Herod the Great (play)

Last updated

The pageant of Magnus Herodes (Herod the Great) is the sixteenth of the pageants of the Towneley Cycle of medieval mystery plays. It occupies folios 55-60 of the unique manuscript of the cycle, Huntington MS HM 1. It is composed in the distinctive stanza-style rhyming associated by scholars with a putative poet known as the 'Wakefield Master'. [1] In the assessment of A. C. Cawley, 'the Wakefield playwright's skill in characterisation is nowhere better shown than in this pageant'. [2] Like other tyrant characters in medieval drama, the protagonist of Herod the Great fictionalises the audience as his own subjects, and this pageant 'presents one of the most extended displays of this figure's interactive antics'. [3]

Contents

Summary

Herod the Great follows pageants depicting the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus and the subsequent flight into Egypt of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus to avoid murder by King Herod the Great, who fears the prophecy that Jesus will become the King of the Jews. The play concerns the massacre of the innocents. After it comes the Purification of Mary, whose account of the presentation of Jesus at the Temple presents a scene of calm and joy in counterpoint to the action of Herod the Great. [4]

Line numbering varies depending on whether editors edit the stanzas of the play as beginning with four long lines (giving a total stanza length of nine lines) or eight short lines (giving a total stanza length of thirteen lines).

Lines

(9-line

stanzas)

Lines

(13-line

stanzas)

Events
1-721-104At the palace of Herod, a messenger extols the power and glory of King Herod to the audience.
73-144105-208Herod rants at the audience, as though they were people in his court, about his anger that a child may become king of the Jews in his place, and that the Three Kings have not returned to his court, as they promised, to tell him where to find the child.
145-96209-284Herod converses with three soldiers. Herod blames them for letting the three kings get away and dismisses them.
197-275285-400Herod summons his counsellors, who cite Isaiah 7:14 as a prophecy of Jesus's birth, and recommend killing all infants of two years old and younger.
276-324401-67A messenger fetches the three soldiers, whom Herod instructs to kill the infants.
325-414468-599Elsewhere in Bethlehem, the three soldiers encounter three women, whose children they kill. The woman do their best to resist and lament their babies' slaughter.
415-59600-63The action returns to Herod's palace. Herod rewards the soldiers richly for their killings.
460-513664-741Herod addresses the audience, expressing his relief that through the slaughter of 144,000 children he has averted usurpation, and admonishes the audience never to speak of anyone else as king near him again.

Sources

The play was adapted from the corresponding pageant of the York Mystery Plays or a similar text. [5]

Interpretations

Peter Ramey has inferred that performances of the play demanded extensive interaction between the audience and the actors, developing the fiction that the audience are themselves characters in the play: "Herod all but begs for vocal opposition from the crowd, repeatedly daring any who are present to challenge him". Yet, in his interpretation, even heckling or opposition from the audience ultimately underlines the fact that, "since Herod controls the terms of the drama", emphasising the powerfully hierarchical structures of medieval English society. [6]

Several commentators have read Herod the Great as developing the theatrical and comical potential of Herod, possibly at the expense of religious or moral contemplation. [7] [8] [9]

The resistance of the mothers in Herod the Great and similar plays has attracted considerable commentary. As the women switch between violent resistance and lamentation, their portrayal draws on stereotypes of unruly women (like Noah's ill-behaved wife in the mystery plays' depictions of the Flood) yet also foreshadows women's lamentations at the crucifixion of Jesus as well, perhaps, as Herod's own wailing in Hell, giving the female characters depth and moral weight. [10] Through its female characters, the play questions patriarchy, power, violence, and tyranny, yet arguably ultimately accepts their naturalness rather than presenting alternative paradigms for understand the world. [11]

Editions

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mystery play</span> Medieval European play

Mystery plays and miracle plays are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song. They told of subjects such as the Creation, Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, and the Last Judgment. Often they were performed together in cycles which could last for days. The name derives from mystery used in its sense of miracle, but an occasionally quoted derivation is from ministerium, meaning craft, and so the 'mysteries' or plays performed by the craft guilds.

<i>Everyman</i> (15th-century play) 15th-century morality play

The Somonyng of Everyman, usually referred to simply as Everyman, is a late 15th-century morality play. Like John Bunyan's 1678 Christian novel The Pilgrim's Progress, Everyman uses allegorical characters to examine the question of Christian salvation and what Man must do to attain it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Morality play</span> Genre of Medieval and early Tudor drama

The morality play is a genre of medieval and early Tudor drama. The term is used by scholars of literary and dramatic history to refer to a genre of play texts from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries that feature personified concepts alongside angels and demons, who are engaged in a struggle to persuade a protagonist who represents a generic human character toward either good or evil. The common story arc of these plays follows "the temptation, fall and redemption of the protagonist".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Massacre of the Innocents</span> Narrative from chapter 2 of Matthew

The Massacreof the Innocents is an incident in the Nativity narrative of the Gospel of Matthew (2:16–18) in which Herod the Great, king of Judea, orders the execution of all male children who are two years old and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem. Christians venerate them as the first Christian martyrs, but a majority of Herod biographers, and "probably a majority of current biblical scholars" consider the story fabricated or unhistorical.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English drama</span>

Drama was introduced to Britain from Europe by the Romans, and auditoriums were constructed across the country for this purpose.

The N-Town Plays are a cycle of 42 medieval Mystery plays from between 1450 and 1500.

Liturgical drama refers to medieval forms of dramatic performance that use stories from the Bible or Christian hagiography.

Ordo Virtutum is an allegorical morality play, or sacred music drama, by Hildegard of Bingen, composed c. 1151, during the construction and relocation of her Abbey at Rupertsberg. It is the earliest morality play by more than a century, and the only medieval musical drama to survive with an attribution for both text and music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medieval theatre</span> Theatrical performances in the Middle Ages

Medieval theatre encompasses theatrical performance in the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century and the beginning of the Renaissance in approximately the 15th century. The category of "medieval theatre" is vast, covering dramatic performance in Europe over a thousand-year period. A broad spectrum of genres needs to be considered, including mystery plays, morality plays, farces and masques. The themes were almost always religious. The most famous examples are the English cycle dramas, the York Mystery Plays, the Chester Mystery Plays, the Wakefield Mystery Plays, and the N-Town Plays, as well as the morality play known as Everyman. One of the first surviving secular plays in English is The Interlude of the Student and the Girl.

The Wakefield or Towneley Mystery Plays are a series of thirty-two mystery plays based on the Bible most likely performed around the Feast of Corpus Christi probably in the town of Wakefield, England during the Late Middle Ages until 1576. It is one of only four surviving English mystery play cycles. Some scholars argue that the Wakefield cycle is not a cycle at all, but a mid-sixteenth-century compilation, formed by a scribe bringing together three separate groups of plays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">York Mystery Plays</span> Annual series of plays in 14th–16th century York, England

The York Mystery Plays, more properly the York Corpus Christi Plays, are a Middle English cycle of 48 mystery plays or pageants covering sacred history from the creation to the Last Judgment. They were traditionally presented on the feast day of Corpus Christi and were performed in the city of York, from the mid-fourteenth century until their suppression in 1569. The plays are one of four virtually complete surviving English mystery play cycles, along with the Chester Mystery Plays, the Towneley/Wakefield plays and the N-Town plays. Two long, composite, and late mystery pageants have survived from the Coventry cycle and there are records and fragments from other similar productions that took place elsewhere. A manuscript of the plays, probably dating from between 1463 and 1477, is still intact and stored at the British Library.

<i>The Tragedy of Mariam</i> English closet tragedy (1613)

The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry is a Jacobean-era drama written by Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, and first published in 1613. There is some speculation that Cary may have written a play before The Tragedy of Mariam that has since been lost, but most scholars agree that The Tragedy of Mariam is the first extant original play written by a woman in English. It is also the first known English play to closely explore the history of King Herod's marriage to Mariam.

PLS, or Poculi Ludique Societas, the Medieval & Renaissance Players of Toronto, sponsors productions of early plays, from the beginnings of medieval drama to as late as the middle of the seventeenth century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nativity play</span> Christmas-based theatrical genre

A Nativity play or Christmas pageant is a play which recounts the story of the Nativity of Jesus. It is usually performed at Christmas, the feast of the Nativity.

This page lists cultural depictions of Herod the Great, grouped by order and arranged by date.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Coventry Mystery Plays</span>

The Coventry Mystery Plays, or Coventry Corpus Christi Pageants, are a cycle of medieval mystery plays from Coventry, West Midlands, England, and are perhaps best known as the source of the "Coventry Carol". Two plays from the original cycle are extant having been copied from the now lost original manuscript in the early 19th century. Another, separate manuscript was initially titled the Ludus Coventriae by a 17th-century librarian who erroneously assumed it was copy of the Coventry mystery plays. The collection within this manuscript are now more commonly known as the N-Town Plays and are thought to have originated in East Anglia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Clare Cawley</span>

Arthur Clare Cawley was Professor of English Language and Medieval English Literature at the University of Leeds.

The Brome play of Abraham and Isaac is a fifteenth-century play of unknown authorship, written in an East Anglian dialect of Middle English, which dramatises the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac.

<i>The Digby Conversion of Saint Paul</i>

The Digby Conversion of Saint Paul is a Middle English miracle play of the late fifteenth century. Written in rhyme royal, it is about the conversion of Paul the Apostle. It is part of a collection of mystery plays that was bequeathed to the Bodleian Library by Sir Kenelm Digby in 1634.

<i>The Second Shepherds Play</i> Medieval mystery play

The Second Shepherds' Play is a famous medieval mystery play which is contained in the manuscript HM1, the unique manuscript of the Wakefield Cycle. These plays are also referred to as the Towneley Plays, on account of the manuscript residing at Towneley Hall. The plays within the manuscript roughly follow the chronology of the Bible and so were believed to be a cycle, which is now considered not to be the case. This play gained its name because in the manuscript it immediately follows another nativity play involving the shepherds. In fact, it has been hypothesized that the second play is a revision of the first. It appears that the two shepherd plays were not intended to be performed together since many of the themes and ideas of the first play carry over to the second one. In both plays it becomes clear that Christ is coming to Earth to redeem the world from its sins. Although the underlying tone of The Second Shepherd's Play is serious, many of the antics that occur among the shepherds are extremely farcical in nature.

References

  1. Garrett P. J. Epp, 'The Towneley Plays: Introduction', in The Towneley Plays, ed. by Garrett P. J. Epp (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2018).
  2. Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, ed. by A. C. Cawley (London: Dent, 1974) [first publ. 1956], p. 105.
  3. Peter Ramey, 'The Audience-Interactive Games of the Middle English Religious Drama', Comparative Drama, 47.1 (Spring 2013), 55-83 doi : 10.1353/cdr.2013.000 (p. 59).
  4. Katharine Goodland, '"Veniance, Lord, apon thaym fall": Maternal Mourning, Divine Justice, and Tragedy in theCorpus Christi Plays', Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 18 (2005), 166-92 (p. 181).
  5. David Staines, 'To Out-Herod Herod: The Development of a Dramatic Character', Comparative Drama, 10.1 (spring 1976), 29-53, doi : 10.1353/cdr.1976.0015 (pp. 45-48).
  6. Peter Ramey, 'The Audience-Interactive Games of the Middle English Religious Drama', Comparative Drama, 47.1 (Spring 2013), 55-83 doi : 10.1353/cdr.2013.000 (p. 61).
  7. Jean E. E. Smith, 'The Characters of Herod the Great and of Herod Antipas in Medieval Drama of Western Europe' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1976), pp. 255-62.
  8. David Staines, 'To Out-Herod Herod: The Development of a Dramatic Character', Comparative Drama, 10.1 (spring 1976), 29-53, doi : 10.1353/cdr.1976.0015 (pp. 45-48).
  9. Bob Godfrey, 'Herod’s Reputation and the Killing of the Children: Some Theatrical Consequences', in Staging Scripture: Biblical Drama, 1350-1600, ed. by Peter Happé and Wim Hüsken, Ludus, 14 (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 253–78 doi : 10.1163/9789004313958_013.
  10. Katharine Goodland, '"Veniance, Lord, apon thaym fall": Maternal Mourning, Divine Justice, and Tragedy in theCorpus Christi Plays', Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 18 (2005), 166-92.
  11. Estella Ciobanu, Representations of the Body in Middle English Biblical Drama (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) ISBN   978-3-319-90918-9.