The Engaged Spectator: Langland and Chaucer on Civic Spectacle and the Theatrum

The Engaged Spectator: Langland and Chaucer on Civic Spectacle and the Theatrum Lawrence M. Clopper Indiana University sPECTACULA ARE PROBLEMATICAL in a numb" of ways foe medi­ eval people, for they are the sites ofsocial, political, and religious strain. Spectacles assert the power and dominance of their sponsors and partic­ ipants; they evoke social relations and create hierarchies. They are lay rather than clerical; indeed, clerics used the Latin term spectacula to refer to the obscene entertainments and the theatrum of the ancient world. Within clerical culture, spectacula were considered to be worldly and thus forbidden to clerics, for spectacula were thought to be conducive to pride, lechery, gluttony, and sloth; they were wasteful and superfluous. The way to control spectacula was to ritualize them-as in Corpus Christi processions. But civic and royal spectacles contended with cleri­ cal ritual for their own spaces in order to legitimate lay identity and prestige. Thus far I have stressed the division between lay and clerical cultures with regard to spectacle. Now I want to move into the more equivocal space of practice in order to see how we might read instances of spec­ tacles as statements about social relations. Recent scholarship on medieval civic spectacle has emphasized the ideological content of mayoral and Corpus Christi processions.1 On one This essay is dedicated to Martin Stevens, mentor and friend. Parts of this paper were presented at the Ninth and Tenth International Congresses of the New Chaucer Society at the University of Dublin (Chaucer) and the University of California at Los Angeles (Langland) in 1994 and 1996, respectively. 1 Charles Phythian-Adams, "Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Cov­ entry 1450-1550," in Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 57-85; MervynJames, "Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town," Past and Present 98 (1983): 3-29; Sheila Lin115 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER side of this debate are scholars such as Charles Phythian-Adams and Mervyn James who emphasize the utopian agendas of these spectacles: the processions are said to contain an image of the whole body of the city or of the mystical body of Christ. Sheila Lindenbaum, on the other hand, points to the dysutopian consequences of elitist productions; for even though a Corpus Christi or civic procession is intended to create an image of unity, the procession itself is made up of discrete units ar­ ranged in hierarchical fashion, which as a consequence makes a state­ ment about lesser and greater degrees, and distinguishes the feet from the head of the body.2 And then there are those nonparticipants who are excluded from the procession altogether. These spectacles have been made to speak about the relationship not only between audience and participant but also among participants, though usually only in general­ ized ways, that is, in terms of groups, the producers and their intended audiences. Because we have few eyewitness accounts of late-medieval spectacles, we can only imagine the diversity of reception that Claire Sponsler has suggested we should look for in any evaluation of public spectacle.3 Langland and Chaucer are diverse witnesses whose testimony has been little used as registers of the problematics of public spectacle. Both give us powerful representations of London spectacle, yet both narrate these events in ways that suggest they were conscious of the clerical critique of spectacle, and, in Chaucer's case, of the theatrum. Langland reports two spectacles, Richard II's coronation procession and the 1366 Pageant of the Lady of the Sun. The first of these is presented approvingly be­ cause it is edificatory, yet it is interesting to note that the poet focuses not on the spectacle, which presumably was costly, but on the words denbaum, "The Smithfield Tournament of 1390," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990): 1-20, and "Ceremony and Oligarchy: The London Midsummer Watch," in Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson, eds., City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 171-88; many of the other essays in City and Spectacle; and Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual...