Gender and Pilgrimage in The Digby Mary Magdalene

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• Gender and Pilgrimage in The Digby Mary Magdalene
• Jiamiao Chen (bio)

The Digby Mary Magdalene, one of the most theatrically and theologically ambitious plays in the corpus of early English drama, is also one of the most complex in terms of its textual and performance history.¹ Based on linguistic evidence, scholars generally suggest that the play was written in East Anglia in the late fifteenth century, and that the surviving manuscript was produced in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.² Further, the extant text seems to reflect an imagined—and very likely realized—use of medieval locus and platea staging techniques: in this arrangement, the plural loca are scaffolds which, as Robert Weimann writes, “delimit a more or less fixed and focused scenic unit,” while the platea provides “an entirely nonrepresentational and unlocalized setting” where the characters can “[rub] shoulders with the plebeian audience.”³ While the precise number of locations presented by the play remains disputed, scholars generally recognize its grand scale; the play was clearly designed to impress and engage its potential audience.⁴ John Coldewey has suggested that the play was likely performed at the Chelmsford festival in 1562—a suggestion which, if correct, would demonstrate its lasting literary and theatrical appeal.⁵

Whatever its reception by early audiences, the play did not initially impress modern scholars of medieval drama. Incorporating both the biblical narrative and apocryphal legend relating to the life and death of the heroine and containing episodes probably borrowed from mystery plays and morality plays, the play is hybrid, episodic, and sprawling in form and content.⁶ Such qualities proved frustrating for many mid-twentieth century scholars, including Arnold Williams, who lamented, “Characterization, the interplay of character and situation, the purposeful [End Page 460] selection of incident to embody theme, of these it has scarcely any.”⁷ Yet since the mid-twentieth century, scholars have sought to better understand and appreciate the play’s sophisticated design by studying it in its medieval contexts and judging its aesthetic merits on its own terms. For instance, John W. Velz finds “sovereignty” a unifying theme for this play, while Victor I. Scherb suggests that the play is unified “through the repetitive symbolic action of the nuntius figure.”⁸ Although criticizing such attempts to find unifying themes and motifs in the Digby Mary Magdalene, Scott Boehnen also establishes, in effect, a form of unity within the play, specifically by drawing attention to its exploration of different kinds of pilgrimage.⁹ Boehnen’s emphasis on the significance of pilgrimage to the play are important for my purposes here, but it is important to note that, in making his argument, Boehnen risks following in the footsteps of earlier critics who failed to appreciate the gendered dimensions of the protagonist’s experiences, including Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall Jr., who argued that the playwright has “translated Mary into Everyman, representing as she did to medieval man the victory of grace, contrition, and penance over human frailty.”¹⁰ In a similar vein, Boehnen claims that, as a pilgrim’s play, the Digby Mary Magdalene “is best considered the play of Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint Peter.”¹¹ As we will see, Mary Magdalene’s distinctive connections to medieval women and their devotional experiences are far too understated in such readings.

While it is true that, in the the Digby play, Mary Magdalene defers to Christ and Peter, both the role of Peter and the passion and resurrection of Christ are effectively upstaged by the remarkably dramatic life and death of the titular heroine. Hence Susan Carter observes the “seductive depth of [the Magdalene’s] story” and “the feminist potential of the female saint.”¹² Scholars have explored different aspects of this feminist potential, including Mimi Still Dixon, who has considered the meanings of Mary’s “Femynyte” and “Inward Mythe”; Susannah Milner, who has examined the function of female asceticism in the play; and Joanne Findon, who has traced the literary and cultural hybridity of Mary’s character.¹³ Dixon and Milner, focusing on Mary’s body, interiority, and asceticism, suggest in their own ways that Mary is ultimately empowered by her adherence to...