At 10:31 09.02.99 -0500, John Marlin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>[...]
>I'd add one more note to the problem of using methods of biblical exegesis
>in understanding secular texts - there seems to be little evidence of such
>a method in practice.  We have plenty of glossed manuscripts of Chaucer,
>but I don't recall seeing any glosses that systematically employ these
>methods (were many of such extant, I imagine Robertson and his school
>would have made much of them). I believe there are extant a number of
>allegorical commentaries on Dante, but, as you said we have to take this
>case-by-case and he's a different case. 

Dear John,

Yes, we have quite a number of Dante commentaries from the 14th and 15th
century where we find allegorical explanations, and in some of them we find
introductory explanations claiming that the Commedia has a threefold (or
otherwise multiple) allegorical sense, in addition to the literal sense.
Yet the allegorical explanation given in these commentaries are usually
rather crude and usually don't explore a hierarchy of distinct allegorical
senses. If I can give any weight to my own reconstructions of allegorical
meanings in the Commedia, I would say that these early commentators had
neither the necessary intellectual/theological background to expound these
meanings, nor where they usually in a position to perform such an
exposition, because they were usually addressing an audience of laymen
(most of them being laymen themselves) who needed a more elementary gloss.

We also have allegorical commentaries on other poetic works (esp. Vergil
and Ovid) and some introductory statements crediting such works with
multiple allegorical senses, but as said before we cannot take this as a
generally valid principle which was applied by every reader to every more
or less authoritative text, or which authors in general expected at least
some of their readers to apply. I am no expert for Chaucer, but judging
from the little that I have read I doubt that he would be a very promising
case for my kind of research.

>
>My interest in this is stirred less by my regularly teaching Chaucer to
>undergrads than by my continuing reading and work in medieval drama.  I
>have a sense, from some of the manuscript rubrics and other shards and
>fragments I've seen, that medieval plays were written (as you said of
>Alanus and Dante) with a wide audience in mind, so that the unlettered
>peasant or craftsman, the somewhat lettered curate, and the highly
>proficient magister all could take something from them.  And because the
>plays are largely on Biblical subjects, it seems that some readers would
>adopt habits of Biblical exegesis in pondering them.  What I'm pondering
>regarding some 12th-century plays (and may extend to vernacular Biblical
>plays of later centuries) is the possibility that exegetical method
>influenced their composition and construction.  That is, I'm wondering if
>plays' dramaturgical frameworks and invented dialogue were so designed as
>to invite particular allegorial readings from proficient audiences. 

This is a very interesting issue, and I wish I knew more about it. I would
like to study this problem in the context of liturgy and figural arts
(including also architecture), because I suppose that these had developed
certain forms of performing spiritual relations between 'then' and 'now',
'here' and 'there', in a way which made such relations perceptible also to
a larger number of spectators or participants, and medieval drama may have
recurred to such techniques and may have developed them further. 

I have never done any serious work on medieval plays, but I have looked a
bit into an early modern play which I find very interesting under this
aspect. Sebastian Brant, better known as author of the _Ship of fools_
(Narrenschiff), also wrote and directed a _Tugent Spyl_ (1512?) which was
rediscovered by Hans Gert Roloff in a posthumous print of 1544, ed.
Hans-Gert Roloff, _Sebastian Brant, Tugent Spyl. Nach der Ausgabe des
Magister Johann Winckel von Strassburg (1544)_, ed. Roloff, Berlin 1968 (=
Ausgaben deutscher Literatur des XV. bis XVIII. Jahrhunderts, Reihe Drama,
1). The play is based on the fable of "Hercules in bivio", i.e. his
decision between Virtus (Tugent) and Voluptas (Wollust), and this fable is
performed as a sort of judicial hearing or trial where Hercules, invoked by
poor and depossessed Dame Virtue as a judge, has to decide whether her
contrahent rightfully reigns the world and whether this contrahent
rightfully has abducted seven of the twelve daughter virtues to her own
service. It's a very long play, performed on two subsequent days, because
both contrahents call witnesses of their cause to court, these witnesses
being outstanding examples of virtue or of vice who testify or are
introduced by shorter embedded plays. In the end, Hercules, unsurprisingly,
decides in favour of Virtus, the Nine Worthies are charged to throw
Voluptas off her throne, and Virtue is reunited and reconciled with her
seven aberrant daughters. The action is closed by a sort of epilogue based
on fable of Ulysses.

The play is allegorical in a very obvious form, in so far as
personifications of virtue and of vice enter the scene and that Hercules as
their arbiter acts as a personification of human judgement (or free will).
In addition to this moral-tropological dimension of the allegory, there is
also a somewhat less obvious historical or political dimension, typological
in a very wide sense, because the state of the world upside down at the
beginning of the play and the restitution of the just world order at the
end are linked with biblical and with contemporary history: Jeremiah,
commenting upon the fall of Voluptas, states that "today it has become
manifest" what he himself many years ago had announced as the punishment of
sinful Jerusalem; and Geoffrey of Bouillon, helping as one of the Nine
Worthies to restitute this just order, expresses his hope that the Holy
Land currently usurped by the Saracens will soon be recovered by emperor
Maximilian I (see my recent list posting re: "Seamless robe of Christ" from
14 January 1999). Thus we may see moral-tropological as well as typological
implications at work, whereas I am less sure about the possibility of
finding anagogical ones. 

What I find particularly interesting is the question how the many
heterogenous materials and persons (each day more than fifty characters
enter the scene) are structured and organised. For example, the number of
witnesses cited by Virtus and Voluptas alternately is twelve (six witnesses
on each of the two days). Virtue cites five of them, Voluptas seven; five
of these witnesses appear alone and only deliver a speech, whereas seven
are accompanied by other persons and enact a more or less autonomous
embedded play. The number twelve divided into five and seven corresponds to
the number of the twelve daughters of Virtue, five of them remain
faithfully in the service of their mother whereas as seven have temporarily
turned themselves into servants of vice. It seems even possible, although
my interpretations has reached no very conclusive results, to relate the
sequence of the seven embedded plays to the catalogue of these seven
pervert daughter virtues. 

Another (related) point of interest is the question if this play was
intended for performance on stage exclusively or also for being read. Here
it seems that the 'telling' names of some of the persons can give us a
clue, because these names are not pronounced in the dialogues and thus
could be known and understood in their implications only by readers of the
written text. By learned readers, we may add, because some of these names
are telling only for readers who (unlike myself) know Greek. To give an
example which is also of interest for Brant's use of biblical typology: one
of the embedded plays introduces (on the request of Voluptas) the knight
Stratiotes who is a passionate hunter and so obsessed with his passion that
one Maundy-Thursday he neglects to attend a sermon at church but prefers to
go out hunting hares together with his two servants Lagotis and Kynigos.
Lagiotes shares his master's enthousiasm, whereas Kynigos complains that
they should rather have gone to church, because in this case they would
afterwards have had a breakfast whereas now they are still hunting with an
empty stomach. Now the devil Diabolus, hunting souls, makes his appearance
and instigates Stratiotes and Lagotis by inspiring his evil instigations
literally with a pair of bellows into their ears. Stratiotes becomes
desperate about his failure to attend a sermon and expresses the idea that,
if he could find somebody who had attended a sermon and was willing to sell
it to him, he would ruefully buy it in order to save his soul, even if he
had to return home naked. Whereupon Lagotis happily replies that he of all
three happens to have attended a sermon and would be delighted to sell it
to his master if he could get his master's coat in return. Yet barely
having received and put on this coat he suddenly becomes insane, curses his
deed, declares himself to be lost, throws away the fatal coat and hangs
himself. Whereas Stratiotes takes this to be a miracle bringing him back to
his senses and vows to attend sermons frequently and regularly in the
future and to abbandon hunting.

The moral of this embedded play is easy to grasp for every
reader/spectator, and also some of the internal quasi-typological relations
are easy to see: Lagotis, like his master a passionate hunter, falls victim
to the venator diabolus. Yet a reader who also knows the names of these
persons and can interpret them in Greek could grasp these relations more
closely: stratiotes means 'soldier', which does not yet give us much
additional sense, whereas Lagotis reminds of lagos, 'hare' (I would need
help to explain the form Lagotis), and Kynigos reminds of kynegos,
'hunter', or kynikos 'doggish'. The relation to 'hare' in Lagotis's name
seems particularly significant: in the beginning of the play, he carries a
dead hare hanging on his spear, and in the end of the play, fallen victim
to a better hunter he hangs himself. In addition, we may see a biblical
typology at work: throwing away the reward of his deed and hanging himself
on a Maundy-Thursday, he refigures Judas Iscariot, one of the more
outstanding biblical figures of avarice/greed and of despair.

Regards,

  Otfried

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