In Play Time, Daisy Black explores the intersection of time, religious identity, and gender in medieval English biblical drama. For Black, not only do competing ideas about time generate conflict between characters in the plays, they also invite scholars to look beyond supersession and typology as the primary interpretive frameworks for interrogating the plays’ handling of their Jewish content. Each of the book’s four main chapters presents a compelling close reading of a dramatized biblical episode that models an alternative approach to temporality that does not necessarily presume Christianity’s neat and total replacement of Judaism as part of a linear narrative of salvation history.
Play Time opens with a substantive introduction that establishes the main lines of Black’s argument, namely, that late-medieval biblical plays “supported multiple, co-existing and subjective experiences of time” and that “one of the principal causes of antagonism between the characters of the biblical plays is their ability (or inability) to define, and thus to manage, time” (4, emphasis original). Each of the book’s subsequent main chapters presents a close reading of a single dramatized biblical episode that illustrates a different working-out of the relationship between Jewish past and Christian present. Chapter 1 takes up the portrayal of the domestic troubles between Joseph and Mary in the N-Town plays on the Virgin. Black argues that Joseph’s conventional characterization as elderly serves not only to provide some cheap laughs at the expense of an old, impotent man who discovers that his teenage bride is pregnant but also and more importantly to stage the eruption of Christian time into the world through Mary’s miraculous conception. Joseph’s repeated mis-readings of Mary’s swollen belly reveal his inability to come to terms with a new Christian reality different from the one he has known up until now, in which virgins do not conceive and remain virgins. Black links Joseph’s refusal to believe his wife’s story with Jewish doubt, which sets the stage for the old law, literalized in the failing body of the aged Joseph, to be replaced by the new in the form of Mary’s pregnant body. Joseph’s doubt makes the path from Jewish time to Christian time bumpy. Joseph finally comes around, of course, with the result that the “N-Town Marian plays present the introduction of Christ into time as a continuous process or re-figuring, rather than a historical caesura or moment of epiphany.” Joseph and Mary experience time differently, and while the play effects a resolution in which the old is eventually assimilated into the new, the process is not as seamless as supersessionary theology demands.
Marital strife, if of a more raucous variety, is on also on display in Chapter 2, which turns to the Flood plays performed in York and Chester. In these plays, Noah’s wife’s refusal to board the ark peacefully and to leave behind all that she has known threatens the project of salvation itself. While Noah desires a fresh start in a post-diluvian future, his wife cannot let go of the past. Black invokes the idea of a “temporality of explosion,” first articulated by Jonathan Gil Harris, to explain how the wife’s memories enable the past to continue exercising agency in the present, thereby disrupting God and Noah’s project to make all things new again through an act of cataclysmic destruction coupled with willful forgetting. Black maintains that the temporal conflict between Noah and his wife “testifies to the insufficiency of human relationships to accommodate the temporal and social transitions which God’s act of destruction enforces” (79).
Chapter 3 offers an innovative reading of perhaps the best known of all medieval English biblical dramatizations, the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play. Here the narrative of a stolen sheep unsuccessfully passed off as a newborn subverts assumptions about time as the linear succession of generations accomplished through heteronormative sexual reproduction. The sheep heist disrupts and delays the birth of Jesus, which happens off stage, as it were. Childbirth is performed only infelicitously, with the sheep-thieves Mak and Gyll also failing to pass, in their case as parents, following the detection by the shepherds of the central deception. The play leaves us to ask what happens to time’s linearity if the reproductive norms upon which it is founded are interrupted in favor of “queer play” (144).
By contrast, motherhood is performed to great effect in the Towneley Herod the Great. The mothers who violently resist the efforts of Herod’s soldiers to murder their newborns may fail to prevent their sons’ untimely demise, but they nevertheless succeed in frustrating the tyrant’s attempts to disrupt prophetic time. Black focuses on the play’s depiction of Herod’s command to his lackeys to search the ancient texts for mention of the king whose promised reign threatens his own. In analyzing Herod’s desires to identify and destroy the links to the past that imperil his ambitions for the future, Black invokes Michel Serres. Serres imagines non-linear, topological time as a crumpled handkerchief, noting that points on the handkerchief that exist in a certain linear relationship to one another when the cloth is laid out flat may find themselves nearer to one another when the fabric is balled up; so too parts of the handkerchief that were once adjacent could be permanently separated if it is torn into pieces. By applying topological principles to the play, Black argues that Herod tries to put distance between himself and the past by commanding the destruction of the texts that foretell his overthrow. The mothers counteract this act of toplogical tearing through their own performance of temporal folding: the sacrifice of their young sons brings together multiple historical events, including the Passover, the Passion, and the lamentations of scriptural matriarchs like Rachel. Herod’s attempts to disrupt time thus fail, as the fabric of Hebrew and Christian scriptural time fold together in ways “mutually fulfilling” (177).
A shorter fifth chapter serves as a conclusion to the book by reminding us that the medieval spectators of these plays would have experienced time differently from the characters themselves. Particularly in York, where the biblical plays were performed annually, Black observes that spectators would not only have known the plot of familiar biblical narratives; they would also have been acquainted with the particular staging of the plays and have therefore enjoyed something akin to the foreknowledge attributed to God in the plays. Medieval audiences who knew, for instance, that Lucifer would fall before he did share in a “God’s-eye view” of time, to quote the chapter’s title, all of which adds yet another layer of temporal complexity to the plays. Zooming out still further, Black reminds us that the plays being discussed continued to be performed well into the sixteenth century and/or were recorded in their surviving manuscript copies then, that is, in a period when Catholic texts were regarded with the same suspicions previously reserved for Jewish texts.
Given its focus on some of the greatest hits of the canon of early English drama and its fresh and insightful readings of familiar texts, Play Time will reward the attention of both scholars of medieval drama and those working in adjacent fields. Throughout the book’s central chapters, Black makes a compelling case for the claim that “processes bringing together events from the Hebrew and Christian Testaments are just as likely to highlight the disjunctions between these times as secure Christological foreshadowing or anticipation” (26). Throughout the study, Black implies that the plays under consideration subvert supersessionary thinking, but it may be that, rather than actively challenging normative temporalities, the plays simply magnify the uncertainties always already inherent in Christian appropriations of the Jewish past. What the plays do resist is several generations of scholarship on the drama that have insisted almost exclusively on typological readings of the plays’ engagement with their source material in the Hebrew Scriptures. Black demonstrates conclusively that multiple temporalities exist playfully side by side within medieval biblical drama and that the hegemony of Christian time is always under threat from history, which rarely is content to remain in the past.
For this reason, Black’s book is also, in a word, timely. It addresses questions about how the past is manipulated to meet the needs of the present. In discussing the contest between remembering and willfully forgetting the past that fuels the conflict between Noah and his wife in the Flood plays, Black remarks: “Like all discourses of erasure and beginning employed by those seeking to annihilate or overwrite an uncomfortable history, the new world must accommodate remnants of the old” (81). I could not help but connect this observation to current debates about how the history of slavery in the United Sates is being re-written, re-imagined, and re-appropriated by those who take a whiggish approach to history’s unfolding in order to avoid having to confront the enduring legacy of the country’s original sin or about how monuments aggrandizing the so-called heroes of the Confederacy ought to be preserved lest history be “erased” in service of a politics dismissively derided by critics as overly “woke.” My sense of the relevance of Play Time’s argument to current events was affirmed in the book’s single-page epilogue, in which Black meditates on the delusional nostalgic desires and supersessionary nationalist fantasies motivating Brexit, an event understood by all as initiating historical change, even if the sides do not agree on what the change is from or to. The tone of the epilogue is uncharacteristically mournful--the book is otherwise playful in keeping with its subject matter--but it also leaves open the possibility of hope, as Black conjures one last time the mothers of Bethlehem, victims of Herod’s inhumanity who nevertheless faithfully hold fast to the search “for connections between things that appear broken” (205).