Tears for Abraham: The Chester Play of Abraham and Isaac and Antisacrifice in Works by Wilfred Owen, Benjamin Britten, and Derek Jarman

The greatest patriarch of the Hebrew Testament, Abraham is seldom thought of as an epic hero. Remembered for his willingness to sacrifice his son at God's command (Gen. 22:1-19), he emerges in medieval literature as a paradigm of faith and obedience. ¹ The Anglo-Saxon poem known as Genesisportrays Abraham as one in whom piety and military might are combined. ² Along with Gideon, David, and other leaders of the Jewish wars, Abraham is honored in later medieval liturgies for the blessing of banners and weapons. ³ With the exception of the Chester cycle, however, English mystery plays of Abraham and Isaac ignore Abraham's success as leader of the army that rescued Lot, his nephew, from the captivity of King Chedorlaomer. ⁴ The Chester play begins with Abraham's thanksgiving to God for his victory over four kings "of uncouth landes" and his promise to give a tithe of the spoils to Melchizedek. Lot in turn thanks Abraham for his deliverance "of enimyes handes." ⁵ Abraham's heroism has consequences for the role of sacrifice in the play and in a sequence of works closely connected to it. They include Benjamin Britten's Canticle IIand War Requiem; a film of the latter made by Derek Jarman; and one of Wilfred Owen's antiwar lyrics used in War Requiem, "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young." This poem provides Britten's and Jarman's works with what is perhaps their most striking moment, the death of Isaac.

In Christian exegesis Isaac is not a sacrificial victim but a type fulfilled by the sacrificial Christ. ⁶ Spared Abraham's sword, he is remembered as a model of submissive faith. In some versions of the Hebrew 'akedah, or the "binding" of Isaac, the boy approaches the altar voluntarily, is sacrificed, and is then immediately revived. ⁷ But in Christian contexts the boy's death is not imagined. The English mystery plays describe Isaac either as a child (as in the Chester cycle) or as a young man of unspecified age (as in plays from Brome, Northampton, Towneley, and in the N-Town cycle and the Cornish Ordinalia). ⁸ Only the York playwright imagined Isaac facing death as an adult; after the sacrifice he is sent off, at the late age of thirty, to be married. ⁹ Like his father, Isaac lived to become an old man, but he did not enjoy a reputation for either strength or wisdom. His wife, Rebekah, successfully schemed to divert Isaac's blessing from Esau to Jacob (Gen. 27), an episode briefly seen in the Towneley play of Isaac. ¹⁰ Although Matthew's gospel twice includes him with Abraham among the leading patriarchs of Israel, Isaac seems to have derived glory from his father's brave and perspicacious deeds rather than from his own (Matt. 8:11, 22:32; and compare Acts 3:13 and Exod. 2:24, 3:6).

Few medieval or modern commentators draw attention to Isaac's existence after Abraham's intended sacrifice. ¹¹ But the boy's traumatic youth and undistinguished old age suggest a biography suitable for an adult whose early experiences haunt his later life--not merely a victim, but a survivor. Isaac's long career might be imagined as the unannounced subject of Derek Jarman's 1989 film, War Requiem, an adaptation of Benjamin Britten's oratorio of the same name. Commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962, Britten's work combines the Latin text of the Requiem Mass with nine poems by Wilfred Owen. Included is "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young," a version of the sacrifice of Isaac that ends with the boy...