Visualizing the Moral Life: Medieval Iconography and the Macro Moralities by Clifford Davidson (review)

Reviews373 is a comparative study by Albert-Reiner Glaap, "Whose Life Is It Anyway? in London and Broadway: A Contrastive Analysis of the British and American Versions of Brian Clark's play." To my mind this revision, which changed the gender of the central character, and translated the dialogue into colloquial American English, was unsuccessful. This is a very thoughtful, well-edited, provocative series of essays showing how new dramatic meanings arise from new circumstances. Nonetheless, it also indicates the problems inherent in printing proceedings of conferences, where space limitations militate against full development of complex arguments. Like Oliver Twist, I continually asked for "more." MARGARET LOFTUS RANALD Queens College, The City University of New York Clifford Davidson. Visualizing the Moral Life: Medieval Iconography and the Macro Moralities. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Pp. xi + 169. $39.50. Clifford Davidson's Visualizing the Moral Life is a book of impressive scholarship that brings to bear on the Macro moralities a lifetime of study of medieval drama and iconography. Inspired by contemporary theatrical revivals of the Macro plays, chiefly the Poculi Ludique Societas production of Mankind, the book seeks to "delineate the visual context in which the plays of the Macro manuscript had their origin and were made to come alive on the fifteenth-century stage" (p. ix). Davidson treats not only theatrical icons but also figurative language and dramatic themes that do not take visual forms in the plays but which can be illuminated by examining the forms they take in the vast iconographie tradition at Davidson's command. Those forms are drawn whenever possible from the same East Anglian community that produced the plays, with the result that Davidson's analysis is more tightly focused than most discussions of drama and the visual arts. While they are bound together in a single manuscript, the Macro moralities—The Castle of Perseverance, Mankind, and Wisdom—are stylistically and dramaturgically very different, and Davidson treats them with appropriate respect for their differences. His discussion of the highlystylized play Wisdom draws on the mystical tradition from St. Bernard to fifteenth-century mystics, chiefly Walter Hilton, to explicate the iconography of mysticism that controls the play. Mankind, on the other hand, a more bawdy and popular play, is treated by Davidson with reference to themes of alienation and penance and is seen to be shaped by the rich iconography that developed around Luke's parable of the sower. While Davidson wisely does not try to argue from the graphic arts to methods of staging the plays, being aware that the esthetic imperatives of flowing stage pictures are different from those of static images, his discussion of iconographie traditions would certainly prove useful to actors and directors and to anyone who seeks to give imaginative form to the implicit visual languages of the plays. Discussing the character Nought in Mankind, for example, Davidson suggests that he is conceived 374Comparative Drama as a formal fool and may have been dressed as fools generally are in fifteenth-century iconography, with ass's ears and a varicolored costume decorated with bells. Davidson locates the imaginative center of the character in illustrations of passages in the Psalter that refer to the fool "as a denier of God—a man who uses foolishness as a cloak to further his impiety" (p. 27, quoting D. J. Gifford), and notes that in those illustrations the fool tends to be associated with despair and suicide and to be represented in postures that are awkward and unbalanced. The issue of imbalance and instability has obvious spiritual and moral implications that characterize the group New-Guise, Now-a-Days, and Nought in Mankind, and the iconography might well provide an actor with a visual fund on which he could draw in choreographing the role, suggesting not only certain kinds of postures but perhaps eccentric rhythms in speech and movement as well that would reproduce theatrically the unbalanced images of the fool. Indeed the iconographie tropes Davidson locates are often so provocative in this respect that I sometimes longed for him to be less circumspect and to push harder at their theatrical implications. As an instance, Davidson notes that the moment when Mankind joins Covetous in...