The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [149]
As early as the eleventh century, the little holiday came to be a particular site for religious reenactments, which became the birth of modern theater. What were the shows about? The key story of carnival was that of a young Jewish girl, Mary, whose belly swelled while she was yet a virgin. Her son Jesus became a preacher who said many beautiful and deep things. Among his followers, he had a special relationship with a woman with the same name as his mother, Mary. The preacher inspired so many people that he became a nuisance and was put to death. Three days later his friend Mary (Mary Magdalene) saw him walking around. After hearing of it, his male disciples had encounters with him as well. There was a sense, later hugely inflated by Paul of Tarsus, that the followers of Jesus would also live again after death. The stated purpose of the plays was to illuminate the facts of history so that everyone would know them and have an experiential link with them. Acting them out, and watching the plays, was a straightforward religious and social duty. But that is not all that was going on. Just as ancient Greek women acted out the stories of Demeter and Dionysus because they needed to act out powerlessness and hidden power, loss and recovery, medieval Europeans acted out the story of a boy without a father, who suffers terribly, and the pleasure and grief of his mother. Again, it is a family drama about powerlessness and hidden power, loss and recovery. These plays were presented in church, on Christmas and Easter, sticking close to the Bible text. They later were acted out elsewhere, on stages of their own, where they turned into dramas of contemporary danger and rescue. The entire dramatic activity of the French fourteenth century was devoted to “the miracles of Our Lady” in which Mother Mary appears and consoles or saves a suffering innocent—for example, a good girl who’d been married off to a lascivious aristocrat who was now treating her roughly. Occasionally, Mary saved a penitent sinner, but mostly it was a good girl, badly used by the world. Some forty-two of these scripts survive intact.5
In the first years of the 1400s, the first theater was set up outside the direct auspices of the Church in Paris, in an old hotel, and the fifteenth century became the century of the “mysteries.” The actors were not traveling professionals; rather, each town had a club. The plays were very long; some took days. The cast might include hundreds of people, all earnestly playing out the roles of their savior’s drama. There was a dedication to realism: when actors depicted the Passion (the torture and death of Jesus), they went through a lot of real pain, and there were many reports of actors playing Jesus on the cross nearly dying onstage. The audience, too, was unusually dedicated. For the annual reenactment of the Passion, almost everyone in Paris crowded into a vast theater to see it. Almost everyone. The city had to post soldiers to protect the deserted homes and stores against theft. The shows were intense, bloody, and by turns hilarious and bawdy. These plays were written mostly by priests, so they were entirely licit, but when one of your featured characters is the devil and another is the fool, you can keep everyone’s attention with scenes of terror, pain, lust, sex, treachery, and perversion, and still be comfortably within bounds. Then there is the simple bloody sadism of the Passion. As we moderns have seen, the Passion of the Christ can still get everybody all excited.
In the 1400s the action at carnival was getting more topsy-turvy, more wild, more like the ancient bacchanalia, and something odd happened: people began speaking of the Christian carnival celebration