Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama by Daisy Black (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama by Daisy Black
• Christopher Swift

Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism And Temporality In Medieval Biblical Drama. By Daisy Black. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020; pp. 248.

On the subject of late medieval English plays, Daisy Black’s Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama gambols among three important critical inquiries from the last few decades. The author conducts close readings of four canonical dramas and situates her readings in conversation with a dazzling array of theorists and historians in medieval studies. Her original contribution to the study of medieval biblical drama is her engagement with gender and critical race studies to uncover subjective experiences of time that disrupted the linear, supersessionary models from the Bible. Black argues that rebellious, heterodox, and ignoble characters, and the incongruous juxtaposition of stage and scriptural time, offered audiences unique experiences of familiar religious stories. By staging these alternative renditions in pedestrian spaces outside the jurisdiction of the Church, the lay producers disrupted the typology of Christian history.

Informed by Carolyn Dinshaw, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Kathleen Davis, among others, Black employs spatial and somatic metaphors for understanding diverse theatricalizations of time. Black focuses on characters in English drama who subvert the Christian supersessionary model by expressing the sense of time as it pauses, meanders, repeats, remembers, and folds in on itself. She writes that “negotiations of time lie behind some of the most fraught depictions of conflict staged between biblical characters” (12), describing the ways in which the subjective experiences of time by those characters resist orthodoxy. Since conventional typologies of Christian history underscored the inevitability of the sacrifice of Christ, moments that undermined these typologies would have been compellingly affective. Importantly, Black demonstrates how these irregular figures of temporality confounded hegemonic constructions of gender and antisemitic tropes from the period. Alternative temporalities in the plays were revealed in scenes of conflict between men and women, Christians and non-Christians, and characters sacred and profane.

The dramatization of the domestic relationship of Joseph and Mary in the N-Town manuscript is the subject of chapter 1. As was typical in many medieval narratives, Joseph’s Jewishness is characterized by his impotent, aging body and doubts about Mary’s miraculous pregnancy. In the drama, the antisemitic attribute of intractable literalness contrasts with the ethereal, vessel-like quality of Mary. Joseph’s Doubt resolves when Joseph abandons his carnal attachments and enters into Christian time as the adoptive father of the unborn Christ. While some critics have argued that the play is a conventional reprisal of the inferiority of Hebrew law, Black’s careful parsing of the text suggests that “what might have been a straightforward, linear conversion narrative snags on the ambiguous nature of Christian time” (66). Ambivalence is at the heart of Christian preoccupation with supersession of the New Testament over the Hebrew Bible, a hermeneutic that builds on Jewish history while attempting to obscure it. Rather than undermining an immutable doctrine, the plays exploited theological fragilities inherent in biblical typology. In chapter 2, the character conflicts between Noah and his wife in the York Noah undermine supersessionary time by blurring the lines between past and present. Noah’s wife is a “disruptive voice,” who, like other female-gendered characters from the Bible, expresses disobedience toward her husband and to God. Black first aligns herself with interpretations of the character as an “unruly other” who is ultimately disciplined by the diluvian story. She then complicates this reading by showing how Noah’s wife’s refusal to forget the quickly vanishing past undermines her husband’s attempt to move forward, as God erases (nearly all of) creation.

In her discussion of multiple, queer experiences of time in the Towneley manuscript’s Second Shepherds’ Play, Black makes a meaningful contribution to the study of one of the most well-known plays of medieval England. Without diminishing the value of the other subjects of the book, this chapter was, for me, the most engaging. In wonderful detail, Black illustrates Christian anxieties about flesh, sexuality, reproduction, and consumption beneath Eucharistic and incarnational symbology. In the play, a Bahktinian [End Page 132...