"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

From this perspective, the "commonplace" nature of the women's wailing should be viewed as a strength instead of a weakness. The prevalence of maternal mourning in these plays, in all of its manifestations--from moments of lyric rapture, to howls of anguish, to comic banter--suggests its heartfelt resonance in late medieval culture. With respect to Herod it is precisely the familiar, "commonplace" quality of his cowardly braggadocio that makes him a dramatically credible and significant character. Daniel C. Boughner puts it succinctly: "Herod is a representative of that arrogant and insolent feudalism whose portrayal gives local English substance and topical import to the scriptural role." (15) I propose that the same is true of the mourning mothers. Just as the plays augment scripture, interpreting the cruel greed of Herod and his mercenary knights from a medieval English perspective, so they depart from the biblical sources in their depiction of the mothers' laments, assimilating popular practices and beliefs to the Christian story.

Matthew 2:13-18 makes no reference to a public confrontation between Herod's henchmen and the mothers of the slaughtered children, but all of the plays include such an encounter. Moreover, apart from an allusion to Jeremiah 31:15, when Rachel weeps for her children, the gospel makes no mention of lamentation, and Rachel's lament does not include oaths and cries of vengeance. (16) Yet even in the briefest renderings of the episode, in the York and the N-Town cycles, the women struggle to protect their babes as they lament. In the Chester cycle and the Digby play, the women directly confront, not only the soldiers, but Herod as well. The full ethical force of their grief impinges upon the consciousness of those who see and hear. In the Towneley play, Herod himself unbiblically dreads the mothers' mad cries. As he sends his soldiers off on their mission, he warns: "If women wax woode; / I warn you, syrs, to spede you" (314-15). These significant deviations from scripture suggest that the women's cries and curses have a dramatic coherence that requires further investigation.

II

Because public sermons and treatises, such as those published in Mirk's Festial, blend formal theology with more widespread cultural practices and ideas, they open a window into the same creative tensions that produced medieval communal theater. (17) Three of Mirk's works, two homilies from the Festial, and a treatise on cursing included in his Advice to the Clergy, help to elucidate late fifteenth-century English beliefs about the moral force of oaths in general, and of maternal mourning in particular. (18)

Mirk illustrates the power and danger of oaths in both "The Points and Articles of Cursing" and a homily written for Passion Sunday. In "The Points and Articles of Cursing," he sets forth the communal enterprise of excommunication. This serious act was accomplished by means of a formal curse, a ritual speech-act pronounced against those who committed wrongs against the clergy or the church. (19) Conducted four times a year, on the first Sunday after Michael's Feast, "Mydlenton" Sunday, the feast of the Holy Trinity, and the Sunday after Candlemass, the practice anathematizes erring parishioners "til [thorn]hei come to amendmente" (61).