Two Moral Interludes: The Pride of Life and Wisdom (review)

David Klausner's recent edition from the TEAMS Middle English Text Series is a worthy addition to this scholarly, but student-friendly, low-cost series. The Pride of Life is perhaps the earliest example of the moral interlude in English, although its date is problematic (Klausner speculates that it belongs to the second half of the fourteenth century, which might put it very close in time to the Macro The Castle of Perseverance, which, again, is very difficult to date precisely). Written on one side of a parchment account roll from the Priory of the Holy Trinity in Dublin, the manuscript suggests the sometimes ephemeral nature of surviving early English dramatic texts, written down on whatever paper came to hand. The original manuscript is no longer extant, having been blown up along with the building in which it was housed in 1922. Klausner thus had to base his edition on a transcription made in 1891 by James Mills and a photographic facsimile (available in Norman Davis's edition of Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments printed by Leeds Studies in English). Even so, the play is a fragment, with the second leaf of the manuscript having been lost or destroyed sometime before Mills made his transcription.

That said, The Pride of Life is an important piece of dramatic literature, and Klausner's edition does a good job of making it accessible to a student audience. His brief introduction gives a precise overview of the manuscript and its unfortunate history as well as a précis of the play, covering both the action of the fragment and a judicious construction of what was missing based upon the summary of the action as detailed in the banns. Klausner quite plausibly envisions the play as following the conventions of late medieval place-and-scaffold staging, one of the chief traditions of late medieval English drama (e.g., the Digby Mary Magdalene). Klausner is careful to separate what we can actually know from probable inferences, and he does so with admirable clarity, suggesting—for example—that while the banns imply that the Blessed Virgin's prayers were performed and that it would be in keeping with the tenor of the text as a whole, it is nevertheless impossible to know for certain in what manner her prayers were represented, given the fragmentary nature of the manuscript.

The play essentially tells the story of Rex Vivus (the King of Life), and his encounter with death. In many ways the archetypal prideful tyrant, in his speeches the King has much in common with characters like Herod, as well as allegorical figures such as Mankind (in the eponymous play from the Macro manuscript), Human Genus (from Castle), and figures such as Youth from later moral interludes. Despite getting wise advice focusing on human mortality from both his wife and bishop (recalling more or less contemporary works such as Chaucer's Tale of Melibee and the anonymous Robert of Sicily), Rex Vivus remains overconfident about his encounter with death, which (at least according to the summary provided by the banns) he inevitably loses. As in all prereformation moral interludes, his soul appears to be saved, apparently by the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, perhaps paralleling the action of the Castle as described in its banns, although not actually represented in the surviving Macro text.

The second of the two moral interludes edited here is Wisdom (also known as The Wisdom Who is Christ), a play that is unique in being the only medieval moral play that exists in two manuscripts. However, the Digby manuscript exemplar is incomplete, which is unfortunate in that the Macro text probably derived from it, as Milla Cozart Riggio has argued in The Play of Wisdom: Its Texts and Contexts (1998), a book with which Klausner is deeply familiar and of which he makes good use. Again, Professor Klausner has done a good job of making his edition both concise and accessible to students.

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