Laughter in medieval English drama: a critique of modernizing and historical analyses

Comparative Drama, Spring-Summer, 2002 by Hans-Jurgen Diller

The use and the exact funtionalization of so much linguistic variety suggests more highly developed linguistic skills and sophistication than may be expected from a "clergyman of modest training" whom Bevington posited as the author of Mankind. (46) It requires, above all, familiarity with a wide variety of literary styles. Whatever the degree of education reached by our author, it is hard to imagine that his linguistic nuances would have been appreciated by a plebeian audience. It seems more plausible to assume a public of students and former students, as it may well be expected in the vicinity of Cambridge. But for such an audience the play, for all its horseplay, contains a very serious message. Students are--or were--fond of distracting nonacademics from their work and of impressing them with their real or pretended erudition. In the first half of the play the three N are successful in their efforts. But they fail in the second half, when their lies have driven Mankind almost to suicide--and thus into danger of certain damnation. Mercy with his "Englysch Laten" returns, and the three Vices must run. Such an analysis would suggest that the play contains a moral not only for its eponymic hero but also for his pseudo-intellectual tempters. The play Mankind would be not only a morality but also a satire on linguistic half-knowledge and theological pseudo-arguments. The laughter which here acquires its seasonal supremacy would not have originated in the marketplace but in the students' hall.

In view of the importance which Bakhtin gives to the Latinate joking of the students, it might be useful to study the relationships between students' customs and popular customs more thoroughly. Anglo-Saxon studies of laughter in medieval drama are still strongly indebted to the Marxian model of the class conflict. The fact that there are other conflicts apart from that between rich and poor, above and below, tends to be overlooked. Even the paradigm shift to gender studies does not seem to have reached the study of laughter--at least as far as medieval English drama is concerned. And it has to be admitted that the conflict between male and female does not play a great part here; apart from a few episodic, quickly resolved quarrels between Noah and his wife or between Mary and Joseph, it does not have much to offer, although these few episodes are indeed exploited for comic effect. Mankind suggests another conflict with comic potential--that is, the conflict between young and old. To take this conflict into consideration would, however, require a highly delicate paradigm shift. We would have to take a new look at the bands of young men who were an important research concern in the 1920s and 1930s and whom the ideologues of romantic nationalism even saw as the cradle of the medieval drama of Europe. But while that sweeping thesis is now totally discredited, it is still possible that those bands left their traces in individual plays such as Mankind and the Continental genre of the Shrovetide play.