Theatre makers enacted the semiotics of the Eucharist across a variety of religious and nonreligious dramatic texts before and after the religious and cultural events of the sixteenth century known as the English Reformation. In Jay Zysk's marvelously theorized first monograph, Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama Across the Reformation Divide, he attends to how early English drama staged "volatile semiotic struggles that stem from controversies over Christ's body" (1). Given the focus on Eucharistic semiotics, the plays and pageants considered in this study range from the expected (fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Crucifixion plays, The Winter's Tale) to the unexpected (Lydgate's processional performances, Jacobean revenge tragedies). Even more unexpected, and pleasantly so, is that neither the Eucharist nor English drama undergoes an inevitable evolution as the medieval gives way to the early modern. Throughout, Zysk engages semiotics from diverse writings on the Eucharist without either reducing religious knowledges to theory alone or the plays to binaries of religious confession. Instead, this book is built on a series of increasingly complex discussions of semiotics in plays from both sides of the Reformation divide that literally and figuratively stage problems of presence, interpretation, substance, and sign.
A carefully researched survey of Eucharistic writings forms chapter 1. Focusing mainly on the Scholastic and Reformation eras, Zysk re-orients theologies articulated by Thomas Aquinas, John Wyclif, Jean Calvin, Thomas More, and Thomas Cranmer, among many others, from chronologically determined "fixed theological positions" to "ongoing controversies" (22) in four categories: body and sign, flesh and spirit, literalism and figuralism, and words and deeds. Attention to the subtle but crucial distinctions in Eucharistic debates, which constitute "a key discursive domain for thinking about questions of interpretation and embodiment" (11), lays the necessary groundwork for the rest of the book. Zysk goes far beyond reminding us that not all orthodox or reformed theologies are the same. For example, it is not just an oversimplification but incorrect to characterize Wyclif's formulation of real presence without substantial change solely as a rejection of transubstantiation. Rather, this response is a "positing of a different Eucharistic theology grounded on a different semiotics" (33). This chapter will be of much use to many scholars and students, including those who do not have particular or general interests in drama.
Just as the Eucharist is not settled, stable, or fixed, neither are the mechanisms of dramatic semiotics. One of the key strengths of this study is the way in which a semiotic crux is identified and examined in one dramatic text so that it's inverse, failure, or revised iteration can be explored in others. Chapter 2 addresses communal interpretation of wounded bodies in biblical dramas and Shakespeare's Coriolanus. Observing that the biblical dramas and the Roman tragedy "all but defy comparison," (53) the object is not to seek analogy or allegory. Coriolanus's dismemberment is not a kind of crucifixion. Rather, whereas Christ instructs beholders to gaze on his body in order to create an interpretive community, the Roman politician withholds his wounds from public view. Thus, Coriolanus's iconoclasm "gives rise to factionalism rather than social cohesion, starvation rather than nourishment" (81). The remaining four chapters are similarly structured with clusters of seemingly disparate dramatic texts from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries revealing theatrical engagement with Eucharistic semiotics as reflected by discourses of sacred kingship (chapter 3), liturgical linguistics (chapter 4), relics (chapter 5), and obscuring signs (chapter 6).
Chapter 3 breathes new life into Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies by examining how Lydgate, Bale, and Shakespeare "figure the king's royal presence in terms of a mystical body" (87) while avoiding a reduction of sacred kingship to the body politic alone. Proceeding from an analysis of how Henry VI's Triumphal Entry into London and A Procession of Corpus Christi dramatically converge "Christ's Eucharistic body and the king's royal body," (88) Zysk argues that both the matyrological King Johan and the psychological Macbet " stage regicide...by means of Eucharistic parodies" (87). Although Bale's play attempts to "divest sacred kingship of its Eucharistic symbolism" (94) for the purposes of enacting a reformed future, the assault on the corpus mysticum with Duncan's murder in Macbeth brings about political chaos.
Chapter 4 is a study of ritual power in contrasts. The sacramental agency of the priest to confect the Eucharist "With five words" [1] in Everyman is Faustus's performative failure. Here, the comparative consideration of Everyman and Doctor Faustus has nothing to do with their shared features of dramatic genre. Put concisely, Doctor Faustus stages the bookish necromancer's "priest envy," which is not a harbored desire so much as a "fascination with the specialized language of Eucharistic ritual used uniquely by Catholic priests" (120). Zysk's characteristic thoroughness attends to both the slight and substantial differences between the A and B texts of Faustus. In extending the analysis of sacramental (in)efficacy and envy to the very end, he suggests that the funerary plans for Faustus's dismembered body, which is unique to Act 5, Scene 3 of the B-text, refers to the power of liturgy to spiritually reassemble the seemingly damned soul "through the rites of the Requiem" mass (151).
Chapters 5 and 6 address how one comes to sense--or not--the substance of a sign. Focusing first on The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, chapter 5 builds on recent discussions of this play's theatrical and theological dimensions to argue that the successive resignification of the consecrated host reflects the semiotic problems associated with relics. These material remains elicit "troubling relations between sign and referent, visible matter and invisible reality" (164) and part and whole. The second part of the chapter attends to the relic confusion at the heart of The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling. These sexually-charged revenge tragedies "repurpose the semiotics" of partial and contact relics as figured by "wax heads, gloves, rings, severed fingers" (174) to stage the deadly misinterpretation of corporal signs.
Chapter 6 considers the converse of the obvious challenge of the Eucharistic sign. That is, "if the consecrated host posits a body present in substance but inaccessible to the senses," the Emmaus plays of Doubting Thomas, Jack Juggler, and The Winter's Tale all stage the problem of "a body present in the flesh but obscured by the sign" (13). The effects of ontological distortion caused by the semiotic acts of disguising, naming, and statue-seeming in this group of plays require new methods of interpretation to repair communal, social, and familial ruptures. The final part of the chapter extends the discussion of Shakespeare's play to explain "why transubstantiation fails to explain Hermione's transformation" (216-217). Recalling the careful examination of Eucharistic writings in Chapter 1, Zysk attends to how the play enacts the semiotics of real presence, sacramental confection, and substance and accidents. While the affecting revelation of Hermione as un-resurrected flesh turns on Eucharistic signs, it occurs "without making a profession of faith, creating an enchanted miracle, or relying on supernatural ghosts" (223). In an elegant, almost meditative consideration of The Winter's Tale and "theology on its own terms" (216-217), Zysk corrects the tendency to read transformation scenes in early modern drama, especially that of Shakespeare, through fixed positions of "transubstantiation or trope, real presence or metaphorical memorial" (217). The play's true marvel is in its theatrical reconceiving of Eucharistic semiotics.
Having thoroughly engaged a host of premodern texts with occasional and appropriate reference to how twentieth-century writers such as Henri de Lubac and J. L. Austin attend to bodies and becoming, the book concludes in the here and now. In a brief Afterword, the more recent linguistic controversies concerning the 2011 English translation of the Roman Catholic liturgy (yes, the "And with your spirit," one) are placed within the context of a much longer history of debates about how "sacramental thinking" marks "particular relations between word and thing, body and text" (228). Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of this project is that theological and theatrical texts appear to have preserved a long intellectual history of semiotics, whatever called and however conceived, in theory and practice.
Readers less familiar with drama traditionally categorized as either medieval or early modern might desire more explanation of some of the dramatic texts, but one hopes that the engaging readings will encourage more frequent encounters with the opposite side of the Reformation divide. Along similar lines, there is not much historical contextualization for the dramatic texts themselves in terms of their contemporary religious and political cultures or theatrical conditions, but this does not represent a limitation. On the contrary, the continual focus on semiotic functions, fissures, and quandaries in early drama maintains a necessary coherence throughout this fine and fascinating study.
This book is aptly titled Shadow and Substance, not From Substance To Shadow or vice versa. As scholarship, it represents a trans-Reformation approach to dramatic criticism as well as the second wave of the religious turn in early modern English literary studies. As such, medieval drama is never just waiting in the wings for Shakespeare to save the show. The rich semiotic exploration of canonical English drama, such as Doctor Faustus and Macbeth, is possible because complex, multi-directional semiotic functions are identified equally throughout earlier and lesser-known theatrical works. In performing what essentially amounts to synchronic criticism, this book sustains a welcome re-periodization of English drama across the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. More broadly, Zysk provides a non-diachronic model for other scholars whose work sits on either end of the Middle Ages as well as for studies on topics, such as sexuality, race, and performance, that defy the normal junctures of received periodization.
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Notes:
1. The Summoning of Everyman in Everyman and Mankind, ed. Douglas Bruster and Eric Rasmussen. (London: Methuen Drama, 2009), 737.