 70, 73–9, 81, 93–4, 95–144, 148, 160, 162–4 as nostalgia, 1, 67–8, 79, 94, 138 the official “register” of, 6, 8 the “originals” or prompt copies of, 8 as producing culture, 5, 7, 9, 13, 19, 24, 29, 37–8, 64–72, 75–6, 78, 94, 135–6, 143, 150–2, 162–4 and public sphere, 10–11, 29, 41, 64–72, 84–6, 93–4, 100–1, 110, 115–18, 134–7, 143, 162–4

213

questions of authorship of, 7–8 as “sacramental theater” (Beckwith), 10, 42, 100 staging methods, 4, 53, 70, 76, 96, 156, 162–3 Toronto production of (1998), 156 and vocabulary of guilds, 52, 71, 78, 112, 118, 134, 135, 136, 137–9, 142, 148, 160, 161 and vocabulary of “work,” 51, 52–3, 54–5, 64–8, 69, 72, 75, 76, 77, 118, 136, 142, 144, 162–3 see also York plays, individual pageants see also under individual sponsoring guilds and individual character entries York plays, individual pageants “Abraham and Isaac” (Play 10), 73–9 “The Agony in the Garden and the Betrayal” (Play 28), 132, 139–43 “The Ascension” (Play 42), 160–1, 163 “The Building of the Ark” (Play 8), 52, 58, 64–8, 73 “Cain and Abel” (Play 7), 56–7 “Christ Before Annas and Caiaphas” (Play 29), 154 “Christ Before Herod” (Play 31), 150, 153 “Christ Before Pilate 1” (Play 30), 150–1, 152 “Christ Before Pilate 2: The Judgment” (Play 33), 147–8, 153–4 “The Conspiracy” (Play 26), 134–7 “The Creation” (Play 2), 51, 54 “The Creation of Adam and Eve” (Play 3), 51–2 “The Crucifixion” (Play 35), 2–3, 43, 144, 155, 157, 162–3 “The Death of Christ” (Play 36), 163 “The Entry into Jerusalem” (Play 25), 122, 127, 129, 133–4

214

INDEX

York plays, individual pageants––continued “The Expulsion” (Play 6), 54–6 “The Fall of Man” (Play 5), 52–4, 56 “The Fall of the Angels” (Play 1), 95–7, 98, 101 “The Flight into Egypt” (Play 18), 84–6, 92 “The Flood” (Play 9), 68–72, 73 “Herod and the Magi” (Play 16), 91–2, 10, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 115–18 “Joseph’s Trouble about Mary” (Play 13), 81–3 “The Last Judgment” (Play 47), 163–4 “The Last Supper” (Play 27), 137–9, 147

“The Nativity” (Play 14), 84–5 “The Pageant of Fergus” (missing play), 91 “The Purification of Mary” (Play 17), 3 “The Resurrection” (Play 38), 155–6 “The Road to Calvary” (Play 34), 161 “The Slaughter of the Innocents” (Play 19), 79, 85, 86, 118 “The Supper at Emmaus” (Play 4), 159 “The Woman Taken in Adultery and the Raising of Lazarus” (Play 24), 122 York Register of Freemen, 17, 26, 117