The Drama As Actual Drama Rather Than Mere Theater Masquerading As A Serious Liturgy

Wherever Christ is present, Antichrist can be detected

, sometimes lurking offstage, sometimes masquerading as other figures, and sometimes playacting as Christ. Parker sets forth this argument in a lengthy introduction ('After Strange Gods: The Making of Christ and His Doubles') that is developed in subsections with titles such as 'The Orthodoxy of Heresy', 'Christ as Antichrist' and 'Salvation through Antichrist'. The introduction and the subsequent four chapters comprise a scholarly tour-de-force ranging through a large collection of primary and secondary materials. The result is often impressive, at times maddeningly wrongheaded, and occasionally bewildering as the argument abruptly shifts from Links Of London Bracelets medieval exegesis to early Christian apologetics to modern biblical scholarship to Protestant reinterpretations and, even occasionally, to medieval drama.

The book delivers less than its title promises because 'Christian drama', whatever that term means, plays a surprisingly small part in the argument. True, each chapter devotes a few pages to theatrical issues or plays. The first ('Lying Likenesses: Typology and the Medieval Mimcula'), for example, briefly discusses the York Cycle and the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, and the second ('Blood Money: Antichristian Economics and the Drama of the Sacraments') includes thematically driven readings of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Mankind, and Everyman. Similarly, near its conclusion Chapter 3 ('Vicarious Criminal: Christ as Representative') considers the Harrowing of Hell in the York and Towneley cycles and the Purification from Chester. But the first three chapters rarely analyse plays in-depth, using them instead for comparative purposes or to bolster an overriding, non-theatrical, argument. Medieval drama thus serves as a set-up for what is to come, as the portentous conclusion to Links Of London the third chapter suggests: 'The coming Protestant dismissal of more than a thousand years of Christian culture for being at bottom mere theater, we're going to see in the next chapter, created a new drama that was equally dubious' (p. 182). Not surprisingly, the fourth chapter ('The Curious Sovereignty of Art: Marlowe's Sacred Counterfeits') delivers what previous chapters anticipated. This final chapter the book's real contribution to drama scholarship includes subsections on 'Jesus Barabbas, Son of God' with detailed analysis of the Jew of Malta (pp. 193-209); 'Apostolic Conquest (Tamburlaine and Paul)' with an excellent reading of Tamburlaine (pp. 219-28); and 'Faustus Magus', the culmination of the argument in Dr. Faustus.

Parker, of course, is not the first early modernist to read a thousand years of medieval religious belief and drama through the critical prism provided by a Renaissance playwright, and it is encouraging that his preface acknowledges what he is doing: 'If Marlowe preserves certain elements of medieval drama, should this not, for example, be allowed to imply that his medieval predecessors achieved by means of the Bible a drama almost as dodgy as his'. What is discouraging is that medieval drama and much previous scholarship elucidating it do not merit serious attention. The Chester Antichrist, for example, receives a cursory three pages and a remarkably eccentric conclusion: 'The drama as actual drama rather than mere theater masquerading as a serious liturgy, could then play Christ to the Ant Christianity already embedded in the pompous solemnity of the Mass'.

by: Christ Pual

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