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dissertation entitled

MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS DRAMA IN MODERN PRODUCTION:
AN APPLICATION OF SELECTED STANISLAVSKI TECHNIQUES TO THE
INTERPRETATION AND STAGING OF CYCLE AND MORALITY PLAYS
FROM THE ENGLISH MIDDLE AGES

presented by

WILLIAM GEORGE MARX

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MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS DRAMA IN MODERN PRODUCTION:
AN APPLICATION OF SELECTED STANISLAVSKI TECHNIQUES TO THE
INTERPRETATION AND STAGING OP CYCLE AND HORALITY PLAYS
FROM THE ENGLISH MIDDLE AGES

BY

William George Marx

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1991

ABSTRACT
MEDIEVAL RELIGIOUS DRAMA IN MODERN PRODUCTION:
AN APPLICATION OF SELECTED STANISLAVSKI TECHNIQUES TO THE

INTERPRETATION AND STAGING OF CYCLE AND MORALITY PLAYS
FROM THE ENGLISH MIDDLE AGES

BY

William George Marx

The surviving texts of the English cycle and morality plays
constitute the written record of a medieval dramatic art. As such,
they represent but one step in a creative process that was completed
only in performance. The modern production of these plays provides a
means to test the dramaturgy and stagecraft of their authors. An
application of selected theatrical techniques developed by Constantin
Stanislavski offers a systematic means to realizing credible
interpretations and effective productions of these plays. The Michigan
State University productions of the §econg §hgphe£ds' gageant and
gagging under my direction demonstrated the effectiveness of
Stanislavski's techniques of thematic interpretation, character
analysis, and production staging. The productions of these two plays
had the collateral benefits of confirming the Second Shepherds'
Eggggnt's high critical estimation and of demonstrating that Mankind
merits equal esteem.

My direction of these plays integrated four operations: the
construction of modern performance scripts; the expression of unified
thematic interpretations in playable ”through-lines of action”; the
development of credible character ”spines"; and the design of

production stagings that suggested a medieval performance style.

The construction of modern performance scripts had to solve substantial
problems: editing, translating Middle English and Latin, adding
supplemental performance elements, and adjusting the script to the
exigencies of casting. The "through-lines of action” became statements
of what the plays were, beyond what they were about, transforming their
abstract ideas into specific physical actions. 'Spines' supplied the
motivational forces of personal ”objectives” and obstacle "thresholds"
underlying the characters' actions. The design for production staging
implemented strategies of actor training and rehearsal and an
integrative plan for the plays' material appearances, stage ”blocking,"
and actor ”business."

Both the §ggond §hephggd§' gaggapg and gagging responded well to
the application of these Stanislavski techniques. That they did
suggests that their dramatic constructions are remarkably parallel and
that their characterizations are equally rich in psychological depth
and complexity. The successful application of Stanislavski techniques
to these two plays also suggests that these techniques may have useful
applications to the interpretation and staging of other cycle and

morality plays.

Copyright by
WILLIAM GEORGE MARX
1991

To the memory of my father and mother,

Theodore J. and Clesta M. Marx

”Therefore God grant 30w all per suam misericordiam
pat ye may be pleyferys wyth pe angellys abowe
And hawe to 3our porcyon vitam eternam. Amen!"

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The production! of ignition and the W were

sponsored by the Department of English at Michigan State University,
and were especially benefited by the assistance of Professors John
Alford, Arnold Williams, and the late John Yunck. The members of my
doctoral committee, Professors John Alford (chair), Lister Matheson,
Randal Robinson, and M. Teresa Tavormina have encouraged my various
productions and generously supported this dissertation. Also, this
dissertation would not have been possible without the contributions of
Peter and Barbara Mott, Quentin Sullivan, Robert Kinnunen, and the
several "communities of players” who helped to stage those plays.

Arnold Williams's enthusiasm for the modern production of medieval
drama first inspired my work. His wisdom and encouragement continue to
guide and sustain it. My enormous debt to him is evident throughout.

James Catello, Rod Porter, Robert Kinnunen, Marguerite Malversen,
and David Purvis provided invaluable counsel and assistance while I
drafted the following chapters. Jay and James Hunt also supplied much
practical support that went too little acknowledged at the time.

My wife, Mitsuko, has always been my most astute audience,
severest critic, and best friend. She has steadfastly supported both
my productions and my writing, looking always for the inner truth and
the human heart in what I do. My acting, directing, and writing are

the better for it.‘ I am the better for it. Kokorokara arigato.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Explorers in New Territory:
The Value of Performance Experience to the Study
of Medieval Drama, Interpretive and Creative
Tensions, Nature of Drama, Playing the Play . .

II. Word Made Flesh:
The Translation of Medieval Dramatic Texts
into Modern Performance Scripts . . . . . . . .

III. Fundamental Lines of Action:
Performance ”Super-Objectives” for flanking

and the Second Shephegdg' Pageant . . . . . . .

Iv. Modern Actors, Medieval Plays:
Character ”Spines' and Through-Lines of Action

for Magkipg and the Second Shepherds' Pageant .

V. A Community of Players:
Actor Training, Rehearsal, and Performance . . .

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

32

80

121

168

230

I. Explorers in New Territory:
The Value of Performance Experience to the Study of
Medieval Drama, Interpretive and Creative Tensions,
Nature of Drama, Playing the Play

Now, I am going to venture to make some observations based on
my own experience, which will lead me to comment on my
intentions, failures, and partial successes, in my own plays.
I do this in the belief that any explorer or experimenter in
new territory may, by putting on record a kind of journal of
his explorations, say something of use to those who follow
him into the same regions and who will perhaps go farther.
(T. S. Eliot, "Poetry and Drama” 138)

The subject of this dissertation is the modern production of the
cycle and morality plays from the English Middle Ages. Like Eliot, I,
too, have tried my hand at realizing theatrical expressions of one sort
of dramatic poetry, albeit dramatic poetry composed by others a long
time ago in languages not now familiar or easily accessible to modern
audiences. Over the past fifteen years I have directed and acted in
five productions of four different plays from the English Middle Ages.
In 1975 and 1976, I directed two productions of Mgggigg and played
Mercy in each. In 1978, I directed a production of the Wakefield
Sggggg_§hgphg£gg;_£gggggt and played the Angel in it. In 1988, I
directed a production of the Wakefield Last Judgment play. And in
1990, I directed a production of the Chester Noah's Flood. All of
these productions were sponsored by the Department of English at

Michigan State University, and were cast largely from graduate students

 

2
in that department. The productions of those four plays survive on
videotape.

Like Eliot, too, I believe now that some reflection on what I
learned in the doing of those plays may serve other explorers "in the
same regions," especially those explorers who bring an essentially
literary background to the study of this drama. This dissertation
argues that performance sensitivity at least, if not outright
performance experience itself, is essential to acquiring a complete
understanding of this dramatic literature. The argument for this
thesis proceeds along three lines. First, the surviving texts of the
medieval cycle and morality plays constitute the written record of an
ancient dramatic art, the corollary to which is that these texts mark
but one point in a progress of interrelated steps that was completed
only in performance. Second, the modern production of these plays
provides demonstrable means to test the dramaturgy and stagecraft of
their playwrights in the medium for which their works were intended.
Third, an application of selected techniques that have grown in a
school of theatrical practice that began with Constantin Stanislavski
offers a coherent and systematic means to realizing credible
interpretations and effective modern productions of these plays. The
strategy of this dissertation is to demonstrate the utility and
effectiveness of its thesis and argument by applying them to two
dramas: the Wakefield figgggg_§hgphg;g§;_zgg§gg§, a cycle play, and
Mgnking, a morality.

This dissertation, however, is not a "how to produce a play"

practical manual: such would be more properly the endeavor of a

3
dissertation in the theater arts. Rather, this study of the
applicability of selected Stanislavski techniques to the interpretation
and staging of English cycle and morality plays means to demonstrate
that the medieval playwrights, to the extent that they were successful
playwrights, wrote in anticipation of and specifically for physical
performance. The proposed benefits to the literary scholar are two.
First, such an understanding of these dramas as may be derived from a
heightened performance sensitivity and experience augments and enhances
(and sometimes corrects) the critical responses to medieval dramaturgy
and stagecraft of more traditional forms of literary study. Second,
the more literary scholars of medieval drama cultivate performance
sensitivity and experience, the more likely they will be to offer
better informed insights for their students into what makes the study
and preservation of this ancient dramatic art important. Important
plays from any age speak to enduring truths of the human condition. To
these ends, Stanislavski's techniques of dramatic analysis, character
interpretation, and production design offer effective ways of
explaining not only the ”hows” but also the "whys” of what happens when
dramas become plays, when the written word becomes the physical
enactment. The greater part of this dissertation, then, illustrates
how directors may work upon medieval dramatic texts to evoke the modern
stage plays that they can legitimately sustain. Though this
dissertation does not intend to offer complete instruction in producing
medieval plays, it does not intend to inhibit such worthy endeavors,

either.

4
The Second Shephetdg' Pageant and Manktgd present an intriguing
pairing to illustrate what directors need to consider in order to
fashion modern performances from medieval texts. For different reasons
each play can at first appear daunting. Critical estimations of their
dramatic merit or lack of it have put them at the top and bottom of
their respective cycle and morality traditions. The Second Shepherdg'
zgggggt has long been regarded as the best play in the Wakefield cycle,
and may arguably be the best play of any cycle to have survived.
Mggttng, however, has had a difficult time winning equal critical
favor. Earlier in this century, E. K. Chambers spoke of it in the most
disparaging of terms, saying that it was ”obviously . . . a very
degraded type of morality” and that the "monk Hyngham ought to have
been ashamed of claiming [its] ownership" (Engltsh Literature 62).
Michael R. Kelley, a more recent student of the English moralities,
suggests ways to boost Mgnkin 's reputation. He writes:
Criticisms of the play have either seized on its vulgar
comedy or accused it of being a badly conceived moral
allegory, since its evil characters don't fit neatly into a
clear theological scheme. When we recognize that the comedy
serves the instructural purpose by parody and contrast, . . .
Mggttgg can be appreciated for what it is--a flamboyantly
illustrated sermon, displaying a consistency of design that
is both rhetorically effective and structurally harmonious.
(93)
These plays, both late additions to their respective traditions, seem
to have won or lost critical favor according to interpretive criteria
that have evaluated their merits only in comparison to others of their
kind. Like first cousins born to families of different backgrounds,

their relative reputations have been established more by their lineage

than by their individual characters.

5

My performance experience with these plays leads me to question
their critical disparity. They share remarkable similarities, even
though they come from different "families.” Their dramatic structures
are remarkably parallel. The characterizations in both plays are drawn
with depths of vision that are startlingly rich in psychological and
spiritual complexity. And their character relationships shift deftly
from the serious to the comic to the moving. flagging and the Saggag
Stagnatda' Pageant are so similar in dramatic vision and execution that
the disparity in their reputations is unwarranted. The pages that
follow will not only use these two plays as examples of what modern
directors do to stage the medieval drama, but they will also invoke
performance authority to confirm the Saggng_§haphgtga;_Pagaaat's high
reputation and to elevate that of gagging to equal status.

My application of Stanislavski techniques to the modern
productions of these plays involves the integration of four elements:
“translations" of medieval dramatic texts into modern performance
scripts: thematic interpretations that ensure fair representations of
medieval social and religious values; actor characterizations that
produce credible individuals; and production stagings that reinforce
thematic meanings and character relationships. Though these elements
will get individual attention in the next four chapters, their
essential concerns need to be seen as interlocking and interdependent.
I Since play productions are always unique to some place, time,

set, and audience, all dramatic texts, ancient or modern, need some

rder of "translation” to become performance scripts. The text of

 

, for example, changes every time the play is performed,

6
being cut here, rearranged there, and now often beginning with lines
added from the last act of flengy VI. Patt 111.1 And since the
languages found in England's medieval drama (Middle English, Latin, and
Medieval French, predominantly) are now generally inaccessible to
modern ears, the challenge to "translate" the meaning of these ancient
dramas to contemporary audiences is all the greater. The thematic
interpretation serves to unite cast and crews into one community of
common purpose and to ensure that the medieval values of these plays
get fair representation. As Stanislavski cautioned, ”the post, the
actor, the tailor, the stage hand serve one goal, which is placed by
the poet in the very basis of his play" (My Lifa ta att 298).
Stanislavski called that ”goal“ the production “super-objective,” and
the means to its attainment, the ”through-line of action.“ To make
sure that the production "goal" and the play's “basis” correspond
requires the artful blend of theatrical imagination and linguistic,
literary, and historical scholarship. Likewise, the development of
credible characterizations requires the same blend of imagination and
scholarship, directed toward the work of the individual actor.
Nowadays, those schooled in the Stanislavski tradition call the bases
for the actors' roles character "spines.“ The spines are
individualized and subordinate versions of the play's super—objective
and through-line of action. Production staging gives physical
reinforcement to thematic meanings and actor characterizations by
creating a performance environment and a complex sequence of stage
events that allow medieval values to take on a concrete, active, and

communicable life. These production elements depend on the directors'

7

abilities to "translate" ideas and words fixed upon the page into the
confluence of sight and sound and action upon the physical stage. In
their grappling with dramatic texts, then, directors are charged with
devising strategies that can evoke expressions of dramatic meaning
among production casts and crews and between them and their audiences
through almost all the communicative media available to the senses,
save those of reading and writing.

The directors' work to translate, virtually to transmute, dramatic
texts into stage performances necessitates struggling with considerable
amounts of interpretive tensions, and results in striking reversals of
strategies midstream. Modern productions of medieval plays share some
common interpretive tensions with all play productions. They also have
some tensions that are uniquely their own. The interpretive tensions

unique to producing medieval dramas are essentially three: the

“*W/

justification for modern performance at all; the distance between the
shared religious, aesthetic, social, and psychological realities of
medieval actors and audiences and those of modern societies and

theaters; and the problem of making the meanings expressed in medieval;
3

languages accessible to the modern ear. The interpretive tensions that
these productions share with all productions of dramatic works lie in
the inescapable struggle to fulfill the silent word on the page through
appropriate utterance, appearance, and action on the stage. The work
of directors to devise strategies to translate word and idea into
communicable experiences involves a calculated reversal of labor that
is striking. The work of directors begins months before first

rehearsals, and results in production notes that accumulate to book

8
proportions. Once rehearsals begin, their goal is to be free of their
production notes as rapidly as possible. Before rehearsals, directors'
minds and eyes and imaginations are in the library and on the page;
once rehearsals begin, their faculties must be directed to the stage.
The most creative work of rehearsals does not come until both the
directors and the actors are "off book." The directors' work on paper,
then, work which this dissertation essentially illustrates, plots the
most exhaustive strategy for them and their production casts and crews
to transcend texts.

The most acute interpretive tension that modern directors of these
old plays must face is scholarly resistance to the notion of any
justification for performance at all. The argument against such an
endeavor as this dissertation proposes has in earlier times been
forceful. For example, Hardin Craig writes:

Indeed, the religious drama had no dramatic technique or
dramatic purpose, and no artistic self-consciousness. Its
life-blood was religion, and its success depended on it
awakening and releasing a pent-up religious knowledge and
religious feeling. Therefore to carry to the study of the
medieval religious drama a body of criteria derived from
Aristotle, Horace, and their Renaissance followers, or of
specialists in the technique of the modern drama or of drama
in general is to bring the wrong equipment. Writers of
medieval religious drama had no doubt their own ways (however
simple) of presenting their religious themes effectively, but
these techniques, originally merely liturgical, have no
connexion with the vast body of doctrine usually referred to
as 'the technique of the drama'. Few studies of the
techniques of playwrights and actors of the medieval
religious drama have been made, except by persons who have
not understood this aspect of the task, and perhaps for the
lack of definite materials none can be made, because we have
here the strange case of a drama that was not striving to be
dramatic but to be religious, a drama whose motive was
worship and not amusement. (4-5)

9
If I had to be the first to counter this position, the first to
straighten out Craig's confusion of message with medium and tenor with
vehicle, such a statement as his would be daunting. Happily, the work
of scholars on the medieval drama over the last 35 years or so has done
much to overcome this prejudice against performance sensitivity. The
studies of John Russell Brown, E. M. Browne, A. C. Cawley, Stanley
Rahrl, Alan Nelson, Richard Southern, Glynne Wickham, and Arnold
Williams, among others, argue persuasively that the medieval
playwrights had a strong sense of the theater arts and that their works
can be understood and validated today in the medium for which they were
intended. Arnold Williams's criteria summarize the stance of these
scholars. He writes that "the fundamental question must always be
whether the imagery enhances the dramatic impact, whether the sermon is
good theater, whether the typology functions under the conditions which
govern any play produced by actors on a stage" ('Typology' 677). Such
criteria reassure me and would doubtless have been reassuring to the
medieval playwright himself, had he needed any more support than that
which the enormous and long running popularity of his works already
gave him. He was not then, nor am I now, fearful that the performance
medium through which he chose to express religious truth was inadequate
or inappropriate to its task.

Beyond the collected work of these scholars who have argued for
the theatrical validation of medieval drama, I may respond briefly to
what seem to be the stifling barriers imposed by Craig's nearly
"territorial” claim on the "unperformed' text and message of medieval

drama. Were his argument generalized, then any aspect of religious art

10

would be off limits to the expertise of those whose "secular"
craftsmanship produced it. Since the church was a religious edifice,
its structure would be outside the expertise of the architect. The
statuary would be off limits to the insights of the sculptor. The
stained glass would be irrelevant to the vision of the glazier. The
church paintings, frescoes, and manuscript illuminations would be safe
from the explanatory comments of the artist. And sacred music would be
far removed from the mundane testaments of those who sing and play.

What seems most disheartening about Craig's assertion, though, is
its misreading of the link between the communal natures of the
theatrical and the religious experiences. The Eucharist itself-~the
priests' acts of distributing the body of Christ to their parishioners-
-unites priesthood with laity and makes of them all a renewed and
vibrant ”Corpus Christi." The central mystery of the faith enacted in
this sacrament--a sacrament directed by Christ himself and performed on
his authority--transmutes religious ideal into actual event. The
apprehension of the reality in the actual and the universal in the
particular was as familiar to the untutored lay person as it was to the
most learned medieval scholastic, though understood, of course, on much
varying levels.2 The Eucharist, then as now, is a religious experience
played out in physical terms that re-creates, renews, and revitalizes a
community of believers. Such, too, is the operating principle of what
makes the theater work, though its shared, believed, communal
experience among the actors and between them and the audience does not
always have to be religious. For the medieval cycle and morality

dramas it was. The nature of what the medieval playwright achieved in

11
re-creating, renewing, and revitalizing religious and social realities
commonly shared by his cast and audience of believers does not need the
artificial pretection from study that Craig is quick to give.

Modern directors of cycle and morality plays must also confront
the interpretive tension of the distance between the shared religious,
aesthetic, social, and psychological realities of medieval actors and
audiences and those of modern societies and theaters. The problems are
formidable but solvable. Essentially, this tension gathers around the
directors' decisions about how much modern productions of these plays
ought to replicate medieval performances themselves. If they decide
that modern productions should be exact replications of medieval
originals, then the tension is loaded heavily against audience
communication. For example, if a modern production of Maattag were
meant to be an exact replication of the original, then the play could
be performed only at specific times during the year and only at
restricted locations, no women could be cast as characters, the script
could not be modernized or glossed, the play's dialogue would have to
be spoken in Middle English and medieval Latin, there could be no
electronic aids to production, costumes would have to be exact to
original specifications, and so on. The burden of historical accuracy
would be so great as to amount to making the play an antiquarian
demonstration rather than a truly communicable experience. If
directors decide that their productions of nanttag should be entirely
modern, then they may grant themselves license to ignore, and thereby
alter, any (if not all) of the play's medieval character. Such

decisions, motivated by notions of modern “relevance" or effortless

12
communication, load the interpretive tensions heavily against
preserving anything of the original integrity of the play at all. The
danger and disappointment in this tack is that these directors risk so
distorting the play's medieval meanings as to make it a modern play,
abundant examples of which already exist. Their decisions about
production would thus negate their choice of play.

I have taken a middle stance between the extremes of historical
replication and wholly modern redaction, one that does not so much
dispel interpretive tension as make it creative, expressive, and
communicable. It asks that the production and the audience each give a
little. The production works to make true medieval meanings
communicable, and the audience works to stretch its comprehensive
powers to representations of other people in other times that can act
as counterpoints to modern understandings. The end is collaborative
effort, a communal experience. Theatrical performance has always
worked this way, even the medieval. In one sense, there is no medieval
original to replicate. The original performance conditions of those
plays, like the conditions for any performance art, were ephemeral and
adaptive, necessarily changing each year for different performance
sites and for different assemblies of actors and audiences. Any
attempt to "recapture” them in the original is to confuse the nature of
the performing arts with that of the material and plastic arts. The
directors' efforts to bring the medieval drama to modern audiences and
them to it are not easy, but entirely possible. Perhaps because
relatively few such productions have been staged, the doing of it may

seem tentative. We may take some encouragement, though, from the

13
numerous productions of plays from the English Renaissance, productions
which demonstrate again and again that the theater can bridge time and
place and cultural sensibilities.

Of the interpretive tensions unique to the medieval drama,
directors have one more to address, that of what to do about the plays'
medieval languages. To leave a play's text unedited and unglossed
would make some of the action and nearly all of the actors' speech
virtually incomprehensible to a modern audience. To gloss a text
completely by substituting wholly modern pronunciations and modern
idioms, syntax, and vocabulary would destroy the medieval character,
meanings, and poetry of the play. Once again, the goal is
communication and the means is collaborative effort. Directors need to
edit the texts and gloss the languages only so far as to enable their
audiences to enter into the experience of the plays. Anyone who
attends performances of Shakespeare's plays already knows how this
works, though Shakespeare's Early Modern English and the actors' Late
Modern English pronunciations help the cause considerably. For the
first few minutes, the audience is busy tuning its ear to Shakespeare's
language: after that, it enters Shakespeare's idiom and works with him
to follow out the play's drama.

The directors' work on the texts of medieval plays can assist this
process in two ways. First, their editing can repair fractures in
dramas that are the results of a variety of past misfortunes. The text
of Maatta_, for example, has a major lacuna at its beginning, abruptly
breaking off Mercy's first long sermon and jumping into the revelry of

the Vices at the tavern. A resolution to this problem may be effected

14
by editing the text to integrate Mercy's sermon with the revelry of the
Vices, thereby precipitating some of the drama's major conflicts and
animosities at the play's very outset. Second, directors have a
variety of options for handling language. For example, almost all of
the characters in Magttag speak in Latin at one time or another. The
Latin may be translated or retained and translated, as in Titivillus's,
"Ego sum dominancium dominus--I am the Lord of Lords" (475), thereby
triply reinforcing his character's pride, or glossed by actor
pantomime, as in Nowadays's, "Osculare fundamentum' (”Kiss my ass”
142). The work of directors is done when they have made complete
understanding possible; they do not have to ensure it at all points.
To do that would be to usurp their audiences' right--in fact, their
duty--to invest some of their own efforts in the success of the
performances.

The interpretive tensions that the productions of medieval drama
share with the productions of any dramatic works lie in the inescapable
struggle to fulfill the silent word on the page through appropriate
utterance, appearance, and action on the stage. The problems of
reconciling presumed authorial intent with performance interpretation
and of suiting word to action are essential matters for directors to
settle, and are not unlike the problems all performance artists must
face. Whereas those who create works in the material and plastic arts
may be content with something like Keats's notion of a ”silent form"
that has the capacity to ”tease us out of thought," those who create
works for performance depend on interpretive artists to give animation

to their ideas through their active play upon the senses. Composers

15
anticipate musicians, dancers, singers, and very likely nowadays
conductors, choreographers, and vocal coaches as well. They would be
loath to think that what they wrote was meant to lie silent upon the
page, to remain a “still unravished bride of quietness.“ Likewise,
playwrights anticipate actors and nowadays directors as well. They
must come to accept that their words, unlike the words of other
authors, create outward-bound, generative contexts, not insulated or
definitive contexts. T. 8. Eliot goes to the heart of the matter:
In writing other verse, I think that one is writing, so to
speak, in terms of one's own voice: the way it sounds when
you read it to yourself is the test. For it is yourself
speaking. The question of communication, of what the reader
will get from it, is not paramount: if your poem is right to
you, you can only hope that the readers will eventually come
to accept it. . . . But in the theatre, the problem of
communication presents itself immediately. You are
deliberately writing verse for other voices, not for your
own, and you do not know whose voices they will be. You are
aiming to write lines which will have an immediate effect
upon an unknown and unprepared audience, to be interpreted to
that audience by unknown actors rehearsed by an unknown
producer [i. e., director]. (138)
Playwrights give over their texts to the expert nurture of production
directors, to be brought by them to completed expression, with
something like the leap of faith with which some medieval and
Renaissance families would give over their adolescent children to be
raised in the households of others, hoping to find them adults upon
their return.
The problems inherent in reconciling presumed author intent with
performance interpretation are complex and knotty. These problems
cluster around several tough questions. Do authors exert so much

intellectual and expressive control over their works that their

meanings and thematic structures admit only one right interpretation?

16

If authors are not available to supply their own interpretive
directions to their works, can their ”intents" be recovered by
subsequent interpreters? Is authorial intent extractable from the text
itself, without the aid of external sources of information? If authors
are not available for interpretive adjudication, upon what bases do
subsequent interpretations claim authority? Is the notion of presumed
authorial intent itself fallacious? Even if an author presumably had a
single intent during the composition process, does that intent
sufficiently explain what in fact was produced? That is, do authors
produce works that convey more meanings in more ways than they are
aware of when they write? These questions are now commonplace in
discussions of literary theory. For directors, however, these
questions cannot remain abstract disputations. Actors and technical
crews demand to know what specific business they should be about every
moment of performance, and gay. Their audiences have an equal right to
expect that what they see and hear on stage will make sense throughout.

Such questions can be especially tough for directors, because the
medium of drama admits more than one hand to the composition process.
Some dramas from the medieval corpus, like the S e d '
Pagaant, can be more confidently assumed to be largely the product of
one author's controlling vision. A good many others show evidence of
many hands working over many different versions over a considerable
period of time. Such a process of multiple contributions to the drama
exists even in modern times. The published text of A.§§££2§£££.E§E§Q
EQELEQ: for example, reflects Tennessee Williams's rewriting of some

actors' rehearsal improvisations, and his notes on the stage design,

17
blocking, and actor business reflect the work of Jo Mielziner and Elia

Kazan.3

The practice of multiple authors, too, is widespread. Neil
Simon has contributed revisions to many another playwright's script
during rehearsals and pre-Broadway runs. George S. Kaufman and Abe
Burrows, to cite two playwrights from earlier in this century, made
profitable moonlighting careers of 'doctoring' the scripts of others.
Any drama, whether medieval or modern, needs to support some order of
controlling vision and thematic structure to be any good at all. But
the communal, collaborative nature of this medium makes singularity in
interpretation impossible, if not altogether undesirable. Only rarely
do performance interpretations approach ”definitive" status (as in
Marlon Brando's Stanley Rowalski). More commonly, directors locate
their interpretations within what can be described as legitimate
"fields" of interpretive responses. The process can seem frustrating,
but it is ultimately liberating.

Playwrights have been surprised and happy on occasion to discover
that their dramas can sustain more than one interpretation. When asked
about the possibility of multiple interpretations of his works, Arthur
Miller once remarked that over time, and after working with a number of
formidable directors including the likes of Harold Clurman and Elia
Razan, he was content to accept that his works were more complex than

he realized when he wrote them.‘

There was no single right
interpretation, though there could be any number of wrong ones.
Stanislavski, himself, ran into this problem during the Moscow Art
Theatre's first reading of Chekhov's In£2§_§i§£§£§- As the delicacy

and pathos of the drama came to grip Stanislavski and the actors more

18
and more, so much so that several of them were moved to tears, Chekhov
grew more and more agitated and finally bolted from the theater in a
rage. He thought that he had written a ”happy comedy" (My Life ta Art
370-71). We know now that the essence of Three Sistera floats
somewhere in between pathos and comedy, though its exact location
resists fixed coordinates. And so it should, for its floating essence
invites performance exploration again and again. Each production, so
long as it remains in the legitimate interpretive field between pathos
and comedy, affirms that Chekhov wrote to invite the discovery of
meaning on the stage, not to impose it.

As for the medieval cycle and morality plays, the interpretive
tensions between presumed authorial intent and directorial
interpretation are both easier and more difficult. Directorial
interpretation of these plays is easier because they all derive their
dramas from a common theology. In one sense, all of them share the
same meaning. Whether it is the Play of Adam or Ngaa or attaham and
Iaaag or The Qaatle of Perseveranca or Everymag or flanking or

whichever, each play, in microcosm, is a dramatic homily on the right
relationship of man to God, which in all instances is effected by
turning the human will to the divine through obedience. In this sense,
each play fully understood becomes all plays in the medieval religious
drama, essentially understood. So long as modern directors are willing
to bend their sympathies to medieval theology and religious observance,
their interpretations cannot go too far wrong.

Things get more difficult when generalities have to be made

specific, when universals have to become local, and when abstractions

19

have to be concrete. That the medieval playwrights recognized that
essential truths could have multiple manifestations is evident in the
quantity of dramas they wrote, especially in the Corpus Christi cycles.
They found the Scriptures replete with variations on the same theme.
Likewise, each drama has its own assembly of multiple and varying
characters who play out its essential themes. The problem for
directors, for which they do not have the easy solution of medieval
theology and religious observance, is what to do with these characters.
Just who are those three shepherds in the Sagogd Shephetga' Pagaant?
Where did they come from? Where are they now? How old are they? What
do they look like? What do they wear? How do they move? How do they
speak? How do they relate to each other? What do they do? And why do
they do it? Why does what happens happen to tnag, and not to somebody
else? Such questions as these, and many more, beg interpretive
answers. Directors cannot avoid these questions and still play the
play. They must think in terms of the actors--real people--leaving the
wings and entering the set, and realize that they are desperate to know
what course of action their characters should be about, why that course
and not some other, and how best to perform it. Actors cannot play
generalities and will not be made to seem witless fools in public.

Underlying all of the other interpretive tensions that directors
must face is the designing of a mise en agene that suits word to
action. Directors are pressed by the unrelenting demands of
performance to transform the abstract and "fixed" state of the dramatic
text into the physical and "fluid" expression of the stage. The

essential problem here is deciding what takes precedence, what

20
dominates—~fidelity to text or fidelity to stage action. Perhaps that
is too stark and artificial a distinction, though I suspect that the
temptation for literary scholars of these plays is to guard the texts
jealously, to protect the words against all apparent license in
interpretation. In so doing, their vigilance can sacrifice the drama
for its poetry. What can take precedence for them is the structure of
imagery or the recurrence of motifs or the running theological argument
(evidenced by apparent typology or figuration or presumed allegory) or
some other critical construction. So long as their vision remains in
these regions, the drama remains an intellectual abstraction,
unexpressed and unexpressible on the stage. For directors to counter
with stage action that ignores literary understandings, though, does
just as much damage to the drama, for the temptation then is to compose
evocative sets or artful tableaux or startling business or intriguing
characterizations for their own sakes, without a controlling
justification from the text itself. The temptation is to make a mark
upon the play by theatrical artifice, something over which directors
have complete control. The directors' yielding to the temptations of
stage effects, without regard for literary authority, risks making
their productions idiosyncratic theatrical ”creations," which would
subvert or subsume the proprietary rights of the source texts.

In his article, "Performing the Poem,“ David Samuelson suggests
some ways in which this tension between the authority of the word and
the experience of performance can be made meaningful, even if it cannot
be entirely assuaged. He argues that the last scene in ELDQ_L£:£

communicates Shakespeare's affirmation of the human experience only in

21
a performance that fuses word to action in a way that gives to each a
greater expressive power. He concentrates on what to do with the
temptation for directors to make the final lines of Lear over the dead
Cordelia a pieta-like tabtgaa xtvan . He writes that to "see this
spectacle would mean we would see more, something like a halo effect
superimposed over this particular image of grief, an aura of the
universal type, a typal image that absorbs the individual instance and
mitigates the horror” (22). However, this staging, he argues, "is
rendered implausible by the language 'dramatically' controlling our
vision, those five 'nevers' [EIDQ_L£§£ v, iii, 314] which at the very
least make this staged emblem cruelly sardonic" (22). Shakespeare's
language prohibits the false, too easy stage action of self-serving
pity, remorse, and reconciliation.

On the other hand, to do nothing on the stage but recite the words
misrepresents the depth of Shakespeare's vision, one that probes deeper
realities than those that can be spoken. Samuelson argues that the
characters, by shattag silent witness to the deaths of Cordelia and
Lear, bind themselves and us to the pain and "heart” of the human
experience. He writes that Shakespeare creates for the stage a
torturing, but affirmative bonding to life in the ”way [the] survivors
refuse deflecting commentary and refuse to look away. Instead, they
gaze with unspeakable care toward the vanished image of nothingness,
and in doing so they evince a human image of 'heart,’ the radical force
Cordelia herself represents and which underlies the 'bonds' in this
play" (24-25). Shakespeare's words carry partial truth; the stage

business carries partial truth. Together, they become something more

22
meaningful than either alone. Lear is witness to Cordelia's death, the
survivors are witnesses to Lear's death, and the audience, sharing a
living silence with them after and beyond their words, is witness to
all. The words, the action, the actors and audience together fulfill
the dramatic moment. Shakespeare's drama completes its meaning in its
playing.

Maaktgg has an analogous moment. Its last scene reconciles
Mankind to God through the intercession of Mercy. The modern
production of this play can act out this reconciliation in ways that
overtake the words and that were not available to its medieval cast.
Everything about the final scene implies that Mercy reconciles Mankind
to God through the sacrament of penance. Such would have been the
appropriate conclusion to a Shrovetide play. But the medieval stage
did not permit the portrayal of the sacraments, so in the text Mercy
teaches Mankind back to God in a scene that includes invitation,
confession, explication, and departing charge--every element of the
sacrament but the laying on of hands and the forgiveness of sin. Our
production inserted the Latin lines of the sacrament ("Ego te absolvo
peccatis tuis”--I forgive you your sin), performed the sacrament, and
cut much of the instruction. The medieval drama, too, completes its
meaning in its playing.

I have used those terms, drama and play, liberally so far, but
with implicitly restricted meanings--drama for what occurs on the page,
play for what occurs on the stage. Before I continue using them, the
boundaries to their usage need to be made more explicit. The nature of

drama can be highly theoretical and difficult to pin down; the playing

23

of the play accrues to itself more physical, but equally demanding,
difficulties. Moreover, the application of Stanislavski techniques to
medieval dramatic literature may seem to beg the question of what
constitutes drama. His techniques are commonly associated with the
naturalistic dramas of Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, Ibsen, and others, and
readers may presume that his techniques impose that character on all
dramas to which they are applied, an imposition that would destroy the
integrity of the medieval dramatic vision. Stanislavski's own career
belies that presumption, however. Stanislavski did not restrict his
directing to naturalistic plays: he also directed the classics, opera,
popular farces, and expressionistic plays. The application of his
techniques has extended to impressionistic and ”absurd” plays as well.
In 1988, Mike Nichols, who was trained by Lee Strasberg at The Actors
Studio (America's foremost advocate of the Stanislavski system),
successfully directed Samuel Beckett's flatttag_1gt_§gagt. Even though
Stanislavski's techniques have been proved to be very adaptive and
flexible indeed, they make certain assumptions about the nature of
drama which will limit the scope of that term for this dissertation.

The most basic of those assumptions is that dramas require
performance. If there is any common authorial "intent“ to dramatic
literature, it is the expectation of playwrights that communities of
actors will enact their words. Though dramas may share some qualities
with other forms of literature, they alone demand physical
representation. The novel may have characters and story and dialogue,
but it is written quietly alone and can be read quietly alone. The

epic may have great poetry and sweeping conflict, but it can complete

24
its meaning between the page and the eye: it can accommodate
performance, but does not require it. The dramatic monologues of
authors like Browning have characters and speech, but no necessity for
stage representation. Playwrights, however, originate works in one
medium that require another and different one for their completion.

Another assumption of Stanislavski's techniques is that dramas
have conflict. His techniques work best when the issues of the drama
necessarily involve struggle. Some dramas in the medieval corpus are
largely episodic, as are the prophets plays, and they do not lend
themselves to Stanislavski's techniques easily. Though they represent
characters, these prophets have little to do with each other and have
little conflict to struggle with, except, perhaps, for having the
implicit struggle of teaching an obdurate humanity the will of God.
(Why else would God have to employ so many of them?) They can be
spectacularly theatrical, given their opportunities for costuming,
properties, and movement, but without intercharacter conflict,
Stanislavski's techniques find them harder to deal with.

Likewise, Stanislavski's techniques have a more difficult time of
it with medieval liturgical dramas. Though I have directed the Qaam
gaaatttta for Easter church services, its very sparseness hobbles the
Stanislavski impulse to develop full characterizations and patterns of
conflict and resolution. The play will yield some interesting staging,
though, when one posits that the Angel has to overcome a number of
doubts, fears, and contrary expectations among three Marys of very
different character backgrounds and temperaments. Directors can make

of this little drama a truly Stanislavskian moment, but it must be

25
carefully done. They have to mine the dialogue with a good bit of
disciplined imagining in order to extract characterizations and action
from what is only barely suggested in the text, and they must be able
to extract them without violating the drama's simplicity of spirit and
expression.

The rest of the medieval religious dramatic corpus--the remaining
cycle, morality, and saints plays--respond to Stanislavski's techniques
well. They are full of conflicts, conflicts of man against man and of
man against the will of God. They play out struggles that are cosmic
and mundane, spiritual and physical, and psychological and social. The
fullest and best of them, represented in this study by the Secogd
Shepherdsi_£ageaat and Manking, provide as much for Stanislavski's
techniques to work with as almost any modern play. Even the briefer
and less developed dramas from this corpus provide substantial amounts
of dramatic conflict, if directors are willing to dig for it. The
twenty minutes or so of the N Town Magi Play, for example, can be
filled with intrigue and dissimulation, pomposity and deception,
resistance to flattery and godly obedience.

Lastly, Stanislavski techniques assume dramatic characterization.
The heart of Stanislavski's system, as first devised by him and as
later augmented by other practitioners, is the development of
individual, believable, integrated character interpretations. Above
all else, Stanislavski's techniques respond to the needs of the actors,
among whose characters the conflicts of the drama will be generated,

acted out, and resolved. Stanislavski's three books establishing the

core of his system (An Actor Ptapatea, Puildtng a Charactag, and

26
thattng_a_Pgla) are all actor based. His techniques presume that the
characterizations in good dramas will sustain the actors as they search
for inner truth and expressive motivational and behavioral logic. In
this regard, the greater part of the medieval drama is packed with
characters who are among the most interesting and important in the
world: Adam, Noah and Mrs. Noah, Abraham, Herod, Mary, Jesus, Pilate,
and on and on. Directors who apply Stanislavski's techniques for
searching out and developing rich characterizations from textual
sources meet little resistance in this medieval drama and find much to
reward their efforts.

These three elements, then--performance intent, conflict, and
characterization--delimit the nature of drama for this study and the
number and sort of dramas in the medieval corpus to which
Stanislavski's techniques will have the most useful applications. On
balance, his techniques apply to more of the dramas than not. Such
news is good on two accounts. First, the application of Stanislavski's
techniques offers a systematic, and as yet largely unapplied, means to
reveal what makes these old dramas successfully dramatic. Second,
because they work so well on so many of these dramas, these techniques
can bolster the reputations of the medieval playwrights themselves.
Though they may have been writing when dramaturgy in Europe was still
young and formative, their works are true dramas, and far from
primitive. Drama did not become some other species of composition when
it turned secular in the Renaissance, as a result of the impacts of the
Protestant Reformation, the rediscovery of Classical writers, and the

rise of Humanism. Its performances may have gotten longer and more

27
elaborate, its conflicts may have gotten more intricate, and its
characterizations may have gotten more complex and sophisticated, but
old man Adam remained (and still remains) his same own self.
Whether the drama is the York Tag Fat; gt Mag or Marc Connelly's
Ina_§tg§n_Paatataa, Archibald MacLeish's gt_§P, or Andrew Lloyd

Webber's £2522 ghtist §uparstat, or any other, the quality of its

dramaturgy is proved by the level of performance that it can sustain--
the final test of any drama is how well it plays. The medieval drama
is not exempt from this stricture and does not need to be. But single
productions of dramatic works can be deceptive. Some good dramas get
bad productions and at first seem weaker than they are. Some bad
dramas get spectacularly distracting productions and for a short while
seem better than they are. Stanislavski's techniques can help to
ensure that each of these old dramas gets fair playing and thereby fair
judgment. They apply the same standards, the same analysis, the same
strategies, the same rehearsal methodology to every production of every
play. By the application of these techniques, the Sagond Shephetda'
Pagaant can receive the same rigorous performance test in Toronto or in
Chapel Hill or back home in Wakefield as it did in East Lansing. And
in the end, multiple productions can confirm its success or failure: it
can escape performance anomaly and critical misrepresentation. The
Wakefield Master likely never needed such a confirmation of his
abilities; his drama played well then and continues to play well today.
Manktng's playwright, on the other hand, would likely have been glad to
know that his work could find in these techniques a way to recover its

reputation for twentieth-century scholars, performers, and audiences.

28

As for the gaggad Shephegga' Pagaaat, the application of
Stanislavski techniques helps to explain and reinforce the literary
esteem for this drama's excellence. These techniques demonstrate that
it is a masterful synthesis of thematic control, tight structure, close
verisimilitude, insightful characterizations, raucous comedy, and
moving pathos-~all brought to heart-catching fulfillment in a final
scene that is as moving as it is revealing. This simple, artless scene
of the shepherds' humble adoration of the Christ child is as serene,
confident, and joyous as was the dramatic craftsmanship of the master
playwright who wrote it. As for Mankind, Stanislavski's techniques
demonstrate that it is an astonishingly powerful, surprisingly
"modern,“ psychological and spiritual "cliffhanger.” It thrashes
through the conflicts that plague the human soul with a ferocity that
is breathtaking, and then it structures the drama so that its final
resolution is the last decision in the last scene of the play. (Will
Mankind confess or not? Will he accept Mercy or not? What will
Mankind decide to a9?) To have an audience hanging on the performance
to see what next a character will do, what act he will next perform, is
dramatic writing at maturity and in full power. Stanislavski's
techniques demonstrate that Manting, far from being a degradation of
the morality dramatic form, is one of the best (if not the best) of its
expressions.

Explorers in the regions of the dramatic arts must be folk of many
parts. Drama is the active fusion of intellect and substance, and
those who study and practice it need to bring mind and body,

understanding and experience to their labors. More than this, these

29
explorers must recognize that they are among a host of collaborators:
playwrights, scholars, directors, actors, production crews, and
audiences. Among all of these laborers and between them and the
completed production is a bundle of inescapable tensions: tensions
between past and present, idea and experience, universal and
particular, intent and interpretation, word and action, conflict and
resolution, error and truth. Modern productions of the medieval drama
have them all. But what is inescapable need not be overwhelming. The
techniques for interpretation, characterization, and staging that have
grown in a school of theatrical practice begun by Constantin
Stanislavski offer systematic means to shaping order from what can at
first seem chaos. By these means, those collaborative and communal
experiences unique to the regions of the dramatic arts can take their
rightful place among the proper experiences of all the arts. And by
these means the medieval drama can claim its proper place in the great
body of English dramatic literature by demonstrable right, and not by

faith alone.

3O

NOTES

1. In his book, 93 Acting, Laurence Olivier writes:

"Now is the winter of our discontent . . .' is the most
dramatic opening speech of any Shakespeare play; a direct,
frontal attack on the audience's sensibilities, more brutal
than Richard's upon Lady Anne's. . . . On film, I had to get
the audience in the mood, give them some background, before
the opening soliloquy. So I gave them the coronation scene,
the last scene from EED£Y_YI_ZA£§_III: as I had done on stage
at the Old Vic. . .' (303). And, ”Even thinking about the
way I shot the soliloquy fills me with pleasure: ideas
springing naturally from the text (which, admittedly, I
manipulated) . . . . For the first seventeen lines [Richard]
speaks as though to each one of us personally. . . . But

upon:

I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,

he turns away from the camera to list his deformities (I used
ten lines from Act III, Scene II of Hanry VI Part 1;; for
this, to save us embarrassment perhaps, to gain our sympathy
certainly, to shout a bit, to show his righteous anger.

Upon:

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun

And descant on mine own deformity

he's standing at the entrance to the large throne room,
expecting the camera to come closer to him. So upon 'Then,
since this earth affords no joy to me' (the beginning of
another five lines from £29£Y_!I he moves toward us . . . '
(304-305). Finally, "The last thirty lines of [Richard's]
speech were from flaaty__1. He says to us, after a modest
smile: 'Meantime, I'll marry with the Lady Anne. Here she
comes'--we see her through the window--'Lamenting her lost
love.’ (Not Shakespeare.) And taking us down a dark passage
towards two huge doors which open into the courtyard, he
explains who her lost love is:

Edward, the Prince of Wales [my words], whom I,
some three months since,

Stabb'd in my angry mood at Tewksbury.

A sweeter and a lovelier gentleman . . .

31

The spacious world cannot again afford; . . .
And made her widow to a woeful bed.

(Richard III, Ag; 1. Scene_ll)

That from his loins no hopeful branch may spring
To cross me from the golden time I look for!

(Henry VI, 23;; III, Act III, Scene II)

. . . and he pushes open the doors. We see Lady Anne walking
behind her husband's coffin . . . .' (306-307)

Cf. Frederick C. Copleston, ed v . The debate
between 'realists” and "nominalists" lasted in one form or another
throughout the whole of the Middle Ages. Whether one favored the
realist position of Anselm and others on, or later the nominalist
position of William of Ockham and others, all positions had to
account for, and somehow link, universals to particulars.

"We cut five pages out of the last scene and that was it. He
[Williams] did insist on rewriting the throwaway lines the actors
spoke to cover activities like carrying Brando to the cold shower.
Tenn called them "dummy lines,” wanted even these bits to have
some quality of writing, so he'd give me scraps of hotel
stationery with what he wished the actors to say instead of the
improvisations I'd allowed. He wanted everything to be as worth
hearing as watching" (Kazan, A_Li§g 344).

Arthur Miller, personal notes from his discussion with the senior
class in theatrical direction (Speech 438) at the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, c. 1 March 1967. Also, ”In America, Qg§§h_gg
g_§glggmgn was the great twentieth-century tragedy; in Europe, it

was the final gggmg_ggti;1g3g on materialism” (Styan 22).

II. Word Made Flesh:
The Translation of Medieval Dramatic Texts
into Modern Performance Scripts

Comparing the manner in which Chekhov conducted himself
at rehearsals with the manner in which other authors
conducted themselves, I cannot help but wonder at the
extraordinary modesty of the great man and the boundless
vanity of the little writers. One of them, for instance,
when I suggested that a long-winded and false-sounding
monologue in his play be shortened, told me with complete
belief and the anger of the insulted in his voice:

"Shorten it, but do not forget that you will be held
responsible by history."

But when we dared to suggest to Anton Pavlovich that a
whole scene be shortened, the whole end of the second act of
"The Cherry Orchard," he became very sad and so pale that we
were ourselves frightened at the pain that we had caused him.
But after thinking for several minutes, he managed to control
himself and said:

"Shorten it.” (Stanislavski, My Life In Ar; 417—18)

The production of any play requires that directors find some means
of bringing the ideas of the playwright recorded in a literary text to
the immediate understandings of an audience attending a live
performance. Anton Chekhov may have been more astute than most
playwrights in accepting the necessity for directorial "translation” of
his plays' texts into performance scripts that were responsive to the
exigencies of the theater. The circumstances of the rehearsal hall and
the stage are different from those of the study and the printing house.
Likewise, directors who create performance scripts for medieval cycle

or morality plays create complete production documents that “translate"

medieval meanings into modes of theatrical expression that will sustain

32

33
the actors' and production crews' work and be communicable to modern
audiences. The foundation for this work is the medieval text itself,
the source of directorial understanding of the playwright's dramatic
vision and the final authority for what can and cannot be justified on
the stage.

Performance scripts are documents created by directors to give
physical expressions to the playwrights' source texts. They anticipate
and prepare for specific productions by adapting and augmenting source
texts to accommodate stagings at particular places and times, with
unique assemblies of actors and production crews, and for specific
audiences. For any written drama, ancient or modern, the directors'
anticipation of and preparation for performance always involve some
order of ”translation" from received texts to acting scripts. As

Harold Clurman argues:

What we call a play in the theater is something radically
different from a play on the page. The dramatist expresses
himself mainly through words, the director through estigg
which involves people amid the paraphernalia of the stage. .
. (273). The dramatist's conception—-his story-line and plan
of action conveyed through descriptive words and dialogue--
serves the other theater craftsmen as the ggw mgteriaI from
which they make the thing we finally witness at performance.
. . (274). Theatrical action is virtually a new medium, a
different language from that which the playwright uses,
although the playwright hopes that his words will suggest the
kind of action that ought to be employed. The director must
be a master of theatrical action, as the dramatist is master
of the written concept of his play. . . (275). On the stage
the dramatist's language must be translated; his spirit must
be made flesh. . . (276). The written play is not the goal
of the theater--only the beginning. If the play at the end
is not something beyond what it was at the beginning, there
is very little point in the process of transposing it from
the book to the stage; very little point, that is, to the
whole art of the theater. (278)

34
Dialogue anticipates speaker, idea intimates character, and conflict
calls for action.

What survive now as source texts of the medieval cycle and
morality dramas are the spotty records of productions long since
completed. The distance between their original and any modern
productions makes the need for and the degree of directorial
translation to create performance scripts all the greater. Their
textual vagaries, distant and unfamiliar languages, and unrecoverable
local and topical allusions make their meanings the more difficult to
determine and the more challenging to communicate. And unlike many
modern dramas, these texts supply little in the way of playwright
suggestions for actor characterizations, costuming, set designs, stage
properties, or sequences of stage actions and actor business. The bars
dialogue and cryptic stage directions that they do provide are now
insufficient to support modern productions, and thus they cannot be
considered performance scripts.1

The translation of medieval dramatic texts into modern performance
scripts has to address and solve substantial problems. The medieval
text may need editing, cutting, and emending; Ma kind, for example, has
a major lacuna at its very beginning, and its text at various places
apparently invites the insertion of local or topical references and
allusions. The texts' Middle English and medieval Latin always need
some degree of translation or reworking otherwise; the characters in
flanking speak in good or corrupt medieval Latin and in a now archaic

East Midland dialect, and the sense of what they say needs to be

brought within reach of modern audiences. Many of these texts also

35
call for songs or other performance elements not supplied by the
playwrights: the Second Shephgggg' gageant calls for songs at three
places, at least, and except for the obligatory glggIg In excelsIg,
nowhere else does the Wakefield Master identify specifically what that
music is to be. And the academic necessity of having to cast actors
largely from shifting populations of students can also affect the
character of the script. Our graduate course production of Mankind, as
it turned out, included only four male students; we had to rewrite some
lines, then, to support female characterizations. The problems that
directors encounter in making modern scripts out of medieval texts thus
range from the most sophisticated of literary concerns to the most
mundane of practical necessities. Directors cannot leave any of them
unsolved and still hope to produce a performance script that achieves
conceptual integrity and expressive coherence.

I wish that I could report that the script-making process for
Mankind and the §ggggg_§h§ph§;g§;_£§gggg§ was simple and linear, but it
was not. The determination and shaping of content and form and the
writing and revising of the scripts were constantly affected by my
accumulation of new insights into the languages of the source texts,
attendant literary and historical research, and emergent notions of
performance possibilities. Each reconsideration or revision of the
developing scripts opened new lines of linguistic, literary,
historical, or performance inquiry. Advances made on one front always
had repercussions on others. The process may sound circular, but it
was in fact a kind of incremental, give and take, bruise-by-teacup

progress. The problems that I encountered in translating these

36
medieval texts into performance scripts and the solutions that I found
were thus multiple, cumulative, and inescapably interactive. General
and integrative principles may be derived from them, but my account of
these problems and their solutions here will, of necessity, take the
artificial form of separate and sequential description.
* * *

The creation of a performance script begins with editing, cutting,
and emending the source text. Before any other considerations,
directors need to secure a written foundation that has textual
integrity and can support a unified thematic interpretation. The
construction of a whole and unified text for any medieval drama can
proceed without having modernized any of its language or having
supplied any supplementary elements. In fact, such a 'pre-modernized"
construction of a whole and unified text is essential, for it assures
that the drama will shape and justify itself in and on its own terms.

A number of the medieval dramatic texts present problems here.
Some texts, as the Shrewsbury and Newcastle fragments illustrate,
survive in very incomplete states. Other texts, like that of MankIn ,
survive in more complete states, but with major lacunae. Still other
texts have lesser gaps caused by physical damage to their manuscripts
or by the carelessness of their copiers, or both. To complicate
matters further, the texts of some medieval cycle dramas are expanded,
cut, or otherwise altered versions of source texts adapted from other
cycles from different towns. Whether great or small, any gap, lapse,
or confusion in the source text disrupts the apparent progress of the

drama and makes its interpretation and direction the harder to

37

ascertain and plot. What are directors to do, then, when faced with
medieval texts that do not readily supply completeness or structural
unity? My work in editing, cutting, and emending MggkI_g's text may be
of some help in this regard. I had to repair a major lacuna, cut the
play's length to fit the external demands of an hour's running time,
and supply local and topical allusions in such a way as to realize the
drama's meaning and structure, and make them both understandable and
communicable to modern players and audiences.

The text of Mankind begins with Mercy's conflict with Mischief (1-
71), then breaks (evidently, one leaf of the manuscript is missing),
and then resumes with Mercy's interruption of the Vices' (i. e., New
Guise, Nowadays, and Nought) revelry and their ensuing conflict (72-
161). Between the Vices' exit and their next appearance, Mercy
preaches to Mankind and seems to win his discipleship (162-322).
Apparently, Mankin 's playwright meant to establish early and crucial
animosities between Mercy and Mischief and the Vices, thereby providing
the provocation for the Vices' later retaliation on Mercy’s disciple,
Mankind. Without such an early establishment of provocation and
discipleship, the Vices' later actions seem misdirected and illogical.
Moreover, Mercy must establish himself early on as the vigorous,
undeniable champion of virtue, an opponent against whom Mischief and
the Vices (and ultimately Titivillus) are wholly unworthy. The logic
of the play's conflict depends on the Vices choosing to attack Mankind,
a more vulnerable adversary, whose rescue in the play's final scene is
made plausible by Mercy's indomitable strength. As they stand in the

text, though, the first 161 lines of Mankind do not provide a very

38

easily understood initiation of conflict: Mischief attacks Mercy for no
other reason it seems than his irritation at pompous oratory, and the
Vices seem to taunt Mercy before he has done anything directly to
provoke them. It remained, then, for the me to reorder these opening
lines to establish some character-justified conflict implicit in the
broken and disjointed text.

The first 322 lines of the play suggest that the initial conflict
of Mercy with Mischief and the Vices and the winning of Mankind as
Mercy's disciple take place in a tavern, in two distinct but related

"motivational units."2

Nowadays's early reference to drinking, the
presence of minstrels and music, and Nought's passion for dancing all
reinforce this tavern locale. Moreover, Mischief’s jealous attack on
Mercy suggests his defence of a tavern society completely under his
dominance. The first unit of the play (1-161) can thus be reordered
and unified to represent Mercy's challenge to Mischief's dominance of
this society. In the performance script Mercy's entrance first
disrupts the revelry of the Vices. Mischief then takes charge,
attempting to restore the tavern's jollity and his dominant position by
interrupting and mocking Mercy's sermon. Their ensuing conflict,
fueled by the Vices' belligerence and vulgarity, awakens Mankind's
sensitivity to his own soul’s peril and motivates his divorce from the
tavern society to become Mercy's disciple in the second motivational
unit (162-322). The challenge to his dominance of the tavern world in
Unit I followed by his loss of Mankind in Unit II spur Mischief to

organize the later retaliation of the Vices, and when that fails, to

invoke the demonic power of Titivillus. 8o conceived, the reordered

39
lines in the initial motivational unit establish and reinforce dominant
and subordinate conflicts in the morality.

The reordered portion of Unit I in our performance script follows.
(Unbracketed line numbers are those of our script. The bracketed line
numbers are those of Eccles's edition of Manking's text.)

Unit I: Mercy Confronts the World in a Tavern
(Enter Mankind, Mischief, Vices, and Minstrels)

NEW GYSE. Ande how, mynstrellys, pley pe comyn trace! 1 [72]
Ley on wyth pi ballys tyll hys bely breste!
NOUGHT. I putt case I breke my neke: how than?
NEW GYSE. I gyff no force, by Sent Tanne!
NOWADAYS. Leppe about lyuely! pou art a wyght man.
Lett ws be mery wyll we be here!
NOUGHT. Xall I breke my neke to schew yow sporte?
NOWADAYS. Therfor euer be ware of pi reports.
NOUGHT. I beschrew ye all! Her ys a schrewde sorte.
Haue peratt pen wyth a mery chere! 10 [81]
Her pei daunce. MERCY [entering] seyth:
Do wey, do wey pis reull, sers! do wey!
NOWADAYS. Do wey, goode Adam? do wey?
Thys ya no parte of pi pley.
NOUGHT. 3ys, mary, I prey yow, for I loue not pis

rewelynge.

Cum forth, goode fader, I yow prey!

Be a lytyll 3e may assay. 16 [87]
MERCY. The very fownder and begynner of owr fyrst

creacyon 17 [1]

Amonge ws synfull wrechys he oweth to be magnyfyede,
bat for owr dysobedyenc he hade non indygnacyon
To sende hys own son to be torn and crucyfyede.
Owr obsequyouse seruyce to hym xulde be aplyede[.]21 [5]
Yt may be seyde and veryfyede, mankynde was dere
bought. 22 [9]
By be pytuose deth of Jhesu he hade hys remedye.
He was purgyde of hys defawte pat wrechydly hade wrought
By hys gloryus passyon, pat blyssyde lauatorye. 25 [12]
[NOUGHT.] Anon of wyth yowr clothes, yf 3e wyll play. 26 [88]
Go to! for I haue hade a praty scottlynge.
MERCY. Nay, brother, I wyll not daunce.
NEW GYSE. Yf 3e wyll, ser, my brother wyll make yow to

prawnce.
NOWADAYS. Wyth all my herte, ser, yf I may yow avaunce.
3e may assay be a lytyll trace. 31 [93]

[MERCY.] O souerence, I beseche yow yowr condycyons to
rectyfye 32 [13]

4O

Ande wyth humylite and reuerence to haue a remocyon

To bis blyssyde prynce bat owr nature doth gloryfye,

bat 3e may be partycypable of hys retribucyon. 35 [16]
I haue be be very mene for yowr restytucyon.

Mercy ys my name, bat mornyth for yowr offence. 36 [18]
NOUGHT. 3e, ser, wyll 3e do well, 37 [94]
Trace not wuth bem, be my cowneell,
For I haue tracyed sumwhat to fell;

I tell yt ys a narow space.
But, ser, I trow of ws thre I herde yow speke.
NEW GYSE. Chrystys curse hade berfor, for I was in slepe.
NOWADAYS. And I hade be cuppe in my honde, redy to goo to
met.

Therfor, ser, curtly, grett yow well.

MERCY. Few wordys, few and well sett!
NEW GYSE. Ser, yt ys be new gyse and be new jett.
Many wordys and schortely sett,

Thys ys be new gyse, euery-dele. 47 [105]
[MERCY.] Dyverte not yowrsylffe in tyme of
temtacyon. . . . 48 [19]

(Continue with Eccles's edition, lines 20-68.)
MYSCHEFF. I say, ear, I am cumme hedyr to make yow
game. 98 [69]

MERCY. Lady, helpe! how wrechys delyte in be synfull
weys! 99 [106]

(Continue with the normal order of the text.)

This reordered first unit for Mankind initiates the play's
desperate and eternal conflict in human and personal terms with
clarity, logic, and economy. In performance, the play opens with the
convergence of the Vices, Mischief, Minstrels, and Mankind in a tavern
(the ”Double-Cross Tavern" in our production). They establish a
worldly context for the conflicts to come. There is much begun here
that will return again and again to tempt and taunt Mankind: drink,
dancing, sexual dalliance, and generally high spirited irreverence.
.Mercy barges into this context and begins his moral instruction and
exhortations. Mischief sees that his control over the tavern world and

its inhabitants is threatened by Mercy and moves to discredit and

41

humiliate him. The Vices join in what promises to be a lively
entertainment at Mercy's expense. But Mercy, even though he does not
yet see all that will be needed to defeat his adversaries later,
counters blow for blow and eventually expels the Vices from the tavern.
Mischief is momentarily defeated and enraged. Throughout the first
unit, Mankind has been a silent witness to all. He has been
embarrassed at his own presence in the tavern, and when the Vices are
expelled he moves to establish contact with Mercy in the next
motivational unit. By the end of the second motivational unit, Mankind
will appear to have been easily rescued and sent back safely to his
fields and labor. Both actors and audiences have an immediate sense of
character relationships and a clearly understood and readily apparent
set of causes for the conflicts to come.

We cut some of Mercy’s lines in the first motivational unit. We
out others of his lines throughout the play, but mostly in the last
unit. Three factors determined the need for and the kind of cuts made

3 One factor was the external demand for an hour's

in the source text.
running time. Our 1975 production was included as part of East
Lansing's Arts Festival performance schedule. We were asked to keep
the length of performance to one hour. The following year our
production of Mnnking was videotaped by Lansing Community College, and
its Instructional Media Department asked that we limit the running time
to one hour to make broadcasting easier to schedule. A second factor
was what Mercy had to say and how he said it. Mercy begins the play a

rather overbearing and flamboyant orator/preacher. He has important

truths to communicate, but he asserts their importance in language that

42
likely sounded pompous to a medieval audience and certainly sounds
extravagant and self-satisfied to a modern one. A good bit of Mercy's
inflated and redundant rhetorical style is open to lampooning, for he
appears at first to be out of touch with and untested by worldly
realities. Mischief and the Vices have a good bit of fun ridiculing
Mercy's sermonizing. We cut three of Mercy's lines at the very
beginning (6-8), for they are simply the amplification by redundancy of
his opening assertion that Christ died to win mankind's redemption. We
out other lines in Mercy's opening sermon (32-41), for they seem to add
a parenthetical explanation of, and justification for, the Eucharist.
Cutting those lines helped the actor playing Mercy stay focused as a
character and helped to minimize the audience's distraction from his
central concern that ”. . . ber xall be a streyt examynacyon,/The corn
xall be sauyde, be chaffe xall be brente" (42-43). The sacrament of
most importance to Mankind in this play is not the Eucharist, but
penance, the third factor in determining the kind and extent of our
cuts in the source text.

In its playing, the drama of Mgnkind becomes the active, sometimes
violent, struggle of an individual Christian to secure his right
relationship to God. That struggle is resolved favorably in the end by
Mankind's confession of sin and acceptance of God's mercy, but the text
does not provide for an enactment of the sacrament of penance. The
medieval stage would not permit the secular portrayal of sacred offices
by lay actors (or by anybody else, for that matter). The opportunity
for the modern production of this play, then, is to complete the drama

by fulfilling the meaning of the text in a way that goes beyond the

43
capacities of the original performance itself. Two questions need to
be answered before the director can go forward with this
interpretation. Can Mercy be played as a member of holy orders with
priestly powers? Does the text justify the inclusion of the sacrament?

Sister Mary Philippa Coogan's monograph, An Integpretation of the
MggnI zIay 'Mankind', establishes Mercy as a Dominican friar with
priestly powers. Her recitation of the internal evidence of the play
is impressive. Mercy describes himself as the "mean for restitution,”
indicative of his priestly powers and is addressed as "good father,"
also an indication of his priestly status; he refers to Mankind as ”my
son" on numerous occasions, a priestly form of address; New Guise
wishes that Mercy be sent to the number of the "demonical friary,” an
indication that Mercy is a friar of some sort, and the twist on
demonical/dominican virtually certifies the order: and Nought assaults
Mercy with "off with your clothes,” suggesting that Mercy is wearing
substantial and imposing clothing, very likely "the robe and cowl that
constitutes the habit of the friar" (Coogan 2-7). Mercy describes
himself as Mankind's ”father gostly,” and that he has a duty to
'procede forth and do my propyrte' (Mnnking 765).

Does this property include the sacrament of penance? Virtually
the whole of the last scene cries yes. The dialogue between Mankind
and Mercy is almost exclusively the recitation of Mankind's confession
and Mercy's explanation of the causes of sin and the exhortation "'Vade
et jam amplius noli peccare." (Go, and sin no more), the very words of
Christ, himself (850, of. John 8:11). Such content is entirely

consonant with the play's Shrovetide theme and original performance

44

occasion. But since the medieval stage would not permit the portrayal
of the sacrament itself, the last scene of this play loads instruction
upon instruction. It communicates its overwhelming import by
accumulated and reiterated verbal bulk rather than by the performance
of the one, sacred act that would cleanse Mankind's soul and restore
his right relationship to God. In the text Mercy teaches Mankind back
to God, rather than actually binding him physically and spiritually to
his maker. Our production reversed this proportion by cutting a good
bit of the instruction and inserting the sacrament, by having Mankind
ask for blessing ("Bless me, Father, for I have sinned”), and by having
Mercy lay hands upon him to confer his healing ministration, ”Ego te
absolvo peccatis tuis” (I absolve you of your sin). The act overtakes
the instruction and makes any more words unnecessary. The last 14
lines of our script for M kind, including the insertion of the
sacrament of penance between lines 898 and 899, ran this way. (Line
numbers are those of Eccles's edition.)

[MERCY.] The New Gyse, Nowadayis, Nowgth, be World we

may hem call; 885
And propyrly Titiuillus syngnyfyth the Fend of helle;886
That ys to sey, the Dewell, be World, be Flesch and be
Fell. 884
Wherfore, goode sunne, absteyne fro syn euermore after
bis. 892
3e may both saue and spyll 3owr sowle bat ys so precyus. 893

3our body ys 3our enmy; let hym not haue hys wyll. 897
Take 3our lewe when 3e wyll. God send 30w good
perseuerans! 898

[MANKIND. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
MERCY. Ego te absolvo peccatis tuis.
In nomine Patris, et Fillii, et Spiritus Sancti.]
MANKEND. . . . her ben I go. 899
God send we all plants of hys gret mercy! [Exit Mankind]

45
MERCY [Addressing audience]. Dominus custodit [vos] ab omni
malo
In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen! 902
[Exit Mercy. The play ends.)

Mercy's address to the audience in words that echo his sacramental
absolution of Mankind closed our production by linking Mankind's
individual drama to the collective experience of those who witnessed
it. We took the immediacy of Mercy's closing benediction and its
associative linking with the sacrament of penance to be sufficient to
carry the import of the last scene and to transfer its implicit
exhortation to eschew worldly vanities for divine grace to the
audience. The last three stanzas of the text, which make the
exhortation explicit, seemed less necessary and redundant and were cut.
The drama came to a swift conclusion, hard upon the heels of its
denouement--Mankind's last and most crucial decision, which was to
accept God's mercy through the sacramental acts of confession and
repentance.

There were other ways, though, that we employed to make the drama
of 333313; more immediate and relevant to a modern audience. Our
emending of the text, especially in our supplying modern local and
topical allusions, helped to bridge the gap of time and also helped to
fulfill some of the potentials for surprise and delight (or as Eccles
says, ”high-spirited fun" xliii) inherent in the text. We know that
Mnnking was originally performed at different locations by a traveling
band of some six or seven players (depending on whether or not the
parts of Mercy and Titivillus were doubled). The insertion of local

and topical allusions appropriate to each medieval performance location

served at least two purposes. First, they made the drama personally

46
relevant to each audience. MnnMLng has its generic figure, Mankind,
but in naming actual people and places, it also became a close and
immediate experience for those who saw it. The drama was not about
other folk at some other time far away, but about those who shared it
in their own time and place. Second, the insertion of local and
topical allusions won audience sympathy. They elicited support and
empathy for the players and their play by establishing a sense of a
close community; the play was performed not by strangers but by
familiar friends. For any who have ever acted, the need for such
audience support and empathy does not have to be argued. The practice
is as old as theater and continues today.

Some of the emendations that we made in Mankind's text simply gave
modern American equivalents to medieval English places and things. For
example, in the text New Guise attempts to conceal the money that he
has just collected from the audience from Titivillus by saying ”By be
masse, I fayll to farthyngys of an halpeny3/3yt hade I ten pounds bis
nyght bat was“ (480-81). We substituted American coinage and slang to
have him say "By the mess, I fail two nickels of a dimelehough I had
ten bucks this night that was." The sense was readily understood by
the audience and made the playing all the more humorous. In fact, we
did collect money from our audiences, and when New Guise delivered
those lines to Titivillus his feeble deception not only sounded witless
and unbelievable, but the large bag of coins that jangled about his
waist also made his lie incredible.

We had more ”high-spirited fun" with our insertions of names into

the text. In lines 689-90 Mischief puts his court in the time of the

47
reign of King Edward IV: "Anne regni regitalis/Edwardi nullateni.“ We
brought the lines closer to home, though we kept some of the self-
important pomp of their Latin: “In this year of the reign regitalis/Of
Geraldus Fordus." (Few American Presidents have been less adept at
being 'regitalis" than Jerry Ford, a joke which our audiences seemed to
catch very quickly.) Earlier in the text, Titivillus orders the Vices
to say to whom they will go where they "may do harme” (502). He
volunteers that they may "Take William Fyde, yf 3e wyll haue ony mo"
(503). That name, and the others supplied by the text, seemed open
invitations to insert current substitutions of our own which our
audiences would delight in hearing. At line 503, Titivillus always
surprised our audiences when he blurted out "Take Tricky Dick, if you
will have any more." His derogatory reference to Richard Nixon, who
had just affirmed again that he was ”no crook," was perfect for
Titivillus's abusive character, the “situational ethics” temper of the
times, and the drama's criminal moment.

In the text, New Guise is the first to respond to Titivillus. He
says that he will go to “Master Huntyngton of Sauston” (505), "Wylliam
Thurlay of Hauston” (506), and Pycharde of Trumpyngton" (507). Our
script, however, did not give him credit for such presence of mind, and
his response to Titivillus amounted to a fumbled stammering of
nonsense. (Throughout our play, New Guise was always the most pompous
and least clever of the Vices.) After New Guise's failure to think of
anything, Titivillus turned to Nowadays, who fared better. In the
text, Nowadays says that he will go to Wyllyham Baker (509), Rycherde

Bollman (510), but "xall spare Master woods of Fullburn/He ya a noli me

48
tangere' (511-12). In our script, Nowadays would go to Henricus
Kissinger and George Wallace. He would ”spare Jean Leclercq, for he is
a noli me tangere.‘ All of our audiences recognized the first two
references. We included Jean Leclercq in Nowadays's list for our
performance at the Eleventh International Congress on Medieval Studies
at Kalamazoo, Michigan. Dom Leclercq attended the conference, and our
audience of medieval scholars was particularly delighted by this
surprise reference to one of their own. In the text, Nought's list
follows. He says that he will go to 'Wyllyam Patryke of Massyngham
(513) and "spare Master Alyngton of Botysam/Ande Hamonde of
Soffeham,/For drede of in manus tuas qweke” (514-16). In our script,
Nought would go to Ronaldus Reagan and would spare Otto Grfindler. The
Reagan brand of conservative ideology and social values was a good
target for Nought's disdain for any pretense to social conservatism or
propriety. Professor Grfindler coordinated the Congress on Medieval
Studies at Kalamazoo that year. It was he who invited us to perform,
and it was he whom we especially wanted to acknowledge and please, “For
drede of in menus tuas qweke."
* t t

The editing, cutting, and emending of the medieval dramatic text
is the necessary first step to creating a performance script. The goal
is to produce a written document that attains wholeness and thematic
unity in and on its own terms. But those terms, expressed as they are
in Middle English and medieval Latin (and other languages, sometimes),
are remote nowadays from the common experiences and understandings of

modern actors and audiences. The necessary next step in creating a

49
performance script is that of devising some means to make the meanings
of the medieval expressions understandable. That process involves two
orders of "translation" at least. One order is simply to make sure
that what amount to foreign expressions now get fair representation in
modern language equivalents. Directors must decide how to bring the
medieval Latin and other foreign languages into the reach of modern
audiences. Directors must also be alert to the shift in meanings of
English words over time, especially those Middle English words that at
first appear commonplace and familiar. Another order of ”translation"
is more complicated. Beyond simply substituting modern lexical'
equivalents to old or foreign words, directors must determine how the
meanings of the medieval languages affect dramatic interpretation and
stage action. There may be no modern equivalent for the medieval
expression, and the forcing of some modern, but only approximate,
"translation” upon the text will result in a misrepresentation of the
dramatic vision of the playwright. In those instances, directors must
invent stage action that will convey the playwrights' dramatic meanings
through and beyond their language. Both orders of translation share a
common goal: the fair representation of the medieval dramatic vision in
speech and action that bring its meanings to the possible grasp of
modern audiences.

Inserting lexical substitutions for old or foreign expressions in
the text is the simpler of the two orders of language translation, but
it is not altogether simple. Directors must decide whether it is
better to translate or not, even if there are modern English

eqmivalents. My work on the medieval Latin in Mnnking offers some

50

examples here. I have already cited Nought's “For drede of in menus
tuas qweke' (516) above. That little line combines English, Latin, and
onomatopoeic nonsense into a phrase that has as its meaning: ”for dread
of being hanged." Eccles notes that the Latin quotes part of Psalm
30:6 in the Vulgate (31:5 in more recent Bibles), "In menus tuas
commendo spiritum meum' (Into thy hands I commend my spirit); it was
"the prayer said by the dying” (223). Moreover, Christ repeated this
verse on the cross (cf. Luke 23:46), thus Nought's appropriation of the
words to death by hanging. That sense, though, is not readily
accessible to a modern audience. The Latin may not be understood and
the phrase's associative medieval meanings, even if the Latin were
understood by the audience, may be lost. Does the director translate
the line or not?

I let the line stand just the way it was for three reasons.
First, Nought is in effect quoting Christ here, at least in part. The
tenor of his speech needed high seriousness at that moment. A possible
hanging has supreme worldly significance for Nought, regardless of its
consequences to his soul. Retaining the Latin elevated the apparent
importance of Nought's concern, albeit his was based solely on worldly
standards. Second, what began as a Latin quote of supremely high
seriousness was immediately undercut by Nought's 'qweke," his
onomatopoeic imitation of the sound of neck-breaking strangulation.
The juxtaposition of the Latin and the nonsense debased the allusion to
Christ's crucifixion and fit Nought's character. Even in the
contemplation of mortal and spiritual extremities, Nought could not

stay serious or resist being vulgar. Third, stage action could convey

51
the line's meaning. If Nought grabbed his throat at 'qweke,“ bugged
his eyes, and stuck out his tongue, then Titivillus, New Guise, and
Nowadays could immediately pick up his sense. Later, when New Guise
warns Nowadays and Nought 'Lett ws con well owr neke-verse, bat we haue
not a cheke' (520), Nought's repetition of the choking pantomime linked
his Latin to New Guise's English and reinforced the line's meaning.
Still, not all of the audience may have got the sense of what he said,
but my obligation as director was met, if the ngggibiIIEy for
understanding had been established. My impulse in all of these
instances was to be conservative. I retained as much of the original
text as possible, and where direct translation would have sacrificed
too much, I invented stage business that made communication possible
beyond what the actors simply had to gny.

The rest of MankIng's Latin was handled in a variety of ways, some
easier than others. Mercy’s "In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus
Sancti' (902), when accompanied by his making the sign of the Cross,
ought to have been recognizable to modern audiences: whether it was or
not, it went untranslated into the script. The Latin in Mercy's
opening sermons was kept, too, for Mischief had to mock it by
imitation, and New Guise had to have cause for his "yowr body ys full
of Englysch Laten' gibe (124). Even if the audience did not understand
what Mercy said in Latin in his preaching, neither did the Vices. It
may well have been sufficient for the audience to have recognized that
Mercy began the play a little too aloof, a little too “bookish” for his
own good or for that of the simple, untutored folk he wanted to save.

Mnnking's playwright did have a sense, it seems, of when his Latin nng

52

‘tg_bn understood. At those points, he provided his own translation, as
when Mercy says to Mankind: ”For ber ys euer a batell betwyx be soull
and be body:/'Vita hominis est milicia super terram'” (227-28, cf. Job
7:1). The metaphor of battle informs the whole of the play!

Following the playwright's cue, our script supplied other
translations that stood side by side with the Latin and reinforced
dramatic meaning. In the text, Titivillus enters saying "Ego sum
dominancium dominus and my name ys Titivillus“ (475). In our script,
we inserted the English translation, "I am the Lord of Lords”
immediately after the Latin, and thus emphasized the devil's pride.

Not only did he proclaim himself lord in over-reaching language, but he
also inflated the Latin with the ”ego" intensifier and then translated
his extravagant claim so that the local Vices would understand and be
cowed by his presence. The audience derived benefit from the
translation, but enjoyed a different response to the message. We also
glossed Mischief’s line "And do yt sub forma jurys, dasarde!" (666) by
adding ”Legal-like, you blockhead' and directing the epithet to a
befuddled New Guise. Mischief’s condescension to New Guise reiterated
their dominant/submissive relationship, and the audience got the
lateral benefit of the gloss.

The more comfortable the actors became with playing out the
meaning of Mnnking's Latin, the more we left it untranslated, as in
Mankind's beginning of the Lord's Prayer at line 554, "Peter noster qui
es in celis." Similarly, the actor playing Nowadays could pantomime
the sense of line 142, 'Osculare fundamentum!” (Kiss my ass!), and

leave the Latin alone. In our script and performance, Nowadays

53
followed Mischief’s lead and taunted Mercy (instead of Nought, as the
text seems to indicate) in his own church language. Nowadays's use of
Latin to express such a vile thought to Mercy made the words, when
accompanied by the pantomime, doubly insulting. Finally, for Mercy's
absolution of Mankind, we added Latin to the script where none occurred
in the text. The sacraments in the Middle Ages were performed in no
other language.

The intent of our script and performance decisions about what to
do with Latin words, phrases, and sentences that were likely to be
outside the immediate understanding of the audience was to preserve
dramatic meaning. If the Latin could be pInygg as it stood in the
text, then it went untranslated into the script. If not, then it was
altered to make its sense clear to the audience in such a way as to
keep our script as close to the playwright's dramatic vision as
possible. Sometimes the Latin was simply retained and glossed,
sometimes it was replaced by whole translations, and sometimes it was
not translated at all. In the end, my decisions about translating
MnnkIng's Latin were individual. The sole criterion for how I handled
each word, phrase, sentence, or speech was how best its dramatic import
could be played on stage.

The same performance criterion applied to the ways in which I
handled the Middle English in MnnkIng and the Secon he h rds'
znggnng. There is, however, one important difference between the
playwrights' usages of Middle English and Latin in the cycle and
morality plays. Whereas Latin is almost always used to invoke special

levels of authority among characters, Middle English is the common

54
language of dramatic meaning. It is from the matrix of Middle English
meanings that directors extract thematic interpretations and determine
performance characters for these plays. What directors make of the
meanings of the Middle English, in short, establishes performance
authority. Without a clear understanding of Middle English meanings,
directors are at a loss to give the actors any coherent or unified
direction to their work on stage. If modern actors have a clear
understanding of what the Middle English meant for the playwright, the
original actors, and their audiences, then they may work together to
bring that dramatic vision within the grasp of modern audiences.
Directors could make something of these plays, even if they understood
no Latin at all, though that "something" would be the lesser for it.
They can do nothing useful with these plays, however, without
understanding the Middle English.

The process of ”translating" Middle English into dramatic action
is as much interpretive as it is lexical. No change in the original
text escapes having interpretive impact on the performance. The
options for actor translation of the Middle English are as many as for
the Latin. The more that actors understand the Middle English
themselves, the less dependent they are on word-by-word substitutions.
And the more that the actors can ”play“ medieval meanings, the less
dependent is the audience on hearing such substitutions. Readers of
these cycle and morality plays may not always grasp this performance
truth: on the stage, action always takes precedence over the spoken
word. Stage action should not violate the sense of the medieval

playwright's words, but his words alone do not make the play. Neither

55
the actors nor the audience has the same contemplative luxury of the
reader. The play cannot stop in performance for interpretive
footnotes, nor can a scene be repeated (reread) to study out its verbal
imagery or thematic motifs. One word here or a line there or a stanza
later on is but one moment in a flowing progression of meaning revealed
in action. Richard Hornby comes to the point directly. Reacting to
over-close readings of Shakespeare, he writes:

The American New Critic Cleanth Brooks, for example,
published an essay on a single short passage from Mncbgt :

a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, hors'd
Upon the sightless couriers of the air. . . (I. vii.
21-23)

Brooks maintained that this complicated and confusing image
informs the entire playscript, containing in kernel form the
whole underlying structure. While he makes an interesting
and often ingenious argument, it is hard to grant so much
weight in a ggnmngig work to a single passage of such
opacity, which requires about five seconds to recite, in a
scene that depends for much of its effect on a banquet going
on simultaneously in the next room. . . . While the method
of imagery analysis contains important implications for the
stage designer, who can translate verbal images into visual
ones, it is simply too static to be adequate by itself for
the actor or director. (18-19)

Whether the Middle English in these cycle and morality plays is simply
retained or retained and glossed or translated outright depends on the
capacities of directors and actors for performance invention, once the
W-

The ”translation" of the plays' Middle English into sound and
action that will be communicable to modern audiences does not intend to
produce simply another variety of literary document. Instead, it seeks
answers to inescapable, and quite practical, questions that affect the

plays' interpretations, productions, and performances. Essentially,

56
these questions address dramatic circumstances, conflict relationships,
and characterizations. Actors need to know who their characters are,
what they look like, what they do, and how they relate to each other.
Set, lighting, make-up, costume, and properties designers and technical
crews need to know what direction the physical construction and
practical operations of the production will take. All look to their
director for answers. And their directors look to the Middle English,
first to understand it and then to decide how best to express its
meaning. Three passages from the Second Shepherds' Paggant can
illustrate how directors may extract answers to the questions of
dramatic circumstances, conflict relationships, and characterizations
from the Wakefield Master's Middle English and how directors may devise
ways to communicate their medieval meanings to modern audiences.

The dramatic circumstances of the §econd Shennggdg' Pageant are
established in the shepherds' opening complaints. The external
physical circumstances may be quickly sketched. The time of year is
late December, just before the birth of Christ. All of the shepherds
begin their complaints with descriptions of the weather. They describe
a decidedly English winter night--cold, wet, and windy. In production,
we left these complaints against the weather just as they were, for
staging, sound effects, and lighting could create the sense of a cold
and hostile environment. We also know from the very beginning that
these shepherds are poor, ill-clothed, and hungry. They eke out an
existence, but by no means thrive. Coll says that he is 'yll happyd"
(l) and 'nere hande dold' (2). Gib says that the frosts are “so hydus

they water myn eeyne' (58) and that "When my shone freys to my fete,/It

57
is not all say“ (62-63). Daw is terrified by the violence of the
night, by "Wyndys and ranys so rude and stormes so keyn' (128).
Everything on this night seems to him to be "wars that it was” (119).
The script glossed 'yll happyd' with 'ill wrapped" to make clear that
Coll was referring to the poor condition of his winter cloak and not to
the whims of fortune. Otherwise, the script kept the Middle English,
for the external physical circumstances were readily communicable
through costuming and staging.

The external physical circumstances are also related to the social
circumstances that affect the external and internal lives of these
shepherds. The violent and oppressive weather is a reflection of
deteriorating social values. Coll does not attribute his condition to
fortune, but to the invidious practice of 'mantenance" (35) that has
elevated undeserving 'gentlery men'I (18) to social prominence and
political and economic power. Coll does not see himself as unlucky at
all, but as one "opprest in point to myscary,/On lyfe" (22-23). The
specific form the oppression takes against him and Gib and Daw has been
that of 'purveance" (33). The actor and the audience both need to know
what Coll is talking about here and how it affects his
characterization, the point of the drama, and the audience's
understanding. Does the language remain or change? How is the crucial
importance of this external social circumstance communicated?

Coll's rage against gentry men and their abuses of power is
crucial to the play and important to make clear to both the actor and
the audience. Not all gentry men are the object of Coll's wrath, only

those newly-made, with fresh stripes on their sleeves or shiny new

58

badges (28). For these men, 'gentlery' describes an acquired social
rank, not a station of birth. They wield their power, not by ancient
right, but by recently bestowed authority, being "lord fest" (20), that
is, bound to a local lord for their protection and 'mantenance' (35).
Arnold Williams writes that the "maintenance' of which the shepherd
complains was viewed by both moralists and legislators as one of the
chief evils of the age. It was simply the practice of the powerful to
hang together and to back up their subordinates, by legal means if
possible, by force if necessary. The outcry against it was shared by
commoner and lesser noble” (annn 133). Lynn Squires ranks
“maintenance, and its attendant evils perjury, champerty, and
conspiracy to defraud" as ”the most familiar evil of the age" (201).
Coll resents the arrogance of these newly-minted men and distrusts them
intensely. They are full of boasting and bragging (34) and they simply
take away Coll's goods through 'purveance" (33). Purveyance included
"the act of requisitioning provisions for the royal household at a
price set by the buyer" (MiddIe EngILgn QigtIgnagy), an act that
amounts virtually to the theft of Coll's goods to which he "were better
be hangyd/Then oones say hym nay" (44-45). Purveyance was widely
abused in fifteenth-century England, and Coll's complaint gives public
outcry to an injustice that must have been silently endured by many.

These three terms--gentry men, maintenance, and purveyance--and
their social import meant different things to Coll's medieval audience
than they would likely mean to modern listeners. Gentry has modern
connotations of comfortable economic circumstances and social

reputation, all rather benign. Further, the word has lately gained a

59
colloquial verbal form in America that connotes a change which brings
about a material improvement to property values, as in “to gentrify' a
neighborhood. Beyond its commonplace meaning of routine upkeep and a
state of good repair, maintenance in American criminal law refers to
third party interference in law suits for personal gain--what Squires
cites as the attendant evil, champerty, above. Those usages, even if a
modern audience knew them, would still not encompass all of Coll's
rage. Purveyance may have now lost most, if not all, of its
connotations of buyer-set prices and virtual theft. If these terms
were left "untranslated" by directors, then the modern actors and their
audiences would likely understand only a part of what had meaning for
Coll and his fifteenth-century English audience, and not the most
important part at that.

The importance of these terms to the Seggng_§n§pn§;gn;_gng§nnt is
so great, however, that directors must devise ways to make their
meanings accessible to modern audiences. Coll's rage against what
appear to him to be fraudulent acts perpetrated by counterfeit gentry
men underlies virtually all of his actions in the play. In this he is
not alone. Not only is maintenance a threat to Coll's livelihood; it
is also a threat to the order of society itself. As Squires writes:
”Law stood for the principle of virtue itself; it stood for the
ordering forces in society and, more importantly for our purposes, in
drama” (200). Coll sees society itself collapsing, especially in the
disintegration of the values of honesty and truth that he esteems most.
Squires notes that the 'retrogression to feudal disorder in the

fifteenth century is a historical commonplace; the cause of disorder is

60

said most usually to be the indentured retinue or band of retainers
serving the often violent purposes of their sworn lords"--in short, the
"gentlery men” (201). Coll rages against their counterfeit of
nobility, their acts of fraud upon the defenseless, and their self-
serving abuse of and disregard for the social contract expressed in
law. The Wakefield Master's short, explosive lines serve Coll's rage
well, as in:

Thus hold they vs hunder,

Thus they bryng vs in blonder;

It were greatte wonder,

And euer shuld we thryfe. (24-27)

These are sharp words from "perhaps the greatest satirist of his times"
(Williams, ngnmn 141). How can directors help an actor to communicate
these dramatic circumstances that Coll's character brings to this play
and that will affect all of his actions in it? How can directors help
to make the sense of the medieval terms that Coll uses to explain
himself accessible to modern audiences?

There are two ways to handle the difficulties of this language
barrier. One way is to gloss and augment the text in place. For
example, lines 15-18 identify the gentry men as the perpetrators of
Coll's oppression. The Master's lines are short, choppy, full of spite
and anger:

we ar so hamyd,
ffor-taxed and ramyd,
We ar mayde hand tamyd,
with thyse gentlery men.
Recasting them into modern English can capture Coll's anger by simply

clarifying the complaints and replacing the demonstrative pronoun

”thyse" with an adjective of contempt and derision:

61
We are so lamed,
Overtaxed and shamed,
That we are hand-tamed,
By tin god gentry men.
The gentry men's abuses of maintenance offend Coll not only because
they violate his traditional senses of social truth (troth) and
justice, but also because the perpetrators flaunt their protected
status. Coll's frustration is that he can do nothing to stop these
abuses. When he speaks of maintenance, the audience must understand
that it is the proper name for a social practice much abused in
fifteenth-century England, and that it is not simply the equivalent of
the modern senses of normal upkeep or support. Also, the performance
script needs to make clear that purveyance amounted to a medieval
license for gentry men to steal. Lines 33-36, then, need some
reworking to convey these medieval meanings. In the text, they read:
he can make purveance,
with boats and bragance,
And all is thrugh mantenance
Of men that are gretter.
The performance script can reorder these lines a bit and insert a gloss
to help the audience understand that Coll is raging against an evil
practice that has legal sanction:
He just takes what he wants,
By law of purveyance,
And brags of his maintenance
By lords that are greater.
This translation not only makes the intimate--to Coll the offensive--
connections among gentry men, maintenance, and purveyance accessible to

the audience, but it also helps to make the mini-drama in Coll's next

stanza clearer.

62

The next stanza (37-45) acts out the gentry's virtual theft of
Coll's goods through purveyance. And the actor's ability to "act out”
the meaning of the lines is the second way in which their meaning can
be communicated. In our production, the actor who played Coll used
these lines to invent a pantomime that depicted one encounter with a
gentry man. The stanza begins, 'Ther shall com a swans as prowde as a
po' (37). We translated the line to ”There comes a swain, as proud as
a peacock" and had Coll burlesque the gentry by strutting haughtily
about the stage. The second line reads, I'he must borow my wane my
ploughe also" (38). We glossed "wane” to wagon, and had Coll's reading
of the line turn venomous on "borrow.” Coll's response in the next two
lines exaggerated the servile and humiliating nature of his forced
compliance. As he said, "Then I am full fans to greunt or [ere] he go"
(39), the actor playing Coll bowed so low to his imaginary gentry man
that he finished the line kneeling before his oppressor. From that
position Coll delivered the next line, "Thus lyf we in payne Anger, and
we" (40), humiliated, but not humbled. He complies, though he hates
it, rather than "be hanged" (44). Coll's pantomime communicates the
meaning of the words, but more importantly, the seething rage behind
them. They make his instant and explosive conflict with Mak inevitable
and understandable.

Understanding the Wakefield Master's Middle English is also
crucial to determining characterizations. Even if lines of the text go
unchanged into the script, the actors need to know how to read them.

We have problems with such readings even in modern play texts. In

modern American urban slang "bed" can mean "good," even ”superior," at

63
times. Actors can go quickly wrong in their characterizations by not
understanding the possible range of readings and their contextual
determinants. The problem is compounded by the distance and
unfamiliarity of Middle English. For example, “sely” (silly) in Middle
English was a benign adjective meaning "innocent" or “humble” or
"poor”; its connotations were not pejorative, as they are today,
meaning "foolish" or "trivial." Directors and actors can err
disastrously, if they interpret all of the "silly“ characters in
medieval drama to be fools, as in Coll's ”we sely shepardes' (10) and
Gib's "we sely wedmen” (65). Middle English words that look familiar
to us but which had a different range of meanings for their medieval
speakers make all directors of these plays cautious.

One brief passage in the Secong §hepnegg§' gnggnng that has great
importance for the shepherds' characterizations illustrates this
problem. After the shepherds' opening complaints, they have only one
short scene of 45 lines (145-189) to establish their characters and the
character of their relationship before Mak enters. These 45 lines,
however, have produced widely different interpretations of the
shepherds' characters, based largely, I think, on various readers'
understandings of the range of medieval connotations to ”master” (145,
156, and 163), 'seruandys' (154), 'knaue' (147), and "shrew" (151).
Lois Roney has considered this campfire scene at length and concluded
that "the First and Second Shepherd are both portrayed as oppressing
masters, to be contrasted with the Third Shepherd, who is depicted as a
maltreated, footdragging servant" (700). Further, she argues that,

”When the three shepherds finally meet, there is genuine bad feeling

64

between them. . . . The human evil here is real. These people lack

goodness in their wills“ (712). John Gardner, however, sees this

campfire scene entirely differently. He writes:
After the three soliloquies, the poet presents a brief
struggle between, on the one side, Coll and Gyb, the masters,
and, on the other, Daw, the servant. Dew asks for supper,
his masters tease him, and Daw berates masters in language
which recalls Coll's complaint against ”gentlery-men"
earlier. . . . Then Dew asserts that since masters will not
treat servants fairly, he will repay his masters with bad
work; and when Gyb asks where the sheep are pastured, Dew
says he left them . . . to wander ”in the corne.‘ Order--
essentially the feudal order, a reflection of the order of
the cosmos--seems undone. But in fact all three shepherds
are, in their rough, country fashion, joking. Only a moment
ago Dew was considering giving the sheep a turn, so it would
seem they have not been left wandering since morning, "in the
corne.” And now the shepherds, actually at one, sing
together to warm themselves. (88)

How do directors decide whether these characters are only ”joking" or

acting out "genuine bad feeling”? How do directors decide whether

these characters are at conflict with each other or ”at one"?

The answers lie in the range of meanings that the Wakefield
Master's Middle English could support and the logical implications of
the given dramatic circumstances. A director's interpretation of four
words-- master, servant, knave, and shrew--is critical. If a director
gives them all pejorative connotations, then the shepherds can have
evil wills. But those words also had benign, even meliorative meanings
for the Wakefield Master, his actors, and their audiences. If
directors choose the meliorative, then the shepherds can be ”at one"
and sing as they say "to myrth vs among" (184).

"Master” (145, 156, 163) does not have to mean "employer"

exclusively. It is used in that sense in this passage, but it is also

used here, too, to connote a difference in ages between Dew and the

65
older shepherds. Master also connotes the command of some discipline
and the authority to teach it, senses that we made much of, for we took
the whole of Coll's relationship to Dew and Gib to be one of the
preservation of ancient feudal values through his teaching. “Servant"
(154), likewise, did not mean employee exclusively. Teachers need
students, and servant can connote that relationship as well. Our
production interpreted the relationship between Coll and Daw to be like
that of a knight and his squire, but since these two characters were
commoners they had only the words "master" and "servant" to describe
it. Modern connotations to 'knaue' (147) are exclusively pejorative;
synonyms range among rascal, rogue, and scoundrel. Five hundred years
ago knave had the more innocent meanings of "a male infant," "a male
servant," or simply of ”a boy” or "young man” (from the German, knnbg).
The MIgg1g_fingli§n_nig§Ignngy goes so far as to say that knave was a
“familiar term of address.” In fact, this is exactly how Gib uses the
word later in the play, when he asks Mak, "Is youre chyld a knaue'
(554)? Coll and Gib need not be impugning Daw's character by calling
him a knave; he is simply a young boy who works for them, whom they
address in familiar terms. Nor would they necessarily be impugning
Daw's character by referring to him as a "shrew" (151). Though its
connotations are almost always pejorative--even in the middle ages--
shrew can also mean simply ” an unruly or ill-disciplined child"
(Mignln_£nglfign_2;§§ignngy), a meaning that certainly fits our first
impression of Dew. In addition to this expanded range of possible
meanings for master, servant, knave, and shrew, directors must consider

the dramatic circumstances in which these words are uttered to decide

66

their meanings. In this case, I found it incredible that these three
men would leave the world outside these fields to spend time together
in the midst of a raging storm and not like--even love--each other.

My decision to choose meliorative over pejorative meanings for
this scene was something like choosing the half-full over the half-
empty cup. This scene represents the shepherds coming to the fields
Ig;_ngmg_gggg, not simply tg g3; nway Iron 59mg ngI. And the good
they come for is the fellowship of each other's company--e company of
"trow men." Directors who would bypass the QnIg;g_Eningn_Q;ggIgnnny

and the MIddle English Dictionggy risk creating performance scripts

(and production interpretations) that are unnecessarily diminished in
meaning or farther removed from the playwright's vision.

The conflict relationships in the ggggng_§ngpng;g§;_£ngggn§ come
out of the dramatic circumstances and the characterizations. Coll's
opening complaint, for example, establishes implicit standards of truth
and justice, honesty and trustworthiness that the shepherds apply to
themselves and others throughout the play. Coll seeks truth and finds
deception instead. He seeks the fellowship of 'trew men” (52), but
into the sanctuary that Daw and Gib and he make against the storms of
the world comes a very lightning rod for his wrath--that fraud of
frauds, Mak. The first words that Mak speaks directly to the
shepherds, "whet! ich be a yoman I tell you, of the king;/The self and
the same sond from a greatt lordyng' (201-2), ignite Coll. Mak's
ludicrous claim to social superiority is delivered at the wrong time in
the wrong place to the wrong man. He has greatly miscalculated the

effect of trying to pass himself off as e gentry man. (Mak has not had

67
the benefit of hearing Coll's opening complaint!) He even has the gall
to threaten the shepherds in words that allude unmistakably to the
practice of maintenance: 'Ich shall make complaynt and make you all to
thwang/At a worde,/And tell euyn how ye doth” (211-213). No strategy
could have been worse.

The audience can understand Coll's explosion when it comes, for
his anger against gentry men, maintenance, and purveyance has been well
established. The text reads:

Bot, Mak, is that sothe?
Now take outt that sothren tothe,
And sett in a torde! (214-216)
The “sothren tothe' allusion is to Mak's imitation of a southern
dialect of Middle English, one more commonly associated with the
nobility. In performance, Mak can alter his speech to sound pompous,
but since this exchange between him and the shepherds occurs just at
his entrance, the audience needs some assistance to know that the
shepherds recognize that both his speech and his pretense are unwelcome
shams. The lines may take some form as this in the script:
But, Mak, is that true?
Why speak like the gentry do,
With a mouth full of turds!
At these lines in our production, Coll took out his broad sword, struck
Mak behind his knees with the flat of the blade, and dropped him to his
seat on the ground, as if an imaginary chair had been hacked out from
under him. Mak begins the play a known fraud, though Coll's depth of
feeling against him cannot be appreciated without seeing their

relationship in the light of the dramatic circumstances revealed in

Coll's opening complaint. This idea--thet the basic conflict

68
underlying all of what happens in the §econd gngnhgrdg' Pageant is one
of truth against falsehood--will be developed more fully in Chapter
III, which deals with a director's responsibility to provide a unifying
thematic interpretation for performance.

The progress of the shepherds throughout the play is marked by the
occasions for song, but the Master's text cites only one song
specifically: ' elu cantat ' in [c];1gIg" (a stage
direction following line 637). Even there, the Master does not specify
gnign gIogIa In excelsis he had in mind. Director need to choose one
from among many. And the play cannot be performed without its director
deciding what songs to supply to the script elsewhere.

Our performance script supplied three additional songs.‘ For the
shepherds' first song, following line 189, I chose the "Agincourt
Carol” (cf. Greene 289). Since we were playing Coll to be a veteran of
Agincourt, the carol fit his character. Moreover, it became the means
to act out the "truth" of fellowship and trust and faith among these
shepherds. In our production, Coll uses this carol to teach the
history of noble deeds of valiant men to Dew, the youngest of the
shepherds. As a stirring account of brave men in battle, the song
accomplished two ends. It gave Coll an opportunity to pass on to a new
generation a description of what true men (including himself) were, in
sharp contrast to the current gentry men. Also, the carol's
transcendent theme of God's grace bestowed upon the brave and faithful
calmed Daw's fears of the dark shapes and 'sodan syghtys' (137) on the
fields at night. Its verses describing the battle and its chorus of

"Dec gracias Anglia/Redde pro victoria' (England, give thanks to God,

69
in return for victory) do not fit the three-part "glee” very well. In
our playing of it, though, we let Coll teach the English verses, Gib
teach the Latin chorus, and Daw learn it all with wonder and joy. The
dramatic intent was for each of the three shepherds to be contributing
some different, but important element to their characters' bonding. In
spirit, its singing was glee.

The shepherds reprise this carol late in the play. After they
have done with Mak and Gyll, Coll still cannot let go of his anger: "On
these thefys yit I mene' (635). He is an old man, and the trauma of
the theft and struggle with Mak has left him "sore in poynt for to
bryst" (629). "In faith,” he says, he "may no more" (630). We took
this moment for Dew to rescue Coll’s spirits and strength by singing
the carol's first verse and then repeating its chorus to him, until
Coll joined in. I changed line 637 from "So, as I say you" to "Do, as
I say you" to give Dew the means to return teaching to the teacher, to
restore faith where he found despair. When their singing grew strong
together and Coll's spirits became brighter--more gleeful--their
repetitions of the chorus were interrupted and overtaken by the
Angel's, gIoggg In exgeIsig. Their “victory“ over Mak and God's
victory over sin and death converged in the "truth" of the Angel's
message. The shepherds' personal glee was gathered into the universal
and the sublime.

For Mak's 'lullay on fast" (445), I spliced together snippets from
the refrain of "Lord Randall” to a repeated "lullaby, lullaby" to

create a strangely appropriate misappropriation of meanings. The song

70
became ”Lullaby, lullaby/Make my bed soon,/For I fain would lie down.”
In the original refrain, the phrase "For I'm weary wi' hunting” comes
just after “soon.“ Rethinking it now, I wish that I had included it
too, so that Mak could have lulled his stolen sheep to sleep with a
morbid hunting ballad. But Mak’s singing would not have lulled any
creature to sleep, for ”neuer none crak so clere out of toyne' (477).
As with everything else about Mak and Gyll, this lullaby was as far
from glee as they were from truth. The song, after all, means to
conceal the truth of Mak's deception and theft from the shepherds. And
Mak's intentions for the sheep are nowhere near benign! In contrast to
that of the shepherds and the Angel, Mak's singing betrays his lack of
character and trustworthiness. He hits no true notes.

To these two songs, I added a third, uncalled for in the text. At
the moment that we had Mak begin to stray from the shepherds' fireside
fellowship to look for a sheep to steal (just after line 252), Daw
caught him back and alerted the other shepherds by crying out ”Hey!"

To cover his act, Mak picked up Daw's "Hey!" note and began a song of
his own, which the shepherds joined. The song was “Hey, Ho, nobody's
home./Meat nor drink nor money have we none,/Yet shall we be marry," a
round that I sang at campfires as a child. I have no idea where it
comes from or how old it is, but it fit this moment of the play. Mak
distracts the shepherds from his interest in their sheep and deceives
them into thinking that he wants to join their fellowship. The lyrics
fit the circumstances, and the shepherds sing them innocently,
believing that they are safe in a sanctuary of their own making. They

fool themselves into complacency and off to sleep. The contrast

71

between Mak's out-of-tune croaking and the shepherds' spirited singing
of the same song puts their different character objectives into
opposition and builds dramatic tension. Their singing is dramatically
active, not idle, and is directed by different characters to different
purposes. Glee is undermined by discord, and truth is lulled to sleep.

The character of the performance script can also be affected by
more mundane and practical concerns. If our experiences at Michigan
State University are any true indication, these old plays are generally
performed by enthusiastic, essentially self-selected students. They
enroll in departmental course work that advertises its performance
intent, or they simply volunteer to participate in a unique campus
experience. Directors are often faced with collections of willing
souls who do not easily fit the apparent demands of the texts. More
often than not, these students include more women than the texts call
for. The problems of adapting texts to the casting of plays can become
formidable. Our productions of the Sgggng_§n§nng;gg;_zgggnn§ and
Mnnking both included women actors. The text of the figggng_fingnng£gg;
zggggnt calls for one female character at least (depending on how
directors view angels). Manking's text calls for none. What are
directors to do, then, to reconcile the apparent expectations of
medieval texts to the happenstance compositions of their modern casts?

James Cagney was once asked a similar question about what happened
when one production plan did not seem to fit the play. His answer: "We
changed it.“ I am not sure whether he meant the play or the production

plan. We have changed both. In the §gcond snepherdg’ Pagggnt we

changed the production plan some. In MankIng we changed the script,

72
too. The cast for the Sgggng_§ngnng;gg;_£nggnnt had one too few male
actors. We did have a female actor to play Gyll, but no man to play
Dew. The youngest shepherd, then, had to be played by a women. As
good luck would have it, that female actor was small of stature and
slight of build. With her hair bobbed in a style reminiscent of
medieval fashion, she could (we hoped) pass for a young boy. Two other
factors assisted in making her characterization the more credible. She
was an experienced, remarkably good actor. She had earlier played
Mischief in both of our productions of Mgnkind to very favorable
effect. Also, she could sing surpassingly well--a factor of critical
importance for our production of the Sgggng_§ngpng;gg;_£gggnn§. Having
her play Daw taught the cast an important lesson: whatever they
ngnggg to be the reality of their play on stage become the reality
accepted and believed by the audience. If medieval and Renaissance
England could have boys play women and be believed, then we could
reverse the casting and succeed as well.

More difficult problems arose with the casting of MnnkIng. We had
far fewer men than the text called for, even though the number of
characters in this play is small. Only four men (including myself)
acted in the play. And since we chose not to double Mercy and
Titivillus, we had one more part to cast with a women than otherwise
could have been the case. The roles of Mischief, Nowadays, and Nought
were played by women. Mankind, of course, had to be played by a man.
And New Guise, whose relations with his wife are ridiculed throughout
the play, also had to be played by a man. I had to rewrite and

reassign some lines in the performance script to accommodate this

73
casting. Those difficulties, however, were more than compensated for
by the surprisingly rich interpretive suggestions that their solutions
yielded.

Most of the lines in MankIng accommodated rather easy changes in
noun and pronoun genders to support the female characterizations. We
did have particular trouble, though, with Mischief’s report of her
night in jail. In the text she says that she 'kyllyde be jaylere,/3e,
ande hys fayer wyff halsyde in a cornere;/A, how swetly I kyssyde be
swete mowth of hers!" (643-45). Our script had Mischief say that she:
"killed the jailor;/Yea and her fair man hugged in a corner:/A, how
sweetly I kissed that sweet mouth of his!” We essentially settled for
noun and pronoun substitutions here, though we were all a bit
unsatisfied with the result. It seemed that we were describing a very
unlikely penal system for the Middle Ages. Also, the woman who played
Mischief (the same who later played Daw in the §ecgnd Snennergg'
ggggnng) was of so slight a build that she appeared incapable of
overpowering and killing a jailor. In the end, we let it stand,
without torturing it into other constructions and meanings, and trusted
to the boldness of the actor to make the line believable. We took some
comfort from the apparent social ambiguities in the original text. Any
jail that would have husband jailers nng their wives on site, it
seemed, could allow a number of unlikely events. We were not
disappointed by the actor's reading of these lines, nor did we ever
receive any audience correction.

Some of Mnnking's lines, though, had to be reassigned, for no

amount of tinkering with their nouns and pronouns would make them

74
appropriate to their original characters. In the text, Nowadays poses
these facetious (and exceedingly vulgar) problems to Mercy:
I prey yow hertyly, worschyppull clerks,
To haue bis Englysch mad in Laten:
'I haue etun a dyschfull of curdys,
Ande I haue schetun yowr mowth full of turdys.’
Now opyn yowr sachell wyth Laten wordys
Ande sey me bis in clerycall manere!
Also I haue a wyf, her name ys Rachell;
Betuyx her and me was a gret betell;
Ande fayn of yow I wolde here tell
Who was be most master. (129-138)
Our script assigned this whole passage to New Guise for three reasons.
Having New Guise ask for the translation fits his preceding gibe about
Mercy's body being full of "Englysch Laten” (124). The lines are not
out of harmony. More importantly, the whole of this passage, it seems,
means to mock Mercy's clerical status--particularly his celibacy. To
remove its "wifely" element would diminish the degree of sexual mocking
implicit in New Guise's question. And finally, New Guise's history of
domestic battles (and apparent losses) becomes a motif for his weak
character throughout the play and helps to explain Mischief’s easy
dominance of him. Nought's interjection of "Thy wyf Rachell, I dare
ley twenti lyse” (139) turns the mockery back upon New Guise and sets
the motif running. Mercy may be celibate, but New Guise is virtually
castrated. Later on in the play, when Mankind takes a spade to New
Guise's 'jewellys," the assault on his masculinity becomes painfully
direct (381). Not only did we preserve the dramatic import of these
lines by reassigning them to New Guise, but we also established a
character trait that would torment him throughout the play.

The work of directors to create coherent, communicable, and stage-

‘worthy performance scripts for the medieval cycle and morality plays

75
thus integrates several operations. Source texts may have to be
edited, cut, or emended. Remote languages may have to be translated or
otherwise adapted for performance. Staging elements not included in
the texts may have to be supplied. Modern scripts may also have to
bend to the exigencies of casting. These operations amount to the
integration of several orders of ”translation." Each order of
translation requires that directors bring older forms of dramatic
expression to the lively experience and understandings of modern actors
and audiences, without losing the medieval meanings of these plays.
Together, these orders of translation present complicated, often
difficult problems. Solutions to any of them are based on one,
overriding criterion--how the playwright's dramatic vision can best be
enacted on stage. The creation of a performance script is not easy
work, but very rewarding. My performance scripts for the figggng
Sngnngggg;_gnggnn§ and Mankind may not have preserved all that had
meaning for their original playwrights, casts, and audiences, but what
they did preserve became meaningful entertainments for those who acted

and saw them anew.

76

NOTES

Martin Stevens cautions that ”It is a mistake to assume that the
extant manuscripts were used as play texts . . .' (Fgu; Middle
EngIIsh Mystery chIgs 14). All of the extant medieval cycle
texts were written long after their respective plays were first
performed. There may have been a time, though, when texts closely
approximate to these did serve as scripts, when their authors
lived to provide immediate interpretations and performance
direction. Mankind's manuscript may have a closer relationship to
its performance. Whatever their degree of relationship to
medieval performances, these texts are now the literary and
historical artifacts of dramatic expressions that no longer have
familiar and current meanings or easily recoverable performance
lives. For the medieval players, much of what is remote and
unfamiliar to us now would have been very close and easily
grasped. Though the character of performance may have changed
some from year to year, it is likely that each medieval production
company, especially those of well established trade guilds, would
have been more stable than not, with essentially the same group of
actors returning to re-create their roles. Such stability among
performers would have allowed for much “shorthand" communication
among actors during rehearsals and would have minimized the need
to make extensive (or any?) alterations to the received text.

This may help to explain why these texts seem to be so sparse in

dialogue and are so lacking in stage directions. Something akin

77
to the re-creative familiarity with text for the medieval company
occurred during our second production of Mnnhing in 1976. With
the exception of the role of Mankind, which was played by a new
actor, all of the rest of the company returned from the previous
year. Having a group of actors who knew their roles and each
other well made rehearsals very quick studies. Most of the script
changes for this second production went unrecorded. The cast was
so familiar with the established script that their inventions,
additions, and alterations fit easily into an already comfortable
context. I do not think that our experience of working with our
performance script of Mgnking was very different from that of its
original cast and their script. The more that our performance
became a familiar, living, and adaptable expression on the stage
the more our own script reverted into being an increasingly
distant record of what we had first thought about the play. As it
happened, our modern script came to assume the character of a more
recent ”text," an authority to appeal to when there was any doubt
or confusion among the players, but ultimately a fixed and limited
document that could only suggest and but barely describe all that
had to become fluid and spontaneous on the stage. We could not
have performed anything, without having first created the script,
but what it now preserves on paper comes nowhere close to
recording all that constituted our performance. Rereading
Mnnking's performance script, even though I created, directed, and
acted it, leaves me puzzled at places about the meaning of what I

wrote years ago that now seems obscure or simply indecipherable.

78
If I were to attempt to re-create my own production of Mnnking
after so many years, I sense that I would have to translate text
into script all over again. Except for the demands of translating
Middle English and medieval Latin into modern expressions, I feel
that I am now in about the same order of relationship to our
performance script as I was to the original text when I first
began to think about this drama. I would do better translating
fresh from the medieval text itself to create the script anew,
though my accumulated experience would now make the process less
intimidating and more quickly productive.
Eccles's text for Mankind has Scene I run from opening line to
Mankind's easy victory over the Vices's disruption of his labor
(1-412). For our performance script, though, we divided this same
portion of the play into three different "motivational units,”
based on Stanislavski's principles of character motivational
"objectives" and obstacle "thresholds." Unit I (Mercy Confronts
the World in a Tavern) in our performance script ran from opening
line through Mercy's expulsion of the Vices from the tavern (1-
161). Unit II (Mankind Receives Good Counsel and Fortification)
encompassed Mercy's instruction and apparent winning of Mankind's
commitment and obedience (162-322). Unit III (Mankind Wins
Apparent Victory and Falls into Overconfidence) ran from the
reappearance of the Vices to their defeat by Mankind (323-412).
The remaining motivational units for our production were: Unit IV
(Plots and Plotters Against Mankind), 413-540; Unit V (Mankind is

Frustrated and Deceived by Titivillus), 541-611; Unit VI (Mankind

79
is Ridiculed and Corrupted by the Vices), 612-733; Unit VII (The
Battle for Mankind), 734-810; and Unit VIII (Mankind is Reconciled
to God Through Mercy), 811-914.
There was a fourth, admittedly selfish factor that influenced
these cuts, but it is only indirectly related to the progress of
the drama itself. Since I acted Mercy in this production, I was
glad to see any opportunity to reduce his part. It is hard enough
to direct a production, without having to act its longest role,
too. Happily, though, the stage business that we devised for
Mercy could convey much of the meaning of his excised lines.
Readers may note that the shepherds also sing upon their exit and
that a fourth song may be required there. In our production, we
had the shepherds join the reprise of the Angel's, gIg;in_In
gnggIgIg, which accompanied their exit and ended the performance.
For the studio videotape production, we did add an additional song
to cover the titles and closing credits. That song was the
anonymous fifteenth-century carol, "Nowell sing we both all and

some,/Now Rex pacificus is come" (cf. Rickert 166-67).

III. Fundamental Lines of Action:
Performance ”Super-Objectives" for
MgnkIng and the ond She d ' a ea

The first stage in the work of the actor and theatre manager
[i. e., the director] is to probe for the germ of the play,
investigating the fundamental line of action that traverses
all of its episodes and is therefore called by the writer its
transparent effect or action. In contrast to some theatrical
directors, who consider every play only as material for
theatrical repetition, the writer believes that in the
production of every important drama the director and actor
must go straight for the most exact and profound conception
of the mind and ideal of the dramatist, and must not change
that ideal for their own. (Stanislavski, ”Direction and
Acting” 22)

Interpretations of the English cycle and morality plays strive to
bring the medieval import of their dramas to performance expressions
that will become lively and meaningful entertainments for those who act
and see them anew. The approach that I have found most useful for this
interpretive work has been my application of Constantin Stanislavski's
criteria for performance "super-objectives" to produce a complex
statement of what constitutes the medieval "mind and ideal" of the
playwright's dramatic vision and how that subject matter can be plotted
into a unified sequence of stage actions. My experience in directing
the Michigan State University productions of MankIng and the figggng

fingnngyg§;_gnggnn§ suggests that these old plays can support unifying

and stage-worthy thematic interpretations, despite the distance and

80

81
unfamiliarity of their religious and social contexts and their dramatic
conventions. Mankind's struggle to secure his salvation and the
shepherds' search for truth replay enduring human conflicts that can
still affect the minds and ideals of those who act and see them now.
The better medieval plays, like the better drama from any period,
can support several different determinations of thematic meanings.
Directors may argue about which among their thematic interpretations
best expresses the drama of any given play, but they must all
acknowledge that their interpretations are inescapably the products of
some favored biases and performance prejudices. None of them comes to
these plays (or any'others, for that matter) with innocent hearts or
clean hands. As Jonathan Miller writes:
Egggeption always approaches its domain with interests,
preoccupations and prejudices about what is important in a
work whether of art or literature. If we agree that the
function of the director is to restore as much of the
information of the original performance as he could, what he
would infer as being important about the original production
would not provide a faithful copy of the original but would
merely tell us what ng thought was important in it. He would
automatically and unavoidably be introducing an
interpretation, and even at his most obedient would introduce
preconceptions. I believe that it is better to be conscious

of your preconceptions rather than simply to be the victim of
them. (53)

 

Something akin to Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle" affects the
interpretation of the performance script; the application of some
system of interpretive mechanics unavoidably changes the perceived
character of the script. Directors inevitably find what they are
looking for. They must be careful that their interpretive work upon
the play does not so alter its essential nature as to make it

unrecognizable in its playing. My own theatrical training, based

82
largely on the work of Stanislavski and subsequent practitioners of his
system, carries significant biases and prejudices. My disposition to
think of drama in terms of character development and interactive
conflict limits my aptitude for directing several sorts of medieval
drama--the highly stylized liturgical plays and the more episodic
prophets plays, in particular. I must always be cautious that my
interpretations do not fabricate character traits or conflicts that
cannot be supported by the script. Other directors schooled in other
systems, the Brechtian "epic theater," say, may have better results
with the more stylized and episodic plays than I. Any director who
sits down to interpret one of these old plays, however, needs to
acknowledge that the result will in one way or another be
idiosyncratic. Interpretations will always be limited and selective
because our knowledge of the Middle Ages will always be incomplete and
the requirements for performance necessitate choosing one among several
possible interpretations. Such directorial acknowledgment early on
makes performance interpretation both a more humble and a less anxious
labor.

As I have worked on establishing thematic interpretations for any
play that I have directed, I have found Stanislavski's prescription for
performance super-objectives to be indispensable. They are the ”germs"
of playable ideas out of which whole productions grow. In the last
chapter of nn_Agtg;_2;§nn;§g, Stanislavski lists four properties of the
super-objective: it conforms to the playwright's point of view; it
establishes intellectual credibility, though it is not simply a summary

of the intellectual argument of the play; it engages the play's

83
emotional content; and it excites the actors' wills to perform (284).
To his list, I might add several other properties. The super-objective
is ell-inclusive; it circumscribes the whole of the play's dramatic
action, from first cue to curtain call. It states what the play 1;,
beyond what it is nbggt, in terms of the characters' actions and
dramatic circumstances. And the super-objective is directive; it
charts the course of the drama through its superior and subordinate
character conflicts, making clear who and what at any given time drive
the play's "fundamental line of action" forward.1 Directors who launch
into rehearsals without having devised these superior and subordinate
expressions of the plays' thematic meanings stand before their casts
and crews like captains lost at sea, whose ships left port without
sextant or compass or chart of ocean currents. They may with luck find
direction, but while they cast about, steering now one way then
another, they put their ships into jeopardy and risk mutiny.
. t e
The script of Mnnking seemed to me to offer two choices to
establish thematic unity. I had to settle on one of them. One choice
(a rather obvious one) was to put dominant stress on the worldly

2 Such an

temptations to which the human soul is subject.
interpretation would thus emphasize the roles of Mischief, the Vices
(New Guise, Nowadays, and Nought), and Titivillus. There is much in
Mnnking to support this choice, and an effective performance could be
made from it. It meets all but one of Stanislavski's super-objective

criteria. It does have some intellectual credibility. In keeping with

the play's original Shrovetide performance occasion, Mischief and the

84
Vices provide a rousing depiction of the assaults of the flesh upon the
spirit. And from one perspective, the play seems to be constructed to
frame Titivillus's literally show-stopping eruption from Hell. The
assaults of the flesh upon the spirit can certainly engage the actors'
emotions and excite their wills to perform. Mankind, for example, is
vexed in body and soul throughout. He begins the play disgusted by
fleshly temptation (”my flesch, bat stynkyng dungehyll' 204), rises to
exhilaration at Mercy's exhortation (”my soull ys well sacyatt/Wyth be
mellyfluose doctryne of bis worschyppfull man” 311-12), swells with
pride at beating back the Vices ("By be subsyde of hys [i. e., God's]
grace bet he hath sente me/Thre of myn enmys I haue putt to flyght”
394-95), backslides to sin after Titivillus deceives him ("I wyll hast
me to be ale-house“ 609), and sinks to suicidal despair in the Vices'
company (”A roppe, a rope, a rope! I am not worthy“ 800). Any actor
would love to get a part that had such a range of emotional expression
as this one does.

This interpretation of the theme of Mgnking includes a significant
part of the playwright's dramatic vision, but not all. According to
this interpretation, Mercy's appearances at the beginning and end of
the play serve merely as e framing device for the depiction of worldly
temptation and sin. Mercy would become a mere appendage to the play, a
character whose lines could be cut in quantity and with near abandon.
Such an interpretation fails to conform to the whole of the
playwright's point of view. Mercy is no simple frame or ”code of
decency” afterthought to an otherwise scatological and scurrilous

farce. Though Mgnkgng's playwright is impressive in his command of

85
scetology and scurrility, he is also capable of a great deal more. The
greater part of these capabilities find their locus in the relationship
between Mankind and Mercy.

Mercy's character development and redemptive actions give the play
substance and unifying purpose. The inclusion of the character of
Mercy in this play signals that there are more conflicts to be found
than the rather simple one of flesh against spirit. The Shrovetide
occasion for this play concentrates more concerns for the state and
destiny of the Christian's life than simply those of the temptations of
the flesh. Mercy's disruption of the life of the tavern puts Mankind
into a life or death struggle. Complicating that struggle is Mercy's
direct challenge to Mischief and the Vices which initiates a conflict
between the duties of religious obedience and the varieties of secular
transgression. Mercy's indirect conflict with Titivillus puts Mankind
into the center of a struggle that pits divine purpose against demonic
perversion. And Mercy's efforts to bolster the resolve of Mankind and
then to rescue him from despair involve them both in psychological and
moral conflicts which are strikingly modern in the complexity of their
internal and interpersonal dynamics. To resign the thematic authority
of this play to the limited potentials of Mischief and the Vices would
be to reduce its character to that of a rather flat melodrama. To be
sure, to play Mankind as melodrama would invite a good bit of fun. But
much would be lost, however entertaining the resultant farce would be.
Mercy's relationship to Mankind does not ”frame" the conflicts of this
play; it embodies them. At Mercy's entrance these conflicts begin, and

in his sacred absolution of Mankind's sins they conclude. Each of the

86
play's conflicts ultimately gets absorbed into the problem of Mankind's
salvation--salvation from worldly temptation and sin, salvation from
despair and death, and salvation from eternal damnation. The character
uniting all is Mercy, "be very mene for . . . restytucyon' (17).

The original Shrovetide performance occasion for Mgnking brings
all of these conflicts into sharp focus. Shrovetide (the three days
before Ash Wednesday) seeks to bring the errant Christian back to God
through confession, repentance, and forgiveness. For medieval
Christians it was a special time to heed their priests' call to the
holy sacrament of penance (now reconciliation), wherein they could be
shriven of their transgressions. Shrovetide concentrated the clergy's
plea for the faithful to enter the Lenten season by putting away the
temptations of ”the Dewell, be World, be Flesch and be Fell” (884), so
that at Easter they "may be partycypable of hys [i. e., Christ's]
retribucyon' (16). Mercy pleads to Mankind: 'Ecce nunc tempus
accetabile, ecce nunc dies salutis' (866). His words are full of the
urgency and import of the moment. Mercy quotes Paul's second letter to
the Corinthians (6:2), ”Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now
is the day of salvation." Sister Mary Philippa reminds us that these
words were read as part of the 'epistle for the first Sunday of Lent”
(11). And Mark Eccles notes that the verse "is also in Matins on Ash
Wednesday” (227). The perfect playdate for Mankind would thus be
Shrove Tuesday, the Christian's last, perhaps desperate chance to
confront and put away sin before Lent. With the exception of Holy Week

Observances, I can think of no other time in the church year when the

87
matters of personal mortality, moral judgment, eternal damnation, and
divine redemption would so concentrate the Christian's attention.
Beyond the superficial temptations of the flesh, Mnnking sets
loose a life or death struggle. The sense of urgency in Mercy's
mission of rescue and redemption is quickened by remembrance of the
"four last things”: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Here, this
remembrance is recurrently expressed in the particularly legalistic
forms of criminal transgression and capital punishment. Mercy alludes
to all four of the last things in the first speech in the text:
For yt [the body and blood of Christ) hath dyssoluyde
mankynde from be bytter bonde
Of be mortall enmys, bat vemynousse [sic] serpente,
From be wyche Gode preserue yow all at be last jugement!
For sekyrly ber xall be a streyt examynacyon,
The corn xall be sauyde, be chaffe xall be brente.
(39-43)
Also, early in the play, Mankind reminds himself that he is only dust
of the earth ('Memento, homo, quod cinis es et in cinerem reuerteris'
321). Late in the play, Mercy characterizes Mankind's protestation of
his unworthiness for God's mercy as a ”crymynose complaynt” (815) and a
'cryme notary" (845), and reassures him that ”The justyce of God wyll
as I wyll" (833). This last scene of the play brings two systems of
justice into convergence at Mercy's rescue of Mankind from the gallows-
-the divine overtaking the secular. For most of the play, Mankind is
buffeted by the world, the devil, the flesh and fell, and is tempted to
weigh his life's worth on secular scales. He is trapped by his own
failings, humiliations, suicidal depression, and Mischief's kangaroo

court. Since he has foresworn mercy, Mankind is particularly

susceptible to Mischief's and the Vices' inducements to sin, despair,

88
and death. He, like Adam before him, falls from grace and is made
painfully vulnerable to the afflictions of the world and the
inevitability of death. So long as Mankind sees himself only in terms
of the world's judgment, his fate appears bleak and terminal. Mercy's
rescue brings Mankind to a different standard of judgment and the
possibility of redemption and salvation. God's justice does not excuse
his sin, but offers a merciful means to overcome it. Mercy's rescue
provides Mankind with the means to free his soul from the prison of his
body. The world will reduce the body to dust again, but God can raise
the soul beyond its bodily confines to an eternal, spiritual life.
MankIng's playwright may have had the third verse of Psalm 50 in
the Vulgate Bible (51:1 in modern Bibles) in mind throughout. It was
the Middle Ages' gallows-escaping ”neck verse'--the one that Mischief
remembers and New Guise forgets. It reads, "Have mercy on me, O God,
according to thy great mercy. And according to the multitude of thy
tender mercies blot out my iniquity.” Mercy and the other characters
in MAEKLBQ allude to it and its pain, death, and gallows connotations
constantly. Mercy introduces himself by appropriating the words of
this Psalm to himself:
be grett mercy of Gode, bat ys of most preemmynence,
Be medyacyon of Owr Lady bat ys euer habundante
To be synfull creature bat wyll repent hys neclygence.
I prey Gode at yowr most nede bat mercy be yowr
defendawnte. (21-24)
He warns Mankind against becoming ensnared by Mischief, who is ever
ready to "brace yow in hys brydyll' (306). And Mercy quotes the neck

verse's Latin opening clause directly ("'Miserere mei, Deus!") late in

the play, in his effort to bring Mankind to penance (830).

89

Mischief, the Vices, and Titivillus provide secular and demonic
counterpoint to Mercy's struggle to bring Mankind to God. They have
rough-neck and head-busting business to conduct throughout the play.
Mischief and the Vices allude to the neck-verse's worldly connotations
of pain and death. Sometimes their allusions are in the context of
their own horseplay in the tavern. Nought complains about New Guise's
rough dancing ("I putt case I breke my neke: how than?” 74 and 'Xall I
breke my neke to schew yow sports?" 78). More often their allusions
are in the context of their combat with Mankind. Nought curses Mankind
for his successful rebuff of the Vices' first attack on him ("Therfor
Crystys curse cum on yowr hedybus' 399). Mischief promises to cure
Nowadays's head wound (“I xall helpe be of bi peyn;/I xall smytt of bi
beds and sett yt on agayn' 434-35). Titivillus breaks Mankind's
resistance to temptation and sin finally by inducing a nightmare vision
of Mercy's hanging ("But I thynke he rydyth on be galouse, to lern for
to daunce,/Bycause of hys theft, bet ys hys gouernance' 598-99).

The threat of hanging is also behind Nought's self-interested
charity in sparing "Master Alyngton of Botysam/Ande Hamonde of
Soffeham” from criminal harm, "For drede of in menus tuas qweke' (514-
15, 516). New Guise specifically cites the neck verse twice (Lett we
con well owr neke-verse, bat we haue not a cheke' 520 and 'Myscheff ya
a convicte, for he coude hys neke-verse“ 619). He alludes to it, too,
in his own misfortune of having forgotten to ”con well" his own advice
(”I was twychyde by be neke; be game was begunne./A grace was, be
halter brast asonder: ecce signum!/The halff ys abowte my neke“ 615-

617). And he has to explain his neck wound to Mankind ("In feyth, Sent

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Audrys holy bende./I haue a lytyll dyshes, as yt plesse Gods to
sende,/Wyth a runnynge ryngeworme' 628-30). Mark Eccles identifies
Saint Audry's bend as the "silk bands for the neck [that] were hallowed
at the shrine of St. Audry in Ely Cathedral” (224). Like all that the
Vices take unto themselves, New Guise reduces the spiritual connotation
of this revered object to one of fleshly corruption, "a runnynge
ryngeworme." In the end, it is Mankind whom the Vices seek to bring to
temptation, sin, pain, and death. Mischief tempts Mankind to suicide
with rope and gallows tree ('Anon, anon, anon! I haue yt [i. e., a
rope] here redy,/Wyth a tre also bet I haue gett' 801-2), while the
hapless New Guise fumbles his demonstration of their use and for the
second time in the play nearly gets himself hanged ('Lo, Mankynde! do
as I do; bis ys bi new gyse./Gyff be roppe just to by neke; bis ys myn
avyse' and "Qweke, qweke, qweke! Alass, my thrott! I beschrew yow,
mery!” 804-5 and 808). Mercy's rescue of Mankind in this scene is the
play's climax.

Mercy's intrusion upon the life of the tavern initiates a conflict
between the duties of religious obedience and the varieties of secular
transgression. He preaches to bring all to the will of God, but is
heard only by Mankind. (In our production Mankind began the play as a
patron of the tavern and was thus present throughout Mercy's opening
sermon.) Mischief quickly opposes and mocks him, to preserve dominance
of the tavern. The Vices join Mischief's counter-attack. Mercy
rebuffs them all, eventually expelling the Vices from the tavern. His
exhortation to Mankind is a pointed reminder to ”Do truly yowr labure

and kepe yowr helyday' (300). Mankind is overwhelmed by the fervency

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of Mercy's words and vows to obey them. But Mischief, the Vices, and
ultimately Titivillus have different plans. Their assault on Mankind
includes the erosion of his faith in the church and its priests.
Titivillus breaks Mankind's spirit by convincing him first to abandon
his labor, then to forswear evensong and his prayers, and finally to
believe that Mercy was hanged for stealing a horse. The effect of
Titivillus's nightmare vision on Mankind is the turning point of the
play. Once Mankind's spirits have been broken and his faith in Mercy
shattered, he can no longer act with self-confidence or moral purpose.
The salvation of Mankind depends on Mercy's ability to restore faith
and effect a reconciliation between them. The means for that
restitution is the sacrament of penance--the play's denouement.

Mercy's indirect conflict with Titivillus puts Mankind into the
center of a struggle that pits divine purpose against demonic
perversion. Mischief's and the Vices' unaided assaults on Mercy are
doomed to fail. They cannot compete against the moral strength and
spiritual authority of one from holy orders. But Titivillus can, or
thinks that he can. His assault on Mankind's faith is an indirect
attack upon Mercy and ultimately upon God ("He [i. e., Mankind] xall
wene grace were wane" 540). If he can destroy both the faith of the
simple Christian and the reputation of a priest, then he can wound God
doubly. In our production, Titivillus carried both silver trident and
red net, the symbol of demonic authority and the means to deception.
Mercy began the play carrying no stage property. At his reappearance
in the play to rescue Mankind, Mercy fought off Mischief and the Vices

with a large staff topped by a gold cross and then donned the purple

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stole of his office to perform the sacrament. He reappeared, then,
armed with the symbol of divine power and the priestly authority to
effect Mankind's salvation--the counters to Titivillus's props. If
Mischief and the Vices could raise the stakes in the conflict by
invoking powers greater than their own, then Mercy could also draw upon
spiritual reinforcements that would give him the necessary strength
beyond human means to defeat the devil.

Mercy's efforts to bolster the resolve of Mankind and then to
rescue him from sin and despair involve them both in psychological and
moral conflicts which are strikingly modern in the complexity of their
internal and interpersonal dynamics. Mankind's spirits seesaw
throughout the play, as his confidence in Mercy and his resistance to
the temptations of the Vices and the deceptions of Titivillus rise and
fall. They take a final turn for the worse when Titivillus deceives
him into believing that Mercy has been hanged. And they hit bottom
when Mercy's rescue forces him to confront his sins (”Dyspose yowrsylff
mekly to asks mercy, and I wyll assent" 816). Titivillus's deceptions
put Mankind's resolve into desperate peril, for they make him question
the justice of a God who would abandon the soul of one who has
seemingly done everything right. For Mankind, the hardships of life
are easily understood and acceptable, when they are the result of
disobedience. But Mercy promised that, so long as Mankind was faithful
and industrious, he would be 'partener" in God's “blysse perpetuall”
(284). In his own eyes, Mankind had been faithful and industrious, and
yet his corn was stolen, his fields grew hard and unmanageable, and he

was apparently abandoned by a deceitful Mercy and a church that did not

93
deliver what it promised. At his rescue, he is thrown into deep moral
confusion and despair and says that he is "not worthy to hawe mercy be
no possibilite' (822). All of the external assaults upon his soul have
taken internal root and will not be dislodged by the sound of Mercy's
preaching alone. To save this “synfull synner' Mercy must reach deep
into his own heart and infuse church doctrine with human compassion
(825).

The infusion of doctrine with compassion demands that Mercy, too,
grow in the exercise of his holy office. The soul of Mankind is not
the only variable factor in this play. Mercy's character also
undergoes change, and so it must to effect Mankind's salvation. We
played Mercy as a Dominican friar--a young and rather raw recruit to
the battle for human salvation. He begins the play full of all of the
right doctrine, but with little life experience. All of what he says
is true, but it is untested by human experience and worldly realities.
At his first encounter with the Vices, Mercy says, revealingly, "Say me
yowr namys, I know yow not” (114). For a time Mercy's doctrine alone
is sufficient. Mankind is at first successful in fending off the moral
assaults of the Vices. By the time of Mercy's second appearance in the
play, though, Mankind has strayed from doctrine and is in peril. Mercy
is at a loss for what to do next, and he fears for the safety of his
'predylecte son" (771). Mercy must learn to add feeling to thought.

He says:

My mynde ys dyspersyde, my body trymmelyth as be aspen leefe.
The terys xuld trekyll down by my chekys, were not yowr
reuerrence.

Yt were to me solace, be cruel vysytacyon of deth.

Wythout rude behauer I kan not expresse bis
inconvenyens.
Wepynge, sythynge, and sobbynge were my suffycyens;

94
All naturall nutriment to me as caren ys odybull.

My inwards afflixcyon 3eldyth me tedyouse wnto yowr
presens.

I kan not bere yt ewynly bat Mankynde ya so

flexybull. (734-741)
This is not the same Mercy who began the play, who warned 'Nober
comfort nor cownsell ber xall non be hade” for those whose "delyte ys
in derysyon/Of her owyn Crysts to hys dyshonur' (179, 168-69). By the
time he sees Mankind in peril Mercy begins to understand that not all
who are in spiritual jeopardy “delyte” in their state or that doctrine
alone, however eloquently expressed, is sufficient to win their
salvation. For the same reason that God himself became man, Mercy must
temper absolute standards of judgment with human sympathy. And this he
does. Mercy's language in the last scene of the play changes the state
of his relationship with Mankind forever. As he reiterates the trials
that have vexed Mankind, Mercy speaks personally and solicitously,
rehearsing all to Mankind in intimate and familiar terms not found in
his earlier preaching. Everything that he says supplies comfort and
”cownsell" to Mankind. He offers a forgiveness that understands what
it forgives. He has, in the end, become Christ-like in character and
equal to the call of his holy order.

Mgnking's playwright constructed a powerful dsnouement to the
complex and convergent conflicts of this drama, for their resolution
comes in the last decision of the last scene of the play, and is put
into the hands of Mankind alone. In this last scene of the play, Mercy
repeatedly implorss Mankind to 'Aryse and asks mercy . . . and be

associat to me” (827). The decision whether to choose mercy--to

confess, repent, and be shriven--is left to Mankind. We have a real

9S
cliffhanger here, one which delays Mankind's confession until his last
speech (”Syth I schall departs, blyss me, fader, her ben I go./God send
we all plente of hys gret mercy!“ 899-900), a scant fourteen lines
before our conclusion of the play. Though Mercy rather confidently
boasts that "The justyce of God wyll as I wyll” (833), he must
ultimately accept that Mankind's salvation depends on Mankind coming to
him ('3e may both saue and spyll 3owr sowle bat ys so precyus./Libere
wells, libers nolle [freely to will, freely not to will] God may not
deny iwys' 893-94). Mankind's confession of sin and Mercy's
sacramental absolution resolve all of the conflicts in the play.
Mankind is forgiven and his faith is restored, Mischief and the Vices
are overcome, Titivillus is defeated, and Mankind, Mercy, God, and the
church are reconciled.

My interpretation, then, took Mnnking to be a play about the
salvation of the human soul, despite its temptations to sin and
despair; it subordinated the temptations of Mischief, the Vices, and
Titivillus to the developing characters of and the relationship between
Mankind and Mercy. I kept all of the strengths of the alternate
interpretation, but made my statement of super-objective comprehensive.
Its one-sentence distillation of the thematic conflicts in Mnnking was
this:

In his struggle to secure his personal salvation, Mankind
suffers the vengeance of New Guise, Nowadays, Nought, and
Titivillus, who lead him by worldly temptation, demonic
deception, and personal humiliation to Mischief and suicidal
despair, until Mercy's compassion brings him to admit

priestly intercession and spiritual rescue through the
sacrament of penance.

96
This one sentence became the interpretive touchstone which proved the
relevance and importance of any subordinate line of action developed
for our performance. It also helped to keep clear the relation of any
one thematic element to any other. As I worked out a through-line of
action for Mankind this statement both began and ended my work. It was
the source of each unit's objective and the culmination of all of the
units' objectives taken in sequence.

The sequence of stage actions that constitute the performance
through-line of action segments the play into interpretive units that
mark significant develOpmental stages in the conflict relationships
among characters. These "motivational units,“ to adopt Stanislavski's
term, have their own playable "objectives," which are subordinate to
the super-objective. The through-line of action may also plot the
course of dramatic conflict by identifying the more traditional
structural demarcations of exposition, attack, rising action, turning
point, climax, falling action, and denouement. I should note that, as
I have adapted Stanislavski's system to my own directing, I have in
fact devised two through-lines of action for each play. One sort is
that illustrated here, which plots the progress of dramatic conflict in
terms of plot action. It is the first step in stating what the play
Le, rather than what it is ebene. The other sort is a comprehensive
statement of dramatic action expressed in terms of the characters'
motivational ”objectives” and obstacle "thresholds." No conflict in
drama happens outside the opposing wills of its characters. For the
actors' purposes, Shakespeare's Cassius was right, ”The fault, dear

Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves . . .' (JnIIue Caesa; I.

97
ii. 141-42). This second through-line of action finds its proper place
in the next chapter on characterization. Not all of the English
medieval religious drama may admit Stanislavski's "motivational unit"
or the more traditional structural analysis. All those that I have
directed, though, have supported both--an indication that some of these
playwrights may have written from received knowledge of dramatic
construction. If they did not write from received knowledge, the
better of these playwrights developed extraordinarily sure instincts
for what made good plays.

My through-line of action for Manking segmented the play into
eight motivational units. For each unit I devised a title, noted where
the conflict in that unit would fit into a traditional structural
analysis, stated the unit's performance objective (its dominant
conflict), and noted subordinate "beat” objectives.3 Since Menking's
super-objective put dominant stress on Mankind's salvation, I tried to
express each unit and beat objective in terms of Mankind's progress.

In all instances, the unit and beat objectives were expressed in terms
of active verbs that could sustain physical expression on the stage.

My through-line of action for MankInd follows. (Line numbers are those
in Eccles's edition, except for Beats 1 and 2 of Unit I, which follow
line numbering of the performance script.)

UNIT I: Confrontations
Exposition and Attack, 1-161

ObjectIve: Mercy awakens Mankind's conscience.
MM:
1. Mercy attacks the tavern revelry. (1-73)

2. Mischief and the Vices retaliate. (74-146)
3. Mercy prevails. (147-61) [ATTACK]

98

UNIT II: Good Counsel
Rising Action, 162-322

Objective: Mankind forsakss the life of the tavern.

Bea; ijectIvee:

1. Mercy counsels Mankind to give up vice. (163-
244)

2. The Vices challenge Mercy's counsel. (245-76)

3. Mankind chooses to follow Mercy. (277-322)

UNIT III: Apparent Victory
Rising Action, 323-412

ijective: Mankind defeats the Vices.

Beat ijectIvee:

1. The Vices attack Mankind. (323-75)
2. Mankind prevails in combat. (376-412)

UNIT IV: Plots and Plotters
Rising Action, 413-540

Objective: Mischief and Titivillus aid the Vices.

Bee; ijectivee:

1. Mischief invokes Titivillus. (413-74)
2. Titivillus takes charge. (475-540)

UNIT V: Frustration and Deceit
Rising Action and Turning Point, 541-611

ijeeEIye: Mankind succumbs to hardship and deception.
W:
1. Titivillus frustrates Mankind's labor and
resolve. (541-88)
2. Titivillus destroys Mankind's faith in Mercy.
(589-611) [TURNING POINT]

UNIT VI: Ridicule and Corruption
Rising Action, 612-733

9212221293 Mankind returns to Mischief and the Vices.

8233.921225ixeaz

1. Mankind appeals to the Vices' mercy. (612-
60)

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2. Mischief and the Vices dominate Mankind.
(661-733)

UNIT VII: The Battle for Mankind
Rising Action and Climax, 734-810

ijective: Mercy rescues Mankind.
t 0 ct v :
1. Mercy retreats from Mischief and the Vices.
(734-82)
2. Mischief tempts Mankind to suicide. (783-805)
3. Mercy rescues Mankind. (806-10) [CLIMAX]

UNIT VIII: Salvation
Falling Action and Denouement, 811-914

991222122: Mercy saves Mankind.
Beet.92122§ixea:

1. Mankind resists Mercy's argument for
reconciliation. (811-70)

2. Mankind is moved by Mercy's compassion to
admit spiritual rescue through the sacrament
of penance. (871-902) [usuousxznrl‘

SUPER-OBJECTIVE:
In his struggle to secure his personal salvation, Mankind
suffers the vengeance of New Guise, Nowadays, Nought, and
Titivillus, who lead him by worldly temptation, demonic
deception, and personal humiliation to Mischief and suicidal
despair, until Mercy's compassion brings him to admit
priestly intercession and spiritual rescue through the
sacrament of penance.

This interpretation of MenMIng ensures that the actors’
performance invention and on-stage interplay will not stray from the
thematic dominance of Mankind's salvation. Mankind's struggle to
secure his personal salvation is ene ”fundamental line of action" in
the play. I believe that this interpretation meets all of
Stanislavski's criteria. It seeks to fulfill, not simplify, the

entirety of the playwright's complex dramatic vision. Its intellectual

100
credibility rests upon understanding (and accepting) the medieval
Christian’s belief in the importance of confession, repentance, and
forgiveness of sin to spiritual humility and personal salvation--the
. very focus of Shrovetide and the one dramatic theme that accounts for
eII of the action of the play. It engages the subtext of emotional
relationships among the characters. Mischief, the Vices, and
Titivillus act out all of the seven deadly sins, not solely the
superficial delights in the transgressions of the flesh. Mercy and
Mankind reconcile because compassion overtakes doctrine. And this
super-objective can excite the actors' wills to perform. From first
cue to last exit, the actors know exactly what each of their characters
sets out to do and how each of their stage actions contributes to a
developing and integrated whole. In short, this super-objective and
through-line of action establish interpretive direction, actor

confidence, and performance coherence.

* t t
The §eeeng_§neene£ge;_£egeen§ also presented two possibilities for
interpretation. These possibilities, it turned out, were similar to

those I had to choose between when I devised the super-objective and

through-line of action for Menking. One interpretation for the §eeeng
eneeneege;_£egeene could stress Mak's and Gyll's roles as anti-types of

Joseph and Mary; its conceptual integrity would thus emphasize the
Master's depiction of a sinful world in need of God's incarnate
ministration. Such an approach is analogous to the rather transparent
emphasis on the temptations of the flesh that first presented itself as

an interpretive possibility for MenkIng. There is much in the fieeeng

101
eneenegge;_2egeene and its scholarship to support this interpretation.
The Master's characterizations of Mak and Gyll do stand out in high
relief. It seems that the demonic perversity of supernatural agents,
the wickedness of malevolent villains, or simply the inept thefts and
deceptions of these two bumbling crooks always attract more interest
and attention than the artless piety of more virtuous characters. But
these two characters and their actions are ultimately insufficient to
the play's dramatic purposes.

The thematic and performance character of this play may get unfair
or distorted representations by oversstimating the importance of Mak
and Gyll, or by underestimating the personal goodwill and integrity of
the shepherds.5 Maynard Mack, Jr., argues that Mak, not the shepherds,
is the ”energizer" of this play's drama (80). In his description of
the shepherds and their lives (apart from Mak's intrusion upon them) as
being ”static" (79 and 81), "passive” (79), and ”largely choric and
undramatic" (80), he misunderstands the motivation for their gathering
together away and apparently safe from the corruptions of the world
outside their fellowship. He denies them a primary motivation and a
dramatic objective of their own. But the actors who play these
shepherds need some compelling reason for their characters to be on
stage, whether Mak is having an influence on their lives or not. V. A.
Kolve thinks that the opening complaints of the shepherds in all of the
Nativity plays are there, "simply in order that contention and discord
may be established as a dramatic fact, a mood, so that dramatic
progress from it can be made" (158). Rosemary Woolf argues that,

"since their [i. e., the shepherds'] night wanderings serve no

102
practical purpose, it gives them a vagabondish air and leaves them with
time for senseless quarrels and feastings' (192). Lois Roney also
underestimates the personal merits of these shepherds by characterizing
them as suspicious men who share no bonds of friendship or trust. She
writes: "When the three shepherds finally meet, there is genuinely bad
feeling between them--the first two grudge the third his food and drink
and vilify his labor; he promises to give them only as good as he gets.
. . . The human evil here is real. These people lack goodness in
their wills" (712).

Whatever the service of these scholarly observations is to other
purposes, they are virtually useless to directors. Some of them are
detrimental to the work of directors. Directors cannot direct actors
to be "static," "passive,“ or "undrematic." Actors need to act. And
they need to act toward some specific purpose that integrates their
interplay into an interpretive vision that accounts for eye;y_ee§ien in
the play. If the medieval cycle and morality plays are well structured
at all, then they are dramatic throughout, not just in part. The
dramatic construction of the §eeeng_§nenne;ge;_2egeen§ is very good,
indeed. It establishes a dramatic tension between truth and falsehood
in Coll's opening complaint and sustains that tension through to its
poignant conclusion. Everything that the shepherds say about
themselves and their circumstances in their opening complaints suggests
that they come to the fields and each other's company to find sanctuary
from a deceitful, unjust, difficult, and terrifying world. Their
opening banter is not the setting of some idle "mood" serving "no

practical purpose” or the expression of long simmering hostilities.

103

Any who have shared the tavern camaraderie of day laborers after long
work hours can recognize the same tough respect and sympathetic bonding
underlying the shepherds' surface speech of spirited ridicule and
personal abuse.6 These shepherds seek each other's company on a cold
and wet night to preserve and reinforce values they esteem, because
there is value and esteem within and among them. They express those
values and that esteem in a rough-hewn manner that befits their
characters and quite likely the characters of sympathetic laborers in
their audiences. If there were not this common bond of values and
esteem, the shepherds would not share food, song, and hardship
together, nor would they be fit for the Angel's message, nor would they
be so genuinely moving in their artless adoration of the Christ-child.
They recognize the universal truth because they are individually true.

In contrast to the shepherds' compelling search for enduring truth
and joy, Mak's and Gyll's infatuation with demonic spells, livestock
thefts, and haphazard deceptions seems a rather sandy base on which to
build an interpretation of this play. We must keep in mind that
transgressions such as theirs would be taken in the Middle Ages to be
the perversions of some a priori virtues. According to Augustinian
theology, no sin had independent existence; each was the dependent,
willful corruption of some corresponding, preexistsnt, and independent

virtue.7

Mak and Gyll, as figures of vice, are dependent on the
shepherds for any justification for their being in the play at all.

Mak feigns social superiority, casts demonic spells, commits theft, and
perpetrates elaborate deceptions--all willful transgressions against

the innocence and goodwill of the shepherds. Gyll is Mak's willing

104
co-conspirator. Between them they act out (explicitly or implicitly)
homespun varieties of all of the seven deadly sins. Whatever they do,
though, has meaning only in the context of their larger relationship to
the shepherds. Simply put, the eeeeng_§nepnegge;_gegeene could be
played entirely without Mak and Gyll, though its richness would be
considerably diminished. The contrary is impossible. To think of Mak
as the play's "energizer,“ as Mack does, seems to misrepresent not only
the source of dramatic action but also the medieval notion of the
relationship of sin to virtue. The character of Mak cannot stand up to
scrutiny on either count. Even Gyll dominates him. I chose to believe
that the Master had better intentions for his play than to entrust its
meaning to the limited capacities of so weak a pair, however
entertaining their slapstick might be.

For my interpretation of the eeeong §henhe£de' gegeene, I took the
Master's use of "true” and ”glee“ to be the informing thematic
principles underlying all that constituted our performance of this
play. Once the medieval meanings of these words are established their
reverberations can be found throughout the play. They establish
values, character objectives, and performance tones that affect every
moment of the actors' play on stage. An understanding of what the
Master meant by these two, not-so-simple words admits directors and
actors into a drama of extraordinary thematic unity and transcendent
joy.

The shepherds' quest for truth sustains their action on stage

throughout, from Coll's opening complaint to Daw's curtain line and

105

their last, exultant exit. Truth for these medieval shepherds meant a
great deal more than our modern notion of an understanding that
corresponds to evidential fact. For them, truth went through and
beyond fact to the surrounding realms of reliability, trustworthiness,
steadfastness, and good faith. It was the wellspring of character and
the basis for both fealty and friendship. Coll's lines, 'ffor I trowe,
perde,/trew men if thay be,/we gett more compane/Or it be noyne” (51-
54) summarize his opening complaint and project his hopes. His
complaint about I‘gentlery men” (18) is an extended argument against
trusting a whole class of newly created men who have neither merited
nor earned his respect or willing service. They are all show and
decoration, and without substance. He brings himself to the fields on
a bleak night to share the company of 'trew men”--Daw and Gib--men he
can trust, men who have proved themselves reliable, men who have proved
their friendship. The whole of the play for Coll (and for Gib and Daw)
amounts to testing the truth of those around them, principally Mak, to
find good faith and trustworthiness in a world of circumstantial
hardship, crumbling values, and cheap deceptions (cf. Coll's line to
Mak, "'can ye now mene you?" 220).

If Coll cannot serve new gentry men, who are the counterfeits of
truth, where else then may he go to find any who are true? Within
their human limitations, Gib and Daw, to be sure, provide some of what
Coll seeks. Mak and Gyll fail his test miserably. The fulfillment of
his search, of course, comes in the Angel's announcement of the birth
of Christ in Bethlehem. Coll's response to the angelic news is that

"It is true as steyll/That prophetys haue spokyn' (699-700). In our

106
production, we played Coll as a veteran of Agincourt. On this line he
caught hold of his sword and became the living image of Paul's militant
Christian (cf. Ephesians 6:13-17). Coll's line echoes an earlier line
of Mak's (”And I am trew as steyll all men waytt' 226) and supplants
the temporal lie with the eternal truth. In the end, Coll and the
other shepherds find the true Son of God, a steadfast lord whom they
may trust, worship, and serve.

The shepherds' poignant adoration of the Christ-child brings the
drama full circle. Coll's address to the infant on Mary's knee sounds
again the triumph of truth over falsehood in terms that describe also
the shepherds' like triumph over Mak: “The fals gyler of teyn now goys
he begylde' (713). They find the child in circumstances remarkably
like their own--cold, homeless, and virtually alone in a perilous
world. His plight must remind them of their own at the beginning of
the play. They offer him simple testaments of faith, humble gifts, and
a warm blanket. Their humility in the presence of faith fulfilled
reveals the depths of their own faith. The shepherds find truth in
this play because they are qualified to seek it and are prepared to
recognize it once found. Mary's confirmation of their search moves
them to true joy expressed in song--to glee.

Glee in this play is the evidence of truth, the outward sign of an
inward grace. The shepherds mention it by name only once, in Daw's
prayer: "Lord, if thi wylles be,/we ar lewde all thre,/Thou grauntt vs
somkyns gle/To comforth thi wight' (706-709). They seek it, though,
through the whole of the play.8 Glee for these shepherds means much

more than its rather restricted and diminutive modern senses of

107
frivolous gaiety or lighthearted song, as in glee club. Though its
oldest sense in English (Old English. 91in, glgg) meant "entertainment"
(often in music and song), the modern reader must be careful not to
assign to that word current meanings, too, and thereby stray farther
still from the solemn joy of those who heard the heroic songs of
ancient gleemen. Though Daw mentions glee late in the play, the
shepherds act out its musical meaning early on in their first song (of.
183-89). The lyrics are not recorded in the text, but the shepherds'
description of it as a three-part song for their unaccompanied voices
fits the definition of the English-invented "glee” exactly. These
shepherds do not sing to while away their idle hours; they have serious
purpose to their music. Whenever they sing, their solemn joy expressed
in song testifies to some important truth--to the truth of their
friendship, to the truth of mutual trust, to the truth of angelic
revelation, to the truth of Christ's birth. There is no affirmation of
truth in this play unaccompanied by glee.

What is crucial for the actors' performance is that these
understandings of the medieval meanings for truth and glee can be
played. The shepherds can search for truth in their every word and act
on stage. Whether in their opening complaints they are speaking to
everyone (addressing the audience) or only to themselves (strict
soliloquy), they seek to sort out truth from falsehood. Coll seems to
speak to himself: “It dos me good, as I walk thus by myn oone,/Of this
warld for to talk" (46-47). Gib seems to speak to the audience: "Bot
yong men of wowing for god that you boght,/Be well war of wedyng and

thynk in youre thoght" (91-92). Daw speaks to the elements of 'floodys

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seyn/Wyndys and ranys so rude and stormes so keyn' (127-28). Bach in
his own way seeks truth. Coll seeks the truth of the social contract
reflected in the character of men. Gib seeks the truth plighted in
marriage. Daw seeks the truth of God's relationship to his created
world. They gather wood, build a fire, share food and drink and song,
and make for themselves a true fellowship. Eventually, all of their
searches become focused on Mak and Gyll, who violate social and
personal trust, strain the bonds of marriage, and invoke demonic spells
to twist the forces of nature. The actors who play the shepherds can
act out their search, whether it takes the form of their verbal
questioning of Mak and Gyll or their ransacking of Mak's and Gyll’s
cottage to find their stolen sheep. And they can play their search for
truth fulfilled. Their adoration of the Christ-child confirms their
objectives won. At Bethlehem they find a true lord, the union of God
and man, and the reconciliation of their mutable and sinful world to
the divine. They testify to their faith, give gifts, and depart
singing. At every moment, their search for truth gives them something
specific tg_gg on stage. Once the actors understand all that truth and
glee meant for the Wakefield Master, then the character and
significance of their playing can work in more ways and on richer
levels than our modern definitions of these words would suggest or
could sustain.

My statement of super-objective for the §egond §hepherds' zaggant,
then, took as its basis the shepherds' resolute search for truth and
joy, despite their hardships: Mak and Gyll and the theft of the sheep

remained important (and comic), but their characters and actions took

109
subordinate place to the overriding story of the shepherds' longing and
fulfillment. Its one-sentence distillation of the play's theme is
this:
In their search for truth and joy amid the circumstantial
hardships, crumbling values, and cheap deceptions of a sinful
world, three humble shepherds endure theft, deception, and
disappointment at the hands of Mak and Gyll, resist the
temptation to exact deadly retribution, reaffirm their faith

in God's providence, and find his truth revealed to them in
the birth of Christ.

My through-line of action for the §ggggg_§n§ph§;g§;_zggg§nt
segmented the play into nine motivational units. Though the first unit
is exposition (strictly speaking), the action of the shepherds to make
a sanctuary for themselves initiates a search for truth and joy which
will find its specific test in Mak's and Gyll's theft and deception.
Unit II includes Mak's entrance and theft of the sheep, the "attack"
action which gives the shepherds' overall search a local and timely
focus. I took the turning point of the play to be the shepherds'
recovery of their stolen sheep, the specific resolution to their
limited search for truth with Mak and Gyll. The shepherds have endured
a worldly test of their good will, but their susceptibility to Mak's
theft and deceptions has left them disheartened and tempted to despair.
The climax of the play comes in the Angel's revelation to the shepherds
of the birth of Christ. At that point the shepherds' specific trials
and personal discoveries are raised to universal and timeless levels.
The denouement of the play's actions comes in Mary's confirmation of
the fulfillment of the shepherds' deepest longing. In all instances,
my statements of unit and beat objectives tried to give the

interrelated themes of truth and falsehood, concealment and discovery,

110

despair and joy controlling expression. My through-line of action for

the fiecegd §hepherde' zegeagg follows.

UNIT I: Sanctuary
Exposition, 1-189

Objective: The shepherds make a sanctuary for themselves.

Beat Objectivee:

1. The shepherds escape worldly tribulations.
(1-144)
2. The shepherds make a sanctuary for themselves.
(145-89)
UNIT II: Betrayal
Attack, 190-295
Ob t v :

Mak steals the shepherds' sheep.

fleet Objectivee:

1. Mak invades the shepherds' sanctuary. (190-

268)

2. Mak steals the shepherds' sheep. (269-95)
[ATTACK]

UNIT III: Co-conspirators
Rising Action, 296-345

QQjeQELEe: Gyll invents a ruse to hide the stolen sheep.

MM:

1. Mak asserts his prowess. (296-331)
2. Gyll reclaims her dominance. (332-45)

UNIT IV: Misdirections
Rising Action, 346-403

c iv : Mak evades the truth.

gee; Objectivee:

1. Daw warns the shepherds of Mak's theft. (346-
76)

2. Mak distracts the shepherds' attention. (377-
403)

UNIT V: Concealment
Rising Action, 404-48

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gyleegiye: Gyll hides the stolen sheep.

Bea; ijeceivee:

1. Mak surrenders to Gyll's dominance. (404-21)
2. Gyll takes charge. (422-48)

UNIT VI: The Pursuit
Rising Action, 449-75

Objective: The shepherds resolve to find out the truth.

Bee; Objectivee:

l. The shepherds confirm the theft of their
sheep. (449-57)
2. The shepherds resolve to pursue Mak. (458-75)

UNIT VII: Deception and Discovery
Rising Action and Turning Point, 476-628

t v : The shepherds recover their stolen sheep.

We:

1. Mak and Gyll deceive the shepherds. (476-570)
2. The shepherds discover the truth. (571-628)
[TURNING POINT]

UNIT VIII: Revelation
Climax and Falling Action, 629-705

921eQEige: An Angel calls the shepherds to witness the
birth of Christ.

Mom:

1. The shepherds recover their strength and
spirits. (629-37)

2. An Angel calls the shepherds to witness the
birth of Christ. (638-46) [CLIMAX]

3. The shepherds test the truth of the Angel's
revelation. (646-705)

UNIT Ix: Fulfillment
Falling Action and Denouement, 706-54

Qe1eQELXe: Mary confirms the shepherds' search for truth
fulfilled.

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ea b c v :
1. The shepherds honor the Christ child. (706-
2. giry confirms the truth of the Angel's
revelation. (737-54) [DENOUEMENT]
SUPER-OBJECTIVE:

In their search for truth and joy amid the circumstantial
hardships, crumbling values, and cheap deceptions of a sinful
world, three humble shepherds endure theft, deception, and
disappointment at the hands of Mak and Gyll, resist the
temptation to exact deadly retribution, reaffirm their faith
in God's providence, and find his truth revealed to them in
the birth of Christ.

This super-objective and through-line of action interpretation for
the fieeeed Shephegde' Pageeg; satisfies all of Stanislavski's criteria.
Its affirmation of the shepherds' dominant importance to the play
embraces all of the Master's dramatic vision, from first line to last
exit. Its intellectual credibility rests upon the positive assertion
of the shepherds' search for truth and joy, a search that conforms not
only to the action of the play but also to its theological
underpinnings. The shepherds' search for truth and joy is en;
"fundamental line of action” in the play. This interpretation also
engages the play's emotional content. The shepherds make for
themselves a true fellowship of trust and benevolent intent, which
finds ultimate purpose and expression in their heartfelt adoration of
the Christ-child. And Mak and Gyll have about them all of the frantic
desperation which their ill-conceived and badly executed transgressions
merit. Finally, it excites the actors' wills to perform. In contrast
to more restrictive visions of this play, each actor in this

interpretation has specific and purposeful business to act out every

moment of his or her appearance on stage. Moreover, the actors see how

113
their individual character actions integrate with the actions of all of
the other characters.

The dramatic constructions of the §ecene fihepgegds' zegeang and
Megkigg, as evidenced by their super-objectives and through-lines of
action, are remarkably parallel. Both place natural men in the hostile
environment of a fallen world. Both begin with complaints about the
variable fortunes and vulnerable characters of men in the face of
external tribulation and internal distress. Both subject these men to
the corrosive influences of hardship, vice, worldly deceit, and demonic
spells. In both plays, the characters' good will and simple piety are
tested and tempered by the world's intrusion into the apparent
sanctuary of their private lands and personal labor. And both plays
redeem their protagonists through the application of supernatural
grace--the divine redemption of the human soul, despite the waywardness
of its will. flanking and the §egond Shepherds' gegeeg; dramatize the
testing and tempering of their principal characters in scenes of
raucous comedy that reinforce a universal perspective on the folly of
sin and vice. Their characterizations are drawn with depths of vision
that are startlingly rich in psychological and spiritual complexity.
They illuminate and reinforce the plays' dramatic themes and
theological meanings in ways that testify to the surety of their
playwrights' commands of dramaturgy and stagecraft. Our audiences'
favorable responses to our productions suggest that both of these plays
still sustain meaningful, entertaining, and affecting performances.
nenking and the §econd ghephegge' zegeang are so similar in dramatic
vision and are so skillful in their executions that what had once been

wide disparity in their critical reputations now seems unwarranted.

114

NOTES

The relation between a play's super-objective and its fundamental
line of action (more commonly known as the "through-line of
action") is symbiotic. The super-objective is a brief but
comprehensive statement of dominant theme; it is the goal of
performance and the interpretive authority to which any single
aspect of performance must appeal. The through-line of action is
the plot of subordinate conflict themes that integrates the
individual and sequential actions of the play and drives them
toward the overriding super-objective. Director Elia Kazan's
"Notebook for A Streegca; Nemeg Desire” illustrates the relation
between the super-objective and its through-line of action. In
his interpretation of the play and in his statement of its super-
objective, Kazan focused the whole drama on the story of Blanche.
He writes that:

This play is a poetic tragedy. We are shown the final

dissolution of a person of worth, who once had great

potential, and who, even as she goes down, has worth

exceeding that of the "healthy,” coarse-grained figures who

kill her. (365)
For his production, this is what the drama is QEQEE- Kazan's
translation of that idea into performance, though, moves to
express its truth through the play's character action. His
statement of super-objective translates the abstract idea of the
play into a concrete description of dramatic action:

Teeme--this is [Blanche's] message from the dark interior.

This little twisted, pathetic, confused bit of light and
culture puts out a cry. It is snuffed out by the crude

115

forces of violence, insensibility and vulgarity which exist
in our South--and this cry is the play. (364)

Kazan's through-line of action, then, tries “to keep each scene in
terms of Blanche" (365). In every instance, the subordinate scene
objectives also translate idea into action. Kazan writes:

1. Blanche comes to the last stop at the end of the line.

2. Blanche tries to make a place for herself.

3. Blanche breaks them [Stanley and Stella] apart, but when
they come together, Blanche is more alone than ever!

4. Blanche, more desperate because more excluded, tries the
direct attack and makes the enemy who will finish her.

5. Blanche finds that she is being tracked down for the
kill. She must work fast.

6. Blanche suddenly finds, suddenly makes for herself, the
only possible, perfect man for her.

7. Blanche comes out of the happy bathroom to find that her
own doom has caught up with her.

8. Blanche fights her last fight. Breaks down. Even
Stella deserts her.

9. Blanche's last desperate effort to save herself by
telling the whole truth. The e;33h_eeeme_heg.

10. Blanche escapes out of this world. She is brought back
by Stanley and destroyed.

ll. Blanche is disposed of. (365-66)

One remarkable moment, among many possible examples, in Marlon
Brando's playing out of Stanley's through-line of action will
illustrate the effectiveness of these suggestive images. This
moment has been preserved in Razan's film version of the play.
Scene 2 opens with Stanley and Stella arguing over the contents of
Blanche's newly-arrived trunk of clothes and costume jewelry.
Stanley suspects that Stella's family estate of Belle Reve (his
property, too, under Louisiana's Napoleonic code) was sold by
Blanche to finance her taste for extravagant living. Stella
protests that Blanche's trunk packs only old, cheap clothes,
feather boas, and rhinestones. As they wrestle out Blanche's

clothes, a few of the feathers from one boa shake loose and float

116
aimlessly around Stanley's head. While he continues the argument,
Stanley plucks one feather then another out of the air and crushes
them in his "coarse-grained“ hands. The image is perfect.
Blanche is an equally vulnerable “feather in the wind," who will
in time be plucked down and crushed by those same hands and
Stanley's ”crude force." Even when she is not on stage, Blanche
dominates the action. And Brando's work as an actor spontaneously
invents subordinate stage images which connect Stanley to Blanche
and the scene objective to the super-objective.
Meekie_'s playwright was clever enough to know that his
characterizations of Mischief and the Vices would be enormously
entertaining. And he was so confident of the audience-pleasing
appearance of Titivillus that his text (and our script)
interrupted the play just before the devil's entrance for the
actors to take up a collection. Nowadays says, "Gyf ws rede
reyallys yf 3e wyll se hys abhomynabull presens' (465). No one in
the audience would have likely given up "red royals" to hear yet
another sermon from Mercy. "Abominable presences" in the theater
may have always claimed a greater market share than more saintly
characters. The amount of money that we gathered at this moment
during our performances was a rather strong indication that the
marketing instincts of Menkieg's playwright were very sure,
indeed. The irony of all of this, I suspect, was not lost on
Menzieg's playwright, and may have been appreciated by some in his
audience. The likely performance sites for many of the medieval

performances of Menking were the courtyards of inns and taverns--

117
the very domain of Mischief and the Vices. And the occasion to
take time away from their more profitable labors to attend a play
as scurrilous as this one may have made some in the medieval
audience a little uneasy at hearing Mercy say, "Remember . . . pe
tyme of contynuance./. . . Spende yt well; serue Gods wyth hertys
affyance./Dystempure not yowr brayn wyth goode ale nor wyth wyn'
(233, 235-36) and ”Do truly yowr labure and be neuer ydyll' (308).
353313; marks an important time in the development of English
dramatic entertainments, for it comes at a moment when religious
dramas became more truly professional and thereby farther removed
from direct associations with church sites or church-sanctioned
civic observances of religious festivals. The dramatic tensions
in this play not only occur among its characters, but also between
it and the changing social norms of its fifteenth-century
audience.
”Beat" in theatrical parlance has many meanings. It can refer to
the internal pace and rhythm of the actors' playing of a scene
(analogous to the time signature in music, as in "Pick up the
beat”) and to the timing of cues ("Lights fade to out in 10 beats”
or "Wait 3 beats after Mercy's exit, then enter"). Beat has also
been employed to mark the smaller incidents of conflict in plays.
In this usage, beat notes the brush fires of emotional exchange,
not so much the passage of time or its pace. This is the usage I
employ here. Though the term now has wide performance currency in

this regard, I believe that it is an accretion by subsequent

118
performance experiences and experiments to the "motivational unit”
interpretive divisions devised by Stanislavski.
Our performance script concluded the play with Mercy's benediction
to the audience. The last three stanzas in the text were cut.
Disproportionate emphasis on malcontent characters occurs in the
scholarship and performance interpretation of many plays,
medieval, Renaissance, or modern. Mrs. Noah always seems to
dominate discussions of the cycle flood plays. Rosemary Woolf's
comments on the flood plays, for example, devote nine pages to
Mrs. Noah and only two to her husband (132-45). Laurence
Olivier's interpretation of Othello effectively counter-balanced
many previous productions that gave disproportionate emphasis to
Iago. And directors must be careful not to let the character of
Stanley Kowalski dominate their interpretations of A §treetee£
Mire-
Cf. John Gardner's helpful discussion of the underlying affection
in the apparent conflicts among the shepherds. He writes that
'Daw asserts that since masters will not treat servants fairly, he
will repay his masters with bad work; and when Gyb asks where the
sheep are pastured, Daw says he left them, early this morning, to
wander 'in the corne.’ Order--essentially the feudal order, a
reflection of the order of the cosmos--seems undone. But in fact
all three shepherds are, in their rough, country fashion, joking"
(88). And, ”in all Gyb's jibing there is a certain gentleness,
the familiar wish of the genial prankster that there be no hard

feelings" (94).

119
Frederick Copleston summarizes Augustine’s view of the dependent
nature of sin this way: "But what is evil in itself, moral evil?
Is it something positive? It cannot, first of all, be something
positive in the sense of something created by God: the cause of
moral evil is not the Creator but the created will. The cause of
good things is the divine goodness, whereas the cause of evil is
the created will which turns away from the immutable Good: evil is
a turning-away of the created will from the immutable and infinite
Good. But evil cannot strictly be termed a 'thing,’ since this
word implies a positive reality, and if moral evil were a positive
reality, it would have to be ascribed to the Creator, unless one
were willing to attribute to the creature the power of positive
creation out of nothing. Evil, then, is 'that which falls away
from essence and tends to non-being . . . . It tends to make that
which is cease to be" (Hi££2£¥_2£_£h112122h¥ 84).
"Glee” and its synonyms can be found throughout the play, whenever
the shepherds give evidence of their good faith. Coll says, "yit
I wold, or we yode oone gaf vs a song" (183). Gib replies, ”So I
thoght as I stode to myrth vs emong" (184). The shepherds
undertake an extended analysis of the Angel's song (656-64) and
even try to imitate it. Daw urges Coll and Gib to hasten to
Bethlehem with the promise of glee, "Be mery and not sad of myrth
is ours sang,/Euer lastyng glad to mede may we fang,/Withoutt
noyse" (667-69). Anticipating the fulfillment of prophecy, Daw
assures Coll and Gib that, 'ffull glad may we be" (683), and then,

to assure himself, prays for 'somkyns gle/To comforth" the child

120

(708-09). The play ends with the shepherds making an explicit

connection between truth and glee:

iiius pastor. ffor sothe all redy it semys to be told full
oft.
primus pastor. what grace we haue fun.
ijus pastor. Com furth, now ar we won.
iijus pastor. To syng ar we bun:
let take on loft. (749-54)

IV. Modern Actors, Medieval Plays:
Character 'Spines' and Through-Lines of Action for

Mankind and the §eeoeg §hepgegde' Pegeene

The actor must learn how to compose a score of lively
physical and psychological objectives; to shape his whole
score into one all-embracing supreme objective; to strive
toward its attainment. Taken all together the superobjective
(desire), through action (striving), and attainment (action)
add up to the creative process of living a part emotionally.
Thus the process of

co 0 o u rob ec v nd t c v
att i ent b mea of t e h e 0 ct o .
(Stanislavski, Qgeagigg e gole 80)

There are no small parts, there are only small actors.

(Stanislavski, My Life in Art 298)

The essence of live theater lies in its actors playing out the
truths and falsehoods, insights and errors, hopes and fears, joys and
sorrows, and successes and failures of believable characters--and there
alone. All of the external apparatus of the theater--the lights,
costumes, sets, make-up, and sound and special effects--exists only to
serve the actors in their work to build and communicate such
characters. Modern productions of the medieval cycle and morality
plays depend on credible characterizations just as much as any other
dramatic performances for their power to move audiences. The most
difficult problem for directors in bringing performance life to any of
these plays, then, is eliciting confident, understandable, and

believable characterizations from casts that are typically made up of

121

122

enthusiastic, but untrained student actors. The solution to this
problem has two parts. Directors must establish interpretive authority
and practical direction for each actor's work to build a character.
Actors need to sense that their individual characters are
understandable and important--that each role contributes to the whole
play, regardless of its size or the frequency of appearances on stage.
Directors must also establish communities of common purpose--
performance ensembles. Actors need the performance confidence that
comes from knowing that what they do individually fits together into a
comprehensive interpretive design that makes sense--that their work
will have meaning only in its collective expression. The approach to
these directorial tasks that I have found most useful is that developed
by Constantin Stanislavski and subsequent practitioners of his system
of actor training. Its expression of character interpretations through
an integrated and cumulative sequencing of motivated stage actions
provides an effective strategy for assisting even the most
inexperienced actors (and directors) in creating believable roles and
ensemble performances. Both Megkigg and the §eeeee_§nepnegge;_£egeen§
are full of characters who play out universal and enduring conflicts in
the specific and concrete terms of compelling character interaction.

Directors bear primary responsibility for coaxing understandable
and believable characterizations from the actors and for integrating
their individual work into commonly shared thematic interpretations and
ensemble performances. Melen Erich Chinoy summarizes the recognized
need for and the emergence of the modern director this way:

When the animators of modern theater--Antoine, Stanislavski,

Appia, Craig, Reinhardt, Meyerhold, Copeau--examined the {in
ge_eieele theaters, they saw only an appalling absence of

123
homogeneous values in the production itself and in its appeal
to the audience. They insisted that if theater was to
reprieve its unique, primitive, communal power, a director
would have to impose a point of view that would integrate
play, production, and spectators. By his interpretation a
director would weld a harmonious art and a cohesive audience
out of the disturbing diversity increasingly apparent in our
urban, industrial, mass society. By his multifarious
activities the director would restore the artistic and social
unity that has always been the central demand of the
collective art of theater. (3-4)
The practical necessity for directors is especially acute here in the
United States, where there are few permanent acting companies--
professional or amateur. Here, directors usually have to work with
casts assembled just a month or so before opening, which very likely
include actors who do not share a common interpretive approach or set
of expressive techniques. More to the point, directors are essential
to the modern performance of medieval drama. If my experience is a
true indication, the casts of student actors who typically perform
these plays bring to interpretation, characterization, rehearsal, and
production virtually no theatrical orientation or training. They have
had, then, an immediate and practical need for a director-teacher to
provide some basic theatrical training and a unified interpretive
vision, character analysis, rehearsal strategy, and production design
for the play that they were to enact.

These actors share some problems and challenges that are common to
actors in any play. As Lee Strasberg once wrote, every actor is
required to cultivate "a special sensibility . . . , an ability to
respond to imaginary stimuli and situations, which makes it possible

for him to enter into the experience and emotions of the character he

is to represent“ ('Acting' 527). Moreover, acting requires that each

124
actor's creative work occur in public, in consort with others, and be
re-created afresh at every performance. The demands of character
interpretation, performance invention, and sustained and collective
work before expectant audiences are unrelenting. Such demands upon
professional actors are routinely accepted occupational stresses; the
same demands put upon amateur actors can become all-consuming terrors.
Where does performance confidence come from? How are the actors to be
sure that they have read their characters rightly? How do they select
one best course of action from an apparent multitude of alternatives?
What guideline exists to give their individual and collective
inventions stimulus, common purpose, and expressive coherence? For
amateur actors, these questions become intensely personal. "How can I
be sure that I will fulfill the acting demands of my part and the play,
and not appear to be a public fool?”

Beyond the common problems which all actors share, the medieval
cycle and morality plays present additional and special problems of
characterization. The presumed "allegory” of the morality plays is
difficult. Many, if not all, of the moralities' characters seem to be
the static depictions of some abstract and general quality. Mankind
has its character, Mercy. Eyegymeg has its characters, Knowledge,
Strength, Discretion, and Fellowship. The Qeetle e; Persevegance's
'nomina ludentium' is particularly long: Mundus, VOluptas, Stulticia,
Detraccio, Auaricia, Superbia, Ira, Invidia, Luxuria, Gula, Accidia,
Caro, Confessio, Penitencia, Caritas, Abstinencia, Solicitudo,
Castitas, Largitas, Humilitas, Cupiditas, Paciencia, Anima, More (and

more), plus soldiers, demons, good angels, and bad angels--in short,

125

all of the sins, virtues, and benevolent or malevolent spirits that can
afflict or save the soul (Eccles 2)! What are directors and actors to
do, when faced with so many characters who seem to defy specific and
concrete representation and who seem content simply "to be“ rather than
compelled ”to act“? Even if they could act, ”allegorical“
personifications would have to act within the rigidly narrow confines
of their defining quality. The actor playing Paciencia in Ine_geee1e
e;_£e;eege;eeee might well ask if he could not lose his “patience"
sometimes and get angry at the inconstancy of Humanum Genus. After
all, constancy is the personification's singular strength and the basis
upon which each relates to all of the other characters. Or is anger
the exclusive property of Ira (wrath), the personification of one of
the seven deadly sins? Experienced actors may find these ”allegorical”
characters difficult to interpret and play; amateur actors may find
them utterly bewildering and more than a little intimidating.

Determining characterizations for the cycle plays is no less
difficult. Directors may find in their researches that much of the
scholarly interpretation of the cycle plays has been typological. The
play of Abraham and Isaac is taken to be a type of the sacrifice of
Christ by God the Father. The typological connection is particularly
emphasized by the eventual (and merciful) substitution of a lamb for
Isaac. The Abraham (God) and Isaac (Christ) typology works easily on
two levels at least: father sacrificing son and the substitute
sacrifice of a lamb, a literal egeee_gei. The play of Noah's Flood is
taken to be a type of the intercession of the church and its priests in

the salvation of mankind. The ark may be taken as a type of the church

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and Noah as a type of priest. As we shall see, the geeeng_§nephe;ee;
Regeene has its share of typological interpretations, too. Such
interpretations may or may not contribute to the actors' work. The
essential problem with typology is that its interpretive function is to
see one thing as an emblem or sign of something else--the charity of
the shepherds in the Nativity plays as a type of the charity of the
Good Shepherd, say. But actors cannot play something else; they must
play their own characters. Directors must be careful to concentrate
their actors' attentions on the specific and concrete business that
their individual characters have to perform, and admit typology only
where it can be justified by the dramatic context and can be
successfully played on stage.

The medieval audience's response to the apparent allegory or
typology of medieval drama was likely quite different from that of
which modern audiences are now capable. The lives of medieval
spectators were permeated with all sorts of examples of allegorical
works and interpretations. The cruciform structure of church
architecture, the depiction of Biblical personages in medieval dress
and contemporary surroundings in sculpture, stained glass, and
manuscript illuminations, and the tendency of preachers to find
allegorical meanings in the circumstances of almost every sacred and
secular human event disposed those in the medieval audience to see
typological and figural implications in virtually every appearance and
action on stage. The medieval playwright did not have to overwork the
literal circumstances of his play to set those associated meanings in

motion for his audience. Modern audiences bring much less of this

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interpretive disposition and capability to performance. Modern
directors, then, have to decide just how far current productions of
these plays ought to ”cue" audiences to meanings beyond the plays'
literal contexts. My approach to this matter parallels my approach to
the translations of meanings of the Middle English and foreign language
elements in performance scripts. My responsibility as a modern
director has been met, if I make these meanings 22251212 for a modern
audience, but do not forsake the plays’ immediate and concrete
characterizations, conflicts, and resolutions to elicit secondary
interpretive responses as if they were primary. For me to do otherwise
would be analogous to storytellers interrupting their narratives to
explain the sadness, suspense, humor, or implicit meanings of their
stories. The sense of narrative immediacy and the right of the
audience to make discoveries on its own would be dulled and
compromised. If the story of the drama preserves its own integrity in
its own terms, the audience may then take care of the rest as well as
it can.1

Actors first need to give their characters specific identities,
definable relationships, a course of physical action, and a compelling
psychological purpose--all within the context of the play at hand. The
cycle plays present as many problems in characterization as the
moralities. Even the longer of these plays seem cryptically short, by
modern standards. The §eeeeg_§nephe;ee;_£egeeee, one of the longest
and most fully developed, still leaves much for directors and actors to
question. Who are these shepherds? Where did they come from? How old

are they? What do they look like? What do they sound like? How do

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they move? Why are they this way or that or choose to do this thing or
that? What is the nature of the relationship among them? Why are
they, and not some other shepherds, chosen to witness the birth of
Christ? None of these questions gets direct answer from the Wakefield
Master. And yet, the play cannot be played without answering these
questions and more. What answers can directors supply? How can those
answers best help the actors?

* * *

To accept all of these questions and concerns a priori to the
production of any of the medieval cycle and morality plays is to
accept, knowingly or not, the primacy of the function of the director
and the pervasive influence of Stanislavski upon modern theatrical
practice. More than any other director of the modern era, Stanislavski
devoted his study and practice of the actor's art to devising ways to
make that creative process accessible and sensible. The charismatic
performances of Marlon Brando, Kim Stanley, Paul Newman, and Geraldine
Page and the directing of Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and Harold
Clurman, along with the work of many others who have been schooled in
Stanislavski's system, may suggest that his prescripts were intended
only for the consummate professional. Such is not the case. He
developed his system primarily to assist directors and actors whose
native talents were not infused with genius--the greater portion by far
of both professionals and amateurs. Stanislavski devoted his long and
distinguished career to discovering ways to make the hardest tasks of
the actor--the invention of a sequence of justified actions and the

expression of true feeling appropriate to the individual character and

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dramatic circumstances--easier to accomplish. In this regard,
Stanislavski was a most humane revolutionary. He devised his system to
be a rigorous, but compassionate restructuring of theatrical purpose
and the actor's craft, as much to help himself as to help his fellow
actors. Stanislavski's system seems ideally suited to the problems of
amateur actors with characterization in the medieval cycle and morality
plays. Most of the student actors whom I have directed have brought to
the production of these plays ample intelligence, imagination, study,
and willingness to work, but virtually no previous actor training.
Stanislavski's system has proved itself well designed for their needs,
as their intelligence and industry have proved readily responsive to
it.

The drama of any play, including the medieval cycle and morality
plays, lives in the dynamic relationships among its characters,
characters continually at work scene after scene, performance after
performance to overcome personal obstacles to achieve some valued
objective. The informing structures to the drama's plan of action on
stage are the individual actors' character "spines” and the play's
through-line of action.2 The interpretive spine unifies and directs
each actor's physical and emotional energies toward the building of a
living, believable character. This lifeline for the actor's work
threads its way through each motivational unit in which the character
appears, weaving character goals and impediments into the fabric of the
play's dramatic structure, which is finally given comprehensive
expression by the director in the integration of all of the individual

character spines into one character-based through-line of action.

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Stanislavski's design in this method of character interpretation was to
supply each actor with a schematic plan of action that would identify
both the character's strengths and desires and the physical and
psychological restrictions that impede action and disrupt emotional
stability. These strengths and desires Stanislavski called
”objectives,” the specific ends that would motivate and direct each
character's efforts. The physical and psychological impediments to the
realization of objectives have come to be called "thresholds.“ The
heart of drama lies in the inherent conflict between character
objectives and thresholds. As Stanislavski writes:

Yet no movement, striving, action is carried out on the

stage, any more than in real life, without obstacles. One

runs inevitably into the counter-movements and strivings of

other people, or into conflicting events, or into obstacles

caused by the elements, or other hindrances. Life is an

unremitting eeeeggle, one overcomes or one is defeated.
Likewise on the stage, side-by-side with the through action

there will be a series of eeeege;;eg;eegn_eeeiege on the part

of other characters, other circumstances. The collision and
conflict of these opposing through actions constitute the

dramatic situation. (Creeeieg e Role 80)

All of Mankind's efforts, for example, are informed by his "major
objective": to secure his personal salvation. Even his apparent defeat
by Titivillus and his reversion to the pleasures of the tavern do not
supplant Mankind's fundamental desire. He is merely attempting to
convince himself that the desire for salvation is subordinate to self-
indulgence. Mankind fails because his conscience cannot accept such an
inversion of value. He finds himself caught in this battle between the
temptation to self-indulgence and the demands of Christian obedience
and piety because of an essential character flaw--a personal insecurity

that makes him easily intimidated and confused.

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Throughout the course of the play Mankind vacillates between
triumph and failure, as his resolution and strength wax and wane. His
character spine traces this progression through the subordinate
objectives and thresholds of each motivational unit until the play
culminates in Mankind's humble triumph through repentance and
forgiveness. The spine also supplies some suggestion of age,
appearance, and personality traits, in order to spark the actor's
imagination to begin building a concrete character of depth and
believability. My character spine for Mankind follows. For each
motivational unit in which he appears, I have stated both a unit
objective and a unit threshold. The objectives are expressed in terms
of active verbs that can suggest and sustain physical expression on the
stage. All of Mankind's subordinate unit objectives and thresholds
lead to his major objective and threshold, and thus provide the actor
who plays him with a motivated and unified plan of action. In addition
to the outline of unit objectives and thresholds, the spine also
includes notes on character background and dramatic circumstances. All
of these elements in the spine mean to supply suggestions for action
and character traits that will spark and sustain the actor's invention
through rehearsals and performance.

Character Spine: Mankind

UNIT I
ngective: To escape his responsibilities.
Threshold: Mercy's disruption of the tavern revelry.
UNIT II
Ob t : To seek the counsel of Mercy.

Tnzeenelg: The temptations of tavern life.

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UNIT III
ijeetive: To defend the honor of his living.
Theeenel_: The disruption of his labor by the Vices.
UNIT V
Q§jee§igez To do his duty.
Threshold: Titivillus's frustration of his labor and
undermining of his faith.
UNIT VI
Objective: To renounce the discipline of his faith.

Meg:

His reluctance to see the little good that his
faith and labor have won stripped away.

UNIT VII
ijecgive: To commit suicide.
Threshold: Mercy's rescue.

Objective:
Weld:

UNIT VIII

To secure his personal salvation.
The temptation to despair.

MAJOR OBJECTIVE AND THRESHOLD:

To secure his personal salvation.
The temptation to sin and despair.

W:

Male. 30-35. Sturdy build. A farmer in simple work
clothes. Mankind's inconstancy, his essential character
flaw, can be played as resulting either from an
impressionable, thick-headed density or as the vacillations
of an intelligent but insecure, easily confused sense of
value (the difference between our first and second
productions). I imagine Mankind as having recently inherited
the family lands, as always having been a good worker, but
who is now intimidated by the responsibility of adult
decision-making, thus his appearance at the tavern in the
opening unit. His "escape" to the tavern is avoidance
behavior, an attempt to get away from having to accept grown-
up responsibilities. Mankind achieves his major objective in
the end because he accepts on faith the nature of his own
being and salvation. His final and most mature decision in
the play is to let God be God and himself be human. He

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learns that his life will always be caught in the turmoil of

temptation, sin, repentance, and forgiveness, but he finally

welcomes that life by trusting that God's love and ”euer

habundante" mercy will prevail over all else. (22)

This spine gives the actor who plays Mankind a character identity,

a compelling purpose, and a course of action. It does for him what the
super-objective and through-line of action do for the whole play. The
major objective and threshold of Mankind's character spine, I believe,
conform to the playwright's point of view. The only objective that
will sustain Mankind's actions throughout the course of the play is his
desire to secure personal salvation, in the face of the enticing
temptations of the Vices and the hardships involved with following
Mercy's counsel--the very point of a mege113y play.3 This spine
establishes intellectual credibility by giving Mankind a rational basis
for his actions within the context of his medieval existence.
Mankind's actions throughout the play have an understandable and
logical progression. He resolves to be industrious and faithful, is
tempted to sin and despair, and is saved by his admission of frailty,
sincere confession, humble repentance, and Mercy's intercession and
sacramental absolution. All of this conforms to orthodox medieval
theology and religious observance. This spine also engages the actor's
emotions. His objectives and thresholds are specific, concrete,
active, and personal. The more he values the attainment of his
objectives and the more he works to overcome their thresholds the more
deeply felt will be his successes and failures, not only by him, but
also by his fellow actors and the audience. Despair, for example, is

not a thing in itself which the actor can call upon directly. It is,

instead, the emotional consequence of a failure to attain some valued

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objective, after the investment of considerable personal effort.
Lastly, this spine excites the actor's will to perform. Its objectives
necessitate eeg§eg--something specific and concrete for the actor to
walk on stage and g9. No one action is an end in itself, but is,
instead, one dynamic moment connected to all of the actions that have
gone before and all those that will come after. The actor has
individual direction and purpose throughout. And at no time is the
actor playing Mankind acting outside the context of the other
characters. He is always part of a community of meaning, a realization
that not only gives him confidence and support but is also related to
the meaning of the play--its super-objective. Mankind is saved within,
and not outside, the community of believers. So, too, is the actor.

The character of Mankind was the simplest one in the play to
interpret. That he is human and labors as a farmer gave early, helpful
interpretive clues that could be expanded into a complex and workable
character spine rather straightforwardly. But Meeting presents other
and more difficult problems in characterization for directors and
actors, as do all of the moralities. These problems cluster around the
meaning of the play's "allegory" and the question of how (if?) an
allegory can be played on the stage. Only one character in the play,
Mankind himself, must necessarily be taken to be human. Only one
character in the play has a prOper name, Titivillus. All of the other
characters are named for some general quality--Mischief, New Guise,
Nowadays, and Nought. Did Meegigg's playwright have any idea of how
difficult--in fact, how impossible--it is for actors to play general

qualities? If he did know, did he care? Did he grow more interested

135
in purely intellectual concepts and less interested in the physical
demands of stage performance? Is the script flawed? Are all of the
moralities flawed in the same fatal way? Eyegymen, for example,
describes itself not as a work for the theater at all, but as a
'treatyse . . . in maner of a morall playe.“ The inescapable tension
between the written word and the stage enactment must be resolved
before any of these moralities can find performance expression.

This difference between the written expression and the theatrical
performance is made more difficult to present when written expression
is intended for performance, especially when that writing is presumed
to be allegorical. Good scripts suggest, perhaps even compel, speech
patterns, movement, and action. Certainly Mercy's lines in Meggigg,
”Do wey, do wey bis reull, sers! do wey!" (82) compel some movement and
action. Mercy's final call, ”Aryse and asks mercy, Mankend, and be
associat to me” (827), suggests the most desperate plea for repentance
and reconciliation. But even the best of scripts cannot prescribe
exact intonation or action, nor would they want to. Such constraints
on the actor's interpretive abilities would be deadening. In fact,
they would deny the spontaneous essence of live theater. All
productions and performances of the same play would seem identical.
Such is the rightful property only of the cinema, and even there it is
the product of directors and film editors, not screen writers. In the.
best of scripts, playwrights yield absolute concern for ideas to the
concrete and specific demands of the stage. In short, the best of
playwrights recognize that meaning in the theater is essentially

experiential, not conceptual.

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Herein lies the problem which allegory presents to the stage. The
necessities of the stage admit no generality, no abstraction, no
constancy. Play production requires that whatever appears general be
made specific, that whatever appears abstract be made concrete, and
that whatever appears constant be charged with physical and emotional
energy. It is simply impossible for actors, even the purest of mimes,
to play generalities or abstractions or to appear on stage without
acting. Any attempt to do so results in the most tiresome cliche or
simple quietude. Try standing in front of the mirror to act out
"patience” and see what looks back at you. And yet, do not these
moralities seem to ask just this? A number of apparently allegorical
characteristics seem evident: the internal struggle of the soul, the
personification of abstract qualities, the fixed nature of constant
values, and in some, the sense of a closed order of relationships. In
what sense are these plays to be taken as strictly allegorical?

As a director (and sometime actor), I must think that these plays
are not meant to be allegorical at all. That is to say, the better
that these moralities work on stage the less they are allegorical; when
they have trouble on stage they have trouble with allegory. Meekieg,
perhaps, is the least allegorical of all the moralities. New Guise,
Nowadays, and Nought are almost completely the representatives of the
external world, not the interior chambers of Mankind's soul. Mankind
is named for his species, not his character. Mischief is the active
agent of secular chaos. Titivillus is an envoy from Hell. And Mercy,

as the counterpoint to Titivillus, is an envoy from holy orders. In

137
fact, the great enemies of Mankind are not identified as the failings
of his own constitution, but as the corrupting pressures of external
vice: "the Dewell, pe World, pe Flesch and pe Fell” (884). These
characters play out their drama in the combat zones of daily life, in
the earthy revelry of a tavern, in the industry and hardship of farm
labor, and in the order and observances of the church. Only Mankind's
nightmare, which the stage demands that Titivillus dictate, attempts to
reveal the conflicts that rumble within his soul. Megking does as much
as any play can to thrash out its conflicts in the concrete terms of
the stage.

In contrast, the play zgegyeeg has greater difficulty stepping
forth onto the stage in bodily form. Its characters do not easily
admit the work of actors. What are actors to do with the characters
Knowledge or Discretion or Five Wits or Goods? figegygeg moves its
drama back and forth, from interior conflicts of the soul to the
external distractions of the world. Though we may assume that the
drama is ongoing in both realms and each realm affects the other, the
play anticipates the stage best in Everyman's dealings with the
external world. Any director loves to see the potential for the stage
in Fellowship's lines:

And yet, yf thou wylte ete & drynke & make good chere,

Or haunt to women the lusty company,

I wolde not forsake you whyle the days is clere. (272-274)
This could all spring to life, if placed within a crowded tavern, with
Fellowship as the barkeep. But where is an actor to go with
Discretion? We know that Discretion accompanies Strength and deserts

Everyman soon after Strength does. That he is addressed by Everyman

138
identifies him by name, but that alone will not define his character
nor describe his speech and action. What does he look like? What does
he do? How is he different from all of the others who first favor then
reject Everyman?

Questions like these constantly plague the staging of these
moralities. They occur wherever their writers grew more interested in
"the silent society of mental images evoked by written characters' than
the very audible and physical business of the stage (Lewis 65). That
these questions are capable of answer is evident in each successful
production of the moralities, but their answers are more a testament to
the imaginative powers of director and actor than to the expressive
clarity of the playwright. These questions cannot avoid being answered
and still have the actors play the play. In the case of such an
internal capacity as discretion, directors must search the text for
some clue to a human act that an actor may walk on stage and do. There
may be many workable answers to the same question. One that occurs to
me is based simply on the text's suggestion that Discretion waits at
the grave for Everyman to be done with Extreme Unction and join him.
Perhaps Discretion, at his oily best, could be the funeral director.
Likewise, Knowledge might be played as a clerk, Five Wits as a reeve,
and Confession as a priest. Of course, even the most inventive of
these interpretations must be grounded on the foundation of the text
and be proved by their efficacy on the stage.

The character of Mercy in nggg;gg, in contrast to that of
Discretion in lgegymen, demonstrates a particularly important

development in medieval dramatic composition. In fact, all of Meeging

139
does, but Mercy will here serve to typify its character. The most
persistent criticism of our production of Meeking was that Mercy did
too much and had too much done to him. Mercy entered the set to break
up the sinful revelry of the tavern. He stopped the dancers, silenced
the music, and struck out at the Vices. In turn, Mischief interrupted
and mocked his sermon; Nought (then played by a woman) taunted him with
verbal abuse and attempted seduction; the Vices, acting together,
struck back. Throughout the play, Mercy exchanged blow for blow, and
finally rescued Mankind by attacking the Vices with a staff and cross,
the counter to Titivillus's trident and the Vices' gallows tree. In
short, he eQEee instead of gee. The objection to all of this was that
Mercy was meant to be simply the personification of one attribute of
God. The exact words were, "I so much wished that you had just let
Mercy alone, to be and to speak. I wanted to hear the rhythm and
beauty of his lines." Such was the apparently persistent influence of
allegory upon one critic of our production.

But words alone cannot make a play or sustain a character. Words
must be spoken with a purpose, a purpose that will engage the actor
into the drama of the play and compel him to act. Mercy does not speak
simply to be heard but to effect the conversion of all who hear.
Moreover, Mercy is not simply the static personification of an abstract
attribute. Sister Mary Philippa’s monograph on Mankigg establishes
that the playwright envisioned Mercy to be a Dominican friar with
priestly powers (1-21). We played him as such. All that Mercy says
implies activity. He tells Mankind that the life of man is a battle

("'Vita hominis est milicia super terram'" 228) and that, "Yf 3e wyll

140
be crownyde, 3e must nedys fyght' (231). He expects no less of
himself. Furthermore, his lines betray his frustration at Mankind's
inconstancy: 'I kan not bere yt ewynly pat Mankynde ys so flexybull'
(741). He is anxious to his soul about the strength of his own
spiritual resources. Finally, his name does not describe the sole
quality of his character, but the one, critical expression of its love
which reconciles Mankind to God and thereby saves his life. He is, in
Arnold Williams's happy thought, ”a dramatic individual capable of
generalized application" (Qgeee 145). As with all characterizations on
the stage, the irony of Mercy's character is that the more he becomes a
believable individual with universal concerns, the more general is his
thematic significance. The first rule of character interpretation is
that the universal comes out of the specific and the concrete, not the
other way around. My character spine for Mercy follows.

Character Spine: Mercy

UNIT I
ijective: To bring the tavern patrons (including
Mankind) to repentance.
sh : The Vices' resistance.
UNIT II
0 e v : To fortify Mankind with good counsel.
Iggeegele: Mankind's inconstancy.
UNIT VI
Opjeceeve: To call Mankind away from Mischief and the
Vices.
Ingeehele: The strength of the Vices' hold on Mankind.
UNIT VII
921§£E1193 To find the means to rescue Mankind.

Ihgeenelg: Mankind's rejection of his doctrine.

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UNIT VIII

QEjeeeLye: To save Mankind.
Iggeeholg: Mankind's despair.

MAJOR OBJECTIVE AND THRESHOLD

To reconcile Mankind to God.
The insufficiency of doctrine alone to effect reconciliation.

Qhegacte; Notee:

Male. 20-25. Dominican Friar. Mercy's intolerance of
human inconstancy, his essential character flaw, stems from
the insulated nature of his clerical life. I imagine him
approaching the tavern on his first preaching mission outside
the moral order and security of the friary. He is a young
and as yet untested combatant for the soul of Mankind. His
faith is sound and his doctrine is right, but he must learn
to temper absolute truth with human compassion. He must
grow, too, in order to effect Mankind's salvation. It takes
the desperate jeopardy of Mankind's spiritual peril and slide
toward despair and death to awaken Mercy’s sense of the need
for human compassion. That he is able to rescue Mankind and
restore his right relationship to God testifies to Mercy's
personal (and painful) growth. He has, in the end, become
Christ-like and equal to the calling of his holy order.

The idea of playing Mercy as a Dominican friar with his own array
of character objectives and thresholds, strengths and weaknesses, and
sequences of stage actions was gee critical interpretive decision for
our production. It turned what otherwise could have been a high-
spirited simple drama into one of surprising complexity and dramatic
tension. Mankind's salvation depends on two closely interrelated
conflicts. One conflict centers on the character of Mankind, and can
be resolved only by Mankind's willing choice to forsake the temptations
of the flesh, repent, and be reconciled to God and the church. But the
"very mene for . . . restytucyon' is not solely within Mankind's
control (17). Mankind must be led back to God and the church, and

Mercy, his guide, must inspire not only doctrinal confidence but also

142
the positive attractions of sympathetic understanding and humane
compassion. It is not sufficient that Mankind simply know that he
eeene to repent; he must also gene to repent to make his confession and
reconciliation true.

The second conflict centers on the necessity for Mercy to grow
into a priest of truly Christ-like stature and compassion. Salvation
does not come on the cheap. Mercy must learn that “mankynde was dere
bought” (9), a notion to which he gives easy lip service early in the
play and must grow through sufferings of his own to fulfill by the end
of the play. If Mercy is interpreted to be simply the personification
of one attribute of God, without human dimension, the successful
resolution of the drama is virtually without doubt. Mercy would be
unbeatable, and the whole dramatization of Mankind's and Mercy's
conflicts with the Vices and Titivillus would be mere diversion.
Instead, if Mercy's character has to undergo change to attain its major
objective, then the successful resolution to the drama is more
precarious, and both the actors and the audience enjoy a drama of
greater thematic richness and dramatic tension.

All of the characters in Meeking work this way. Each combatant
for the soul of Mankind is given his own specific gravity and concrete
identity. Mankind may be played as a poor farmer, New Guise as a
henpecked fop, Nowadays as a drunk, Nought (when played by a woman) as
a whore, Mischief as the barkeep who dabbles in witchcraft, and
Titivillus as a winged devil from Hell. Meekgeg's playwright evidently
realized that the stage was a different world from the "silent society

of mental images.” In writing fleeting he found a way to translate the

143
thematic concerns of allegory into the language of the theater. He
developed the battle for the soul into the physical play of dramatic
individuals whose personal motives reflect the general tendencies of
our lives. If there is any allegory at work here it is to be sought
out more properly in the interpretive mechanics of the audience's
mind.‘

The actors who play the Vices and Titivillus, just as much as
those who play Mercy and Mankind, need to know that their characters
fit into some integrated pattern of dramatic conflict that will
constitute the play. Drama is a collective enterprise; no one actor or
role defines the play's interpretation or its performance. All work
together to create a complex through-line of character action. In the
previous chapter, I provided examples of through-lines of action based
on the thematic content of Mankind and the so d She d ' P .
Through-lines of action can also be constructed on the basis of
character objectives and thresholds. The two through-lines of action
serve different but complementary purposes. The thematic through-line
of action is an interpretive way 1259 the drama of the play. The
character through-line of action is an early step 925.21 the dramatic
text into the exigencies of performance. They display for the whole
cast the relationships among the play's characters in terms of their
individual desires and obstacles, all of which contribute to making up
the play's performance super-objective--a statement of its overriding
thematic conflict.

Effective through-lines of action express each character's major

objective and threshold in active verbs that necessitate interaction on

144
stage. Mercy's major objective in fiegkig , for example, may be taken
to be a desire to reconcile Mankind to God, an objective that forces
him to interact with Mankind and against those who would prevent him
from achieving his objective. I took the major obstacle to Mercy's
achievement of this objective to be the insufficiency of doctrine alone
to effect reconciliation. Mercy must learn to infuse doctrine with
human compassion--in short, to become Christ-like. Mercy's secular
antagonist, Mischief, has as her major objective the desire to bring
Mankind to corruption and despair by encouraging the Vices and invoking
Titivillus. Not surprisingly, Mischief's major obstacle to achieving
this objective is Mercy's counsel and Mankind's desire for salvation.
And so on. In devising the following character through-line of action
for Meekie_, I tried to express each of the major objectives in terms
of active verbs that would necessitate character interaction. The
major thresholds were either obstacles put in the characters' ways by
others, by circumstances, or by deficiencies in their own
personalities. My character through-line of action for Menkieg
follows:
Through-Line of Action: Meekeeg
a o d T
Mercy: Ob. To reconcile Mankind to God.
Th. The insufficiency of doctrine alone
to effect reconciliation.

Mankind: Ob. To secure his personal salvation.
Th. The temptation to self-doubt and despair.

Titivillus: Ob. To drive Mankind to corruption and
despair by frustrating his labor and
destroying his faith in Mercy.

Th. Mercy's counsel and Mankind's desire to
live a pious life.

14S

Mischief: Ob. To bring Mankind to corruption and
despair by encouraging the Vices and
invoking Titivillus.

Th. Mercy's counsel and Mankind's desire for
salvation.

New Guise: Ob. To revenge his humiliation on Mankind by
bringing him to Mischief and despair.
Th. His loss of self-respect through
Mankind's attack and his own failed (and
ridiculed) attempts at leadership, wit,
and style.

Nought: Ob. To revenge her humiliation on Mankind by
bringing him to Mischief and despair
through sexual debasement.

Th. Her loss of self-respect through
Mankind's rebuke and her own sexual
excesses.

Nowadays: Ob. To revenge her wounded pride on Mankind
by bringing him to Mischief and despair.
Th. Her loss of self-respect through
Mankind's rebuke and her own alcoholic
excesses.

SUPER-OBJECTIVE:

In his struggle to secure his personal salvation, Mankind
suffers the vengeance of New Guise, Nowadays, Nought, and
Titivillus, who lead him by worldly temptation, demonic
deception, and personal humiliation to Mischief and suicidal
despair, until Mercy's compassion brings him to admit
priestly intercession and spiritual rescue through the
sacrament of penance.

* t t
The characters in the §econe Shepherde' EQQQQDE present different

but equally demanding challenges to directors and actors. The
characterizations for the shepherds are difficult, for though the play
is about them, they have not received nearly the amount of scholarly
attention that Mak has. Simply knowing that they are shepherds and
that each begins the play with a revealing complaint does not amount to

a characterization. These shepherds are individuals who come to the

146
fields and each other's company for reasons of their own. They are
moved to say and do things that reflect their own desires and
temperaments. They also walk, talk, dress, and move in ways that are
their own and that are outward signs of their inward characters. Who
is tell, who short? Who is old, who young? Who is slim, who stout?
Who is critical and testy, who ameliorative? Questions multiply the
more that directors and actors pore over the text. The Wakefield
Master, however, is not very forthcoming with abundant or obvious
answers. There is, unfortunately, little scholarship to help the
performer fashion individual characterizations for the shepherds. It
falls to directors, then, to extract from the text the defining
qualities and motivations for action that will become the actors' bases
for character invention. Perhaps for that reason, in our production
the shepherds' characters were the most interesting and rewarding for
the actors and me to discover.

The character spine for the first shepherd in the fieeeng
Shepherga;_£ageant may help to illustrate how directors work upon texts
and background information to suggest playable characterizations. We
know that the first shepherd's name is Coll, not because he identifies
himself but because others address him or refer to him as such (449).
He is also the oldest of the shepherds. His opening complaint includes
references to bodily aches and pains (2-3, 40-41), and he is the only
one to have lived long enough to make critical comparisons between an
earlier social order in England and the one in which he finds himself
"now on dayes' (28). Also, Coll's language, especially in his address

to Daw reveals a distance of age and rank; Coll always addresses Daw

147
and Gib in the familiar (thee, thou, thy,), and they in turn address
him formally (ye, you, your). We know, too, that he can be hot-
tempered and violent. He is the one who carries a weapon (615) and
wants to do Mak and Gyll to death (621). Coll's interactions with Mak
throughout have the bluntest and most physical aspects ('Bot, Mak, is
that sothe?/Now take outt that sothren tothe,/And sett in a torde' 214-
216). Daw, the youngest shepherd, has to caution him to restrain his
wrath, even after the business with Mak and Gyll has been completed
(635-37).

We may posit other things about his character and background. We
know from internal and external sources that the fieeene_§nepgegge;
zeeeene was composed sometime in the 1430s. It is not too great a
stretch to imagine that Coll, the oldest, most combative shepherd, is a
veteran of military service, perhaps a veteran of Agincourt itself
(fought in 1415). In our production we played him as such, an
interpretation that allowed Coll to use the Agincourt Carol for the
song (unidentified in the text) that he teaches Daw around the campfire
(189). Its chorus of ”Dec gracias Anglia/Redde pro victoria' (England,
give thanks to God, in return for victory) nicely fits his character
and heralds events and meanings to come. Also, playing Coll as a
military veteran gave added authority and poignancy to his observation
that "It is true as steyll/That prophetys hays spokyn” (699-700). His
motivation was shaped from a line near the end of his opening
complaint. We meet him at the play's opening, suffering alone on the
fields and in the midst of a raging storm (neatly reflective of the

times and of his own stalwart, volatile character), waiting to find

148
solace in the company of "trew men“ (52). That motivation--to find
true men to trust, true men to bear hardship with, true men to give
steadfast meaning to mutable and treacherous times--ultimately finds
fulfillment in his call to witness the birth of Christ--his and the
world's true Lord.

Coll's character spine follows. I have tried to express his unit
objectives and major objective in terms of his search for truth,
particularly the truths of the social contract and his personal fealty.
Coll's unit thresholds are especially important for the play, for they
reveal the heart of the shepherds' problems with Mak and Gyll. In the
previous chapter I argued that the shepherds came to the fields to
escape the tribulations of the world by making a sanctuary for
themselves on the fields. The more they believe that they have
succeeded in making a sanctuary, the more their false sense of security
makes them susceptible to Mak's deceptions; they fool themselves as
much as (probably more than) Mak fools them. Coll's thresholds for
units II, IV, and VI are the spots where this little drama of the
shepherds' self-deception takes place. In unit II Coll underestimates
Mak's threat to the shepherds' fellowship. He quickly asserts physical
dominance over Mak and forces him to sit down in the midst of the
shepherds' company where they can keep close watch over him (214-216).
And a little later he explodes Mak's pretensions directly (“can ye now
mene you?" 220). Because Coll is so confident that he has quelled
Mak's threat to the fellowship, Gib and Daw are confident in their
safety, too. In unit IV, Coll cannot believe that Mak could have

stolen the sheep, for that would mean that his efforts to protect the

149
fellowship were inadequate. Daw is the only one to have any suspicion
at this point; both Coll and Gib protest that Mak went nowhere and that
Daw's dream has distressed him overmuch (359-376). Things come to a
head in unit VI, where both Daw and Gib insist that Mak is the only
possible suspect. Coll still resists; his self-respect and prowess are
at stake. He says to Daw, 'peasse, man, be still! I sagh when he [Mak]
went;/Thou sklanders hym yll thou aght to repent,/Goode spede" (460-
462). Having to accept that he has been fooled by Mak makes Coll the
angrier, when the truth does come out and the sheep is recovered. His
quick response, then, to do the thieves to death not only fits his
character but also the particular shocks to his pride and the
psychological stresses that the subordinate conflicts of units II, IV,
and VI have put upon him.

Character Spine: Coll

UNIT I
ereQELXe: . To escape the injustice of the world by making
a sanctuary for true men.
Ingeshold: The bickering between Gib and Daw.
UNIT II
9912££1223 To protect the fellowship by exposing Mak's
true identity and character.
Theeeeelg: Mak's apparent harmlessness.
UNIT IV
QQjeee1ye: To assure Gib and Daw that the sheep (and the
fellowship) are safe.
Thrsgngldz Daw's suspicion that Mak has stolen a sheep.
UNIT VI
QEjeeiiye: To defend the record of his protection of the

flock by protesting Gib's and Daw's accusation
of Mak.

150

Threshold: Gib's and Daw's insistence that Mak is the
only suspect.

UNIT VII

b vs: To exact capital punishment on Mak and Gyll,
"Syn thay manteyn thare theft" (621) in the
face of the truth.

ngesgold: Gib's and Daw's appeal to spare Mak's and
Gyll's lives when they are at mercy.

UNIT VIII
Objective: To confirm the truth of the Angel's message to
the shepherds.
Thgeshold: His difficulty in believing that poor men such

as they would be the first chosen to hear the
news of Christ's birth.

UNIT IX
Objective: To honor and comfort the Christ-child.
Threshold: The humbleness of his gift and the apparent

inadequacy of his means.
MAJOR OBJECTIVE AND THRESHOLD

To find a true lord to serve in a changing and deceitful
world.

The temptation to betray his standards in anger at Mak and
Gyll--the temptation to kill them when they are at mercy.

§h£££££§£_EQ£§!3

Coll describes himself as ”yll happyd" (1), 'al
lappyd/In sorow' (4-5), and as one who ”has neuer rest" (8).
He lives “by myn oone" (46) in "payne Anger, and wo' (40),
seeking out his subsistence with a simple, but tough
integrity. He is now about fifty years old, hoary and lean,
and armed with a sword.

I imagine Coll to be well into middle age. He has led a
strong, vigorous life. He is tough and weathered--an old
campaigner. He has rather basic values: personal integrity,
loyalty, strength, and courage, though his strength and skill
at arms belong now more to the past than the present. He is
a freeman, but is desperately poor.

In his youth Coll fought at Agincourt, distinguishing
himself with bow and sword. His honor and integrity have
been hard fought for and won. In the best sense of the word,
Coll is a proud man. Soon after Agincourt, however, his lord
died, and since that time Coll's favor with his patron family
has steadily waned. Coll has seen the erosion of his social
status mirrored in the apparent collapse of the old order.

151

Now (c. 1435) well into the reign of Henry VI, England seems
to be slipping toward confusion and weakness. England is
losing ground abroad and seems to be slipping into economic
and social distress at home. Traditional feudal structures
seem to be increasingly undermined by emerging middle-class
guild and money values. Old loyalties, old forms, old
courtesies and duties seem to be withering. Coll has been
replaced in favor by younger, liveried men who have not
earned their station, but who enjoy social advantage “thrugh
mantenance/Of men that are gretter' (35-36). He resents
their arrogance and inexperience.

Coll has been left to eke out his meager existence as
best he can. He is an unequal partner in the sheep-raising
business with Gib. He paid his own way into this business,
but his share is very small. Though neither one will ever
say it, Coll is indebted to Gib for this means of preserving
his independence and integrity. He drags his cold, weary
bones to the fields to preserve his self-respect and to
harbor and protect the ancient values he loves. He is not
one to be comfortable with intellectual niceties or moral
ambiguities; his fundamental senses of right and wrong, good
and bad, though simple, have served him well and are
staunchly held. He seeks a true lord to serve, and he finds
him in Bethlehem.

Such directorial interpretation, based first on the text and then
on outside sources, gives the actor enough suggestions for him to begin
to flesh out his character's look and sound and movement and choice of
action. Coll becomes a believable, understandable, concrete
individual, one who can be played with authority and conviction from
first appearance to last exit.

Similarly, Gib and Daw also have their individual characters. Gib
is the dominant partner in the sheep business with Coll. Whereas Coll
contributes strength, traditional values, and stout senses of loyalty
and duty to the fellowship, Gib contributes food and drink and
friendship. He finds a social warmth on the fields that he does not
experience at home. He spends his energies in the play seeking the
basis to make this fellowship true and lasting. At Bethlehem, he finds

that love and compassion have been perfectly revealed in the birth of

152
Christ and have been sanctified in his own life. Daw is the youngest
of the shepherds, hardly more than a boy. He has attached himself to
Gib as his first hired hand. At the beginning of the play, he is
easily frightened by the floods, winds, rains, and storms of the world
and the "sodan syghtys' (137) on the fields at night. In the testing
and proving of his loyalty to the fellowship and husbandry of the
sheep, Daw affirms for himself traditional senses of right and wrong,
duty and honor. From Coll, he has learned something like the chivalric
values that a squire might have learned in earlier times, but he
applies them here to different and more humble circumstances. At
Bethlehem, Daw finds the greatest of 'meruels' in the humblest of
settings, something which ennobles and validates his humble life
immediately where and as it is. In his tenderness and with his gift,
Daw combines the insights of C011 and Gib to see that Christ is both
lord and servant to the world. Ultimately, it will be Daw who carries
this new vision into the future.

The shepherds are difficult to characterize because there is
little to work with in the play itself, and there is not a great deal
to be found about their individual characters in the scholarship as
well. The same cannot be said of Mak, however. The difficulty in
determining a characterization for Mak is that there is nearly too much
written about him and his role in the eeeege_§gepge;ge;_zegeen§. Like
the audiences who enjoyed (and enjoy) these plays, scholars have been
most fascinated by the cycles' malcontent characters--Eve, Cain, Mrs.
Noah, Herod, Pilate, and Mak. On top of that, scholarly interest in

Mak has especially emphasized his typological significance, and with it

153
the typological significance of the whole play. Rosemary Wealf's

comments are not atypical. She writes:

The placing of the Mak episode is in fact important, for,
whilst in one way it provides a type or rather, like the Fall
of Man, an antityps of part of the Redemption, it also
pretends to be in itself a fulfillment of earlier typological
patterns. This is particularly clear in the relationship of
Mak and his wife. Mak in his cottage is obviously a debased
version of St. Joseph, and like St. Joseph he sees himself in
the role of the unhappily married man. But his wife, who is
the leading partner in the fraud, to some extent casts
herself as the second Eve. Thus whilst Mak complains about
the sufferings in an evil marriage, his wife is given to
eeeeeQELee about the virtues of women. . . . Other figures
should similarly be seen in a twofold relationship: for
instance, the sheep purporting to be a baby anticipates the
baby who was symbolically a lamb, but it is also a grotesque
fulfillment of the lamb offered by Abel and the sheep offered
in place of Isaac. (191)

John Gardner makes the direct connection between Mak and Satan:
"Moreover, Mak, however charming and harmless in the pageant, does
introduce, in his character as false God or devil, darker
possibilities--the war of Christ and Satan" (95). And this is only a
small portion of the typological interpretations given to this Nativity

play and those of other cycles.5

These typological interpretations may or may not be helpful in the
characterization of Mak. Arnold Williams, in ”Typology and the Cycle
Plays: Some Criteria," offers three criteria to help determine how
useful any typological interpretation may be to the staging of these
cycle dramas. First, the typological connection or metaphorical
“transference should be striking if it is to have any impact.

Otherwise it is obvious, and so not a real transference” (679).
Second, the typological explication needs to be able to be

"communicated in an actual production designed to be seen and heard,

154
rather than read" (679). Williams's third criterion is perhaps the
most important. He writes: "A play, if it is to have unity, must have
a dramatic purpose, some central meaning, capable of realization within
the limits of stage presentation, around which the whole play is
organized. Granted that a suggested typology is playable, [is it]
appropriate to the dramatic purpose of the play“ (682-83)? Applying
these criteria to the 5eeegg_§hepne£ee;_gegeee§, he cites both the
possibilities and the problems with incorporating typological
interpretations into Mak's characterization.

Of the possibilities, Williams notes that the ”text itself
strongly suggests that Mak is a diabolical creature. He enchants the
shepherds, he wears a wolfskin, he promises to make a fire, which, by
stage lighting, could easily suggest the fires of hell" (682). This
typological identification of Mak with the demonic works. Not only
does Mak look the part of wolf, but he also acts out the wolf's part in
his theft of the sheep. If Christ is the Good Shepherd and his sheep
the Christian faithful, then the wolf, as a devourer of sheep, may be
taken as an image of the devil (cf. Matthew 7:15). The typology is
playable. In our production, the shepherds fell asleep by line 264.
Mak began his enchantment by commending himself to Pontius Pilate (265-
268) and blessing himself and mocking the shepherds with a left-handed
cross. He drew an enchanted "serkyll as rownds as a moyn' (278) about
the shepherds by dropping sparkling dust around their reclining bodies.
While he was doing that, the campfire effect lighting grew more
brightly red to suggest both the unnatural spell and Mak's association

with demonic forces. Our sound effects of lightning and thunder also

155
meant to suggest Mak's disturbance of the natural world. Williams
asks, "Why not make Mak's sheep black. . . “(682)? And so we did.
Having one 'black sheep“ steal another worked and was easily enacted.
This typological connection between Mak and the devil contributes to
the play's unified dramatic meaning. The shepherds search for truth
throughout the play; Mak practices deception. God reveals; the devil
conceals. Christ brings truth into the world (cf. John 1:14; 14:6);
the devil deceives (cf. John 8:44).

There are problems, however, with pushing typological
interpretations too far. Some typological readings can become so
subtle as to be useless to the theatrical medium which depends on
audiences being able to grasp meaning immediately in the play's
physical representation, without the benefit of footnotes or learned
commentary. Williams writes:

When we turn to the interpretations suggested in recent
scholarship, we encounter much subtler readings. Here, we
find that Mak's sheep is a symbol of the ”lamb of God“
instead of an anti-type. One of the Shepherds says,
"Chrystys crosse me spede,‘ another, "Chrystys curs, my
knave". . . [118, 148]. The anachronisms have been
interpreted as prophecies of the event the shepherds are
about to witness. How does one convey that meaning on a
stage? Or establish the identification of Mak, not as a
generalized diabolic agent, but specifically as Antichrist?
(682)
Well, Mak could be played as the Antichrist, but doing so would
disintegrate the play. Mak's role would become more important and
Mak's character would become more serious than either deserves to be.
To play Mak as the Antichrist would make the play his, as if it were

another Herod play. But this would so distort the intent of this

Nativity play as to make it unrecognizable as such. More than this,

156
Mak's character is eeeie, pathetically comic in fact, just as all
pretensions to illicit power and evil must be pathetically comic to the
eye of God. And therein lies the problem of assigning too much
typological significance to him. Mak is not any of those things,
sorcerer or devil or Antichrist. Perhaps he would like to be, but he
is, in the end, only the bumbling, ineffectual pretence of them. He is
no more than a small-time, local hoodlum, who wants to be taken as
someone of great importance--by the shepherds, by Gyll, by himself.
The only one he convinces is himself, and even then the charade does
not last very long.

The actor who plays Mak must search for his character in the
concrete realities of his impoverished life, in his miserable
circumstances of having a scold for a wife and a horde of children to
feed. The actor must devise a rationale for Mak's pretentious behavior
that will sustain his invention and make it comic rather than serious.
Stanislavski's experience in playing Moliere's imaginary invalid is
helpful here, for he had the same problem. He described his search for
his character's major objective this way:

Our first approach was elementary and we chose the theme [i.
e., the objective] 'I wish to be sick.’ But the more effort
I put into it and the more successful I was, the more evident
it became that we were turning a jolly, satisfying comedy
into a pathological tragedy. We soon saw the error of our
ways and changed to: 'I wish to be thought sick.’ Then the
whole comic side came to the fore and the ground was prepared

to show up the way in which the charlatans of the medical
world exploited the stupid Argan, which was what Moliere

meant to 60- (mm 257-58)

Just so with Mak. His major objective is not so substantial as te be
powerful and important, but only 32.22.52229hi powerful and important,

something closer to his abilities, anyway. My character spine for Mak

157
follows. In it, I have tried to counter the shepherds' search for
truth with Mak's desire for respect and need to deceive. His
thresholds, of course, are the shepherds' relentless search for and
discovery of the truth and Gyll's withering derision of his feeble

competence even to deceive.

Character Spine: Mak

UNIT II
921§££1218 To steal one of the shepherds' sheep.
Thresholg: The shepherds' suspicion.
UNIT III
Objective: To impress Gyll with his cleverness at
stealing the sheep.
Thgeshold: Gyll's manipulation of his fear of being
caught.
UNIT IV
Objective: To dissociate himself from the shepherds'
concern for their sheep.
sho : Daw's accusations.
UNIT V
ijective: To get Gyll's assurance that she will assist
him in concealing the stolen sheep.
hr s l : Gyll's demand that he acknowledge her
superiority in the home.
UNIT VII
ijective: To conceal the stolen sheep by deceiving the
shepherds.
IEIQEBQLQS The shepherds' discovery of the truth and

their recovery of the sheep.

MAJOR OBJECTIVE AND THRESHOLD

To establish himself in the eyes of the world and Gyll as a

superior man.

The pursuit of the shepherds after truth, which threatens not
only the success of the theft but also his self image.

158

QDIIS££§£_EQ§§!

Mak is essentially a weak man, spiritually and
physically, with pretensions to superiority. Early in the
play, even Daw feels safe to mock him (218). But Mak is bent
on a course of self-deception and is thus inconstant and
dangerous to those who encounter him. He is now a braggart
in the world ("ich be a yoman" 201) and is frustrated and
bitter at home. He fancies himself better than others, but
through indolence, self indulgence, fundamental cowardice,
over appetite, and pride he has failed to establish personal
strength and integrity. He has wasted his gifts, neglected
his family, and reduced himself to ridicule, poverty, and
near starvation. He seeks not fellowship but subservience,
and he is frustrated all round.

Mak's theft of the sheep comes on the heels of this
recent infatuation with the occult, his association with
exotic personalities, and his participation in the exercise
of forbidden knowledge. He has begun to feel that he has
entered into that special status that he has so long deserved
but has been denied. In the back of his mind, Mak is
terrified at his trafficking with the demonic, but his lack
of will has left him defenseless against temptation. His
danger to others is heightened because he does not fully
understand what he has gotten himself into, and he has not
reckoned what price instant power will exact. It is doubtful
whether he has come to understand the price even at the end
of the play.

I imagine that his theft of the sheep represents Mak's
first attempt to work demonic spells against men. Contrary
to his expectations--even though the magic worked--he is left
in frustration and humiliation. The shepherds still do not
take him seriously! In fact, their blanket-tossing
belittling of Mak suggests that they think him not to be more
dangerous, but simply more ridiculous. Mak's humiliation at
the shepherds' hands will drive him to more subtle, more
serious, and more dangerous ambitions. He will not retract
or repent his choice. He will stray farther and farther from
the truth to become more frustrated, more profoundly evil,
and in the light of Christ's birth, more pathetically comic.

The character spines in the §QEQBQ_§h£2h2£Q1L_EiQ§§n§ align
opposing wills. The shepherds seek truth, Mak and Gyll seek personal
gain through theft and deception, and the Angel and Mary seek witnesses
to the fulfillment of divine prophecy. There are multiple conflicts.

Each shepherd comes to the fellowship to escape some conflict in the

159
world, whether social injustice, marital discord, or the upheavals of
nature. The shepherds' efforts to make a sanctuary for themselves are
disrupted by Mak's invasion of their privacy and violation of their
trust. Among the shepherds there is the tension of Coll's denial of
Gib's and Daw's accusation that Mak stole their sheep. Mak has no
peace at home. Gyll explodes his pretensions and dominates his
behavior. And between the shepherds and Mak and Gyll there is conflict
between those who would find the truth and those who would evade it.
All of these separate conflicts are subordinate to one overriding
quest, that of the shepherds for truth and joy, which finds its sublime
fulfillment in the birth of Christ at Bethlehem. My character through-
line of action for the Second Shepherds' zegeage follows. Its
statement of character major objectives and thresholds outlines these

several conflicts and directs them all toward the play's super-

objective.
Through-Line of Action: cond e he ds' e

a s Ob d .

Coll: Ob. To find a true lord to serve in a changing and
deceitful world.

Th. The temptation to betray his standards in
anger at the theft and deceit of Mak and Gyll-
-the temptation to kill them when they are at
mercy.

Gib: Ob. To find true faith in a life of marital
tribulation and circumstantial woe.

Th. The temptation to believe, because of Mak,
that human relationships are treacherous and
evil.

Daw: Ob. To find true security in a mutable and

terrifying world.

Th. The temptation to believe, because of Mak,
that the world will ever be in upheaval and
danger.

160

Mak: Ob. To establish himself in the eyes of the world
and Gyll as a superior man.
Th. The pursuit of the shepherds after truth,
which threatens not only his retention of the
sheep but also his guarded self-image.

Gyll: Ob. To secure what she believes is rightfully
hers: comfort, respect, gentility.
Th. The pursuit of the shepherds after truth,
which threatens not only her retention of the
sheep but also her guarded self-image.

Angel: Ob. To direct the shepherds to the birthplace of
their Lord and Savior.
Th. The reluctance of the shepherds to be "taken
in” twice.

Mary: Ob. To confirm the truth of Christ's birth.
Th. Her concern for the safety and protection of
her child.
SUPER-OBJECTIVE:

In their search for truth and joy amid the circumstantial
hardships, crumbling values and cheap deceptions of a sinful
world, three humble shepherds endure theft, deception, and
disappointment at the hands of Mak and Gyll, resist the
temptation to exact deadly retribution, reaffirm their faith
in God's providence, and find his truth revealed to them in
the birth of Christ.

The amateur actors who typically perform in modern productions of
the medieval cycle and morality plays need special help from their
directors. Many have never acted before, and only a few have had any
systematic actor training. Almost all of them have not stood before an
audience for any purpose in years. Their initial excitement at the
prospect of acting may turn to anxiety, even stage-fright. Moreover,
as actors of the medieval religious drama, they have to contend with
the special problems of allegory in the morality plays and typology in
the cycle plays, even if they choose to reject those interpretive

approaches. The tension between the written word and the physical

performance--the abstract idea and the specific, concrete act--never

161
lets up. To find their characters the actors must look first to the
human desires, obstacles, conflicts, and resolutions inside the play.
The task is never easy, for good acting requires that actors confront
kindred desires, obstacles, and conflicts within and among themselves.
Constructing character spines not only gives the actors useful and
practical assistance, but it also makes the work of characterization
less intimidating. Actors can anticipate stage actions to perform and
character traits to develop. They have early assurance that their
appearances on stage will be purposeful and important, and that they
will not act the public fool. Each spine helps the individual actor.
Collectively, the spines assure that the independent inventions of the
actors integrate to produce a unified, ensemble performance. The
cumulative expression of these individual spines is summarized in the
play's character through-line of action--the actors' first assurance
that the rehearsals and the performance have credible and attainable
goals and the practical means to reach them.

Stanislavski's device of constructing character spines and
through-lines of action served the needs of the actors in our
productions of Meekine and the §eeeng_§hepne£ge;_fiegeeg§ well. But
developing successful character spines and through-lines of action for
these plays has also had collateral benefits. Both plays developed
their dramatic conflicts from the nature of the character relationships
within them, and not from some external place. That is to say, both
the M33313; playwright and the Wakefield Master wrote character-based
plays. Our happiest discovery in performing Menkgne was that Mankind's

salvation depended on the change in and growth of two characters,

162
Mankind egg Mercy. Their relationship and the relationship between
them and Mischief, the Vices, and Titivillus made the play truly
dramatic. Its successful resolution was no foregone conclusion, but
the result of acute conflicts and hardships and active compassion,
repentance, and forgiveness. The geeeeg_§nepnegge;_£egeene had an
equal portion of character development. The answer to a director's
most fundamental question about the play--why are QQeee shepherds
chosen to witness the birth of Christ and not others?--lies altogether
in the nature of the shepherds' characters. The Angel's selection of
them was not random but reflective of their true hearts and proven
faith. They can recognize, and more importantly, they can testify to,
the truth of Christ's birth, for they themselves have been proven true.
After having read so much of Mak and Gyll in the scholarship, it was my
pleasure to discover the characters and affirm the dominant importance
of the shepherds in their own play! Neither of these plays is readily
forthcoming with abundant and obvious character details, but they do
not thwart a director's looking for them, either. Rather, they reward
such efforts. As with the outline of their dramatic constructions in
the last chapter, the success with which Meegieg and the geeeeg
Shenhsrda;_£assaat sustained constructions of character spines and
through-lines of action suggests that their playwrights were closer in
talent and dramatic achievement than the long standing disparity in

their plays' reputations warrants.

163

NOTES

For an extended discussion of the medieval audience's capability
of sensing associated Biblical and theological meanings behind the
literal contexts of medieval drama, see Erich Auerbach's chapter,
“Adam and Eve“ in Mimeeie (143-173), especially: ”Being a living
representation of Biblical episodes as contained, with their
innately dramatic elements, in the liturgy, [medieval drama] opens
its arms invitingly to receive the simple and untutored and to
lead them from the concrete, the everyday, to the hidden and the
true--precisely as did that great plastic art of the medieval
churches . . .' (155). And, "This [i. e., the figural
interpretation of history] implies that every occurrence, in all
its everyday reality, is simultaneously a part in a world-
historical context through which each part is related to every
other, and thus is likewise to be regarded as being of all times
or above all time" (156). And, "Everything in the dramatic play
which grew out of the liturgy during the Middle Ages is part of
one--and always the same--context: of one great drama whose
beginning is God's creation of the world, whose climax is Christ's
Incarnation and Passion, and whose expected conclusion will be
Christ's second coming and the Last Judgment. The intervals
between the poles of action are filled partly by figuration,
partly by imitation, of Christ" (158). See also Auerbach's
discussion of "figura' earlier in the same work (72 ff.). Arnold

Williams's articles, ”Medieval Allegory: An Operational Approach"

164
and "Typology and the Cycle Plays: Some Criteria,” are also useful
in sorting out allegorical functions and characteristics and their
practical applications to the staging of medieval drama.
As the quotation that begins this chapter illustrates,
Stanislavski called the plotting of a character's cumulative
sequence of unit objectives leading to a major objective a
”score,“ a carry-over from his early years of musical training.
Over time, the term “spine" has come to replace "score," connoting
better Stanislavski's idea of constructing an imaginative, living
conduit for the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the actor's
character.
As Arnold Williams writes: 'Newguise, Nowadays, and mischief [sic]
are engaging fellows, if you don't look too deeply. Mercy seems
priggish and pompous. But isn't vice always more attractive than
virtue? Would there be any moral problem were it not so“ ("Moral
Play” 18)?
The intentions of Magkin 's playwright are not wholly recoverable.
Nor is it possible to demonstrate that what he thought he was
doing is altogether what I may now think he was doing.
Nonetheless, they need thinking about. What stands between the
Mania. the W. the We. and
genie; (or Qe;_Ieen, for that matter) are these old moralities.
They are good plays in themselves, but more than that, they
suggest themselves to be the workshops in which writers for the
theater developed a way to enact the drama of the soul upon the

rough-hewn boards of the stage.

165
Woolf suggests that the shepherds' references to sheep rot in the
Chester Nativity play are meant to invoke a connection between
“the sheep dying of IQE' and ”mankind before the Incarnation”
(186). Writing about the shepherds in the Nativity play in Luge;
geyegegiee, she says that the “author is evidently influenced by
allegorical expositions in which the shepherds (peggegee)
mystically signified the clergy who also watch over their flocks
and.can penetrate to a spiritual meaning beneath the letter of the
text“ (183). V. A. Kolve suggests that the shepherds' feasting in
the Nativity Plays may be taken as a type of the Christmas feast
that followed a season of Advent fasting (159-166). Though Kolve
cites possible typological connections between the apparently
contentious relationships of the youngest of the shepherds and his
elders in the Chester and Towneley plays and the festive role of
the Boy Bishop, the overthrow of Herod, and the harrowing of Hell
only to reject them, Rosemary Woolf extends the connection by
suggesting that the wrestling match in Chester is a type of ”the
defeat of Goliath by David, 'that Shepherd with his Sling', as
Herod calls him in the next play" (187). John Gardner argued
that: "The §BEHQQ£_22§£Q£QE is in a sense an exploration of the
Christian significance of the number three: the pageant focuses on
three shepherds; it begins with three soliloquies which open the
first of three distinct movements; it treats three motifs
appropriate to the Nativity story--1aw, charity, and wonder--and
associates these motifs with parts of the Holy Trinity; it closes

with three adorations of the Christ child and the giving of three

166
symbolic gifts. The threes are by no means simply graceful
embellishment. They are the heart of the matter" (85). Gardner
went on to argue that ”each of the three shepherds calls to mind a
specific aspect of the Trinity. Coll comes to be related to
Wisdom, Gyb to Love, Daw to Power“ (92). Martin Stevens, however,
finds a different ”heart“ for the play in the significance of its
music. He writes: "What has happened then in the overall progress
of the Second Shepherds' play is a wholesale elevation of tone.
The most dissonant voices of the secular world have been stilled,
and the singers of popular song have been inspired by angelic
example to raise their voices in sacred harmony to celebrate the
birth of Christ. For the Wakefield author the ultimate interest
in the Second Shepherds' play is to elevate the language of his
rustics in order that they might find the right tone in which to
hail God” (179). The stolen sheep has several typological
meanings. As Lawrence J. Ross writes: ”For the sheep, the figure
for spiritually graced simplicity and innocence, is not only the
most common symbol of the eucharistic Victim (the Paschal Lamb
being the gypge_gh£;e§i_igeegnengi). It is also used to represent
'that which was lost' which 'the Son of Man is come to save'
(Matt. 18:11). In the parable in Luke 15:3-7, the shepherd's
placing of the found sheep upon his shoulders was glossed as
Christ's assumption of human nature in order to carry the burden
of human sin. And the sheep of 'stoice with me for I have found
my sheep which was lost' was interpreted, not just as the

individual repentant sinner, but as all graced humanity which the

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Pastor restored to heaven. 2e;11§_ee_ingeeee_ee§; 'What grace we
haue fun' [found] cry the shepherds at the close (1. 751)." And
on and on. The list of typological reverberations in this play

seems almost endless.

V. A Community of Players:
Actor Training, Rehearsal, and Performance

The post, the actor, the artist, the tailor, the stage hand
serve one goal, which is placed by the poet in the very basis

of his play. (Stanislavski, My_Li1e_ig_M;§ 298)

No one who acts in any play acts alone. Even in plays that have
only one character (e. 9., Mark Twain Tonighe or zhe Belle ef Amnegeg),
the actor still does not act alone, for he or she works closely
throughout rehearsals and may continue to work intermittently during
performance runs with the director. He or she may have occasional
rehearsal and performance assistance from vocal, movement, dance, and
dialect coaches, or from other specialty support people. During
performance, the actor works in collaboration with a small army of
technical support people, applying, maintaining, "aging,” or otherwise
changing character make-up with the help of specialists in that art,
changing costumes with the aid of wardrobe personnel, acting on a set
that has been constructed and is maintained by a crew of skilled
artisans, using properties supplied and arranged by the property master
and crew, being “presented" to best effect by acting in coordination
with complex and delicately arranged lighting and sound cues set and
run by highly skilled technicians, and on and on. If the production

travels, then there are additional crews to handle the special demands

168

169
of transportation. The list of personnel involved in even the most
modest productions can thus be long.

The same network of group effort and mutual support works in more
elaborate productions that include numbers of characters. Each
character has purpose and meaning in relation to all of the others. No
one actor in those plays can appear on stage and be seen or heard or
understood without the help of fellow actors, costumers, make-up
artists, set designers, and lighting, sound, and property crews. These
relationships are complex and dynamic. They are never exactly the same
from one performance to the next. A papular method of staging Jean
Anouilh's Becket, in fact, is to have the actors playing Thomas Becket
and Henry II switch roles periodically! Sometimes unexpected
circumstances can change relationships during a single performance, one
reason for understudies. In short, there are no absolutes in
performance, except perhaps for the constant state of mutual
dependency. What is more, the work of the actors is not complete until
expression becomes communication. The play is fulfilled in the actors'
communication with an audience that is willing to share belief (or to
suspend disbelief) in the imaginative reality of performance. For the
duration of the play, actors and audience share belief, empathy, trust,
good faith, and mutual dependency, and thereby unite their separate
communities into one.

Like all communities, the community of performance is a collection
of individuals united by common senses of value and identity. The
person most responsible for ensuring that the actors and technical

support personnel for a dramatic performance will share one common

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interpretive vision of the play and its production is the director. As
I have argued in the preceding chapters, directors are responsible for
the construction of performance scripts, the articulation of both the
thematic and the character-based through-lines of action, and the
development of the character spines. That work, as Stanislavski
characterized it, is bent on articulating the “one goal“ of
performance, "which is placed by the poet in the very basis of his
play” (My_Li1e_in_M;e 298). All of that preliminary work is completed
long before directors ever cast their plays or meet with the technical
support personnel. But that is not all of the work that directors have
to do. The director is also responsible for devising strategies by
which those who will constitute any play's production may realize the
performance goal. Directors of medieval drama are responsible, more
often than not, for devising strategies for enthusiastic, but
inexperienced students and community volunteers to become actors,
actors to become characters, individual characters to become casts, the
casts and technical crews to become production companies, and the
companies to achieve performances. At every stage of the progress
toward performance, the one overriding purpose to any director's
interpretive and production strategies is to turn a collection of
individuals of widely different backgrounds, interests, experiences,
and abilities into a community of singular purpose.

This chapter, then, presents strategies of actor training,
rehearsal, and performance to achieve that end. It assumes that most
who are interested in producing medieval drama will have to teach the

fundamentals of acting to bright, but inexperienced students and

171
volunteers. In many cases, these “directors' may be as new to the
theater arts as their student and volunteer actors. Their likely
training as literary scholars, though helpful to the work on the
performance script and the through-lines of action and character spine
interpretations, may become something of a hindrance when theory has to
become practice. Nothing kills an actor's will to perform more quickly
than exhaustive lectures or discussions. Rather sooner than later, the
actor needs to quit listening and talking about the play and begin
acting it out. Understanding must become some order of concrete
experience shared and expressed by all who participate in the
production. While this chapter will have its say on actor training,
rehearsal, and performance, it cannot supplant, but only complement the
actual experience of "doing" medieval drama by giving those who
undertake it some assurance that the experience can be well structured,
enlightening, and enjoyable.

The fundamental lesson of acting--that actors need to get their
minds off themselves and on what they are doing--is easy to state, but
difficult to practice. The exercises to help beginning actors learn
this truth accomplish two ends. Not only do they teach a fundamental
truth of acting, but they also begin the process of establishing a
sense of community among the players. All share the same arduous,
sometimes silly and embarrassing exercises together, and their common
experiences are mutually binding. The rehearsal period concentrates on
translating collective individual understandings into believable group
behavior appropriate to the imaginative reality of the play. The

processes of building a character and creating a role are integrative.

172
The actor builds a character by integrating the separate moments of the
character's life on stage into a seamless movement, something which is
initially plotted by the director in the character spine. The actor
creates a role by integrating the movement of his or her character into
the complex progress of the whole play, something which is outlined in
the play's through-lines of action. Performance is the medium through
which practiced expression among the actors becomes active
communication with an audience. Among the joys of live performance is
the actors' gradual realization that they are not simply "on display,"
but are instead interacting among themselves and with the audience.
What is more, the audience has come to the performance for the very
experience of participating in imaginative play by supporting the
actors' efforts. In the end, both actors and audience constitute one
community of players.

Before I go on to provide more details of the strategies and
mechanisms to train actors, conduct rehearsals, and sustain
performances, I need to make explicit an ethos of human relationships
in the theater that I have as yet only implied. I do this because I
want to make very clear that the translation of intellectual
understanding into human behavior is not simply the result of scholarly
research, no matter how brilliant. The drama of any play lives among
those who enact it, and nowhere else. No amount of program notes or
post facto rationalizations can mask the failure of a production to
express something true about the human condition, however ancient or
modern. That human truth is what the actors are ultimately responsible

for portraying. As the actors come to realize and accept that

173
responsibility, they face the prospect of behaving in ways that may be
quite beyond the expressive range of their normal public selves. The
confidence and power that stage actors may seem to have in performance
are not infrequently preceded--and perhaps accompanied--by doubts and
fears and feelings of acute vulnerability. Responsible work in the
theater can be exhilarating; irresponsible work can be devastating to
the psyche of the actors and the production companies. Ultimately,
director are responsible for ensuring that the artistic and ethical
bonds among all those involved in any production are nurturing,
supportive, and principled.

What helped to attain a principled order of relationships for
Stanislavski and the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre and what has
helped to attain a similar order of relationships among my casts and
crews is a statement of purpose that subordinates personal ego to
performance integrity. The ideal of the Moscow Art Theatre was based
on a clearly understood hierarchy of values and ethics. At the top of
that hierarchy is the inviolate integrity of the play itself, ”placed
by the poet in [its] very basis." Next in importance is the work of
the actors, who bear responsibility for making the drama live among its
characters; they serve the play by serving each other. Serving the
actors are all of the technical support personnel, whose work is meant
to make the actors' task easier and more communicable. And serving all
of them--actors and crews--is the director. The detailed work of the
previous chapters may suggest that the entire production exists to
fulfill the overriding purpose of the director, but just the opposite

is true. My work as a director is meticulous because the work of so

174

many other people depends on it. By the time my production company
begins performance, I ought to be the least important (and least
necessary) person in the whole company. Like a parent who must let go
of the child grown to maturity, the director who has done his work well
needs to let the production company take confident charge of its own
play and then get out of the way. The director's love, too, is one
that wills toward separation.

* * ,

The processes of actor training, rehearsal, and performance are
progressive, moving always from understanding to expression, from the
needs of the single actor to the needs of the cast, from the experience
of the production company to the experience of the community of
performance. The guide through these progressive stages is the
director. Once work on the performance script has been completed, once
the research on the play is completed, once the through-lines of action
and character spines have been devised, the director must leave the
library and begin the process of transforming the performance script
into human behavior. The director is the one who coaxes the actor out
of the person and the play out of the cast. At every stage of these
processes the director restates and reinforces the fundamental lessons
of giving expression to understanding and of integrating the single
person or event into the communal experience.

Most who act in the modern productions of the medieval cycle and
morality plays need some introduction to the actors' craft. Apart from
the relatively professional productions of these plays in England at

York and Chester, Cornwall and Wakefield, productions elsewhere have

175
relied heavily on volunteer amateur actors, mostly students and
interested townsfolk in or associated with an academic community, as at
the University of Toronto or in Professor Edgar Schell's current
project to produce and videotape the N-Town cycle at the University of

California at Irvine.1

Of the graduate students who have acted in the
five productions of medieval drama that I have so far directed (some 50
students), none had any actor training, and only three had any
university level theater experience of any sort. One term's or
semester's work on producing one of these plays will not make these
actors professional or even very polished. However, one term's or
semester's work done responsibly will ensure that their understanding
of how drama comes to be fulfilled through production will be well
grasped and that their resultant performance will be credible at least,
and receptive to inspiration. To neglect training in the actor's craft
would risk putting people of good will and generous spirit into
positions of public discomfort (at least) or excruciating
embarrassment. Medieval drama for them and their audiences would thus
carry indelible associations with theatrical experiences of the crudest
sort--a disservice to the drama, the actors, and the audience.

The work of actors toward the perfection of their craft can occupy
a lifetime. Stanislavski and his colleagues at the Moscow Art Theatre
devoted their lives to the discovery of new insights into the actor's
art. They would rehearse some plays for months. One reason that
Stanislavski's record of his discoveries has taken so long to be

published outside the Soviet Union is that he never stopped revising

his notes, just as he never stopped refining his acting technique. Lee

176
Strasberg, Harold Clurman, and Cheryl Crawford envisioned the same
sense of dedication and discipline for their actors, when they founded
the Group Theatre in America in 1931. The work begun by the Group
Theatre survives in part in The Actors Studio, which provides advanced
training in Stanislavski techniques for experienced actors. Much of
what occupies the time of such actors there is work on subtle internal
and interpersonal techniques that may take years to master. That level
of performance is quite beyond the normal expectations for the amateur
actors in university productions of medieval drama. But simply because
these actors cannot become young Brandos or Woodwards in one term or
semester does not mean that they cannot perform credibly on stage and
that their performances cannot have meaning and emotive power for them
and their audiences. After all, Stanislavski's techniques were devised
for young, untrained actors first. These techniques will not inhibit
the flowering of genius, but they do not require it.

The fundamental elements of actor training amount to providing a
means by which beginning actors can bring themselves to a state of
readiness for rehearsal and performance. In theatrical parlance, this
training amounts to "tuning the instruments" of the actor's body,
attention, imagination, and will. Actors need to be able to move
easily and expressively, and their voices must project clearly and
without strain. Their performance will not be hindered if their
movement can attain some grace and their voices produce some variety,
if not music. The medieval cycle and morality plays are written in
verse, and the style of acting they require includes some ability to

reflect the timbre, pitch, and rhythm of their lines. In many of these

177
plays (certainly in Meekigg and the 5eeegg_§hephe£ge;_2egeen§), the
characters have occasion to sing. In Meeging, Mischief, the Vices,
Titivillus, and a reluctant Mankind also dance. Actors need to be able
to execute actions with conviction, and without self-defeating
inhibitions. They need to be able to focus attention on the stage, and
not let routine distractions from outside the field of play disrupt the
progress of dramatic action. And actors need to sense that their work
individually and collectively becomes "drama“ when it involves some
degree of struggle to attain some objective against some obstacle
threshold. These five elements--physical relaxation, vocal projection,
concentration on action, focused attention, and objective/threshold
struggle--constitute the basis of training for those who have acted in
our productions of medieval drama. They are as much as any beginning
actor can learn in half a term or semester, and while they do not
address all aspects of the actor's craft, they are enough to ensure
credibility and inspire self-confidence.

I have used exercises in physical relaxation and vocal projection
both to teach expression and to cultivate a sense of community. In
every cast, I have found that at least two of the actors have had
experience in physical conditioning and vocal training. Instead of
conducting the exercises myself, I have asked that these cast members
take on the responsibilities of leading regular, low-impact stretching
and aerobic warmup exercises and of leading vocal warmups and singing
before every class meeting and rehearsal. I plan the progressive
regimens with them, but follow their lead along with the rest of the

company. The physical warmups accomplish two ends. The exercises

178
themselves over time serve to limber and strengthen the actors' bodies.
The stretching exercises, from head rolls to leg and back stretches,
are important sources of relaxation. Tight muscles cannot be very
expressive; it is essential that the actor's primary instrument be
relaxed and flexible. Also, the actor needs some amount of physical
conditioning, for live performances do not allow for commercial
respites every six minutes or so, as in television, or for the play to
stop midstream for the actors to rethink, reset, and try the scene
again, as in film. The actor who played Mischief in our production of
Maekin , for example, had to speak, sing, whisper, shout, walk, run,
dance, crawl, leap, strut, swagger, and tiptoe about the stage.

The same principle applies to the relaxation, conditioning, and
articulation of the voice. We have used our vocal warmups not only to
teach and practice breathing techniques, tone production, articulation,
and projection, but also to structure frequent and regular practices in
singing the music of the play. The Agincourt Carol that we used in the
§£22D§_§h§2h££§1L_2§Q§£D§ is not simple, and our repeated singing of it
not only assured our learning it, but also the group effort in
practicing the carol was effective support for the actor who played
Coll, who had the greatest responsibility for singing it during
performance. From the very first training session, the actors take
significant responsibilities for themselves and thus begin to create a
group identity. And it is vitally important that they begin to sense
early on that their identity is separate from the director's, whether

they are consciously aware of it or not.

179

The most basic lesson in acting is that the actor must concentrate
on action, and not on self. Behind Stanislavski's dictum that “One
must love art, and not one's self in art" (N¥_LLIQ_LD_A£§ 298) is the
fundamental truth that actors cannot perform with full expression or
credibility if their attention is dominated by a self-conscious and
inhibiting awareness of themselves in the act of performing.
Stanislavski attacked this problem by giving his beginning actors ever
more complicated physical problems to solve on stage, thereby forcing
them to concentrate more and more on attaining some tangible objective
and less and less on being watched by themselves or anyone else. The
goal was for the actor to be able to create a sense of ”Solitude in
Public," which Stanislavski described as the ability to concentrate
attention on specific "circles“ of details and activities so that
during "a performance, before an audience of thousands, you can always
enclose yourself in this circle like a snail in its shell" (Me_Me§e;
zgepegee 78). Stanislavski's snail simile is a little unfortunate, for
the actor neither intends to hide from the audience nor construct
impenetrable barriers against expression or communication. Rather,
public solitude is meant to free the expressive powers of the actor and
enhance communication, for the actor's concentration is absorbed by
detail and action and not by self. The actor becomes the action, much
as Yeats's dancer became the dance.

The first actor exercise that I was taught, and the first exercise
that I teach my actors, is one that counteracts the beginning actor's
tendency toward self-conscious inhibition. The exercise amounts to

having each actor, one by one, sing four repetitions of "Happy

180

Birthday," changing the circumstances of the song each time. The first
time that the actor sings the song, I ask that he or she sing simply,
without “interpretation" or gesture, stand still, and keep the arms
relaxed and at the side. The actors almost always have a difficult
time. They are nervous, stiff, and awkward; they fidget. Their voices
are strained and at a higher-than-normal singing pitch for them. Their
fellow actors who make up the audience are equally nervous, and their
anxious laughter easily distracts the singer. The second time that the
actor sings the song, I ask that he or she do all that I asked the
first time, but also jump up and down. There are more protestations,
false starts, apologies, and embarrassed laughter, until my insistence
carries the actor through. The third time, I ask that the actor sing
the song while skipping in a circle (or dancing a dance), holding each
note for exactly the same length of time: "Haaap Pyyy Birrrth Daaay
tooo Youuu. . . .” The actor continues until the simultaneous tasks
have been mastered, which usually takes about three or four repetitions
for the actor to resolve to get down to business, concentrate on the
multiple actions, and complete the exercise. The fourth time that the
actor sings the song is under the same circumstances as the first.
There is always a change in the actor's performance. The actor's body
is more relaxed, the voice has lowered to a more comfortable pitch, and
the song is sung simply, directly, and without hesitation.

There are many useful lessons for the actor packed into this
apparently simple song exercise. Lee Strasberg, who routinely used his
own variation of this exercise at the Actors Studio, thinks that it

trains "the actor to break his verbal habits and to extend his ability

181
to control his expressiveness” (A_n;eemLej_£eeeien 156). He thinks
that the lessons are so important and the exercise so beneficial that
he devotes seven pages to describing its effects on his actors (153-
59). Strasberg emphasizes again and again that the key to the
performance of this song is the exercise of the actor's will, and that
in exercising that will the actor learns that he may speak and move in
ways that are far removed from those that are habitual and
conventional. Strasberg believes that the discovery of such capacities
is liberating for the actor. He writes that this exercise and others
like it "develop and strengthen the voice and body by eliminating the
stifling grip of habit and the inhibiting factors of nonexpression
encouraged by social conditioning” (159-60). Strasberg also writes
that he discovered something of additional value:
. . . the actor's basic attitude when he faces the public.
No matter what the actor is prepared to do on the stage, he
is more concerned with the audience than he is with what he
should be doing. In this particular exercise, I discovered
that the actor did not have any imaginary life to hide
behind; there was nothing to deflect his attention from the
audience. . . . This was the first time I was aware that the
actor could be concerned about the audience even when he was
not called upon to act. The mere attitude of standing before
the public would start many things going in the actor, even
when he was called upon to perform a seemingly simple task.
(154-55)
Strasberg's insights into the actor's work and relation to the audience
are true, but perhaps directed too much to the needs of the
professional actor. The "Happy Birthday" song exercise makes sense to
and does useful service for the beginning actor as well.
My beginning actors and I have had the same reactions to the song

exercise as Strasberg's more experienced actors at the Actors Studio,

and I have two lessons to add to his that are based on our experience.

182

First, the exercise is well suited for beginning actors because its
execution depends more on the director's will than that of the actors,
who may have great difficulty at this time in overcoming performance
inertia on their own. The exercise is an immediate “ice-breaker.” The
actors conform to the director's will for any of several reasons: the
desire to learn, the desire to please, the desire to retain membership
in the "community“ by sharing a common (and unavoidable) experience.
Whatever the reason, their primary motivation to do this first exercise
is external. Eventually, the actors must find a method of developing
self-sustaining motivations to action. As a first step, though, this
exercise is invaluable, for the actors learn through immediate and
personal experience that performance requires concentration on detail
and action. The greater the actor's ability to concentrate on detail
and action, the greater the likelihood that performance expression will
be free of self-conscious inhibitions. And second, by having every
member of the company go through the same exercise the director creates
something like a rite of initiation. From that moment on, the actors
share a common experience that begins to give them a feeling of
individual achievement and a sense of group identity, both well earned.

The attention that I have given to the ”Happy Birthday” song
exercise may seem disproportionate to the needs of amateur actors
preparing to perform medieval drama. Some readers may wonder if the
cycle and morality plays require actors to sing with such apparent
abandon or accompany their singing with anything like the exercise
behavior. The answer was found in the very first production that we

staged. The Vices in Menging taunt Mankind with a scatological song

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a that is ”about as bad a sample as has ever been written down”
(Williams, Qgeme 156). In our production Nought led the antiphonal
singing, and had the audacity to ask the audience to join her,
Mischief, and the rest of the Vices in singing the repetitive
responses. The lyrics are:

It ys wretyn wyth a coll, yt ys wretyn wyth a cole,

He pat schytyth wyth hys hoyll, he pat schytyth wyth hys

hoyll,

But he wyppe hys ars clen, but he wyppe his ars clen,

On hys breche yt xall be sen, on hys breche yt

xall be sen. (335, 337, 339, 341)
The actors who were required to launch that assault on decency with
lusty voices and pantomimed Obscenities must have felt then that the
"Happy Birthday” song exercise more than justified itself. Perhaps by
then, it may have seemed a bit tame.

There was another occasion for song that required even more of my
actors. In our production of the Secoee §gepnegds' gageege, Daw was
called upon to revive the spirits of Coll after the final confrontation
with Mak and Gyll. We inserted a reprise of the Agincourt Carol just
after line 637, which we rewrote to read "Do, as I say you." The
challenge for the actors was to use the song to express Daw's love and
understanding to Coll, and by that expression of love to rescue Coll's
sense of purpose and personal worth. That the actors were able to play
the moment truthfully meant two things. Their expression of genuine
affection for one another was no longer constrained by ”the stifling
grip of habit and the inhibiting factors of nonexpression encouraged by
social conditioning.” And the motivation to express the love between

them was by then their own, and no longer the imposition of the

director's external will.

184

The method by which actors may learn to develop a self-sustaining
motivation to action is progressive, beginning with the most elemental
pantomime and ending with two-person scene work. The object of this
progression is to refine the actor's focus of attention through
successive stages of ever more complicated stage action. I have used a
five-step progression, three pantomime exercises for individual actors,
one silent two-person exercise, and one two-person dialogue scene.
These exercises are not just more progressively complicated. Each
separately and all five together require that the actors work to attain
some specific objective by overcoming some order of resistance, the
basis of dramatic conflict. Each exercise depends on the actors
inventing their own objectives and obstacle thresholds. Their
motivation to act is directly related to their own invention, and their
will to perform ever more internal and self-sustaining. There is
nothing sacrosanct about this five-step progression, but I have found
that the pace of one step a week provides the actors with sufficient
orientation to the craft and leaves enough time in the term or semester
to rehearse and perform the play.

The first pantomime exercise is to carry a heavy object from one
side of the stage to the other. The pantomime includes the lift, the
carry, and the setting down of the object. The challenge for the
actors is that they can use no props. They must choose an object at
home, practice the exercise with it, and then re-create their movements
without the physical object itself. To perform this pantomime well,
the actor needs to pay attention to the size, shape, weight, and

texture of the object, the muscle coordination and effort to lift, the

185

strategy by which the legs, arms, hands, and back adjust to carry such
a load, and the redistribution of weight and muscle tension to set the
object down and release it. For the audience to “believe“ the work of
the actor, it must be able to 'see'_the non-existent object and the
effect of its shape and weight on the actor. If the actors do not see
these things, no one else will either. Typically, the problems actors
face with this exercise are losing the object's weight and shape. The
handles on suitcases, for example, have size and form, and the actors
fail to convince anyone if their hands simply squeeze shut and carry
nothing more than air. The more that the actors become absorbed in the
detail of this exercise, the more their attention is focused on
accurately replicating the actual work. The greater the attention to
detail, the more they believe their own actions, and the more the
audience believes them, too.

This exercise had direct applications to the stagings of Megkine
and the §QEQDQ.§h22h§£Q§L.£§Q§ln§o Both of our productions of 3335139
had minimal sets, only two tables and a few benches and chairs, and no
walls or backdrops. We intended to keep the spirit of the original
troupe of players, who had to adapt their performance to the
circumstances of many different settings (of. Eccles xlii). Our
productions of MegMiee were performed on campus lawns, on portable
outdoor stages, and on the indoor stage of the Shaw Theatre in
Kalamazoo, Michigan. Wherever we performed, we had to make the play's
tavern and cornfield settings real to ourselves and to the audience,

something which demanded that we “see” and believe in surroundings that

were not actually there. Also, the §eeond ghepherde' gageeng begins

186
with the shepherds taking shelter from the cold, wind, and rain of a
raging storm by huddling around the warmth of a campfire. We had no
actual temperature drop or wind or rain or fire, though we did have
sound and lighting cues to help create the illusion of these elements.
The actors had to create the realities of those elements, though,
largely through the strength of their pantomime, the direct performance
application of their first pantomime exercise.

The second and third exercises require the actors to add physical
and musical elements to their individual pantomimes. The exercises are
two to three minutes each. In the second exercise, the actors use
three actual props to define a “dramatic" circumstance, clarify an
objective, and overcome an obstacle threshold. For his exercise, one
actor pantomimed a strategy for a child to use a kitchen step ladder to
pilfer cookies from a jar set high on a shelf, without making a sound.
Similarly, in our production of the §econd Shepherde' gegeant, Mak had
to steal food, drink, and an uncooperative sheep without waking the
three shepherds. The third exercise adds music to the pantomime. The
music requires that the actors learn to synchronize their actions to
external rhythms and to sense an appropriate connection between the
emotional content of the music and that of the dramatic moment. A
three-minute piece of music will likely have a well-developed
construction that builds toward a musical climax, something that also
affects the pacing and content of the pantomime exercise. When I first
did this exercise myself, I used a few minutes of recorded music from

the film Erem gussie, wiEh Move, a "James Bond" spy thriller, to

accompany my pantomimed theft of a watermelon from a farmer's field.

187
The senses of timing and emotional connotation and movement also have
their application to medieval drama. In the §eeeng_§heenegge;_£egeeg§,
for example, the shepherds move from the farce and anger of the
confrontation at Mak's cottage to the pathos of their recovery on the
fields and then to the sublime visitation by the Angel in a matter of
minutes. The physical and emotional transitions within and among these
scenes are handled by a mixture of dialogue, pantomime, set changes,
and music.
The last two exercises in this short course on acting involve two
actors working together. The first of the two--the "mirror" exercise--
is a staple of beginning acting classes. One actor initiates a
sequence of action, while a second actor (facing the first) duplicates
those actions as a “mirror" reflection. That is, if the first actor
raises her right arm, the second actor raises his left. Viola Spolin
notes that this exercise ”can give you a quick index into each
student's natural sense of play, clowning, inventiveness, ability to
create tension, and timing" (60). It is also a means to sharpen
observation skills and to discipline the attention. Spolin suggests a
useful variation to this exercise:
Have student-actors use this exercise without telling their
audience which one of the two is the mirror. This effort to
confound the audience demands a heightened concentration and
produces a more intense involvement with the problem and each
other. This is an early step in breaking down the walls
between actor and actor and actor and audience. (61)

As with the first pantomime, this exercise requires that the actors who

are "playing" mirrors focus attention off themselves and on what their

partners are doing. Both actors must work as a team; the illusion

188
cannot work if either actor breaks concentration or acts without
consideration for the other.

The effects of actors working closely together in this fashion can
be compelling. In Mengeee, the actors playing Titivillus and Mankind
worked closely together to make the nightmare dream sequence (594-604)
the turning point of the play. Titivillus's nightmare vision has its
own Fbuild," climax, and denouement. From 'Alasse, Mankynde, alasse!
Mercy has stown a mere" (594) to ”Trust no more on hym, he ya a marryde
man" (600), Titivillus plants one lie after another in the brain of the
sleeping Mankind. Mercy "stown a mare” (594), "runn away fro hys
master" (595), "stale both a hors and a nets" (596), "brake hys neke as
he rode in Fraunce' (597), and "rydyth on be galouse' (598). As the
lies got worse and worse, our Mankind's reactions in sleep got more and
more agitated, a new and more violent reaction to each new lie. Each
reaction so tortured Mankind that he was wrenched up, even in sleep, so
that at the gallows lie he was propped up to nearly a sitting position
by the full extension of his right arm to the ground. At "Trust no
more on hym” Titivillus's demeanor turned from one of "playful" torment
to one of ferocious hatred. With each new command, Titivillus hammered
at Mankind's vulnerable spirit, until it and his body were flattened by
despair. Jabbing at Mankind with his trident, Titivillus says ”Aryse
and asks mercy of Neu Gyse, Nowadays, and Nought" (602), "pi own wyff
brethell, and take pe a lemman” (604), with each phrase knocking
Mankind back down a bit more. The coordination of this sequence
between the two actors playing Mankind and Titivillus was carefully

done, for Mankind had to be able to react without being able to see

189
Titivillus. And Titivillus could not rush headlong through his lines,
without attending to Mankind's reactions. Action and appropriate
reaction, one character's behavior having meaning only in the context
of the other character's response, and attention focused on doing
several things simultaneously--these are the essential lessons of the
”mirror” exercise.

The last exercise that I have used with these beginning actors is
a two- or three-minute "nonsense“ dialogue. Two actors work with a
page of dialogue that has been taken out of an existing dramatic
context or invented by me out of whole cloth. Their task is to
integrate the work of the first four exercises and add the dimension of
speech to their pantomime and work with props. The heart of the
exercise lies in the actors' collective struggle to invent for
themselves a dramatic circumstance that will provide character
motivations and one overriding conflict for this scene. It is not
necessary for the audience to recognize what the dramatic circumstance
or conflict is. The important lesson is in the actors creating a
dramatic moment that has an imaginative reality for them. Often the
audience can recognize the dramatic circumstances, but the exercise is
a success if the audience is convinced that the actors are behaving
according to some mutually understood and compelling reason.

I have adapted some lines from Samuel Beckett's E51E1D9_£9£_§QQQ£
for this exercise, because a number of its passages at first seem
unconnected and barely referential to other moments or events inside or
outside the play. For the purposes of this exercise, the less

referential the dialogue the better. The following scene is an example

190

of one such adapted excerpt. I have omitted the character names and

stage directions to minimize the chance of character recognition or

external interpretive influence.

“Nonsense" Dialogue

Now? . . . . There you are again . . . . There we are
again . . . . There I am again.

You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel
better alone too.

Then why do you always come crawling back?

I don't know.

No, but I do. It's because you don't know how to defend
yourself. I wouldn't have let them beat you.

You couldn't have stopped them.

Why not?

There was ten of them.

No, I mean before they beat you. I would have stopped
you from doing whatever it was you were doing.

I wasn't doing anything.

Then why did they beat you?

I don't know.

Ah no, . . . the truth is there are things escape you
that don't escape me, you must feel it yourself.

I tell you I wasn't doing anything.

Perhaps you weren't. But it's the way of doing it that
counts, the way of doing it, if you want to go on
living.

I wasn't doing anything.

You must be happy too, deep down, if you only knew it.
Happy about what?

To be back with me again.

Would you say so?

Say you are, even if it's not true.

What am I to say?

Say, I am happy.

I am happy.

80 am I.

So am I.

We are happy.

We are happy. . . . What do we do now, now that we are

helppy? (W 38-39)

There is no one right solution to playing this scene, because its

dramatic circumstances are wholly within the control of the actors'

imaginative response to the dialogue. If six teams of actors do the

exercise, there ought to be six very different scenes played. Each

191
team must invent a situation, determine characterizations, and define
the underlying conflict. The actors then pursue their characters'
motivational objectives and struggle to overcome their obstacle
thresholds. They use the dialogue as the principal expression of their
action. Each team's success is directly related to its willingness to
share the process of invention and to believe in and depend on the work
of each other.2

The problems of this little scene are not so far removed from
those often presented by the cryptic dialogue in much of the medieval
drama. A first reading of the campfire scene in the fieeeee_§nepne£ge;
2399395 (145-189, plus the song) seems to present problems similar to
the "nonsense" dialogue exercise. Its brevity seemingly defies the
actors' attempts to find the playwright's clues to the character and
history of the relationship among the three shepherds. What is their
reason for congregating together on such a night? What conflict, if
any, exists among them? Is it serious or playful? Are they friends or
enemies? What resolutions do their speech and action effect?

The campfire scene is the only place in the whole play where the
Wakefield Master gives the actors a brief, but uninterrupted
opportunity to define their relationship. They must not waste the
moment. In our production, the shepherds came to the fields for true
fellowship. They were escaping the tribulations of the world, which
seemed to pursue them everywhere--in social oppression, marital woe,
and unnaturally stormy weather. They worked together to make a
sanctuary against such hardship and to affirm the value of their mutual

esteem and love. These 45 lines of dialogue are crucial to the whole

192
play, for they establish the inherent good nature and good will of
these three men. Without first establishing this relationship, the
events that eventually befall the shepherds would have little
justification or emotional effect. Beyond the dialogue, though, the
shepherds shared fire, food, drink, blankets, laughter, and song. They
enjoyed themselves. The scene was the actors' fusion of focused
attention, concentrated action, and compelling character objectives and
obstacle thresholds expressed through dialogue, pantomime, and prop
handling. Each actor willingly supported the work of the other two.
Their belief in a shared reality among them made the work of each the
stronger. The work of the actors, in short, became the work of the

characters.

The rehearsal period concentrates on translating the collective
individual understandings and sensibilities of the actors into
believable group behavior appropriate to the imaginative reality of the
play. It integrates each actor's individual work to build a believable
character with the cast's collective work to create roles that
complement each other. I have usually set aside five weeks of
rehearsal time to prepare a medieval play for performance. Such a time
frame has been useful for several reasons. Five weeks is about the
standard period of time that experienced actors need to rehearse
conventional plays of some two hours or more duration. Medieval plays
are shorter, but the actors in them are likely much less experienced,
so the extra time serves them well. The extra rehearsal time allows

the actors to learn the rudiments of stage movement, blocking,

193

projection, and the like, while they work on building their characters
and creating their roles. Also, the actors in medieval drama are
usually balancing rehearsal time with other commitments--classes, work,
family, community, and so on. The extra time thus compensates for a
rehearsal schedule that cannot include daily rehearsals or rehearsals
that extend much over two or three hours at any one time. Five weeks
of rehearsal may seem at first too generous for a play that will not
have much more than an hour's running time, and probably less. It is

not.3

"Apropos of this," Harold Clurman writes, "I cannot refrain from
citing a Stanislavsky quip: 'No matter how long one rshearses one
always needs two more weeks" (Qg_21;e93199 90).

The work of the actors during the rehearsal period passes through
various stages which take them from being simply a collection of
individuals to being a company of mutually supportive, ensemble
players. Though different directors may identify more (or perhaps
different) stages, I have looked for four at least, with each stage
dominating something like a week of rehearsal, more or less. I have
generally thought of these stages in terms that are roughly analogous
to those of human growth: orientation, exploration and discovery,
development, and maturity. The relative importance of the director to
each of these stages is steadily less. The director, for example,
dominates the actors' orientation to the play, for it is in that stage
that all of the director's preparatory work on and interpretive vision
of the play are presented to the cast. The last stage of the rehearsal

period belongs to the actors, who have by then taken charge of their

own play and are ”setting” their work in anticipation of performance.

194

In between the first and last stages, the relationship of the
director to the actors undergoes gradual change. As the actors grow
more confident and inventive, the director becomes more of an editing
audience and less of a dominating manager. In the exploration and
discovery stage, the director may need to work hard to coax, cajole,
even force the actors to experiment with character interpretation.
Conversely, by the time that the actors are well into the development
stage, the director may have to work hard to rein in their invention.
All directors should hope to reach a moment in their rehearsals when
the actors come to identify themselves as a mature and unified company.
At that moment, the company will assert its proprietary rights to the
play, and the director must then be wise enough to yield place.

Rehearsals of a medieval play begin with the director's
orientation of the actors to their individual and collective work. The
director's orientation encompasses four concerns. The first part of
the orientation links the modern production of one medieval play to
some knowledge of the genre itself. The actors should not only have an
idea of how this modern production relates to the original, but also
some notion of how this production may relate to other attempts to
stage it in recent times. The actors do not perform in an artistic or
historical vacuum.‘ The orientation also includes an introduction to
the stage. Many, if not all, of these actors have never heard of or
worked with the terms that actors use to describe the logistics of

5

stage movement. The orientation includes, too, the director's

presentation of the production's interpretive vision. Much of this

195
work is included in the actors' first reading of the performance script
and in the director's presentation of the through-lines of action and
character spines. And finally, the director may also provide a preview
of what the production will look like and the rehearsal schedule for
the cast and crews to reach that end.

The overriding concern throughout the various aspects of the
orientation is that the actors gain early confidence in the purpose,
integrity, and worthiness of the production. They take that confidence
first from the authority and enthusiasm of the director, much as they
first depended on the director's will to motivate their “Happy
Birthday" song exercise. The director gives them the performance
script, a comprehensive interpretive vision in the through-lines of
action, and individual character spines. For the actors who know that
they will have to face an audience in five weeks, this body of work
provided by the director at the first rehearsal is immediately
reassuring. They know that will not be left to fumble their way
blindly toward a public performance of uncertain quality. But actor
confidence also comes from something more, and that something is more
difficult to express.

The actors need to sense the worthiness of their individual and
collective work to produce the medieval drama, a sense of worthiness
that goes beyond course requirements or the director's accumulated
research notes or the intellectual construct of the play. The actor's
will to perform emanates as much from the heart as the head, and as
much from the spirit as the body. During the orientation stage, the

actors look to the director for some external spark to fire their

196
imaginations and stimulate their wills to perform. (Later on in the
rehearsal process that fire will burn within the actors themselves.)
In my attempt to spark the actors' wills to perform, I appeal to their
powers of imagination and empathy, and to their pride. I ask them to
imagine themselves to be archaeologists of a rather special kind.
Their labors will recover one dramatic artifact buried in the literary
archives of the English Middle Ages, an artifact that has no chance to
be seen or heard, experienced or understood in its intended and
rightful medium of expression apart from their effort. Their
imagination and labor will give theatrical life to this play once
again. That recovery work alone has value--for the play itself, for
our greater understanding of medieval drama, and for the audience whose
lives its performance will broaden and enrich.

I ask my actors to do more. I ask them to stretch their
imaginations to sense the presence of the original community of players
in our recovery of their work. Why did these medieval playwrights and
actors make any effort at all to preserve their plays? Not so that
their plays would die with them, certainly. Nor did those ancient
playwrights and actors write them down solely to protect commercial
properties, either, though they were surely not naive about the
economic value of their plays even then. Rather, I like to imagine
that they took care to make records of their plays so that they would
survive the fleeting moment of one performance to live again somehow
else--to entertain, even inspire, actors and audiences of other times

and perhaps of other places. (Even in their own times, the Secend

§Mepgeege;_£egeen§ was performed year after year and Menkind was taken

197
from place to place.) The import of the ephemeral nature of live
theater was not lost on the medieval players and their audiences. It
was at once the image of the transitoriness of earthly life and the
perpetual acting out of resurrection, very like the power of the drama
of the Mass itself.‘

And now, some five or six hundred years later, one of their plays
has survived the vicissitudes of time and fortune to come to us. What
are we to think of ourselves for being so lucky--indeed, privileged--as
to have one of their few surviving plays to produce now? Does not our
production awaken some ancient spirits? Our commitment to perform
Menking or the Second Shephegde' gegeagt or any one of the rest of the
surviving medieval plays is a pledge to honor the trust of an ancient
and distant community of players who believed in the value of their
dramatic work, but who cannot now protect its interpretation or oversee
its production. Whatever else the modern production of medieval drama
is, it is also a solemn act of faith. And if 0. B. Hardison's
observations about the intimate connections between the aesthetic power
of medieval vernacular drama and the divine power of the drama of the
Mass are right, then the resurrection of these old plays for modern
actors and audiences might well effect a communion of spirits of
impressive dimensions.7

The exploration and discovery stage of rehearsal begins the moment
that the actors first stand up to walk through the director's
preliminary plan of stage "blocking" (the actors' movements) and

character ”business" (personal actions) and ends the moment that the

content of the director's preliminary plan is exhausted. It is the

198
first time that the actors see that the director's idea of the play has
practical consequences, and it is the first time that they interact
physicallly with one another. It is also the first time that the
director sees the actual results of what up to that time had only been
a sequence of notations and diagrams made in the margins and on the
blank sides of the pages of the script. Both the actors and the
director explore new territory. Both make discoveries.
The guiding principle for the director in designing the blocking
and character business of a play is to plan a sequence of movement and
action that reveals dramatic meaning and focusses the audience's
attention on the crucial point of interest in each motivational unit.
The director of experienced actors may be able to approach blocking the
play without having determined very many specifics ahead of time.
Experienced actors can be comfortable inventing blocking as they go
along, letting the director react more than direct. The director of
medieval drama, however, needs to anticipate the insecurities of
inexperienced actors. As Carl Allensworth writes:
With inexperienced actors, a director will be better advised
to work out in his own mind almost all of the moves his
actors will be expected to make on stage and get them down in
the margins of his script. He should make a note of where
and when and how his actors will enter, how and when they
cross, when they sit, when they get up, when they start for
the door, and when and how they exit. While this sort of
detailed blocking out leaves very little to the discretion of
the actors, it does give them a sense of security, which is
essential for them to function at all. (195)

I have plotted the preliminary plan of blocking in great detail because

it also saves a considerable amount of time in the early rehearsals and

gives the actors a "moving picture” preview of what their play will

look like. The blocking cannot be arbitrary. It must, as Charles

McGaw writes,

 

ehe;ee§e;;e_gee§e [i. e., the major and motivational unit objectives].
Otherwise, no movement has any reason for being” (133).

I will have more to say about the contributions of stage blocking
and character business to the thematic unity of performance later.
Here, I need to speak to their contributions to the actors' and the
director's experiences of exploration and discovery into the new
territory of the physical and interpersonal implications of the script.
One example may encapsulate the quality of this experience. In our
production of Mankige, Nought was played by a woman and was interpreted
to be the tavern whore. Her relationship to New Guise, Mercy, and
Mankind could thus have highly charged sexual connotations. Early on
in the play, Nought says to Mankind:

My name ys Nought. I loue well to make mery.

I haue be sethen wyth pe comyn tapster of Bury

And pleyde so longs pe foll pat I am ewyn wery.

3yt xall I be per ageyn to-morn. (273-276)

The actor who played Nought (and the rest of the cast, for that matter)
first thought of these lines as simple self-description--virtually the
playwright's commentary on the character. Such a reading is much too
passive an approach. All lines are tools for the characters to apply
toward attaining their objectives. In this instance, I took Nought's
objective to be a desire to intimidate Mankind sexually. Her lines
imply that she is very familiar with the life of the tavern. Her
pronouncement that she loves "to make mery" constitutes an open-ended
invitation to all sorts of folly. To block the lines, I first had

Nought insert the sweet-as-treacle address, ”Oh, Mankind,“ just before

she began to move toward him. As she walked slowly toward Mankind

200
(crossing from stage left to stage right) speaking the lines in her
best “come hither” voice, she reached her hands behind her back, and
pulled down the left sleeve of her baggy sweatshirt, thereby flashing a
stunningly white and very bare shoulder. In performance the exposure
of her shoulder was more striking, since Nought wore an easily
rearranged, bright red dress.

The effect on the cast was immediate and electric. The movement
and character action seemed startling in their revelations of dramatic
relationships, character objectives, and expanded senses of what could
happen on stage. They were immediately understandable, appropriate to
Nought's character and circumstances, and full of comic surprise. All
at once, it seemed, the actors were seized by a sense of newly expanded
possibilities for their own inventions. The actor playing Nought was
delighted with herself, not simply because she got to do something a
bit racy on stage, but more importantly because her actions were right
for her character and had immediate and positive effects on the work of
the other actors in the scene. Mankind could sit up to take notice,
Mercy could intercede to protect his naive and vulnerable pupil, and
the tavern could urge Nought on with boisterous encouragement. Each
time that we played the scene, the effect on the audience was much the
same as the effect on the cast the first time we blocked it--surprise,
recognition, and delight.

Whether the director's initial plot of blocking and character
action is extensive or minimal, it initiates the actors' exploration
and discovery of their roles. For the generally inexperienced actors

who make up the casts of medieval drama, it gives them a sense of

201
security while it also stimulates their invention. Eventually, though,
the cast exhausts the content of all the pro-rehearsal marginal and
diagram notations on blocking and character business in the director's
prompt script. In effect, the actors exhaust the director's
preliminary inventions and have to face the continuation of rehearsal,
not as the passive receptors of the director's predetermined will, but
as active and equal collaborators. The rehearsal passes into its
development stage.

During the development stage of rehearsal the relationships among
the actors become more important than their relationship to the
director. Also, it is during this stage of rehearsal that the actors
will develop their sense of belief in the imaginative reality of the
drama. Belief comes from concentrated action and focused attention,
the essential elements that the actors practiced so hard to learn in
their training exercises. The principal difference between the
training exercises and the rehearsal is that the actors are learning to
adapt their actions and reactions to the needs and temperaments of
their characters. The more that they commit themselves to working to
attain their characters' objectives the more self-sustaining ”reality”
their characters have for them, for one another, and for the audience.
The success of this period of development depends on the director's
increasing willingness to accept--even invite--the actors'
contributions to characterization, blocking, and stage business.

The director's work during the development period lies primarily
in assisting the actors in integrating the separate moments of their

characters' lives into a seamless movement of motivated stage action.

202
That process of integration has two parts: the integration of the
separate actions of each actor's character and the integration of all
of the actions of all of the characters into one play. The director's
work to segment the play into motivational units and beats helps the
actors to focus first on small portions of the drama and then gradually
to integrate the separate moments of their characters' lives into ever
larger portions of the play. Rehearsals move gradually from doing
mostly "sectional“ work at the beginning to doing more and more
frequent 'run-throughs' later on. Development begins with the actors'
intense concentration on fulfilling their own character spines. The
development period ends when the actors together concentrate on
fulfilling the play's through-line of action. Throughout the
development period the director's overarching task is to help the
actors come to sense the emerging authenticity of their collective
work. By the end of the development stage, the actors have come to
esteem the value of their ensemble play as much as--perhaps more than--
that of their individual inventions.

The development of the actors' individual character spines and
that of the play's through-line of action run on parallel tracks. Both
may be described as the development of a seamless movement of
corresponding subordinate and dominant sequences of action. As
Stanislavski describes it, the essence of one character or of an entire
play is expressed in an ”unbroken chain of changing objects on which
[performers and audiences] concentrate [their] attention” (Mg_5e§e;
zgepegee 243). The play, in fact, is not made up of static 53213528

211335;, but "living” beats and units of motivated action that evolve

203
so quickly and accommodate so many complexities that they become a kind
of visible metamorphosis. Each beat and unit transforms itself into
the next with an apparent inevitability that seems the "natural“ and
logical consequence of all that has gone before.

One example from the §eeene_§neenegee;_fiegeene may help to make
this process clear. Gib's major objective in our production of the
play was "to find true faith in a life of marital tribulation and
circumstantial woe.” 'He appears in six of the play's nine motivational
units, and in each one he makes some small progress toward his major
objective. In each of these units his progress is marked by some act
that comforts or protects others. Gib is increasingly the reconciling
agent among the shepherds, reconciling them to each other, to Mak and
Gyll, to the message of the Angel, and finally to Christ. What is
striking about Gib is his persistent humility. I suggested to the
actor that he imagine two imperatives for his actions. One was from
the Sermon on the Mount. Christ's injunction to replace the old law of
retaliation (the 125.55112011) with a new one of charity penetrates
Gib's heart:

But I say to you not to resist evil: but if one strike thee
on thy right cheek, turn to him also with the other: And if a
man will contend with thee in judgment, and take away thy
coat, let go thy cloak also unto him. (Matthew, 5:39-40)
The second was more personal. I asked the actor to think of some
moment from his own experience when an act of selfless charity resolved
some interpersonal conflict. I did not ask the actor to tell me what
that moment was, and he never did. I did not have to know what that

moment was any more than I had to know what lay behind the actor's

interpretation of the ”nonsense" dialogue exercise. (The actor who

204
played Gib, I might add, had gained earlier and invaluable experience
acting out several classroom demonstration scenes from fle§§igg_1e£
geeee.) What was important was that the actor bring to Gib's actions
an understanding and a commitment validated by kindred experiences of
his own. I was not disappointed.

More often than not, Gib's simple act of providing blankets for
someone else expressed his motives in recurring acts of humble charity.
In the first motivational unit he brought a blanket to the fields for
Coll. In response to Daw's line, "We ar oft weytt and wery when
master-men wynkys' (156), Gib later (at 'Peasse, boy” 174) moved to
Daw's side and wrapped him in a blanket. Before all went to sleep in
Unit II, Gib made sure that everyone had food and drink and blankets.
In the seventh motivational unit of our production it was Gib who
suggested that Mak be tossed in a blanket, more to save Mak from Coll's
wrath than to inflict a humiliating punishment of his own. And at
Bethlehem in the last motivational unit of our production, Gib was the
shepherd who noticed that the Christ child lay “full cold“ (748) and
gave Coll a blanket to wrap him.

The actor who played Gib was the least demonstrative of the actors
playing the shepherds. At the beginning of rehearsals his work was
rather overshadowed by the boisterousness of Coll and the excitability
of Daw. Gib, by contrast, was heavy-laden, deliberate in manner, and
measured of speech. His character did not at first seem as "dramatic”
as that of the other shepherds. But Gib's character had the effect of
ballast on the other two. Coll could rage because Gib was there to

sympathize. Daw could panic because Gib was there to calm his fears

205

and protect him. The relationship between Coll and Daw developed as
well as it did because Gib was their intermediary. After the
shepherds' confrontation with Mak and Gyll, it was Gib who pointed out
Coll's dispirited exhaustion to Dew and moved him to compassion and
spiritual rescue. The more this sense of progressive dramatic value
came to grip the actor playing Gib the more his individual scenes were
marked by increased concentration on the import and effect of each of
his actions. His first action upon meeting Coll was to give him a
blanket for himself, and Coll silently acknowledged Gib's charity. His
last act was to give Coll another blanket, but this time so that Coll
could comfort the Christ-child--one act of charity that initiated
another. The significance of that moment was not lost on either actor,
for it was the perfect fulfillment of Gib's character objective and the
inevitable consequence of all of his previous actions. I was always
pleased to see with what unaccustomed quiet and studied recognition the
actor playing Coll would follow Gib's direction. Gib's simple,
unassuming actions almost always caused some real goodness to befall
another character. He found true faith because he practiced it. The
actor playing Gib always remained the least demonstrative of the
shepherds, but by the end of the development period of rehearsal he was
at least the equal of the other two in self-esteem and confidence.

Gib's personal drama is also connected to the larger drama of the
whole play. It is a subordinate sequence of action that provides one
standard of good faith to judge the larger relationship between the
shepherds and Mak and Gyll. Mak and Gyll have their own minidrama

involving a blanket, but theirs is a contrasting one of theft,

206

selfishness, and deception. In our production Gyll first entered the
set carrying a bag in which she concealed a stolen blanket. As she
took it out to admire it in the quiet and safety of her own home, Mak
rushed in with the stolen sheep and snatched the blanket away from her
to hide the sheep. Gyll was furious at being deprived of her booty,
and Mak was at an immediate disadvantage, without ever knowing why.
Later they both used the blanket to hide the sheep in their bed. And
it is the same blanket in which the shepherds tossed Mak in
retribution. At the blanket tossing, two personal dramas--Gib's and
Mak and Gyll's--involving blankets as emblems of good faith or deceit
merged into the progress of meaning through the whole play. That
merging was not only one of several thematic elements, but also one of
the entire cast around one action that for a moment defined all of
their relationships. As the actors came to sense the intimate
connections between the authenticity of their individual actions and
the integrity of the drama itself, they came to consider themselves as
less a collection of individuals and as more of a cast. The several
characters and their personal dramas became one play.

There are several unmistakable signs of maturation in rehearsal.
All of them signal the emerging dominance of the cast in determining
the final character of the play. Groups of two or three actors or so
arrange "homework" rehearsals of their own to prepare for work with the
rest of the cast. The cast assumes control of "setting" (i. e.,
finalizing) the blocking and stage business. The actors invest their
characterizations with as much nuance, belief, and emotion as they are

then capable of. They arrive at such a state of confidence in

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themselves that the character of their rehearsals shifts from work to
play. They grow both proud and protective of their corporate identity.
They look to the director for informed and interested responses to
their work, but no longer for primary inspiration. Whatever
inspiration exists finds its source among the actors themselves. And
they discover that they have a longing to perform, a feeling that a few
of the actors may have thought impossible to experience only a few
weeks before. The director encourages all of this.

During the maturation stage of rehearsal, the director functions
more and more like a surrogate audience for the cast. The actors come
to look to the director for an informed, critical response to the
progress of their collective work, for ”objective” correction of its
faults and confirmation of its merit. As that role has come to me
toward the end of rehearsals, I have kept in mind the three qualities
that George C. Scott once said that he looked for in a good
performance. First, he said that he looked for technical competence.
Did the performance give evidence that those connected with the
production knew the grammar of their art? Second, he looked for
inspiration. Was there something about the production that revealed
meaning in ways that were at once true and fresh? And third, Scott
looked for the joy of performance. Were the actors able to "play" on
stage? Were they able to enjoy themselves in the act of acting? By
the end of rehearsals only one of those criteria matters. The actors
have already learned as much of the grammar of their art as this
production will permit. The quality of inspiration is the product of

months of research and planning by the director and weeks of training,

208
orientation, exploration and discovery, and development by the director
and actors. The quality of their inspiration is directly related to
the quality of their work before and during rehearsal.

What is left is the cultivation of a sense of the joy of
performance. The audience never wants to see actors "work." Instead,
it wants to participate in the deep pleasure of experiencing the result
of the actors' rehearsal labor--the liberating play of the imagination.
One important contributor to the senses of play and joy among the cast
is improvisation. Unlike many directors, I reserve improvisation for
later stages of rehearsal. Improvisation is difficult. While it is
not the godlike creation of something out of nothing, it is a kind of
free invention based upon some preexistent idea, something like what

jazz musicians do to some chosen musical "theme" or ”sentence.” As

Stanislavski writes, the actor lets

. . . his inner impulses as they spontaneously shape
themselves in him prompt the most immediate objectives and
also the superobjective of the improvisation. However, while
he is doing this work the actor should not forget the
circumstances proposed by the playwright, which are those the
actor has already been through, and which, in any case, he
would unwillingly part with since he has grown so close to
them in the previous period of experiencing his part

emotionally. (ggeaeige e Mole 96)

Stanislavski, too, deferred improvisations to later stages of the
rehearsal period, until his actors were familiar with the fundamental
dramatic themes and lines of action in the play. The ability to invent
action based upon some notion of an idea requires that the actors have
a basic command of the grammar of their art, much as the jazz musician

must know key signatures, scales, tempos, and sheet music "charts.”

209

Near the end of the development stage of rehearsal the actors
begin to give evidence that they have grown comfortable enough with
their roles and with acting itself for me to introduce some
improvisation. Improvisation can have several important benefits to
performance. It can help the actors to explore lines of character and
conflict development that might not have occurred to them otherwise.
It can also help the actors learn to adjust to--in fact, make use of--
the inevitable variations (inspirations or accidents) that occur during

rehearsals and performances.9

And improvisation can help the actors
develop or recover the sense of play, the joyous act of "pretending."
Improvisation helped to make the shepherds' campfire scene in our
production of the Secend §hepgerge' zegeane more effective. In our
effort to reaffirm the shepherds' dominance of their own play, we paid
special attention to the character of their campfire fellowship before
Mak's arrival. I especially wanted the scene to affirm that the
shepherds' search for truth and joy was quite capable of making an
interesting drama all by itself, and was not at all dependent on Mak.
When Mak did arrive he would be taken as an interruption to the
interesting drama already in progress. The campfire scene was crucial
to this end, for it was only there that the shepherds could establish
their own context of meaning. The shepherds improvised a variety of
ways to share food, drink, blankets, song, and verbal and physical
horseplay. As the actors grew more comfortable with each other, their
characters began to develop a greater sense of intimacy and affection.

We settled on a gradual emotional transition in the scene from gaiety

to seriousness. The shepherds began the scene glad to see each other

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and content to share food, drink, and a bit of jostling and good
natured verbal abuse. By the time they began to sing the Agincourt
Carol, though, their demeanors had turned serious, and the character of
their fellowship aspired to higher purposes. When Mak's first line
broke into Daw's joyous repetition of the carol's chorus, I trust that
the audience was as irritated by Mak's interruption as the shepherds
were.

Improvisation also provided a crucial ”spark” to our second
production of Mankin . We performed Menkind over a period of two years
in a variety of settings and before a variety of audiences. No
performance was more challenging than our last, given before an
audience made up of medieval scholars attending the Eleventh
International Congress on Medieval Studies hosted by Western Michigan
University. We had a technical run-through of the play the afternoon
of the performance on stage at Shaw Theater that became our most
enjoyable and important improvisation. I noticed that the actors were
unusually tense. They were performing for the first time in an indoor
theater, and were immediately intimidated by all of the unfamiliar
technical support apparatus. They were also intimidated by the
prospect of performing before an audience that would undoubtedly be our
most critical. The tension was bad on two counts. First, it shifted
the actors' attention away from the play to themselves. They forgot
the first lesson of their actor training. Second, the tension began to
erode their confidence in a production that we had performed many times
before. They forgot the lesson of their "nonsense" dialogue exercise:

at the moment of performance, no one knows as much about what the

211
actors are doing on stage than the actors do. No one in the audience
spent months (in our case, years) preparing that play for that
performance.

Since I also played the character of Mercy, I could act on stage
to change (and control) the circumstances of the rehearsal to make the
actors interact in new ways. My intent was to so disrupt their self-
defeating self-consciousness that they would have to focus their
attentions on wholly unanticipated character responses, and in so doing
recover their senses of spontaneity, confidence, and shared joy. My
tack was to do and to say all of the things that Mercy's rigid sense of
decorum would never otherwise have let him express--in short, to make
the subtext of Mercy's lines explicit. As New Guise got to about the
middle of his long, obscene assault on Mercy's dignity, at "Ande sey me
pie in clerycall mansre” (134), I interrupted his favorite speech by
interjecting the modern idiom: ”Up yours, New Guise!" New Guise was
speechless for a beat or two, then he caught on to the invitation to
improvise and began to invent modern idiomatic dialogue and stage
action based on the theme of the play and the objectives and thresholds
of his character. The other actors were quick to join in. I think
that they thought that if the director was so comfortable with the
quality of the play that he could have such fun taking last minute
liberties with it, then their work must be very solid indeed.

In fact, the confidence of our improvisation was infectious, for
the Shaw Theater technical support personnel caught on as quickly as
the actors. The technical cues for our performance were relatively few

and simple. Also, Mengeng had only an hour's running time, so the

212

technical crews were willing to have us play the whole play, instead of
jumping from one technical cue to the next, skipping over parts of the
play that did not require the technical personnel to take any action.
Our improvisation did not stray from the dramatic progress of the play
or so far from the script that the crews could not follow it easily.
And except for their insistence that we play the individual cue lines
and the whole of the last scene "straight" (because it called for a
timed light cue), the crews came to have as much fun as the actors and
soon felt themselves a part of our company. The strategy to improvise
was a gamble, but not much of one, given the cast. What could have
been a terrifyingly cautious technical run-through (and subsequent
performance) became instead a joyous celebration of our mastery of the
play and of our two-year experience of acting together. I believe that
our last performance was our best.

e s *

Performance is an invitation for two, perhaps even three, separate
communities to become one. The community of actors invites the
audience to share an imaginative experience with them. The quality of
their belief in the imaginative reality of the characters and their
conflicts directly affects the audience's capacity to share belief and
participation in the play. I do not believe that any audience comes to
any play to be separated from the significance of its imaginative
reality. Even Bertolt Brecht's argument for an "epic theater” that
would so distance the actors and audience from the emotive power of the
action that they could make critical judgments, describes performance

as a "social function" (244). Actors and audiences in Brecht's model

213
still agree to share some order of common experience. There may be a
third community that unites with the actors and audiences of medieval
drama, and I have encouraged my actors at least to sense its presence.
Their performance can have the effect of becoming a medium through
which both they and their modern audiences share realities with
playwrights, actors, and audiences of the English Middle Ages. In this
sense, the modern performance of these old plays can resurrect matters
that moved a distant and now ancient people to laughter and tears,
thought and reverence. Modern actors and audiences can discover how
important those matters continue to be by the laughter and tears,
thought and reverence their dramatic representation may still evoke.
As with any drama, the final test of these old plays is the quality of
performance that they can sustain.

The director's contribution to the quality of performance is to
provide the company with an integrative design for production staging.
The director's design for the production staging of the medieval drama
ensures that its material appearances, stage blocking, and actor
business all reflect and reinforce the play's super-objective and
through-lines of action and that they will be communicable to the
audience. The design of the material appearances of the production
account for set construction, costumes, properties, make-up, lighting,
sound, and special effects. Each element of the material appearance of
the production contributes to a complex, but unified expression of the
play's dramatic environment. The patterning of blocking throughout the
play reveals character relationships, conflict development, and

thematic meanings that reinforce the play's super-objective and

214
through-line of action. Actor business and the use of props also
reveal character relationships and conflict development that reinforce
the play's super-objective. All of these elements are expressions of
meaning that provide an environment for and a physical accompaniment to
the actors' dialogue. Their design should strive to provide such a
clear physical representation of the play that its dramatic
circumstances, characters, conflict, and resolution could be well
perceived even without the benefit of dialogue.

The design of the material appearances for our productions of
MegMieg and the §econd §hephegee' zegeeng emphasized the simple
humanity of both plays. These plays are not about extraordinary
people, but about people with whom members of the audience could
readily identify and sympathize. Menhige had no constructed set, only
two tables, several benches and chairs, a hanging tavern sign, and a
variety of stage properties. The idea was to suggest something like
the sort of "pick up and make do" playing circumstances Meeting's
original cast worked in. Its cast of some six or seven men travelled
to "villages in Cambridgeshire and Norfolk” and performed inside inns
or in the inn yards (Eccles xlii). The "playing area" for our
production became whatever the actors believed it to be, eventually
including the audience itself, when the production stopped to collect
money just before Titivillus's entrance. We performed Manking on a
grassy knoll in the center of campus, on a portable stage set up in a
downtown East Lansing street, and on the indoor stage of the Shaw

Theater in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

215

The set for the §econd gnepgegds' Pageege followed Arnold

Williams's suggestion for a tri-level stage. ”It must be obvious that
the §econd ghepheede['] 213! is constructed to suggest the universal
significance of the Nativity. The three locales of the play, moor,
Mak's hovel, and manger, inevitably suggest the three levels of the
universe, earth, hell, and heaven. By dividing the stage into three
parts--you have to in any event--you can certainly externalize this
meaning" ('Typology' 682). Mak's and Gyll's hovel was a simple stone
cottage that had no right angles. It was, in fact, a rustic version of
the sort of expressionistic set designs that are epitomized by the 1919
German film, Cabinet of Dr. Celigegi. Our idea was not to modernize
the play or to make it expressionistic, but to use the "untrue" design
of the cottage to heighten the contrast between the natural world of
the shepherds and the unnatural lives of Mak and Gyll. Also, the odd
angles of Mak's and Gyll's cottage stood out in contrast to the artless
simplicity of the Manger and the play's closing Nativity scene.

All of the material appearances of both productions were kept to a
simple level. Costumes and properties were based on medieval models
(e. g., shepherds, farmers, Dominican friar, tavern folk, peasants),
and were entirely naturalistic. The one exception to this, of course,
was Titivillus, who was costumed as a horned and winged devil and
carried a trident and magic net. Titivillus's flamboyant, red-winged
costume and silver trident were balanced by Mercy's ecclesiastical
habit, staff and cross, and purple stole. All of the human characters
wore natural make-up, though Nought, Nowadays, and Gyll had overlays of

garish cheek rouge and lip and eye liner. Titivillus wore a horned

216
devil's mask. All of the music for both productions was produced by
live musicians and singers. The musicians for Meeging played on stage
as part of the tavern entertainment, and used replicas of medieval
instruments. The singers for the §eeege_§hepne;ge;_gegeen§ sang
offstage to accompany the appearance of the Angel and the last exit of
the shepherds.

The special effects for both productions were kept to a minimum,
and were sometimes done in partial view of the audience. In the
outdoor performance of Mankind, a black-clothed stagehand in partial
view of the audience ignited a pot of black powder at Titivillus's
entrance and exit. For the indoor performance, we used flashpowder
which was triggered electronically by the Shaw Theater stage crew.
Titivillus's entrances and exits were also accompanied by the rumbling
of a thunder sheet, effected by one of the actors while his character
was off-stage. On the indoor stage, Titivillus entered and exited
through an upstage center trap bathed in pulsating red light. In the
indoor stage performances of the §222n9_§h§nhezdai_£sseanto the
shepherds' complaints were accompanied by electronic lightning and
thunder effects. The shepherds' campfire had a red light "special"
that could be surreptitiously brought up to a demonic brilliance as Mak
began casting his spell over the sleeping shepherds. The ethereal
appearance of the Angel was effected by an ”Angel Special" light and
was accompanied by an offstage chorus singing the glegie_in_e§eeleie.

The intent behind the simplicity of the material appearances of
both productions was twofold. I intended to produce these plays in a

manner that would not be altogether removed from the sort of technical

217

capabilities of their original producers. The necessities of indoor
performance, of course, required that we use some different production
means than those available to the medieval stage. But even there, we
meant to keep a simplicity of spirit and appearance. Also, I intended
for the simplicity of the production to decrease the aesthetic distance
between the actors and the audience. The idea was to make the audience
feel as close to and as much a part of the play as possible. I know
that we succeeded with at least one member of the audience at Shaw
Theater. I am not sure whether the man who cried out, "Watch it!” as
Titivillus bent forward to 'ronde' (593) nightmares in Hankind's ear
meant to scare Titivillus away or to waken Mankind. Either way, he
found himself caught up in the imaginative reality of the play and
ready to interject his rescue to compensate for Mercy's untimely
absence 1 1°

The patterning of blocking throughout the course of the play
reveals character relationships, conflict development, and thematic
meanings that reinforce the play's super-objective and through-line of
action. The spatial relationships in flanking, for example, were very
important. The changes in Mankind's fortunes were always reflected in
relative stage posture and position. Generally, characters were at
their strongest when they were standing and at their weakest when they
were prostrate. I blocked more of Mankind's temptations and all of his
trial to stage right, and more of Mercy's counsel and the sacrament of
penance to stage left. Mercy's first great counsel to Mankind was down
center, as were Mankind's evensong prayer, nightmare sleep, collapse

into despair after his rescue, and Mercy's closing benediction to the

218
audience. Patterns of stage composition would thus keep reappearing,
but their elements would be changed to reflect the changing orders of
relationships among the characters.

Who knelt to whom and when and where also became important parts
of the blocking pattern. I blocked much of this movement to repeat
itself in different contexts to measure changing states and degrees of
dominance and submission, strength and weakness, success and failure.
When Mankind first decided to appeal to Mercy, for example, he
announced his decision down right, kneeling to one of the tavern
damsels who sat on the ground. He then crossed to kneel before Mercy
at left center. When Mankind prayed at evensong, he knelt down center.
He succumbed to Titivillus's nightmare visions while lying asleep down
center. When he returned to the tavern to ask mercy of the Vices,
Mankind knelt to New Guise who sat left center just where Mercy had
earlier heard Mankind's pleas. When Mercy was later rebuffed by
Mankind, he knelt to pray down center. Mankind knelt to Mischief as
she sat as judge over her court at right center. After Mercy triumphed
over the last of the Vices, he turned to find Mankind prostrate with
despair down center, just where Titivillus had deceived him with the
nightmare vision. Mercy prayed over Mankind then, and implored him to
arise, assuming the same physical relationship to Mankind as had
Titivillus when he beat down Mankind's spirit. And finally, Mankind
knelt again to Mercy (standing in triumph this time at left center) to
receive the sacrament of penance at the same place they first met.
After the sacrament Mankind then stood, too, thanked God for his mercy,

and exited. There were also independent and intersecting patterns of

219
blocking for all of the other characters. This continuum of living
tableaux of character postures and relationships joins with the actors'
stage business and use of props to create a complex pantomime of the
conflict and resolution of the play.

A recurring thematic motif in nagging is the characters' concern
with their necks and heads. The references to hanging or physical
violence to the head are almost always a sign of a soul (and body) in
peril. The actors invented a lot of stage business to convey that
meaning. The audience's first sight of Mankind was that of a poor,
befuddled farmer sitting at a table in the tavern and having to contend
with the encircling arms of one of the tavern damsels around his neck.
When Mercy called Mankind to leave the distractions of the tavern,
Mankind rose from the table with a scarf from one of the damsels still
around his neck, an emblem of worldly temptation which Mercy ripped off
and quickly discarded. As the Vices left to carry out Titivillus's
orders, New Guise warned the others to remember their neck verse, at
which admonition Nought grabbed her throat, bugged her eyes, and
pantomimed a gallows' strangulation. Titivillus ensnared Mankind by
putting him to sleep with the trident and wrapping his net of deception
around him. New Guise returned from a night of robbery with the broken
end of a noose about his neck. When Mankind begged to join the company
of the Vices, New Guise welcomed him by wrapping his arm around
Mankind's neck as he told him how to excel at lechery, nearly
strangling him. Mercy came to learn of the seriousness of Mankind's
peril by discovering New Guise's discarded noose. Mankind returned to

the court of Mischief despairing, and there Mischief held out the noose

220
as an inducement to suicide. New Guise put the noose around his neck
to demonstrate its use, and nearly got himself hanged a second time.
And finally, Mercy put the purple stole of his priestly office around
his neck to perform the sacrament of penance and lay hands on Mankind's
head to absolve him of sin. The individual and cumulative effect of
the actors' work with neck and head props in flanking thus reinforced

dramatic values and character relationships in much the same way as the

actors' work with blankets did in the §gggng_§hgpngzgg;_£§ggagt.

* t *

The final test of any drama is the level of performance that it
can sustain. The best dramas sustain performances that depict the
dense complexities of the human condition and do not lose their
humanity in the process. It is their very "humanness" that sustains
the performers’ and the audience's shared involvement in the drama's
conflict and resolution. A shared humanity, after all, is Egg common
bond between all actors and their audiences. Dramas that affirm that
truth deserve to survive. As David Samuelson explains, the power of
King Lear in performance lies in the actors' open invitation for their
audiences to share the experience of a horrible human tragedy.
Together, actors and audiences ”refuse deflecting commentary and refuse
to look away. Instead they gaze with unspeakable care toward the
vanished image of nothingness, and in doing so they evince a human
image of 'heart,’ the radical force Cordelia herself represents and
which underlies the 'bonds' in this play" (24-25). I repeat that
quotation from Chapter I now, because it speaks to the "binding”

experience of actors and audiences in all great dramas, comedies and

221
tragedies alike. If our performances of Mankind and the Sggggg
Shephggg§;_£§ggant can be said to have been any good at all, then they
can be said to have effectively bridged the gaps of time and cultural
distance between the English Middle Ages and twentieth-century America
by affirming their common humanity. I believe that is exactly what
they did.

Our performances of Mankind demonstrated it to be every bit as
effective a play as the §egggg_§h§phgzgg;_ggg§gng. In some ways it is
stronger. Its intellectual strength lies in its facing of moral and
theological problems that are more complex than any raised by the
Wakefield Master through his shepherds. Like Shakespeare, Mankind's
playwright, within his limits, refused to 'look away,” too, and the
result is a series of dramatic challenges to Mankind's sense of moral
certitude that can still give us pause. Is it possible to live a moral
life, or live any life at all, in the world without God? Why does evil
and hardship befall those who have lived according to God's laws? What
is the point of our laboring to perfect our lives, when human
perfection is unattainable anyway? What are the causes of error and
human suffering, and what is the way to salvation? 'What ys a man
wythowte mercy” (835)? Such questions as these are everywhere in
flanking. Any of them may still trouble reflective souls today.
Mankind's playwright found answers to all of these questions in the
order and observances of the church. More than this, our performance
revealed that his answers were not impersonal. To effect Mankind's
rescue, reconciliation to the church, and salvation, Mercy had to grow

through pain and hardship himself to understand human frailty and to

222
embrace compassion. His reconciliation to Mankind, like that between
any priest and humble penitent, was an intensely human act graced by
divinity. In the end the play is a moral and spiritual cliffhanger.
Will Mankind accept Mercy or not? Will he confess his sins or not?
Will Mankind rejoin the community of believers or not? Will Mankind be
saved or not? That our audiences hung so attentively on Mankind's last
sequence of agonizing decisions may have meant that they were then
recognizing in his struggles some daunting moral and spiritual
struggles of their own.

The Second Shepherds' Pageant has less apparent ecclesiastical and
theological sophistication than Mankig , but a greater sense of human
”glee" and commonplace verisimilitude. The purposes of Mankind's
Shrovetide occasion would not permit the celebration of human and
worldly joy, but that is just what lies at the "heart” of the figggng

d ' a e . Christmas, after all, reminds us that '. . . God
so loved the world, as to give his only begotten Son; that whosoever
believeth in him, may not perish, but may have life everlasting” (John
3:16). It is Shrovetide that warns of a "streyt examynacyon," wherein
”be chaffe xall be brente" (Mankind 42-43, cf. Matthew 3:12, Luke
3:17). The Wakefield Master's subject matter and artistic manner allow
for greater grace and charity. He does not disappoint. His shepherds
are real people who voice complaints that are still common: bad
weather, high taxes, dishonest landlords, petty bureaucrats, marital
discord, and natural disasters. Their joys, happily for us, are just
as real. Their love of food, drink, spirited companionship, and song

is as appealing to us in its uncomplicated directness as it must have

223
been to the Master's own audiences. But this is not all the shepherds
love. Their faithfulness and devotion to each other and to standards
of personal trust and social duty reveal moral strengths of character
that are worthy even now. In contrast to the shepherds' strength of
character, Mak's and Gyll's social pretensions and bungled thefts seem
pathetically comic. The true order of the world rests with the
shepherds' "somkyns gle' and in their acts of humble charity. The
Master's Nativity scene gives the shepherds and the audience sublime
confirmation of that vision. The human community in the persons of the
shepherds receives the incarnation of divinity. The Master's artless
depiction of the shepherds' adoration of the Christ-child is as
aesthetically and emotionally satisfying as the sacrament that ended
Maghig_, and is not so far removed from the satisfactions of the Mass
itself.

The community of performance, then, includes many players, actors,
technical support personnel, and audiences. More than this, the
performance of medieval drama may also include a sense of communion
with playwrights, actors, and audiences from a distant time and place.
This expansive sense of a community of players is important to any
production, but especially so for the modern productions of the
medieval cycle and morality plays. It is important to grasping some
understanding of the place these dramas had in their original
communities. It is also important to assuring the quality of their
modern productions. And it is important to the actors who perform
them. As I have worked with the graduate students in English who have

largely made up the amateur casts for these plays, I have been struck

224
again and again by the effect of our productions on them. The
Stanislavski techniques that I have adopted for actor training,
rehearsal, and performance require that these students learn to
transform the literature of drama into concrete experience and to
believe in the worthiness of their individual and collective labors.
For many, this experience first reveals that the literature of drama is
fulfilled only through physical action on a stage: contemplation alone
is insufficient to its purpose. Also, for many of these students this
experience first reveals that whatever is understood by one is useless
until it finds its proper expression among the many. These two lessons
are not antithetical to the character of the Middle Ages or of medieval
drama. The best life for medieval people was one that combined
contemplation and action. And the way to salvation and eternal life

for them was within, and not outside, the community of believers.

225

NOTES

Of. John R. Elliott, Jr., v e th
Modern Stage and the ”Calendar of Twentieth-Century Revivals of
English Mystery Cycles and Other Major Religious Plays of the
Middle Ages in England“ in Glynne Wickham, 1hg_nggigg§1_1hggtgg
(234-238). See also Glynne Wickham, “The Staging of Saint Plays
in England.“ In addition to his general discussion of the modern
revivals of the surviving English cycle plays, Elliott also notes
the experiments of Meg Twycross to reproduce medieval acting
methods in her productions at Oxford in the early 1970s. He
writes that, “Working backwards from seventeenth-century materials
on the art of elocution, Twycross taught her actors a set of
stylized hand-gestures, each expressing a different feeling or
action, which they used to illustrate the phrases in their
dialogue. The technique brought a visual rhythm to the speeches
(given in the original Middle English), not the least benefit of
which was to greatly increase their intelligibility. The
resulting style struck some spectators as more oriental than
western. It may be that the mysteries, or at least some of them,
were acted more like Non and Kabuki than we have suspected" (131).
Information about completed productions and videotapes of the
University of California-Irvine N-Town cycle project may be
obtained from Professor Edgar Schell, Department of English and
Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, CA

92717.

226
When I directed ngting f9; dio; in 1971, I took this little
passage to be crucial to an understanding of the relationship
between Vladimir (A) and Estragon (3). Why was it that they were
continually separating, and then continually struggling to get
back together? My solution to their character tug of war was that
Vladimir was a confidence man and Estragon was a pickpocket. They
worked their scam together. Even though they did not like each
other very much, they needed each other to survive. Vladimir's
talk distracted the “mark" from Estragon's theft. Without
Estragon, Vladimir got no money or goods. Without Vladimir's
distractions, Estragon always got caught (and beaten). As in a
tug of war, these two disgruntled and begrudging characters, too,
are bound together.
I remember the amazement of one of my actors who came to realize
just how much time it took to rehearse a play well. We had just
finished the first blocking rehearsal of our 1990 production of
the Chester Nggh;g_zigg_. After two hours of work we had blocked
only the first half of the play, which was as much as I had
planned to complete. My actor, though, was stunned. She reported
to me that when the class began she did not know how we could
devote five weeks to rehearsing a play that took only twenty
minutes to read. After that first blocking rehearsal, though, she
said that she was suddenly terrified that we would not have enough
time to complete all that had to be learned and done!

The productions of Mggkigg and the §ecgnd Shepherds' Pageant were

extracurricular projects associated with the Michigan State

227
University Department of English that drew heavily upon the good
will and scholarly assistance of Professors Arnold Williams, John
Yunck, and John Alford. Not only did they offer much useful
counsel on the preparation of the performance scripts, but they
also supplied much information and assistance in production.
Their expertise in medieval dramatic literature was complemented
by their having seen several modern productions of medieval plays
in England and America. They were thus able to help assure that
our productions would fairly represent the plays' medieval
qualities and yet not become mere antiquarian oddities. The last
two productions of the medieval drama that I have directed have
been included as part of the Department of English's graduate
course in early English drama (English 812). Professor Lister
Matheson, who taught the course, provided the students with a
survey background in medieval drama and served as the producer of
both plays.
Every acting text and play production handbook has a glossary of
stage terms. Charles McGaw's chapter, ”Learning the Lingo,“ for
example, in Ag;ing_ig_figiigying (123-131) is perfectly adequate to
the needs of the beginning actor.
Cf. Hardison, ”Just as the Mass is a sacred drama encompassing all
history and embodying in its structure the central pattern of
Christian life on which all Christian drama must draw, the
celebration of the Mass contains all elements necessary to secular
performances. The Mass is the general case--for Christian

culture, the archetype. Individual dramas are shaped in its mold.

228
As theologians have long known and anthropologists have recently
discovered, man does not make God in his image. Rather, he makes

himself in the image of his gods" (79).

Oh "The Mu- “ Sacred Drama” in Wise

Qggmg (35-79), especially: ”That the service which has just been
described is dramatic cannot be doubted. The nature and, as it
might be called, the tonality of the drama is another matter. It
has a configuration which may be experienced but which cannot be
fully communicated. The problems confronting the would-be critic
are not unlike those posed by the analysis of a poem. The
history, genre, ideas, social background, and rhetoric of the poem
can be described, but its ggiggn_g;§§;g, its mode of existence in
the mind at the moment of full aesthetic response, eludes
definition for the very simple reason that the only adequate
expression of the poem's meaning is the experience of the poem
itself” (77).

Viola Spolin has a longer and more detailed definition of
improvisation. She writes that it is

Playing the game; setting out to solve a problem with no
preconception as to how you will do it; permitting everything
in the environment (animate or inanimate) to work for you in
solving the problem; it is not the scene, it is the way to
the scene; a predominate function of the intuitive; playing
the game brings opportunity to learn theater to a cross-
section of people; 'playing it by ear'; process as opposed to
result; not ad-lib or 'originality' or 'making it up by
yourself'; a form, if understood, possible to any age group;
setting object in motion between players as in a game;
solving of problems together; the ability to allow the acting
problem to evolve the scene; a moment in the lives of people
without needing plot or story line for the communication; an
art form; transformation; brings forth details and
relationships as organic whole; living process. (383-84)

10.

229
Our 1990 production of the Chester Nggh;g_fiiggg provides an
example of this improvisational capacity to adapt to surprises.
The outdoor performance was accompanied--but not interrupted-~by
rain showers that began and ended virtually on God's cue lines
(and the audience's gasps, laughter, and applause). The showers
made it seem as if we had the technical support of a superlatively
capable stage manager. The audience's cheerful willingness to get
a little wet, right along with Noah and his family, supported the
players greatly and made the performance truly communal.
A similar incident happened to me during the first performance of
Mankind's second production. I played the character of Mercy as a
Dominican Friar and entered from the back of the audience, crying
”Do wey, do wey pis reull,sers! do wey” (82), to put an end to
the tavern revelry. As I made my entrance, I bumped into a young
man who had turned to see who was disrupting the play, saw me, and

in shock and surprise could only stammer, "Oh, sorry, Father."

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