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Theme and Irony in the Wakefield Mactacio Abel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John Gardner
John Gardner*
Affiliation:
San Francisco State College, San Francisco, Calif.
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Extract

Whatever the play may have seemed to its immediate audience, to modern critics the Wakefield Mactacio Abel has generally seemed interesting for its realism but not especially successful either as drama or as dramatic sermon. Miss Eleanor Prosser goes so far as to say,

Doctrine remains in this play only by sufferance. But even apart from homiletic considerations, the play is unsuccessful. It has no unity: it leaps from farce to Scripture to farce with neither transition nor dramatic probability. The conflict is poorly established (witness the weakness of Abel and God); the characterization is one-dimensional; motivations are inconsistent (Cain's despair); much of the humor is pointless and simple-minded (Cain's striking Pykeharnes without motivation, just to keep his hand in, or the repeated obscenities that are comic solely by reason of their obscenity); the main interest in the play is irrelevant to the main plot action.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 5 , December 1965, pp. 515 - 521
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 Quotations are from The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. A. C. Cawley, 1958.

2 Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays (Stanford, Calif., 1961) p. 80.

3 See my discussion, “Theme and Technique in The Second Shepherds' Play,” Tulane Drama Review, forthcoming.

4 For the metaphor of cosmic feudalism see, for instance, Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, tr. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, Mass. 1951), pp. 3–4 and 28–29. For the commonplace view of the devil as king, sinners as members of the devil's court, see the discussion of the seven deadly sins in the Ancrene Riwle.

5 The basically Aristotelean idea of conflict resulting in a causally related series of events which, taken together, make up a complete action—Aristotle's energia (the actualization of the potential which exists in character and situation)—can have no place in drama based not on a theory of reality as process but on a theory of reality as stasis. If reality is the unchanging, supreme Good, if Nature is God's revelation of Himself in emblematic form, and if the proper response to this mutable world is the search within it for the vestigia or “traces” of God, the immutable (see Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Bonaventura, The Mind's Road to God, or Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy), then a concern with action is not only unwarranted but perverse, a failure of right reason. Man's whole study should be the implicit unchangeable, the contrast between the Old Jerusalem and the New (as the Pearl-poet has it), or the contrast between the physical Israel and the spiritual Israel, or Rome and the City of God. Work based on contrast rather than conflict is not something we need to adjust ourselves to (pace D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives, Princeton, N.J., 1962, pp. 45–51). It is the mode of satire from The Alchemist to Pogo, to speak only of things modern. What satire and Christian drama have in common, it might be added, is an absolute base: As satire depends for its effect on the unquestioned values of the audience, Christian drama depends for its effect on unquestionable dogma.

6 In “Langland's Piers Plowman” (The Age of Chaucer, ed., Boris Ford, Baltimore, Md., 1954), Derek Traversi describes Langland's transformation of Piers into Christ as “daring.” But the identification of the plowman as assiduous Christian and type of Christ is thoroughly traditional—and Langland's device as inevitable as the thud of his lines. The well-known medieval lyric beginning “The merthe of all this londe Maketh the good husbonde” is “explicated,” almost point for point, in Gregory's much earlier Pastoral Care (tr. Henry Davis, S. J., Westminster, Md. 1950, pp. 134 ff).

7 If, with some readers, we take “harnes” to mean not “armor” but merely any sort of apparel (harness), the reading still holds. The parable of the wedding guest in tattered clothes provides a basis for identification of clothes and good works—a common identification in the writings of the Schoolmen. Cf. Purity.

8 See Hugh of St. Victor, op. cit., p. 102.

9 F. L. Ganshof, Feudalism, tr. Philip Grierson (New York, 1961), p. 26.

10 In holding this view, Cain is doubtless not unlike many a hard-pressed medieval farmer in the audience, particularly the manor laborer cruelly taxed by a lord he has never met or even seen. See Sidney Painter, Mediaeval Society (Ithaca, N.Y., 1951), pp. 43–62.

11 Prosser, p. 79.

12 Cain's use of this weapon was almost certainly traditional (see Cawley's note to l. 324), but this makes the point no less valid.

18 See Cawley's notes to ll. 324 and 408.