Enacting the Sacrament: Counter-Lollardy in the Towneley Cycle by Lauren Lepow (review)

REVIEWS LAUREN LEPOW. Enacting the Sacrament: Counter-Lo/lardy in the Towneley Cycle. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Uni­ versity Press, 1991. Pp. 167. $28.50. As she admits in her introduction, Lepow cannot hope to prove that the Towneley Cycle is a deliberate attempt to "counterLollardy." What she tries to do in this book is show that thecycle couldbeconceivedin that sense and that nothing in the text would confute such an interpretation. This much she accomplishes in admirable fashion. She clearly points out the Lollards' chief objections to the established church. Since the plays are a Corpus Christi cycle, it is easy enough to show that they reaffirm the value of holy communion. And since they are in English, they respond to the Lollard objection that the wordof God was being withheld from thecommon man. Herresponse to theLollard objection to drama, however, I found somewhat misguided. Most of Lepow's quotations from Lollard tracts are not against plays on the life of Christ but oppose those on the lives of men and women-thatis, the miracle plays, not the mystery cycles. As we know, the much more numerous saint's life plays focused on miracles performed by people, not by Christ, and this is what theLollardsseem to beobjectingto. Finally, the most prevalent concern is in showing that the cycle is an answer to the Lollards' objections to the priesthood, and these are the portions of the book that seem the least convincing. Lepow is constantly trying to find good characters in the play who are "proto-priests" or "priest­ like" as opposed to the evil characters who are like Lollards, and this gets into some curious interpretations ofthe plays. For instance, in The Killing ofAbel, while Cain might possibly be seen as a Lollard by someone looking for that trait, to a Yorkshire peasant audience he would more likely be seen as a familiar greedy landlord, ill-treating his tenants and, like Oliver in As YouLike It, an olderbrother who could not stand to see his younger brother more approved of than he was. The possibilities for an anti-Lollard inter­ pretation are indeed in the play, as Lepow argues, but it is hard to see that this is what the playwright had in mind or what the audience would perceive. And while one can easily see Abel as a proper Christian, it is difficult to see him as "a familiar type of the priest at Mass." He strikes one more as a devout fifteenth-century Christian who wants his brother to do the right thing in his tithing. A more difficult problem is in Noah. Seeing Noah in "a priest's role" may be possible, but never in the many productions of the play that I have seen does that interpretation come through. He may be a devout Christian 227 SWDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER husband with an obedient trio of sons and a recalcitrant wife who fulfills his duty to guide his family to do what God has ordered. In production, however, he invariably comes across as comic, not "priestly." I have seen this playperformed,forinstance,before English audiences at Wakefield Cathe­ dral and before American audiences in Toronto, and the comic effect was always thesame. In fact, in the TorontoperformanceNoah wasso inept that Godsentan angel down to help him build the ark when hepleaded, "Bot if God helpamang, I may sit downe claw/ To ken." Even so, Noah's wife still "cannot find/ Which is before, which is behind." Again in Abraham and Isaac, one sees a distraught father who wishes to be obedient to God and whoreluctantly obeys God's order even though he doesnotunderstand why his son should be slain-not a "priestlike character," who ought to under­ stand God's will. Perhaps the most convincing analysis in the entire book is that ofMagnus Herodes, where Herod anachronistically tells his counselors to look in Virgil and Homer but not in saints' lives, Epistles, graduals, the Mass, or matins-exactly the sort of church writings the Lollards weresuspicious of. But the analysis of this play is curiously limited to a single paragraph. Lepowdoesa much more thorough job in showing thejohn the Baptist...