Drama in Sermons: Quotation, Performativity, and Conversion in a Middle English Sermon on the Prodigal Son and in A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge

Medieval England's most severe vernacular antitheatrical statement, the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (ca. 1380-1425), is also its fullest expression of dramatic theory. ¹ Though it finds nothing redeeming in theater, rejecting it as ineffectual and blasphemous while extolling preaching instead, the Tretise is itself a theory of the theater that quotes and disputes another theory of the theater--making it an antagonistic dialogue of theories. The fact that the Tretise has two distinct authors, one providing a continuation to the other's text, further compounds its dialogic character. In this sense, the Tretise employs drama's constituent linguistic form in order to further an unrelenting antitheatrical position. ²

I take this basic contradiction to be more than a symptomatic voicing of exactly the thing the Tretise tries most to suppress, more than a case of contradictory desires in the speaking subject. This fundamental contradiction in the Tretise is instructive, worth following out not so that we might rescue medieval drama from its medieval detractors, but so that we might engage it with current critical thought--so that we might see, that is, what the Tretise can reveal about performativity and its relation to conversion. When the Tretise places preaching in opposition to playing, it argues that preaching is able to produce effects denied to playing, that preaching is performative while the theater is not. But its performative formulation of preaching creates problems for its own rejection of theater. While the Tretise and the theater it militates against share the conversion of their listeners as an ultimate concern, they disagree about mimesis's ability to convert listeners, and this divergence ultimately derives from the way in which narrative and metaphor structure the subject's experience of conversion. In order to trace out in more detail this complex set of theoretical relations among mimesis, the performative, identification, and conversion, I will focus on a few specific texts: the Tretise, of course, but also a representative Middle English sermon contemporaneous with the Tretise, and, ultimately, the parable of the prodigal son, which this sermon retells as its main exemplum. I want to show how the emblematic conversion narrative of the prodigal son story (Luke 15:11-32) as it appears in sermon number 32 in Woodburn O. Ross's Middle English Sermons provides a context and countertext for the Tretise's rejection of theater. ³ The representation of conversion in the parable and in the sermon's retelling of it shows that conversion foregrounds a fundamental instability in the subject, which problematizes any simple understanding of the function of mimesis in a didactic medium, sermon, or drama.

The Tretise

The Tretise is an unusual document, objecting to the theater in a period that saw an efflorescence of it, yet responding only obliquely. Except in part, with a brief nod to a "pley of Anticrist and of the Day of Dome" (101-2), the Tretise never mentions the cycles, those most authorized, expensive, extravagant, and wide-spread theatrical productions. Rather, the term "miraclis," as Clifford Davidson writes, "seems to have been intended as a broad category that would link [it] with a spectrum of dramatic activity ranging from the staging of religious scenes to representations on feast days and seasons such as Christmas" (2). The Tretise proceeds against the theater in large part by answering unnamed defenders of the theater, an anonymous "they," summarizing their six defenses as though from another document--"here agenus they seyen that." The Tretise claims that "they" claim:

1) that miracle plays are a form of "the worschip of God";

2) that they convert people "to gode livinge";

3) that they often move people "to compassion and devocion, wepinge bitere teris";

4) that, because some people will not be converted "by ernestful doinge . . . but by gamen and pley," it is profitable...