"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

In contrast, Richard Beadle and Pamela King echo Rosemary Woolf's remarks of a generation ago; they view the York cycle as unique in its tasteful representation of the event: (6)

  The York dramatist on the whole avoided the grotesque effect found in
  other cycles, where the women confronted the soldiers with coarse
  invective, whilst their keening and screaming after the massacre ran
  the risk of becoming as much a common-place as Herod's ranting.
  Instead, the women are here presented in a largely lyrical and passive
  vein, clearly intended to prefigure the Virgin's Planctus Mariae of
  The Death of Christ and also to echo her tone in The Flight into
  Egypt. (7)

Like Woolf, who finds the representation of the mothers "surprising," and Robinson who asserts that "lesser playwrights" could not handle their material, Beadle and King implicitly dismiss the spirited encounters of the "other cycles" as artistically flawed.

These aesthetic discriminations collapse under the pressure of close reading. The distinction between "active" and "passive," moreover, proves an unreliable guide to clarifying the dramatic function of the mourning mothers within the poetics of the plays, and to ascertaining their typological relation-ship to the Virgin Mary. Beadle and King's own editorial notes appear to contradict their reading of the mothers as "largely passive." In the note to line 203, they observe that the first soldier returns a blow because the first woman has struck out at him. In the note to line 209, they point out that the soldiers' words, "These queans will quell us here," mean that the soldier is afraid the women will destroy [quell] them. Note 194 points out that the first woman curses the soldiers. As J. W. Robinson observes, the women fight back in both the Towneley and the York (169). Although the mothers lose the struggle, they attempt to defend their infants by denouncing the soldiers, as well as striking at them. In the York play the first woman curses: "Out on you, thieves, I cry" (194), (8) while the Second Woman calls them "false lurdayns [wretches]" (222). This language is no more or less coarse than the mothers' cries for vengeance in the Towneley and Digby versions. In the Towneley play the mothers call the soldiers "ffals thefe" (338), and "No man" (356). (9) In the Digby, they call them "false traitours" (301), "coward" (309), and "javelle [knave]" (345). (10) Only in the N-Town, in which there is no verbal exchange between the women and the soldiers, do the mothers not include oaths in their laments. (11)

The only play that stands out for its coarse language is the Chester Innocents, which also differs significantly in dramatic mood. Like the Digby Killing of the Children, it mingles comedy with tragedy in a carnival inversion of gender. As the First Woman beats the First Soldier with her distaff, she swears she will do so until he "both shyte and pisse!" (358). (12) Similarly, the Second Woman tells the Second Soldier: "My child shall thou not assayle. / Hit hath two hooles under the tayle; / kysse and thou may assaye" (366-68). (13) Despite their bawdy behavior, their laments do have internal typological resonances with the Virgin's. Moreover, their raucousness appears to fulfill a cathartic communal function. (14)