Comparative Drama

Social Disorder, Festive Celebration, and Jean Michel's Le Mistere de la Passion JesusCrist Sandra Billington ? Background. Until recently, the balance of interest in European medieval theater has tilted almost exclusively into the welltrodden paths of English texts—a situation highlighted by the Conference on Medieval Drama Research at Harvard in 1986 and addressed in the special issue of Comparative Drama, Vol. 27 (Spring 1993).' Perhaps in the past it has been the number of extant continental religious plays,2 and the size of some of them— e.g., the Passion of Jean Michel (1486), written for four days' performance—which has deterred critical interest. Also, the content of Michel's play and of its predecessor by Arnoul Greban' originally attracted negative attention4 for the scurrilous behavior of some characters in the sacred context. Such crudities were attributed to the mores of a society which sixteenth-century Frenchmen wished to put behind them (a reaction that Hansjürgen Linke has also found behind German neglect of its preReformation theater7), for, in common with English mystery plays, Gréban and Michel included scenes of secular levity, even allowing the torturers enjoyment of their cruelty to Christ. Although Louis Petit de Julleville undertook a partial apologia of both in the last century, his bafflement over the interminable scenes of the scourging of Jesus, especially in the Michel, extends over two pages.6 More recently, the strengths of these two plays have begun to be recognized7 through the excellent editions of them by Omer Jodogne, and I would argue that Michel's Mistere de la Passion JesusCrist. in particular, is a masterpiece of dramatic writing, incorporating the many social problems and some of the recreations experienced by his Angevin audience in such a way as to make a Christian life the only sane alternative. But 216 Sandra Billington217 it is a play which needs to be understood in its time: the social and festive context provides a sub-text through which one can discover a coherence in the play's religious purpose. Two contemporary accounts agree that it was performed in Angers in 1486, beginning on 20 August. On 12 August that year the City Council put into effect orders for the safety of the city during the week of the play, to begin in "eight days" time.8 while Guillaume Oudin recorded that: The Mystery of the Passion of Jesus Christ was played in this town of Angers, the Sunday the twentieth of August, and the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday and Friday following, in the year 1486; and was played by the greatest and most notable persons of the said town, such as deans, canons, curés, chaplains, the burghers, merchants, officers, the nobility and others; in such a manner that many men of the regions of Lyons. Ia Rochelle, Bordeaux, Poitiers, Paris, Tours, Normandy, Brittany, and men of other nations said they had never seen a performance so rich, honorable, enjoyable, and excellent: and which seemed to the people Io be played better and better each day.'' Why it took six rather than four days remains unexplained, but one can understand the City Council's anxiety over safety. A crowd of strangers could bring with it unwelcome guests, and hoteliers were obliged to reveal the identity of visitors to the police, who recruited temporary reinforcements.1" Similarly, anarchy and lawlessness provide much of the drama of Michel's play; their incorporation reflects the social problems which Michel relates to Lucifer's ambitions. Marcel Schwob, Auguste Vitu, and André Joubert have all quoted characters from Michel. Gréban, and other late-medieval religious plays as evidence for the behavior of Fiance's fifteenth-century outlaws;" here I wish to consider how this behavior might be relevant to, rather than a distraction from, the sacred argument of the plays. The whole of the north of France was still suffering the effects of the Hundred Years' War and also of the internecine wars which helped prolong it. As in the rest of Europe, France was not an integrated society ruled from one city, but constituted as regions under different families, linked by marriage and still frequently in conflict. At the end of the fourteenth...