Striking a Pose: Performance Cues in Four French Hagiographic Mystery Plays

While they approach medieval theater from different perspectives, modern theorists and theater historians nevertheless agree that theatrical texts are unlike literary texts in a variety of ways. Their most obvious difference lies in the fact that theatrical texts presuppose a supra-textual performance that may include gestures, décors, timing, costumes, props, intonation, simulated action, noise, and music. Players, musicians, painters, and staging supervisors are among those who amend the structural and thematic intention of the written words by providing any number of conventional, or improvised, creative acts. As theoretician Anne Ubersfeld has argued, this intentional relationship between a dramatic text's verbal (textual) and nonverbal (performance) elements is unique to theatrical works.¹ From the historical perspective, Graham Runnalls's examination of French mystery play culture in the late medieval period confirms that a performance intention preceded in most cases the writing of an appropriate text; therefore, that intention would have been reflected in the resulting document.² Accordingly, the written composition of any work intended for performance contains evidence of this unique relationship between a spoken narrative and its performance mandate.

As a result of this internal relationship between spoken text and implied performance, plays are not simply characterized by written dialogue that carries a narrative forward, but by spoken words that rely on physical and vocal acts to amplify, or perhaps even complete, their narrative intention. If a dramatic character proclaims that "[t]here is the church I seek," he or she must follow through on those words by moving physically through space toward the appropriate décor or prop. If he or she fails to do so, the theatrical intention fails to achieve its communicative goal. In other words, even if the narrative itself has been satisfied by such an announcement, the theatrical intention requires further interpretation. Theater's genesis as an art form, as Mercedes Travieso Ganaza reiterates, resides in the fact that it is "toujours liée, concrètement et virtuellement, à des configurations de mise en scène" (always linked, physically and purposefully, to the contours of performance).³

With regard to the mystery plays of the late medieval era,⁴ written records of their spoken texts dwarf in volume and in comprehensiveness any surviving production notes, whether the latter take the form of didascalias, post-production records, or witness reports. This state of affairs is the direct reflection of a medieval performance culture in which surviving theatrical texts are generally post-production souvenirs. Thus, unless they were created as commemorative copies of a singular event, the surviving texts tend to retain few recorded features, beyond the spoken text itself, which may have been relevant to performance.⁵ For this reason, when a surviving text does include some staging notations their purpose there seems to "play some part for a reader who through them can imagine how the action might take place," according to Peter Happé's work with the English Macro plays.⁶ That is, the surviving textual souvenir has become a performance prototype rather than an exhaustive account of a theatrical event because that event, even when carefully planned and executed by a team of professional poets, painters, and technicians, was not usually recorded in a single document. By reflecting how the action might take place rather than how it actually did take place, the "post-production" copy of a mystery play reflects only part of its original intention.⁷ This is as it should be, since any renewed performance would have necessitated re-evaluating the written souvenir text for its applicability to different circumstances, funding, or participants. Thus, in the propensity in modern times to imagine the surviving performance remnant of a medieval play as an actualized text we have tended to mistake the skeletal theatrical text for a full-fledged literary one.

Consequently, it is not surprising that the rubrics, titles, and didascalias that punctuate the spoken dialogue of many medieval plays have sometimes been regarded by modern scholars as both unnecessary to the narrative and unhelpful to deciphering its performance requirements. A "speech then action" format, as I have maintained elsewhere...