Theater of the Word

Julie Paulson

Description

In Theater of the Word: Selfhood in the English Morality Play, Julie Paulson sheds new light on medieval constructions of the self as they emerge from within a deeply sacramental culture. The book examines the medieval morality play, a genre that explicitly addresses the question of what it means to be human and takes up the ritual traditions of confession and penance, long associated with medieval interiority, as its primary subjects.

The morality play is allegorical drama, a “theater of the word," that follows a penitential progression in which an everyman figure falls into sin and is eventually redeemed through penitential ritual. Written during an era of reform when the ritual life of the medieval Church was under scrutiny, the morality plays as a whole insist upon a self that is first and foremost performed—constructed, articulated, and known through ritual and other communal performances that were interwoven into the fabric of medieval life.

This fascinating look at the genre of the morality play will be of keen interest to scholars of medieval drama and to those interested in late medieval culture, sacramentalism, penance and confession, the history of the self, and theater and performance.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Literary Criticism
• Medieval
• Theater
• Inglaterra
• Edad Media
• Theatre
• Middle Ages
• Christianity
• England

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268104641
• Langue: English

Extrait

Theater of the Word
ReFormations: Medieval and Early Modern
S ERIES E DITORS: D AVID A ERS , S ARAH B ECKWITH, AND J AMES S IMPSON
R ECENT T ITLES IN THE S ERIES
Writing Faith and Telling Tales: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Work of Thomas More (2013)
Thomas Betteridge
Unwritten Verities: The Making of England’s Vernacular Legal Culture, 1463–1549 (2015)
Sebastian Sobecki
Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1750 (2015)
Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith, eds.
The Civic Cycles: Artisan Drama and Identity in Premodern England (2015)
Nicole R. Rice and Margaret Aziza Pappano
Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600 (2016)
Ryan McDermott
Volition’s Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature (2017)
Andrew Escobedo
Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide (2017)
Jay Zysk
Queen of Heaven: The Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin in Early Modern English Writing (2018)
Lilla Grindlay
Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (2019)
Matthew J. Smith
JULIE PAULSON
Theater of the Word
SELFHOOD IN THE ENGLISH MORALITY PLAY
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2019 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Paulson, Julie C., 1970- author.
Title: Theater of the word : selfhood in the English morality play / Julie Paulson.
Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2019] | Series: Reformations : medieval and early modern | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019002933 (print) | LCCN 2019007021 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104634 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268104641 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104610 | ISBN 9780268104610 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104611 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268104627 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 026810462X (paperback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Self in literature. | Moralities, English—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PR635.S38 (ebook) | LCC PR635.S38 P38 2019 (print) | DDC 822/.051609—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002933
∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
For my parents.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ONE The Castle of Perseverance and Penitential Platea
TWO A Theater of the Soul’s Interior: Contemplative Literature and Penitential Education in Wisdom
THREE Speaking for Mankind
FOUR Everyman and Community
FIVE A New Theater of the Word: The Morality Play and the English Reformation
Conclusion: Morality Drama Inside Out
Notes
Works Cited
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is in large part about the role of community in shaping the self. I have been very fortunate in the course of my life to be shaped by wonderful intellectual and educational communities, accumulating numerous debts along the way. I trace my interest in premodern selfhood to the storied “Hum 110” course required of all first-year students at Reed College and wish to acknowledge the inspiring teachers there, particularly Nathalia King, Gail Sherman, and Ellen Stauder. Good fortune landed me at Duke University for graduate work with Sarah Beckwith and David Aers, who helped me shape the central premises of this book at its earliest inception, many years ago. It is my sincere hope that the richness, rigor, and generosity of their instruction is felt by my own students today. I am also grateful for the contributions of Meg Greer, Toril Moi, and Laurie Shannon and to the many others who formed my intellectual community at Duke. Thank you, Sarah, for encouraging me to submit the book to the ReFormations series.
My wonderful colleagues at San Francisco State University have been indispensable to the development of this project. Steve Arkin, Dean Paul Sherwin, and Sugie Goen-Salter provided crucial support early and late in its development, and I am grateful for the leaves and assigned time that allowed me time for research. I would particularly like to thank the core members of my writing group—Sara Hackenberg, Gitanjali Shahani, Lynn Wardley, and Lehua Yim—for their astute comments and companionship in the writing process. Sara Hackenberg has read and reread every chapter of this book, always with great assiduousness and invaluable suggestions. Lara Bovilsky, Sarita Cannon, Jody Enders, Jason Gleckman, Robert Hornback, Erin Kelly, Shirin Khanmohamadi, Maura Nolan, Margaret Pappano, Melissa Sanchez, Summer Star, and Andrew Tumminia also provided helpful feedback on pieces of this project at various stages in its progress. Dorrie Armstrong, Kathy Ashley, Katie Little, and the late Claire Sponsler reviewed the manuscript in full, and I have greatly benefited from their insights and encouragement.
I wish to thank Stephen Little, Matt Dowd, Susan Berger, and Wendy McMillen at the University of Notre Dame Press for shepherding this book toward publication and Scott Barker for his skilled copy editing. This is a far better book for the perceptive and thorough commentary received from Kate Crassons and an anonymous reader for the press—I deeply thank them both. All errors and shortcomings are my own.
An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared as “A Theater of the Soul’s Interior: Contemplative Literature and Penitential Education in the Morality Play Wisdom ” in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38.2 (Spring 2008). Likewise, an earlier version of chapter 4 appeared as “Death’s Arrival and Everyman ’s Separation” in Theatre Survey 48.1 (May 2007). Thank you to the Folger Shakespeare Library for permission to use the image of the stage plan of The Castle of Perseverance .
This book is dedicated to my parents, Leon and Pearl Paulson, whose abundant love and support over the years I cannot even begin to describe. This book only exists because of the countless hours of childcare my parents and husband provided, and the many family outings and trips I missed so I could write. I especially thank my husband, Ben Wallace, and my children, Zachary and Adeline, for the sacrifices they made to make this book possible. I am immeasurably thankful for the love and companionship they give me every day.
INTRODUCTION
One and the same man perceives himself both to understand and to have sensations. Yet sensation involves the body, so that the body must be said to be part of man.
—Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
“Man,” writes Augustine in the City of God , “is neither the soul alone, nor the body alone, but body and soul together.” 1 Invoking Augustine’s definition, Aquinas likewise argues that a human being is a compound of a soul and a body where the “intellectual soul” is the “form of the human body.” 2 Human beings cannot be a soul or mind without a body. It will be such conceptions of the human and the Aristotelian metaphysics they imply that Descartes will reject in his famous formulation of the cogito with its radical separation of mind and body and attendant privileging of the interior life as the guarantor of the self. Descartes’s influence, despite much critical debate, continues to be felt today in the privileging of a private, hidden interiority—and the associated categories of inwardness, self-recognition, subjectivity, introspection, self-consciousness, and the like—as the defining criteria of what we mean by a “self.” Such privileging is also operative in histories of the self that seek to establish when the modern individualist “subject,” however variously defined, first emerged. This book, by turning away from Cartesian conceptions of the self as subject, offers a new way of understanding medieval representations of the self. I propose Wittgenstein, rather than Descartes, as the philosopher who can best help us understand the joined body and soul of medieval conceptions of selfhood. 3

For much of the twentieth century (and earlier), scholars identified the dawn of modernity with the emergence of an individual self-consciousness. 4 In response to a spate of Marxist-inspired histories of subjectivity produced in the 1980s, David Aers and Lee Patterson wrote a set of influential essays that rightly sought to correct the view that interiority in the Middle Ages did not exist. “The dialectic between an inward subjectivity and an external world that alienates it from both itself and its divine source,” Patterson pointed out, “provides the fundamental economy of the medieval idea of selfhood.” 5 Although it importantly redirects critical attention to medieval anthropologies of the self, Patterson’s formulation nonetheless leaves the binary between an inward subjectivity and the external world in place. Notably, at the same critical moment that medievalists were defending the very existence of interiority in the Middle Ages, other critics, most prominently Judith Butler, were insisting on the performative nature of identity, where the self is variably constructed in and through its acts. 6 In this book, I reconsider our privileging of internal subjectivity and the language of self-revelation as the defining category of what it means to be a self. I look anew at how medieval constructions of self-hood emerge from a sacramental culture in which penitential ritual and other social performances play a formative role in the shaping of Christian selves. I focus on the form of drama known as the morality play, a dramatic form that explicitly addresses the question of what it means to be human and that takes up a ritual tradition long associated with medieval “interiority”—confession and penance—as its primary subject.
The morality play is allegorical drama, a theater of the w