Joseph as Mother, Jutta as Pope: Gender and Transgression in Medieval German Drama

I

It is one of the fundamental axioms of performance theory that there is always a dialectical relationship between a fictional character and the living actor who represents him or her upon the stage. As Peter Thomson formulates it, the disembodied dramatic character imagined by the playwright must always contend with the bodily presence of the indispensable actor who brings the role to life. ¹ The sacred drama of the Middle Ages provides an especially interesting case in point. Because women were prohibited from acting in German religious drama throughout the Middle Ages, all female roles were played by men. ² Under these circumstances, two closely related questions become particularly acute: How were women embodied on the all-male stage? And how was the notion of gender itself perceived by a diverse audience comprising both women and men?

On the one hand, some historians have adopted the view that the conventions governing female impersonation in the early European theatre were so ubiquitous and so deeply ingrained that the male actor simply disappeared within the role he played. As the Kabuki theatre still demonstrates, even non-illusionistic stage conventions can be so powerful as to cause spectators to suspend their disbelief and thus minimize the distinction between character and actor to the point where it becomes inconsequential. ³ The maleness of the actor becomes invisible as the audience perceives only the female character that his costumed body represents. Conversely, other critics contend that the discrepancy between the actor’s own anatomy and his cross-gendered role could never be completely obscured. Stephen Orgel’s analysis of the effects of boys playing women’s parts on the Elizabethan stage, for example, considers theatrical cross-dressing to be “virtually identical to transvestism” and takes this customary stage practice as a point of departure for “investigations of sexual identity and misogynistic and homoerotic tendencies in Elizabethan society.” ⁴ According to this view, spectators always perceive at least a residual dissonance between character and actor, resulting in either pleasure or anxiety as the case may be.

In what follows, I hope to shed new light on this vexed problem by approaching the representation of gender in medieval German religious drama from a somewhat different point of view. This essay reformulates the traditional question of what happens when male actors impersonate women in order to ask what happens when dramatic characters on the stage, whether they be portrayed as male or female, imitate the behavior of the opposite sex. Do male characters who imitate women and women characters who imitate men disappear within the fictive roles that they choose to play, or is the audience expected to perceive the tension between the identity of the original character and the cross-gendered role which the character temporarily adopts? At the same time, the essay also poses a second question that is necessarily entailed by the first: To what extent does the deliberate transgression of traditional gender categories on stage indicate an awareness of the social construction (and hence the mutability) of gender roles in everyday life? In the end, I wish to argue that the success of at least some medieval plays must have depended upon the audience’s ability to recognize that principal characters (whether male or female) could re-invent themselves by imitating aspects of the stereotypical behavior of the opposite sex. For the plays to have worked at all, spectators must have been able to conceive of a gender role (be it masculine or feminine) as something provisional, that is to say, as a kind of per-formance in its own right. In this respect, public performances of church-sponsored drama could pose destabilizing alternatives to the prevailing conceptions of gender-appropriate social behavior for both women and men.

I take as my starting point two separate but complementary dramatic traditions intended for broad popular audiences in pre-Reformation Germany, both of which feature a principal character who successfully mimics the behavior of the opposite sex. The first is the role of Joseph in the so-called Kindelwiegen (cradle-rocking) episode...