Devils and Vices in English Non-Cycle Plays: Sacrament and Social Body

Devils and Vices in English Non-Cycle Plays: Sacrament and Social Body John D. Cox The English mystery plays have recently come to be understood anew through the social dimension of the Eucharist. Historians have coined the term 'social body' to refer to the preReformation sense of communal coherence bestowed by the most important of the sacraments, especially in the wake of preaching and writing about the feast of Corpus Christi, established in 1311, and that sense of coherence has been the basis for fruitful discussion of the scriptural drama.1 Non-cycle plays, however, are another matter. Neither the morality nor miracle plays, as they are now called, were associated with the Eucharist or with Corpus Christi. Miracle plays were performed on saints' days; morality plays, at any time of the year; and neither seems to have involved the community in the same way the mystery plays did, since the life of a particular saint or of a representative abstraction did not offer, as dramatic subjects, the same scope for social cooperation and competition that was offered by the history of the world, and neither seems to have involved anything like the Corpus Christi procession.2 Yet the ritual orientation of non-cycle plays is evident everywhere in them—a point that may be demonstrated by noting the identical social function of devils and vices, which are too often associated uncritically with mystery plays and morality plays respectively . Robert Potter pointed out several years ago that the morality play belongs to a "tradition of sermons and penitential literature advocating repentance and preaching the forgiveness of sins."3 He argued that the dramatic purpose of the morality play is therefore the same as that of the mystery plays: "the morality play performs the same ceremony in the microcosm of the individual human life as that of the Corpus Christi cycle in the in the macrocosm of historical time."4 This is an important insight, at least for pre-Reformation plays, not only because it sees beyond 188 John D. Cox189 generic distinctions but because penance and the Eucharist were closely identified, both with each other and with renewal of the social body, not merely of the individual's moral and spiritual life. Lay communion was taken only once a year, on Easter Sunday , and the Lenten season that preceded it was designed not simply for personal abstinence but for the examination of conscience preparatory to the mending of relationships and making confession in the interest of restoring communal harmony. In a sermon on the Easter communion, Mirk's Festial thus charges first that parishioners preparing for the annual rite be in charity with their neighbors and second that they be shriven: "Wherfor, good men and woymen, I charch you heyly in Godys byhalue bat non of you to-day com to Godys bord, but he be in full charyte to all Godis pepull; and also pat 3e be clene schryuen and yn full wyll to leue your synne."5 In the exemplum that follows, the preacher relates how a bishop was granted a vision of parishioners coming to communion as if their moral and spiritual condition were revealed in their physical condition. What he saw were vivid personifications of envy, wrath, and lechery—all sources of communal division. This "vision" thus makes concrete the preacher's earlier warning that "as wele as hym schall be bat comybe to bys fest wele arayde in Godys lyuere, clobyd in loue and scharyte, als euell schall hym be bat comybe yn fendys lyuere, clobyd in envy and dedly wrabe."6 Envy and wrath are "fiends' livery," and the opposite, "God's livery," is love and charity, the basis of social wholeness. A close collocation appears here that also is to be observed throughout early non-cycle drama. It consists, on one hand, of personified deadly sins (alternately called "vices") accompanying the fiend as sources of communal division, and, on the other, of the sacraments as means of restoring and maintaining social wholeness. The Castle of Perseverance, for example, includes three of the seven sacraments: Baptism, Penance, and the Eucharist . In every case, the healing and unifying power of the sacraments is opposed by...