"Veniance, Lord, apon thaym fall": maternal mourning, divine justice, and tragedy in the Corpus Christi plays

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Annual, 2006 by Katharine Goodland

SCHOLARS have long recognized that medieval concepts of reciprocal justice and divine retribution underpin the dramatic patterns of the Herod plays. (1) However, they have overlooked the evidence suggesting that this ethical design is embodied in the mothers' laments. There is also critical disagreement over the strength of the typological association between the mothers of the Slaughter plays and the Virgin Mary of the Flight, Purification, and Passion sequences. While scholars agree that the plays skillfully blend topical realism with the biblical story in portraying Herod and his knights, (2) they vary in their assessments of the mourning mothers.

There is critical disagreement over whether or not the mothers of the Herod plays are "active" or "passive" in their suffering. This issue leads directly to the problem of typology: those who see the mothers as "active" often construe the Virgin as "passive." These critical discrepancies expose tacit biases with respect to the dramatic representation of female grief, particularly the Virgin's. There appears to be an expectation that female sorrow, and especially the Virgin's, should be dramatized as restrained, picturesque, and lyrical rather than angry and vengeful. None have pursued the parallels between Mary and the mothers beyond pointing out how their association supports the typology between Christ and the Innocents, a relationship that has been thoroughly charted. (3) The evidence of the plays suggests, however, that the affinity between Mary and the mothers is meaningful in its own right.

In this essay I hope to redress this critical oversight by demonstrating the significance of the typology between the Virgin of the Flight, Purification, and Passion sequences and the mothers of the Slaughter plays. In all four cycles Mary's narrow escape with her child prefigures the plight of the mothers, just as their dilemma, in turn, foreshadows Mary's woe during the Passion. The Purification play adds the last thematic thread to the dramatic tapestry that intertwines the fates of Mary and the mothers. It underscores the tragic kinship between them by auguring both the mothers' loss of their children and Mary's inevitable loss of Jesus.

The maternal mourning of the holy women in medieval drama, as Peter Dronke shows, is rooted in the wails of anguish and songs of sorrow through which medieval women coped with the death of their loved ones throughout their own lives. (4) In these plays, the mourning Mother of God is not a mute emblem of sorrow; her dramatic power emanates from her wails, not her silence. Her laments condemn Herod, while the cries of the bereaved mothers compound her denunciation and engender his fate. Moreover, this dramatic typology conveys not simply Christ's tragic burden, but also his mother's.

To make this argument, I first examine critical resistence to reading the dramatic agency of maternal mourning in these plays. Next, I analyze writings by John Mirk, the popular late medieval English preacher, to illuminate medieval beliefs about the power of cursing and maternal mourning. After establishing this critical and historical background, I turn to a close reading of the plays in order to demonstrate the dramatic agency of maternal mourning in the medieval English Corpus Christi drama.

I

In their discussions of the Towneley Slaughter of the Innocents both David Bevington and J. W. Robinson raise the issue of typology between the Virgin of the Passion and the mothers of the Herod plays, but they reach different conclusions. Bevington begins by noting a correspondence between the mourning mothers of the Towneley Herod the Great and the lamenting Virgin of the Towneley Crucifixion. However, his observation remains inconclusive because he sees the Virgin's lament as passive and the mothers of the Herod play as active. Observing that the "the mothers of the slain children are ... vividly portrayed" in the Wakefield play, he concludes: "Although their role is similar to that of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the cross, they are not passive mourners but fiercely protective women justly accusing their oppressors of unmanliness." (5) While J. W. Robinson agrees that "each woman in turn puts up a defense" against the knights, he has no doubt that the terms of their laments are meant to "recall Mary's lamentation at the Crucifixion, thus making clear, by implication that their sons have been killed for Christ" (167). While Robinson sees the typology between Mary and the mothers, he interprets its significance only in terms of Christ.

In addition to differences of opinion concerning the strengths of the typological links between the mothers and the Virgin, scholars vary in their assessments of the conflict between the women and the knights in the different cycles. J. W. Robinson reads the Towneley and York versions of the episode as similar in mood and intent:

  To his credit and, as in the York play, the Wakefield Master has not
  prolonged this section of the play. The lamentations are loud and
  forceful but brief. The struggles, although accompanied by insulting
  words on both sides are deadly serious and especially noticeable for
  the helplessness of fingernails against gleaming armor, an image
  similar to the image common in paintings and carvings of the
  Crucifixion in which a very thin and nearly naked Christ is no match
  for his fleshy and muscular opponents. The women squall and scratch
  helplessly, and lesser (and later) playwrights seized the opportunity
  to turn what at York, and even more so in the Towneley collection, is
  calculatedly horrifying into farce so that the effect is more like the
  domestic squabble shown on misericords, one of which, in St. Mary's
  church, Whalley, Lincolnshire, from the early fifteenth-century shows
  a warrior, his weapons abandoned, kneeling before a woman who beats
  him with a frying pan. (168)