Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays

Devotional Iconography in the N-Town Marian Plays Theresa Coletti The Middle English N-Town cycle evinces an extraordinary consciousness of the motifs and interpretations that characterized late medieval devotion to the Virgin. Of the four Middle Eng­ lish Corpus Christi plays, only the N-Town cycle includes a group of plays, extending from The Conception of Maty to The Trial of Joseph and Mary, specifically concerned with the life of the Virgin before the birth of Christ. 1 The scope of Marian attention in the cycle also embraces plays such as the Nativity and The Adoration of the Magi, and the N-Town manuscript shares a Death and Assumption play only with the York cycle. Many scholars have noted the unique Marian preoccupation of the cycle,2 but the iconographie and devotional richness of this group of plays remains largely unexamined. The cycle’s mani­ fest awareness of Marian concerns thus invites an exploration of the relationship of devotional iconography to dramatic im­ port. This study explores the N-Town Marian plays as a form of devotional art. It proposes ways in which stage iconography could have embodied the spiritual concerns of the dramatic audience. Since the publication of Emile Mâle’s L’art religieux de la fin du moyen âge, few students of the medieval religious drama have disputed the significant relationship of late medieval art forms to the affective spirituality that characterized Christian devotion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Among the dominant forms of pictorial art in the late Middle Ages, the illuminated Book of Hours is particularly relevant to a consid­ eration of devotional iconography in the N-Town Marian plays. For like that cycle, this most popular of late medieval prayerbooks emphasized the Virgin; the Book of Hours always con22 Theresa Coletti 23 tained the Little Office of the Virgin, which was frequently illustrated by a pictorial narrative sequence of scenes from her life. The typological meanings of the Virgin, her role in the miraculous nativity of Christ, and her capacity as intercessor are only some of the subjects of the N-Town Marian plays repre­ sented in the illuminated Book of Hours. Because the miniatures of Books of Hours suggestively illustrate how the late Middle Ages visualized the relationship of the Virgin to redemptive history, they offer persuasive evidence for an imaginative re­ construction of devotional iconography in the Marian plays.3 I Recent students of the N-Town cycle agree that the entire play is amenable to platea and loca staging, with a variety of stations situated around or inside a rather large playing space.4 The Marian plays call for an elevated Heaven, a Temple, sev­ eral loca (variously designated as the homes of Anna and Joachim, Mary and Joseph, and Elizabeth and Zechariah) and a playing area for numerous joumeys.5 We can suppose Heaven to be a raised scaffold centrally located toward the edge of the platea. The repeated requirement for a Temple in the early Marian plays and the frequent juxtaposition of activities in the Temple with God’s presence in Heaven suggest that the Temple would have been placed near Heaven. The proliferation of divine messengers in these plays (angels visit Anna, Joachim, Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, and the Magi) suggests that other principal loca, and especially the place of the Annunciation, would have been arranged relatively close to the Heaven scaf­ fold. Such a stage plan would confer a visual as well as a dra­ matic unity upon the events in the life of the Virgin and the early life of Christ. The Conception of Mary, the first of the Marian plays, presents a microcosm of universal history after the Fall. The play dramatizes the movement from tristitia to gaudium by showing the transformation of Anna’s barrenness to blessedness through the birth of Mary. The Conception thus provides a spiritually resonant opening for the series of plays elaborating the Virgin’s crucial role in God’s redemption of mankind. The text of the N-Town cycle shows an awareness of the interpretive tradition which found Christological meanings in the activities 24 Comparative Drama of the Virgin before the birth of Christ, meanings which are...