What does it mean to be a self? Focusing on issues of selfhood in the English morality plays, Julie Paulson in her new book offers a refreshing approach that elevates the status of these plays, suggesting that they are rich resources for uncovering essential struggles over intersections of faith and being that defined Christianity in late medieval and early Reformation England. At the same time, Theater of the Word also incites reflection on contemporary understandings of what defines a self.
Selecting the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein as the principle underpinning for her study, Paulson argues that his conception of a significantly intertwined relationship between mind and body provides a basis for exploring how the self is portrayed in these plays that is far more appropriate than the Cartesian separation which has dominated Western thought. In fact, in turning to Wittgenstein, Paulson argues that a reliance upon Descartes and his emphasis upon the importance of interior versus bodily life has resulted in misguided and even inaccurate interpretations of the morality plays and of, in general, late medieval notions of selfhood. Thus, defining the self primarily in connection with internal subjectivity, as we are accustomed to doing, has blinded us to a much more externalized and performative expression of selfhood for which Paulson finds particularly strong evidence in the morality plays.
More specifically, as works which focus on the role of penance in order to achieve proper Christian selfhood, the morality plays, Paulson argues, provide explicit examples of how the medieval self--in connection with fundamental aspects of sacramental Christianity--is discovered and revealed primarily through the performance of ritual and devotional practice. Self-knowledge, then, is a much more profoundly relational activity than Descartes' philosophy would encourage us to believe and the morality plays both present this idea of a self while also offering penitents the kind of training that will lead them there.
In her first three chapters, Paulson explores how this instructional drive remains present in each of the three morality plays from the Macro manuscript even as the plays likewise reflect and reveal some of the predominate ideological struggles over theological tenets of their time periods. Indeed, as interpreted by Paulson, The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, and Mankind offer responses to debates over the appropriate role of the sacraments, to Lollard critiques of penance, to the controversial push for reform movements in the institutional Church, and to conflicting views regarding clerical authority and the role of the sermon. Paulson deftly re-characterizes the Macro moralities: rather than didactic, even hierarchical texts, whose message and lessons are delivered in a "top-down" fashion, these plays are, instead, pedagogical texts. Emphasizing participatory and communal instruction as the means for achieving Christian self-knowledge, they encompass and communicate a selfhood necessarily dependent upon the meaningful practice of external rites and rituals.
Turning, in chapter 4, to Everyman, Paulson again resists more traditional readings and in doing so reveals how many of these more familiar approaches have worked perhaps too eagerly to see Everyman as a discourse on the isolating nature of death. Rather than displaying a turning toward an interior self that encourages an understanding of Everyman's plight as a separation from others, Paulson argues instead that, in focusing on penance and penitential ritual as humanly relational activities, the play presents Everyman's journey as a process of gradual recognition regarding his necessary role in the community. This recognition, in fact, challenges--if not dispels--the notion that individual selves can be understood only as distinct from others.
In her last two chapters, Paulson focuses on John Bale's King Johan and Lewis Wager'sThe Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene--both examples of English Reformation morality plays which she states, were employed "as a means of vilifying the rituals that had defined the Catholic Church" (34). More specifically, by asserting a form of spectatorship fundamentally different from that encouraged in the medieval moralities, Paulson argues that King Johan and Mary Magdalene seek to critique and combat a performative and communal idea of selfhood associated with the earlier faith and replace it with, instead, an act of self-attentive witnessing presented as ostensibly more true, virtuous, and godly.
As I share an interest in the religious drama in late medieval England--and also an approach to these plays that is especially attentive to the role of audience participation and which likewise highlights the fluidity of performance possibilities they contain, I was excited to read Paulson's text and to see her confirm some of my own suggestions about the role of response as a explicit topic connected to dramatic self-exploration in the morality plays. Her work with Wager's Mary Magdalene, moreover, has convinced me further that that play--along with other dramatic texts from the late medieval and early Reformation period that I have also examined in my own work in a similar vein--are fascinating examples of a shifting religious polemic at work, one focused on critiquing past audience behaviors and faith practices in order to present alternatives more in keeping with emerging Protestant agendas.
In introducing readers to a way of thinking about selfhood that will be unfamiliar to most readers of her work, Paulson manages to enliven a set of plays that have often been seen as rather dull and flat: containing what appear to be static personifications of human traits, sins, and temptations, the morality plays have been read as crude and simplistic in contrast to what we believe is our more sophisticated internally directed way of understanding what it means to be a human being. Yet, Paulson's explanations of how Wittgenstein's philosophy offers an alternative way of thinking about the self and her suggestion that the morality plays may offer a particularly resonant example for this way of thinking helps us to reimagine these plays as fascinating--even foreign--objects of study that encourage us (almost thrillingly) to rethink contemporary notions of the self which we have assumed (and presumed) too willingly to be just how things are. Her final chapter, which smartly focuses on the 2015 film Inside Out as a contemporary version of a morality play, provides an example--even in connection with such "basic," but societally crucial, issues as childhood and parenting--of how contemporary society is perhaps at this moment especially eager to engage in rethinking notions of self and community.