Re-membering the Jews: theatrical violence in the N-Town Marian plays

Comparative Drama, Winter, 2007 by Merrall Llewelyn Price

The saturation of English spirituality with Marian devotion does not necessarily point to anti-Semitism, as certainly not all Marian miracles are anti-Semitic. However, Robert Worth Frank has estimated that some 7.5 percent fit this category; given the large number and wide-ranging scope of the tales in each anthology, so few of the collections escape the taint of anti-Semitism altogether that it is fair to state, with Frank, that anti-Semitism is "a standard constituent element"(177). (14) England, dower of the Virgin, was also the home of the first accusation of Jews ritually crucifying a Christian child, and in many ways remained the spiritual home of the medieval ritual murder accusation. Robert Stacey has made the case for a precocious English anti-Semitism marked by ritual murder accusations, the stigmatization of an entire community, and the 1290 expulsion, an expulsion that did not prevent the development in English literature and iconography of the symbol of the Jew, even more richly charged with wickedness than before. (15)

Originally thought to have been performed in Coventry, the N-Town plays are now generally agreed to belong to fifteenth-century East Anglia, and it is perhaps a result of the proximity of Walsingham that the cycle should be so unusually focused on the Virgin Mary, featuring as it does a play of "Joachim and Anna," "The Presentation of Mary in the Temple," "The Salutation and Conception," "Joseph's Doubt," "The Visit to Elizabeth," "The Trial of Mary and Joseph," "The Nativity," "The Purification," "Christ and the Doctors," "The Crucifixion," "The Burial," "Christ's Appearance to Mary," and "The Assumption of Mary," in each of which the Virgin has an important role, leading Gail McMurray Gibson to conclude that the N-Town Cycle is unique in comprising "the play of salvation history heralded by the body of Mary." (16) East Angha, however, also has a particular place in the history of English Jews; it was home to several of the wealthiest Jewish communities outside London in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but also, perhaps not unrelatedly, saw what seems to have been an unusually high level of animosity between Jews and Christians. (17) This included two of the earliest cases of ritual murder accusations ever recorded, those of William of Norwich in 1144 and the infant Robert of Bury in 1181, as well as perhaps the most famous ritual murder case in England, that of Hugh of Lincoln in 1255. The outbreak of crusade-related violence in 1190 that culminated in the massacre at York seems to have begun at Lynn, and had the effect of leading to the abandonment of smaller Jewish communities in East Anglia. (18) Further, the East Anglian towns of Lincoln and Norwich were two of the only three English communities to be actually made subject to a much wider canonical food embargo directed toward Jews in 1222. (19) Given this context, it is especially interesting to explore the particular role ascribed to the doubting Jew in the fifteenth-century East Anglian Marian plays.