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Empathy with the Devil: Movement, Kinesthesia, and Affect in The Castle of Perseverance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 April 2019

Clare Wright
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Extract

In 1997 Claire Sponsler argued that, contrary to conventional interpretations, the anarchic, disruptive bodies of sin in medieval morality plays do not “unproblematically and unilaterally lead to the ratification of virtue over vice.” Instead, “the memory of the pleasures of misbehavior, of the satisfactions that come from unruly bodies allowed free rein” lingered with spectators to the extent that any “attempts made by these plays to bring misbehavior to a halt look highly unsatisfactory and incomplete.” For Sponsler, the powerful allure of vice performed was such that morality plays would have been unable fully “to negate the charms of misgovernance” they enacted. In this article, however, I want to argue against Sponsler's assumption and investigate how one English morality play, The Castle of Perseverance, understood very well the allure of performed sin and actively cultivated it as part of its dramaturgical and didactic strategies. All morality plays, as Sponsler observes, use representations of “disorderly behavior grounded in the misuse of bodies and commodities,” investing these figures of sin “with remarkable energy, interest, and vitality, so much so that the vices are … very seductive.” The Castle is no exception, and the vast majority of its roughly three thousand lines are spoken by the Three Enemies of Man and their affiliated Sins. In addition, the playtext also provides unusually rich, detailed descriptions of how these spiritual enemies and sins should move around the performance space. Drawing on the theory of kinesthetic empathy, I examine the kinesic dimension of these “unruly bodies” and argue, contrary to Sponsler, that it is their presence, and the audience's own embodied responses to them, that deepens and enhances, rather than detracts from, the play's moral message.

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Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , May 2019 , pp. 179 - 206
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Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2019 

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References

Endnotes

1. Sponsler, Claire, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 80–4Google Scholar.

2. Ibid., 80.

3. Wood, Karen, “Kinesthetic Empathy: Conditions for Viewing,” in The Oxford Handbook of Screendance Studies, ed. Rosenberg, Douglas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 245–61Google Scholar, at 245.

4. Foster, Susan Leigh, “Movement's Contagion: The Kinesthetic Impact of Performance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Davis, Tracy C. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 46–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 49.

5. “Watching Dance: Kinesthetic Empathy,” legacy site of the Watching Dance project, www.watchingdance.org/about_us/index.php, accessed 13 September 2017, ¶3 of 11.

6. Susan Leigh Foster, Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), 7; 74.

7. Ibid., 127–8.

8. Ibid., 10; 127. Cf. “projecting oneself into the object of contemplation,” Dee Reynolds and Matthew Reason, “Introduction,” in Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. Reynolds and Reason (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2012), 17–25, at 19.

9. John Martin, America Dancing: The Background and Personalities of the Modern Dance (New York: Dodge Publishing, 1936), 117. Quoted and discussed in Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 7–8.

10. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 2; Susan Leigh Foster, “Movement's Contagion,” 49; see also Wood, 247.

11. For an introduction to morality plays, see Pamela M. King, “Morality Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2d ed., ed. Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 235–62.

12. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 2; “Movement's Contagion,” 49.

13. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 218; Wood, 247.

14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty [1945], Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 112–69; Michel de Certeau [1980], The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, 3d ed. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2011), 91–130.

15. Janette Dillon, The Language of Space in Court Performance, 1400–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 7.

16. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Kinesthetic Experience: Understanding Movement Inside and Out,” Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy 5.2 (2010): 111–27, at 114.

17. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 137.

18. For further discussion, see Clare Wright, “Ontologies of Play: Reconstructing the Relationship between Audience and Act in Early English Drama,” Shakespeare Bulletin 35.2 (2017): 187–206.

19. There are similar sketches from the Continent and designs for circular staging in extant manuscripts of medieval Cornish drama. See David Mills, “Diagrams for Staging Plays, Early or Middle Fifteenth Century,” in Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England, ed. R. A. Skelton and P. D. A. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 344–5; Merle Fifield, “The Arena Theatres in Vienna Codices 2535 and 2536,” Comparative Drama 2.4 (1968–9), 259–82; Sydney Higgins, Theatre in the Round: The Staging of Cornish Medieval Drama (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2013).

20. For discussion of The Castle’s diagram and its issues, see Richard Southern, The Medieval Theatre in the Round: A Study of the Staging of “The Castle of Perseverance” and Related Matters (London: Faber & Faber, 1957); Pat M. Ryan, “Review: The Medieval Theatre in the Round: A Study of the Staging of ‘The Castle of Perseverance’ and Related Matters (London: Faber and Faber, 1957),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 44 (1958): 444–5; Natalie Crohn Schmitt, “Was There a Medieval Theatre in the Round? A Re-Examination of the Evidence,” in Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual, ed. Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 292–315; William Tydeman, English Medieval Theatre, 1400–1500 (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1986); Andrea Louise Young, Vision and Audience in Medieval Drama: A Study of “The Castle of Perseverance” (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

21. Robert Weimann first popularized the use of the terms locus and platea, of which place-and-scaffold is a primary example. He defines them as a fixed, symbolic location and a nonrepresentational open space, respectively. See his Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1978), 73–84. For criticism see Erika T. Lin, “Performance Practice and Theatrical Privilege: Rethinking Weimann's Concepts of Locus and Platea,” New Theatre Quarterly 22.3 (2006): 283–98; and Wright, “Ontologies of Play.”

22. All quotations from The Castle of Perseverance are as in The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles, EETS 262 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 1–111.

23. Tydeman, 83. See Southern, 56, for an alternative interpretation.

24. A photo archive of the 1979 PLS production can be found at www.flickr.com/photos/plspls/albums/72157629762340360/with/7212266736/, accessed 2 May 2018.

25. Southern, 11–12.

26. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 21–2.

27. David Bevington, Action Is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 8–9.

28. Clifford Davidson, Visualizing the Moral Life: Medieval Iconography and the Macro Morality Plays (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 52.

29. Debra Higgs Strickland notes the typical “[p]ictorial principles of opposition” in medieval depictions of demons. See Strickland, Saracens, Demons and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 71.

30. See also Sarah Carpenter, “Laughter and Sin: Vice Families in Tudor Interludes,” in “Folly's Family, Folly's Children,” comp. Richard Hillman, Theta XII (2016): 15–37, http://umr6576.cesr.univ-tours.fr/Publications/Theta12/, accessed 2 May 2018.

31. Natalie Crohn Schmitt argues (300–3) that the Virtues probably descended to the ground immediately surrounding the Castle, but were defended by the ditch, which she suggests encircled the Castle.

32. Tydeman proposes that the actor playing God would have been hidden by a curtain until he speaks. For further discussion see, Tydeman, 86–98.

33. The Book of Vices and Virtues: A Fourteenth Century English Translation of the “Somme le Roi” of Lorens d'Orléans, ed. W. Nelson Francis, EETS, orig. ser. 217 (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 103, ll. 4–12.

34. The precise meaning of these last two lines is unclear, and depends on the transcription of þo (either those or the), whether dewylys is singular or plural possessive, and the interpretation of wode. Wode has multiple meanings in Middle English, the most common being wood and madness, both interconnected. See Middle English Dictionary entries wọ̄de (n. (2)) and wọ̄d(e (n. (3)), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/lookup.html, accessed 2 January 2019. Cf. David N. Klausner's gloss, The Castle of Perseverance (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2010).

35. The polysemy of degre in Middle English is important to this reading. It can mean, among other things: an elevated place, a platform; a stage of advancement or development; a stage in a process; and a geometric measurement of angles or circular arcs. See the entry for degre (n.) in the Middle English Dictionary and degree (n.) in OED.

36. For more on the representation of devils in early English drama see John D. Cox, The Devil and the Sacred in Early English Drama, 1350–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); John D. Cox, “Devils and Vices in English Non-Cycle Plays: Sacrament and Social Body,” Comparative Drama 30.2 (1996): 188–219; and Max Harris, “Flesh and Spirits: The Battle Between Virtues and Vices in Medieval Drama Reassessed,” Medium Ævum 57.1 (1988): 56–64.

37. Richard Rastall, The Heaven Singing: Music in Early Religious Drama, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 1:206.

38. In the fourteenth century, John Bromyard draws on this passage in his Summa praedicantium, where he criticizes masked dancers “whose feet are swift to seek out evil.” Cited in The Medieval European Stage 500–1550, ed. William Tydeman et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 260.

39. Alexandra F. Johnston, “‘At the Still Point of the Turning World’: Augustinian Roots of Medieval Dramaturgy,” European Medieval Drama 2 (1998): 1–9, at 3.

40. Book of Vices and Virtues, 44, ll. 14–19.

41. Simon Shepherd, Theatre, Body and Pleasure (London: Routledge, 2006), 11.

42. Ibid., 36.

43. Eccles, The Macro Plays, xvi–xvii. For more on alliterative verse form see, for example, Ralph Hanna, “Defining Middle English Alliterative Poetry,” in The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff, ed. M. Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 43–64; and the introduction to The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2007).

44. There is no punctuation in the manuscript, but the sense and syntactical pattern of World's lines would seem to suggest a pause after “in pes be ȝe bent” (160). For a facsimile edition of the text see The Macro Plays: A Facsimile Edition with Facing Transcriptions, ed. David Bevington, Folger Facsimiles, MS Series 1 (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972). A digitized copy of the Macro Plays can be found via the Folger's Luna Digital Image Collection: https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/view/search?q=mfhd_repository_number%3D%22V.a.354%22&os=0, accessed 22 January 2019.

45. For more on medieval masking traditions, see Meg Twycross and Sarah Carpenter, Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002).

46. The number of syllables will depend on whether final -e is sounded in the East Midlands dialect of this period. See Hoyt N. Duggan, “Final -e and the Rhythmic Structure of the B-Verse in Middle English Alliterative Poetry,” Modern Philology 86.2 (1988): 119–45.

47. For discussion of Herod's speech, see Clare Wright, “Acoustic Tyranny: Metre, Alliteration and Voice in Christ before Herod,” Medieval English Theatre 34 (2012): 3–29.

48. Jean-Claude Schmitt, “The Rationale of Gestures in the West: Third to Thirteenth Centuries,” in A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), 59–70, at 66–7 (quote on 67).

49. Hugh of Saint Victor, quoted in Jean-Claude Schmitt, “The Ethics of Gesture,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 3 pts., ed. Michel Feher, with Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 2:129–47, at 139.

50. Bernard of Clairvaux, Five Books on Consideration: Advice to a Pope, trans. John D. Anderson and Elizabeth T. Kennan (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1976), bk. 2, chap. 19, 72.

51. The Book of the Knight of the Tower, ed. M. Y. Offord, trans. William Caxton, EETS, suppl. ser., 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 28, ll. 10–13. Offord's edition maintains the punctuation of Caxton's original printed text.

52. Ibid., 25, ll. 5–8.

53. Ibid., 25, ll. 11–13.

54. In doing so, the artist also seeks to illustrate the innate moral distinctions between the nobility and the lower social estates. For a discussion of the moral, social, and political implications of movement in the period, and in particular of dance, see Skiles Howard, The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998).

55. Matthew Reason, “Watching Dance, Drawing the Experience and Visual Knowledge,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 64.4 (2010): 391–414, at 392. For full discussion, see the contributions in Experiencing Liveness in Contemporary Performance, ed. Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof (New York: Routledge, 2017).

56. Bernard Beckerman, The Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method of Analysis (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1979), p.150.

57. Shepherd, 36–7 (quote on 37).

58. Jill Stevenson, Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 138.

59. Ibid., 24.

60. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 7–8.

61. Anthony D. Passaro, “A Cautionary Note from a Neuroscientist's Perspective: Interpreting from Mirror Neurons and Neuroplasticity,” Postmedieval 3.3 (2012): 355–60, at 355.

62. Giuseppe di Pellegrino et al., “Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study,” Experimental Brain Research 91.1 (1992): 176–80; Giacomo Rizzolatti et al., “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions,” Cognitive Brain Research 3.2 (1996): 131–41; Vittorio Gallese et al., “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119.2 (1996): 593–609.

63. Leonardo Fogassi, “The Mirror Neuron System: How Cognitive Functions Emerge from Motor Organization,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 77.1 (2011): 66–75, at 71.

64. See, for example, Kenneth R. Leslie, Scott H. Johnson-Frey, and Scott T. Grafton, “Functional Imaging of Face and Hand Imitation: Towards a Motor Theory of Empathy,” Neuroimage 21.2 (2004): 601–7; Marco Iacoboni et al., “Grasping the Intentions of Others with One's Own Mirror Neuron System,” PLoS Biology 3.3 (2005): e79 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.0030079, accessed 3 January 2019; Istvan Molnar-Szakacs, “From Actions to Empathy and Morality—A Neural Perspective,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 77.1 (2011) 76–85; Antonella Corradini and Alessandro Antonietti, “Mirror Neurons and Their Function in Cognitively Understood Empathy,” Consciousness and Cognition 22.3 (2013): 1152–61; Sashenka I. Milston, Eric J. Vanman, and Ross Cunnington, “Cognitive Empathy and Motor Activity during Observed Actions,” Neuropsychologia 51.6 (2013): 1103–8.

65. Gregory Hickok, “Eight Problems for the Mirror Neuron Theory of Action Understanding in Monkeys and Humans,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 21.7 (2009): 1229–43; Luc Turrella et al., “Mirror Neurons in Humans: Consisting or Confounding Evidence?” Brain and Language 108.1 (2009): 10–21. See also see Jean Decety, “To What Extent Is the Experience of Empathy Mediated by Shared Neural Circuits?” Emotion Review 2.3 (2010): 204–7; Emma Borg, “More Questions for Mirror Neurons,” Consciousness and Cognition 22.3 (2013): 1122–31; Daniel D. Hutto, “Action Understanding: How Low Can You Go?” Consciousness and Cognition 22.3 (2013): 1142–51.

66. Passaro, 356.

67. Ibid.

68. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Movement and Mirror Neurons: A Challenging and Choice Conversation,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11.3 (2012): 385–401, at 388.

69. Ibid., 389 (author's emphasis); 391.

70. Hanna Järvinen, “Some Steps Towards a Historical Epistemology of Corporeality,” in Rethinking Practice and Theory / Repenser pratique et théorie: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Dance Research (CORD/SDHS) (Paris: Centre national de la danse, 2007), 145–8, at 145.

71. Matthew Reason and Dee Reynolds, “Kinesthesia, Empathy, and Related Pleasures: An Inquiry into Audience Experiences of Watching Dance,” Dance Research Journal 42.2 (2010): 49–75, at 72.

72. Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain (Amsterdam: Social Brain Press, 2011), 123.

73. Guillemette Bolens, “Kinesthetic Empathy in Charlie Chaplin's Silent Films,” in Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. Reynolds and Reason, 143–56, at 145.

74. Reynolds, Dee, “Empathy, Contagion and Affect: The Role of Kinesthesia in Watching Dance,” in Touching and Being Touched: Kinesthesia and Empathy in Dance and Movement, ed. Brandstetter, Gabriele, Egert, Gerko, and Zubarik, Sabine (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 211–31Google Scholar, at 214.

75. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, trans. Kilian Walsh (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1976), 24–5.

76. Woolgar, C. M., The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 2Google Scholar.

77. A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, rev. ed., ed. Clifford Davidson, Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series 19 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), ll. 59–60; ll. 120–3. Subsequent line citations are given parenthetically in the text, marked TMP.

78. Shepherd, Theatre Body and Pleasure, 74; 80. On the idea of contagion, see also Foster, “Movement's Contagion,” 57, and Reynolds, “Empathy, Contagion and Affect,” 213–14.

79. Leiberg, Silke and Anders, Susanne, “The Multiple Facets of Empathy: A Survey of Theory and Evidence,” Progress in Brain Research 156 (2006): 419–40CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 419. Quoted in Reynolds, “Empathy, Contagion and Affect,” 212.

80. Reynolds, “Kinesthetic Empathy and the Dance's Body,” in Kinesthetic Empathy in Creative and Cultural Practices, ed. Reynolds and Reason, 121–36, at 124.

81. Reynolds, “Empathy, Contagion and Affect,” 212.

82. Reynolds, “Dance's Body,” 124; Reynolds, “Empathy, Contagion and Affect,” 213.

83. Reynolds, “Empathy, Contagion and Affect,” 213.

84. Ibid., 214; Reynolds, “Dance's Body,” 126.

85. Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 218. Compare also, Foster's discussion of corporeality (213–15) and empathy (218).