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Acting Mary: The Emotional Realism ofthe Mature Virgin in the N-Town Plays Alexandra F. Johnston The founding almost thirty years ago of the Poculi Ludique Societas, the medieval and Renaissance play group of the University of Toronto, can be attributed directly to the enthusiasm of Arnold Williams for the production of early drama. At a meeting of the seminar which he founded in association with the Modern Language Association, John Leyerle caught his excitement and returned to Toronto to make the production of a medieval play (inevitably Everyman) part of his first graduate seminar. Two years later Professor Leyerle's Seminar (PLS) became independent of the course and the rather pretentious Latin words that fitted the initials were chosen for the group. The group has passed through many phases since then but it remains at the center of much of what we now know about early drama. I have been associated with the PLS since 1974. What follows is based on my experiences as an actor and director, bringing my scholarly knowledge and training to the realization of the mature figure of the Virgin Mary in the N-Town plays.l Recent feminist scholarship has begun to uncover some unsuspected complexities that underlie the texts of early drama. In her essay on feminist approaches to the Corpus Christi cycles, Teresa Coletti centers much of her discussion on the figure of the Virgin Mary and examines "the many roles and meanings attributed to her during the Middle Ages."2 Three other recent publications have focused our attention on the figure of the N-Town Virgin. Peter Meredith has abstracted the play on the childhood of the Virgin from the manuscript and published it as a separate play.3 Martin Stevens emphasizes Mary's role in the Birth sequence but sees her importance, as well, in the episodes after the Resurrection. In N-Town, the risen Christ appears first to his mother and she then becomes, according to Stevens, "the presiding spirit of comic resolution" for the entire sequence.4 Most particularly, however, 85 86 AlexandraF. Johnston a consideration of Mary and her cult forms a large part of Gail McMurray Gibson's fine book on East Anglian lay spirituality and the drama. She writes: The incarnational preoccupation of the late Middle Ages tended to make the Virgin Mary-perhaps even more than Christ himself-the very emblem of Christian mystery. Mary of Nazareth had been chosen God's bride and God's mother; her body had enclosed divinity, had given Godhead a human form and likeness, had finally been transported to heaven, where Mary, ever Virgin, reigned not only as Queen of Heaven, but as Gabriel extols her in the N-Town "Salutation and Conception," even as "empres of helle." The Virgin Mary was for late medieval Christendom a mother goddess of powers conceivable and inconceivable, a saint raised uniquely among the whole company of saints to the highest pantheon of the sacred Trinity.5 Although my own approach has been influenced by these works, it has been through the experience of acting Mary and discussing the issues with my students that my ideas have been formed.6 Much of the concern in feminist approaches to the Virgin has been focused on her physical role as mother. Stimulated by the gynecological preoccupation of the plays on the Nativity themselves, attention has been given to the young Mary, the Mary of the Christmas story. Although this young figure seems in many ways to have dominated much of the thinking about Mary in the late Middle Ages, she remains removed from the everyday experience of ordinary women. There is an essential alterity about a virgin mother who bore her child without pain. This alterity sometimes expresses itself in the art of the period, as in the famous east window of the church in East Harling, Norfolk, where the figure of the Virgin remains young and blonde throughout the depiction of the sequence of events that covers more than fifty years. For many artists and theologians the figure of the Virgin remained the unattainable, beautiful child chosen by God to redeem the world, a child whose very physical purity was a constant rebuke to unbelievers. Yet the dramatic character of this Mary, based on the legends of her childhood and the miraculous events that led to the birth of Christ, is of less interest to me than that of the mature Mary of the Passion story, the post-Resurrection appearances, and the plays...

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