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

Comparative Drama, Spring, 2007 by Michael Mark Chemers

It is indeed a pressing problem that goes directly to the heart of the New Historicist project, but a refocusing on more dynamic sets of priorities has proven very difficult to achieve in practice, especially for historians of the theater who must contend with the analysis of performance events long gone. Joseph Roach's 1996 study Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, (12) however, provides a model that is perhaps at once agile enough and sufficiently well anchored in historical practice to provide a productive opportunity to, at the very least, raise some interesting new questions about the Play of the Sacrament. Roach's mission in that volume is to reveal the ways in which nineteenth-century performance events, such as Mardi Gras parades as well as conventional melodramas, were put to use in revising important narratives of communal identity in the United States, particularly pertaining to race. In so doing, he crafts a model of theater historiography that has wide applications beyond the specific moment of circum-Atlantic performances he examines. Grounded in postcolonial thought, this model is particularly useful in medieval studies if one considers Kathleen Biddick's now oft-quoted recognition that "[t]he periodization of colonialism and ethnography begins to look very different if one includes Jews. (13)

Roach's surrogacy is a technique by which a community defines its core identity by identifying its borders. Surrogacy is envisioned as a function of three complex and seemingly illogical social elements: collective memory, performance, and substitution. The process is by its very nature imperfect, even perverse, since the community's unified core identity is actually, in Roach's words,"a convenient but dangerous fiction." Acknowledging that fiction in order to critique it, which most radical theater attempts to do, is a dangerous act, because calling attention to a disunited social sphere increases sociocultural anxiety. Using performance to conceal or naturalize the fiction, on the other hand, is an act of affirmation that reduces anxiety by congratulating oneself and one's fellows for living in a perfect, harmonious society. Surrogacy is necessary, argues Roach, whenever the general social matrix suffers a significant loss that leaves a discernible gulf between an ideal society and the disappointments of reality. Surrogacy addresses a void and is distinct from substitution, which suggests a replacement of something that does not purport to be the original. A substitute teacher, for instance, does not pretend to be the teacher he or she replaces, but only to stand in for the teacher. The missing teacher, therefore, is "gone but not forgotten."

On the other hand, a teacher may find him or herself operating in loco parentis, as a moral and psychological guide for a student, in fact, as a surrogate for a missing or inadequate parent. In such a case, in order to be effective the actual process of substitution must itself be concealed, so there is no discernible trace of a switch having taken place. In individual relationships as well as in large communities, such concealment requires the construction of elaborate systems of belief that mask the inconsistencies; these systems must be embodied by physical performance and repeated as often as possible to drive home the message against all evidence to the contrary. Roach's humorous, if not ironic, exemplum of the process is the Professor Emeritus, described as "forgotten but not gone."