Reconnecting Text to Context: The Ontology of “French Medieval Drama” and the Case of the Istoire de la Destruction de Troie

Spring 2011 37 Reconnecting Text to Context: The Ontology of “French Medieval Drama” and the Case of the Istoire de la Destruction de Troie Lofton L. Durham Jody Enders’s essay “Medieval Stages” in the November 2009 issue of Theatre Survey serves as a particularly apt introduction for this article. Enders identifies three fissures in the contemporary critical landscape surrounding medieval performance: (1) history vs. literature; (2) continental vs. British; and (3) religious vs. secular.1 These divisions in the field have acted like smokescreens, often obscuring important data and frustrating efforts to penetrate the gloom. This is especially true in Anglophone scholarship, which understandably tends to emphasize English-language drama and records, but therefore helps underpin the “Continental vs. British” polarity above. But even in other languages—and the example of Francophone drama is most relevant to the case I present here—divisions into religious and secular, sacred and profane, persist, influencing the bibliographic practices in French drama and, hence, structuring how basic reference information might be accessed. I share both Enders’s frustration with the durability of these binaries and her optimism about the future of medieval performance studies and its potential to inform the modern and postmodern critical and historiographical landscape. But there is a dichotomy at work here as well. On the one hand, specialists are no doubt aware of scholars, such as Jelle Koopmans, Darwin Smith, Carol Symes, Jody Enders, Pamela Sheingorn, Elina Gertsman, Donald and Sara Sturm-Maddox, and others, who have been using French examples to articulate a far more complex and nuanced view of medieval performance culture and its relationship to extant records.2 What is more, work over the last decade by Darwin Smith’s Groupe d’études sur le théâtre médiéval at the Sorbonne on digitizing critical editions of texts such as the gigantic Mystère des Actes des Apôtres and creating the thoroughly indexed and user-friendly database Théâtre et performances en France au Moyen Age, and Jesse Hurlbut’s similar efforts with DScriptorium, represent unprecedented advances in accessibility.3 On the other hand, the strength and interdisciplinarity of this work notwithstanding, the new perspectives have not penetrated very far into mainstream discussions of theatre history or into the journals most often read by theatre and performance studies scholars. I embark, therefore, Lofton L. Durham is assistant professor of theatre, an affiliate faculty member of the Medieval Institute, and founding member of the University Center for the Humanities at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. He has presented at conferences of the MedievalAcademy ofAmerica, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. Lofton translates plays for production and has directed professionally in Washington, DC and Pittsburgh, PA. He earned his PhD in 2009 from the University of Pittsburgh. 38 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism on a two-fold mission: to provide in this venue a critique of the historiography of “medieval French drama” that has led us to neglect one example of a fifteenthcentury dramatization; and to suggest several ways in which this example sheds additional light on some of the most important cultural formations of the period. I do not intend to be comprehensive in this analysis here, but I do hope to demonstrate what we might gain if we revive interest in the documents that lay hidden behind the received history of medieval theatre and drama. The misapprehended evidence in this case is a fifteenth-century dramatization of the legend of the Trojan War, L’Istoire de la Destruction de Troye la Grant (“Story of the Destruction of Troy the Great”). It has survived in a remarkable number of examples: thirteen manuscripts, two with colored illustrations, and thirteen print editions, spanning nearly a century of circulation in book form.4 Sometimes familiar to scholars of medieval French literature, and far less frequently familiar to scholars of theatre and drama, this particular work has suffered widespread critical neglect since the late nineteenth century. The existence of the Istoire, however, has long been known. The first scholarly descriptions appeared in the monumental work of the brothers Parfaict, who first attempted...