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Time, Eternity, and Dramatic form in L udus C oventriae “Passion Play I” Daniel P. Poteet II Few students of the English mystery cycles would contest the truism that, in general, the dramatic conventions of Ludus Coventriae “Passion Play I” and all other medieval plays are in tended to interpret a Christian world and universe.1 Yet even the most perceptive critics appear reluctant to construe “conven tions” as more comprehensive than staging and theme, or to consider the fundamental likelihood that such touchstones of analysis as character, conflict, and development possess a low priority in the interpretation of a medieval Christian universe. These concerns, which are inseparable from the post-medieval appeal of world, individual, and time, however, bear only mini mal relation to the primary medieval interest in the timeless structure of eternity and reality. The liturgy and sacramental system, philosophical interest in being rather than becoming, and the iconographie and typological system of correspondences be tween earth and heaven—all relevant in some degree to “Passion I”—demonstrate the seminal position of timelessness in medieval thought. Time itself, with its attributes of causality, sequence, and change, was thought to be of secondary and deceptive im portance^ In “Passion I,” which dramatizes the intersection of history and eternity in the displacement of the Paschal Feast by the Eucharist, the distinction between time and timelessness is crucial not only to theme, but to the action and total structure of the play. The ways in which the play gives substance and shape to this distinction challenge the reliability of time oriented inter pretive criteria and indicate that medieval belief and aesthetic imagination and medieval dramatic decorum are sometimes indivisible. Critical investigation of the play has established many of its 369 370 Comparative Drama distinguishing characteristics—e.g., a high level of dramatic irony, rigid adherence to theme, startling moral contrasts among situations and characters—but usually in studies that stress iso lated insights rather than wider generic qualities. Eleanor Pros ser’s description of “Passion Play I,” for instance, as “a carefully unified sermon on repentance: a sermon with exhortations, exempla, and meditations,” pinpoints an important theme, but blurs the basic aesthetic differences between expository forms of theology and moral philosophy and imaginative drama.3 Rose mary Woolf recognizes the theme of God’s redemptive love and the eucharistic and liturgical emphasis of the play, but attempts no comprehensive interpretation.4 Of greater value, in terms of aesthetics, are analyses of multiple staging, simultaneous scenes, and telescoping action by Stanley Kahrl and Kenneth Cameron and by Glynne Wickham, but even these studies do little to dem onstrate the formative impact of theological milieu on dramatic form.5 No study to date, in other words, has attempted to inter pret these attractive elements of the play in the context of its remarkable time suppressing characteristics—the rearrangement of historical order, the total lack of moral development among characters, common sacramental imagery, the ironically futile temporal sequence attending the denigration and capture of Jesus —which collectively suggest the influence of a non-naturalistic informing milieu and objectify a spiritual alternative to the worldly significance of sequential time. Together with other plays in the Ludus Coventriae, “Passion I” may well represent a kind of drama that, in its purest form, is highly symbolic, free from meaningful overt conflict, and theoretically timeless among its exemplars of virtue—a kind of drama whose theologically based principles of organization and their aesthetic consequences dis tinguish it from drama that is Christian only in theme. Indications of the influence and nature of these principles occur with provocative frequency. Sacramental representation and imagery, the prologues by Demon and John the Baptist, and the healing of two blind paupers, for instance, all imply the asso ciation of illusion with time and truth with eternity. They en courage the search for evidence of this distinction in more basic qualities of the play, and they remind us, more importantly, that the distinction is a matter of Christian metaphysics as well as of simple definition. Sacramentalism is obvious in a central episode, the Last Supper, and in the detailed institution of the Lord’s Daniel P. Poteet II 371 Supper; the later...
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