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A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras

2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 219 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/english/efn033

1756-1124

P. M. King,

Medieval Literature and History

T he town of Arras in Picardy was contested territory, subject to acts of destruction in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as it was in the 1914–18 war. It is also the locus of Europe's earliest secular medieval plays to pass into written record. Carol Symes insists that the plays of Arras are earlier and better than anything comparable. A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras is a detailed, original, scholarly, and arrestingly written study of these remarkable plays in context. It provides a meticulously researched analysis of the peculiar nature of the civic and ecclesiastical culture from which they emanated, as well as a detailed account of each play, frequently suggesting convincing connections between the two. It commands attention beyond the field of early drama in France and the Low Countries, prompting reconsiderations of the categories of medieval performance as a whole. Jean Bodel's Jeu de Saint Nicolas is revealed as the work of a performer turned civic notary. Redolent with topical, local, mercantile references, the play emanates from a milieu where there was a cross-over between the clerkly and the secular, and in which Bodel, as custodian of the town's memory, was able to ensure that his creative work became part of its written culture. Courtois d'Arras uses the parable of the prodigal son in the socially mobile world of medieval Arras, to underscore the difficult relationships between step-parents and their step-children. Its surviving manuscript witness also evidences how later editions can falsify the relationship between poems and plays. The discussion then widens to take up other topics surrounding the use and abuse of written cultures, intimately linked with the story of how the guild of jongleurs in Arras achieved civic respectability; the very documentation that makes the guild accessible to us now is also the means by which it validated its activities and resisted threat. The book's most interesting chapter gives a witty account of Le Garçon et L'Aveugle , demonstrating how civic legitimacy and power was dependent on manipulating the public media, showing how various strategies were used to gain ‘air-time’ in a world which depended on public performance and its correlative, public writing. Jeu de la Feuillée is then used to prompt a further exploration into the nature of public performance, in particular the veneration of the relics of Saint Nicolas, fraught with local power-struggles. Here Symes, finding a blend of piety and celebration, judiciously calls to question the binary divide on which Bakhtin's theory of carnival is predicated.