Giving voice to women: Teaching feminist approaches to the mystery plays

College Literature, Spring 2001 by Normington, Katie

The second reason that Wickham cites for the non-performance by women is their exclusion from the producing institutions. He argues that the cycles were authorised by "bishops, cannons, and city fathers" which he concludes was an "exclusively male hierarchy." The plays were produced by guilds that were only "open to men." In other words, Wickham interprets medieval theatre by reference to the dominant hierarchies of the time: masculine institutions. Yet recent work by feminist historians has sought to reevaluate the identity of social institutions and practices and has questioned to what extent women were excluded from medieval institutions.6 The role of women within the controlling organizations of medieval England was not as limited as Wickham suggests.7

Wickham's final argument as to why women did not appear on the medieval stage concerns the inaudibility of their voices on the open-air stages. Wickham's point does not seem to be watertight. Evidence from Europe suggests that women did in fact perform speaking roles in outdoor performances. Lynette Muir's research into performance records from France reveals that the 1547 Passion play at Valenciennes included four girls, one of whom played the Virgin (1985,107). Further records show that girls performed speaking roles at Mons, and that adult women acted at Romans, Valence, Grenoble and Metz.8 If French women's voices were strong enough to perform outside, there seems to be little truth in the argument that English women were too weak to be heard. I have explored the possible reasons for non-performance by women elsewhere.9 I will not revisit those arguments here; however, it is worth noting that Wickham's opinion is flawed and that similar assumptions, often revealed in standard textbooks, need to be properly challenged.

Recent research has reopened the debate as to how far women participated in the mystery plays. The publication of Records of Early English Drama provides a welcome addition to an area of research that suffers from a paucity of concrete evidence. Somewhat surprisingly, the Records do provide examples of women's participation within the mystery plays.10 Although they have not unearthed fresh evidence of performance, there are plenty of examples of women undertaking backstage work, such as sewing banners, washing, and mending costumes, and providing refreshments.ll However, it is not remarkable that Wickham has overlooked this aspect of women's participation. These are all activities that remain invisible and silent unless particular strategies are utilised to read against the grain of dominant patriarchal ideologies.

I have outlined above some of the problems that are encountered when one tries to develop a feminist approach to teaching the mystery plays. In order to make the activity of women audible it is important that we give women a voice in the classroom. In this essay I will consider some of the ways that feminist approaches to the mystery plays can be engendered within teaching, and, in turn, I will suggest how experiments within the classroom can help to identify further directions that feminist research into medieval drama might take.