"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

The poetic reverberations of the women's laments continually intertwine the mothers' pain with Mary's destiny. She is also associated with them through variations of Simeon's prophecy in Luke 2:35. As Lumiansky and Mills note, the original prophecy is "obscure" (Commentary 165): "Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed." Each cycle alters the prophecy, making it more specific, so that it stresses the tragic affinities among the women. Lumiansky and Mills note that "[c]ommentators generally regarded the passage as a reference to Mary's anguish at Christ's Passion" (165). This traditional interpretation underlies all of the cycles, but it is extended as well to the suffering of the mothers as they look upon their murdered children.

In the N-Town cycle, dramatic structure, iconographic staging, and poetic echoes link Mary with the bereaved mothers and associate their maternal mourning with Herod's ultimate doom. Although numbered and titled as individual plays in the N-Town manuscript, the Purification and The Massacre of the Innocents were clearly conceived and performed as the middle and final episodes of a dramatic trilogy that begins with the Adoration of the Magi. (31) Both the opening and concluding plays of this dramatic unit begin with Herod's search for the king he wishes to destroy, framing Mary's Purification, the central play, with his threats. The action of the trilogy moves swiftly, alternating between the earthly "place" where Herod murders and the mothers mourn and the heavenly "platform" where Mary offers her son to God and escapes with him into Egypt.

The dramatic structure and iconographic staging of the sequence represents a time-space continuum in which all action is viewed from both the earthly and the heavenly perspectives. Mary's motherhood, the theme of the Purification, is the centerpiece of the action, framed on the horizontal plane by Herod's machinations and the mothers' anguish. Her position on the vertical plane, conversely, crowns the action below. Her dramatic centrality in this trilogy of plays thus signifies both horizontally and vertically. On the earthly plane her ritual offering during the Purification foreshadows both her ultimate sacrifice of Christ and the mothers' sacrifice of their innocents. On the heavenly plane, in the fullness of time, the mothers and their children, like Mary and Christ, will be safe in God's hands, while Herod will be damned forever.

Poetic reverberations from the Purification through the Flight and Slaughter scenes culminate in the Passion sequence and reinforce this dramatic iconography. These plays sustain and ring changes upon Symeon's metaphor of the sharp sword, which binds together in suffering the mothers and the Virgin. In the Purification play, as Symeon and Anna await the arrival of the holy family, Symeon muses to Anna: "Swych a sorwe bothe sharpe and smerte / [thorn]at as a swerd perce it xalle [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]even thorwe his moderys herte" (88-90). Following the Purification, the Flight scene transpires on the platform in a brief span of time between the soldiers' gloating and the actual slaughter. The holy family sleeps on the platform as Herod issues the order and the knights prepare for execution. As the Second Soldier whets his weapon, his bloodthirsty boast literalizes Symeon's metaphor for sorrow and creates a new one: "Ffor swerdys sharpe / as An harpe / quenys xul karpe / and of sorwe synge" (65-68). The simile comparing the sharpness of the sword to the tautness of a harp likens the sword to the mothers' lamentation in a new way. Both will "sing": the sword as it swishes through the air, and the mothers as they look upon their butchered babes and lament. The knight's analogy thus conflates the sword that murders the babes with the lamentation of the mothers. Immediately after the knight prates of his prowess, the angel awakens Joseph and Mary, repeating the ominous image of the sword: "Kynge herowde with sharpe knyff / his knyghtys he doth sende ... / Ffor cruel knyghtys [thorn]i childe haue ment / with swerde to sle and shende" (75-80). Just as Symeon's prophecy resounds through the massacre, so it completes itself at the onset of Christ's Passion. When Mary learns of Jesus' betrayal she laments, uttering her mental anguish in a metaphor that recalls and fulfills the prophet's words: "[thorn]e swerd of sorwe hath so thyrlyd my meende" (1066).