Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (review)

Jody Enders's scholarship is indispensable for the study of medieval European theatre and drama, for the history of rhetoric, and for cultural studies. The publication of this new work raises the question: which of her recent books should one read? Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends covers much of the same material as The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); however, the two aim for different audiences. The earlier book explores the connections between torture, law, rhetoric, memory, and drama, and the ways in which theatre and torture purport to reveal truth—or to create it. The more recent book examines medieval "urban legends" about the theatre; that is, stories of ambiguous origin that are repeated authoritatively to demonstrate how powerful (and dangerous) the theatre can be.

Both books center on the relation between reality and simulation. Death by Drama begins where The Medieval Theater of Cruelty ended; that is, with a drama of Judith and Holofernes staged upon the occasion of Philip II's entry into Tournai in 1549, for which the producers are reported to have arranged for a criminal in the role of Judith to really decapitate a condemned heretic and murderer in the role of Holofernes. Histories of the medieval theatre abound in this sort of anecdote. Enders not only compares them to urban legends, but she also has the requisite theatre historian's skills to ferret out the evidence that does exist and to evaluate it thoroughly. Her investigation of the Tournai story led Enders to many others, their credibility just as questionable. She argues that, in medieval Europe at least, "there was something about the theater that not only reinforced belief but created it as it unfolded in real time. There was something about the realities of the experience of representation that made for true experiences, if not necessarily true accounts" (xxiii). Like urban legends, stories about the dangerous medieval theatre reveal more about what people fear than about what occurs (xxii).

Since both books feature, in their inspiration and near their ends, the Tournai incident, their treatments of it provide a handy ground for comparison. Death by Drama presents the historiographic conundrum in the prologue and then returns to the incident in the final chapter, where Enders mentions in passing the reports of snuff films that circulated in the 1970s and examines possible meanings for the story—meanings for which the truth of the incident matters to varying extents. The brief epilogue of Death by Drama addresses the plethora of contemporary snuff info-tainments available under the guise of news and investigative reporting. The Medieval Theater of Cruelty embeds the Tournai story in a long chapter on "The Performance of Violence," which also includes in-depth discussions of theatricalized legal pleading, scourging scenes in saint and passion plays, public execution, the special effects used to stage violence in late-medieval France, and a number of the other medieval urban legends about theatrical violence that Death by Drama treats at greater length, along with a substantially similar discussion of snuff films and real violence in the modern theatre.

The thesis of The Medieval Theater of Cruelty is that the medieval understanding of torture both enabled and encouraged the representation of violence as a means of rhetorical coercion in the theatre. Enders argues that theatre and law have "a forensic correspondence borne of spectacularity and performance," and that medieval literature "poeticizes" legal ordeal. Both theatre and law depend upon human suffering to invent (or discover) truth, and also to inscribe that truth in memory. Enders argues that rhetorical practices (including theatre) are inherently violent. Although constructed as a nonviolent form of social mediation, rhetoric does in fact perpetuate social (real) violence. I strongly recommend this book for anyone working on memory, violence, cruelty, or pain in any time period or culture. Of special interest to the theatre...