Religious Ritual in John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance

Religious Ritual in John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance THOMAS P. ADLER • IN A RECENT ARTICLE, Mary B. O'Connell suggests that John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance is "a contemporary folk ritual" whose "characterization and plot development" are modeled on the medieval Mummers Play of Plough Monday, which traditionally was "a mime slaying of winter."} The purpose here is not to dispute Miss O'Connell's suggestion, since the Plough Monday play might well be the inspiration behind some elements in Arden's drama, especially the second dance near the end during which "Each man takes his drink, swigs a large gulp, then links wrists with the previous one, until all are dancing around the centre-piece in a chorus, singing.,,2 I suggest, however, that the first dance in the play, undertaken near the beginning of Act III by Musgrave alone, partakes of ritual elements of a more specifically religious nature. Here Musgrave, "waving his rifle, his face contorted with demonic fury," dances around "an articulated skeleton dressed in a soldier's tunic and trousers," hanging from "the cross-bar" in the town square (p. 84), in what is obviously a grotesque parody of the Christian "slaying of winter" - the Crucifixion - and a perversion of its essential meaning. Arden's debt to medieval drama is well-known: his modern mystery play, The Business of Good Government, written for performance during Christmastime , is, as John Russell Taylor says, "of a radiant grace and simplicity which make clear some of the lessons Arden has learned from a study of the medieval stage...";3 and Robert John Jordan has rightly singled out certain aspects of the characterization and conflict in Musgrave's Dance as "almost morality-play in style.,,4 Although there was never any literal dance around the cross in the Crucifixion plays in the medieval mystery cycles, Christ's death was seen as the climactic event in the sacred history of mankind from the Creation to the Last Judgment in that it reconciled man with God and was thus the culmination of God's salvific dance of grace on earth. 163 164 THOMAS P. ADLER Arden's stage directions specify a number of visual images and gestures which would suggest to the audience a re-enactment of the Crucifixion albeit in a parodic way - in the hoisting of the skeleton and Musgrave's demonic dance around it. The description of the stage set for Act III, Scene One, states that "In the centre of the stage is a practicable feature -- the centre-piece of the market place. It is a sort of Victorian clock·tower-cumlamppost -cum-market-cross, and stands on a raised plinth. There is a ladder leaning against it" (p. 76). (The last two photographs of the English production which are published at the back of the Grove Press edition of the play show very well how the crosslike formation of this centre-piece dominates the setting.) Two other stage directions dictating gesture and movement by the actors would also play on the audience's awareness of Christian symbology and call to mind Christ's crucifixion: when Attercliffe, the pacifist follower of Musgrave, jumps in front of Hurst's Gatling gun to prevent him from opening fire on the crowd, he "stands on the step of the plinth ... with his arms spread out" in a Christlike pose (p. 96); and when the skeleton of Billy Hicks is removed from the cross-bar, his former mistress Annie "sits with it on her knees," cradling it in her arms in a visual image reminiscent of the Pieal (p. 99). If the central message of Christ's crucifixion is one of love and reconciliation - the inauguration of a new dispensation of forgiveness -, then Musgrave's fanatical plan for revenge - a throwback to the old dispensation of "an eye for an eye" vengeanceS - is antithetical to the meaning of the cross. Musgrave is correct in his original assumption that his gospel of no more war coincides with the Word of God, particularly as expressed by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount; as Musgrave says, "without God" such a proclamation of peace is but "a bad belch and...