Anti-Semitism, surrogacy, and the invocation of Mohammed in the Play of the Sacrament

Comparative Drama, Spring, 2007 by Michael Mark Chemers

Jewish characters in the drama of the period, however, seem to take a particular delight in the invocation of Mohammed specifically as a curse or to throw weight behind a threat. In the Digby Play of Mary Magdalene, Herod warns "Yff yow do, I xal havrle of yower hedys, be Mahondys bonys, / As I am trew kyng to Mahond so fie!" (142-43). In the Towneley Conspiracy, the Jew Malchus (possibly the same fellow from John 18:10) invokes "mahowne" (1. 603). Nuntius opens Herod the Great with "Moste mighty Mahowne meng you with mirthe!" (1); he asserts that Herod is king"by grace of Mahowne" (10), and that "Mahowne" is Herod's "cosyn" (54). Herod swears "by Mahowne" six times (127, 429, 458, 460, 473). In the N-Town Death of Herod, Herod invokes"Mahound" once (209), and he continues to do so in Herod and the Magi, The Slaughter of Innocents, The Trial before Annas and Caiaphas, and The Trial before Pilate and Herod. (8) In York's Arrest of Christ, Caiphas (Caiaphas) behaves likewise (1. 342), and the Herod of the York plays makes similar oaths and curses in The Coming of the Three Kings to Herod, Massacre of the Innocents, and Trial before Herod; the Herod of the Chester cycle does the same in The Three Kings Come to Herod and The Slaughter of the Innocents. (9) The tradition of Jewish invocation of the Muslim prophet continues into the sixteenth century in Robert Wilson's 1584 Three Ladies of London, wherein Gerontus, a Jewish merchant, warns his debtor Mercadore "Trulie pay me my money, and that euen now presently, / Or by mightie Mahomet I swear, I will forthwith arrest yee" (1545-46). (10)

That Jonathas of the Play of the Sacrament and his co-conspirators call on Mohammed in their malice or duress is worth examining closely, since certain traits render them unique. Unlike Herod and Caiaphas, Jonathas and his cohorts are not biblical Jews but contemporaries of the fifteenth-century (likely Christian) audience explicitly involved in an act of host desecration followed by a miracle, a practice that by this time had become legendary. An examination of the relationship of the drama to miraculous events in the historical record reveals a significant material precedent linking host desecration by Jews to the invocation of Mohammed. That precedent, I contend, strongly suggests an answer to a question that has troubled scholars of the play over the last century; what exactly do the Jews in this play signify?

I. Surrogacy and the Surrogate

Certain recent investigators of theater history are dissatisfied with strategies of New Historicism that purport to complicate the historiographies of unified voices of power and politics, and wind up, however inadvertently, reifying the very unity they seek to destabilize and fragment. David Lawton writes:

   Analysis of resistance and subversion, for example, necessarily
   (and for Foucault advisedly) casts them as tributaries to the
   mainstream of power. Examining the Other as a discursive category,
   a signified into which mul tiple signifiers may fit, is to testify
   perhaps unduly to the power of One. A totalizing cultural model is
   contested by a totalizing critique. (11)