A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [204]
In the miracle plays and mysteries staged for the populace, realism was the desired effect. A system of weights and pulleys resurrected Jesus from the tomb and lifted him to a ceiling of clouds. Angels and devils were made to appear magically through trapdoors; Hell opened and closed its monstrous mouth, and Noah’s flood inundated the stage from casks of water overturned backstage while stone-filled barrels turned by cranks resounded with thunder. When John the Baptist was decapitated, the actor was whisked away so cunningly in exchange for a fake corpse and fake head spilling ox blood that the audience shrieked in excitement. Actors playing Jesus sometimes remained tied to the cross reciting verses for three hours.
More completely than any other medium, the stage mirrored medieval life. Developing out of liturgical plays performed at the church door, drama had left the church for the street, where it was produced by guilds and confréries on wheeled platforms with different scenes drawn along in succession. The plays traveled from town to town, attracting all of society as audience—peasants and bourgeois, monks and students, knights and ladies, and the local seigneur in a front-row seat. For a major performance, criers went out to inform the public a day in advance. Subject matter was religious, but manner was secular, designed for entertainment. Every mystery of the Christian story, and its central mystery of salvation through the birth and death of Christ, was made physical and concrete and presented in terms of everyday life—irreverent, bloody, and bawdy. The shepherds who watched by night were portrayed as sheep-stealers, pathos in the sacrifice of Isaac was played to the hilt, the favorite comic relief was the on-stage donkey for Balaam’s ass or for the Virgin to ride on the Flight into Egypt or for the Three Kings in lieu of camels. The “hin-han” brayed by the actor inside the donkey’s skin and the turds dropped from a lifted tail evoked howls of delight even when the donkey bore Jesus into Jerusalem.
Sex and sadism were relished in the rape of Dinah, in the exposure of Noah naked and drunk, the sins of the Sodomites, the peeping of the Elders at Susanna, and all the varieties of torn flesh in the martyrdom of saints. Scenes of torture in revolting realism were regular theatrical fare, as if a violent time bred enjoyment of violence. Nero slitting open the belly of his mother to see where he came from was performed with the aid of gory entrails, supplied by the local pork butcher, spilling from the victim. Schadenfreude was not peculiar to the Middle Ages, but it was a dark variety indeed, induced by plague and successive calamities, that found expression in gruesome scenes of the tortures on the cross, with the soldiers shown spitting on the Redeemer of man.
In an age of anxiety, the Miracles of Notre Dame, a series of plays originating in the second half of the century, supplied what comfort faith in divine omnipotence could offer. No wretch so poor or wicked, no misery or injustice but could be remedied by the miraculous intervention of the Holy Virgin. The most vulnerable figure of society, a wronged woman, seduced and deserted or falsely accused of crime, was usually the central figure. In one play a long-barren woman whose prayers to the Virgin have at last brought her a son is exhausted by the pains of childbirth and falls asleep while bathing her baby. When he drowns in the tub, the mother is accused of child-murder and condemned to the stake. In response to her husband’s prayers, Notre Dame descends from