“L’enfer, c’est les autres”: En-gendering Sin in Middle English Religious Drama. The Case of Chester

This article investigates the relationship between sin and its retribution as depicted in three Middle English biblical plays concerned with retribution, Noah’s Flood, the Harrowing of Hell and the Last Judgement, in the Chester biblical drama collection. The plays’ general tenor is, to modern sensibilities, conservative and disciplinarian with respect to social mores. Yet, studying the portrayal of sin against the plays’ social background may uncover secular mutations of the Christian conceptualisation of sin as a function of gender as well as estate. Chester’s Last Judgement dramatises sin in accordance with fifteenth-century ecclesiastical and secular developments which criminalise people along gender-specific, not just trade-specific, lines. In showing Mulier as the only human being whom Christ leaves behind in hell after his redemptive descensus, the Harrowing dooms not just the brewers’ and alehouse-keepers’ dishonesty, as imputed to brewsters in late medieval England, but women themselves, if under the guise of their trade-related dishonesty. The underside of the Chester Noahs’ cleansing voyage is women’s ideological and social suppression. Whether or not we regard the Good Gossips’ wine-drinking – for fear of the surging waters – or Mrs Noah’s defiant resistance to her husband as a performance of the sin of humankind calling for the punitive deluge, the script gives female characters a voice not only to show their sinfulness. Rather, like the Harrowing of Hell and less so the Last Judgement, Noah’s Flood, I argue, participates in a hegemonic game which appropriates one sin of the tongue, gossip, to make it backfire against those incriminated for using it in the first place: women.

Moving the margins with/of methodology

Various scholars have speculated about the possible link between the Fourth Gospel and drama. Such a connection, if valid, could potentially lead to the widening of hermeneutical lenses with which the Gospel is explored. While the exegetical field of biblical performance criticism has begun to break open the hermeneutical field by introducing performative and oral elements into the conversation, an attempt to formulate a methodology for a drama analysis of the text still needs to be made. This article evaluates the possibility of reading the Fourth Gospel through a drama lens in order to explore its possible performative impact on a first-time hypothetical audience. The article experiments with possible parameters of biblical drama criticism and how the translation of the text into stage-script format could be useful in academic and ecclesial spaces. Such a translation invites new experiences with the text and an expansion of the hermeneutical spectrum to include various non-textual elements like sound and sight. Moreover, it widens the hermeneutical scope to explore the audience’s own (vulnerable) journey with the performance by taking their possible struggle(s) with the drama seriously.

El proceso de lectura de Baltasar de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda: Los personajes femeninos y su modo de actuación

La recepción inicial del drama bíblico Baltasar de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda no sólo destacaba las virtudes del pueblo judío frente al paganismo de la corte de Babilonia, sino que analizaba el hastío vital del rey tirano. Sin embargo, nuestro proceso de lectura prefiera subrayar la importancia de los personajes femeninos, porque si bien la autora no traiciona las normas de la jerarquía dominante, sí concede una voz diferenciada a la mujer, cuyo modo de actuación se aleja del estereotipo fijado por la cultura oficial. The initial reception of the biblical drama Baltasar by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda is not only focused on defending the values of the Jewish people against the paganism of the Babylonian court, but also on the tedium vitae of the tyrant king. Nevertheless, our reading process wishes to underline the importance of the female characters, because while the author does not betray the rules of the dominant hierarchy, it does grant a differentiated voice to women, whose characterization move away from the stereotype marked out byofficial culture

Proximate Translation: George Buchanan's Baptistes, Sophocles’ Antigone, and Early Modern English Drama

This essay takes up the question of what impact Greek tragedy had on original plays written in Latin in the sixteenth century. In exploring George Buchanan's biblical drama Baptistes sive calumnia (printed 1577) and its reworking of scenes and images from Sophocles' Antigone, we see how neo-Latin drama provided a valuable channel for the sharing and shaping of early modern ideas about Greek tragedy. The impact of the Baptistes on English drama is then examined, with particular reference to Thomas Watson's celebrated Latin translation of Antigone (1581). The strange affinities between Watson's and Buchanan's plays reveal the potential for Greek tragedy to shape early modern drama, but also for early modern drama to shape how Greek tragedy itself was read and received in early modern England.