'"Now wole I a newe game begynne": staging suffering in King Lear, the mystery plays and Grotius's Christus Patiens

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Annual, 2007 by Beatrice Groves

Caiaphas's proposed blinding of Christ in the Towneley play--"bot I shall out-thrist / Both his een on a raw"--is one of the specific, recognized connections between this scene and the blinding of Gloucester. (14) It has no basis in the Gospels and is drawn instead from a medieval interpretative tradition known as the secret Passion. This was an account of Christ's Passion that grew up in the fourteenth century in response to a desire for more affecting narratives about his suffering, which were embellished with details culled from Old Testament prophecies. (15) In these stories every punishment inflicted on Old Testament prefigurements of the messiah were also described as suffered by Jesus. The blinding of Christ became part of the secret Passion sufferings because of the connections that were recognized between Samson and Christ. Samson was a ubiquitous type of Christ, and from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century almost every event in his life--from his miraculous birth to his triumphant death--could be understood as a prefiguration of the redeemer. (16) The deep connections perceived between Samson and Jesus led to the belief that Christ too might have been blinded as one of his torments. James Marrow suggests that the juxtaposition of illustrations of the crowning with thorns and the blinding of Samson prepared the way for the merging of the two in the secret Passion. Marrow relates that during the crowning with thorns, "the majority of Netherlandic Passion tracts report that the thorns pierced Christ's eyes, or at least His eyelids or brows." (17) Likewise Samson was shorn of his hair and hence, as one source for the mystery plays phrased it: "whan Iewes had dampned hym [Christ] deth for to haue, / Shamely berde and hede gun they shaue." (18) This interpretation retained its popularity beyond the Reformation because two Isaiahan prophecies likewise suggest that the messiah would suffer the indignity of having his hair and beard pulled out: Isaiah 53:7--"as a sheepe before her shearer is dumme, so he openeth not his mouth"--and Isaiah 50:6: "I gaue my backe unto the smiters, and my cheekes to the nippers" (the Geneva Bible glossed "nippers" as "those who pull out the beard").

Gloucester in act 3, scene 7 shares his blinding with the Christ of the secret Passion, and he likewise suffers the indignity of having hairs pulled out of his beard:

    Gloucester. By the kind gods, 'tis most ignobly done,
    To pluck me by the beard ...
    These hairs which thou dost ravish from my chin
    Will quicken and accuse thee.
    (3.7.33-38)

Despite the frequency of this torment in pictorial illustrations, however, it has been thought that there is no evidence for its occurrence in the mysteries. (19) The text of the N-town plays, however, may record a staging of this part of the secret Passion while the Jews are playing hot cockles with Jesus:

    Quartus Judeus. A, and now wole I a newe game begynne
    That we mon pley at, all that arn hereinne:
    Whele and pylle, whele and pylle,
    Comyth to halle hoso wylle--
    Ho was that?
    (N-Town play, 29.185-92)