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As Above, So Below: Staging the Digby Mary Magdalene

The fifteenth-century anonymous play of the Digby Mary Magdalene (named such after Kenelm Digby, an early owner of the manuscript) has thirty-seven locations and over fifty characters; it attempts to recount all three of the major threads of the Magdalene's vita as depicted in Jacobus de Voragine's thirteenth-century Latin hagiographical text Legenda Aurea. The beginning of the play deals with the vita evangelica, or the accounts of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the sinner in Luke conflated into a single figure. It then segues into a modified version of the vita apostolica, or circumstances of the post-Biblical evangelism of the saint, before concluding with the vita eremitica, which describes Mary Magdalene's thirty-years living in the desert as a hermit, without food or drink (Jansen 3739). She is framed in the vita evangelica portion of the play as an allegorical "everyman" figure, similar to the protagonists of the anonymous fifteenth-century East Anglian morality plays Mankind and the Castle of Perseverance, and used to discuss the importance of penance as a means of salvation through interaction with allegorical figures. The vita apostolica portion of the play stresses the importance of pilgrimage and Mary Magdalene's power as a female intercessionary figure through her evangelical activities in Marseilles. Finally, the vita eremitica portion of the play stages the spectacle of Mary Magdalene's ascension into Heaven and the circumstances of her death, cementing her position as a saint for the audience (Coletti, Gibson). Any community wishing to perform this ambitious work needed to prepare for a significant undertaking. To stage all three portions of the Magdalene's life, the playtext calls for a space that represents both the allegorical and physical worlds. This space contains the Holy Land, Marseilles, a wilderness, and Rome, as well as Heaven, Hell, and the homes of the Kings of Flesh and the World. A moving ship traverses the space, and special effects--fire from Heaven and a moving cloud--are incorporated. The budgetary, casting, and dramaturgical concerns surrounding this ambitious work, rightfully considered the most complex staging challenge in the corpus of Middle English Drama, must have had our hypothetical community scrambling to find a way to produce the play as simply and conveniently as possible, while losing none of its impact on an audience. Unfortunately, we lack a convenient diagram, as exists with The Castle of Perseverance, to show a perceived perfect staging of the play by a contemporary scribe. Nevertheless, the playtext of the Mary Magdalene provides some clues that can help a careful reader to determine a likely staging. (1) As Robert Weimann points out, medieval drama was not only "performed on the big four- or six-wheeled pageant wagons or movable stages ... but also in stationary acting places--sometimes in the round--where actors spoke from atop scaffold structures or descended so as to perform at ground level" (73). These scaffolds, known most commonly as loci, "delimit a more or less fixed and focused scenic unit" and represent concrete and unchanging geographic locations in the staging of the play (79). The platea, as its origin in the Latin word for "street" might suggest, is the "nonrepresentational and unlocalized" space between these set geographic locations, which formed a "general acting area in which the communal festivities were conducted". Weimann's primary concern is with medieval drama as presaging Shakespeare in the form of the great pageant plays, and the terminology of locus and platea reflects this. However, the general concept of the difference between the set locus, or "scaffold," and the more undifferentiated platea, or "place" has utility for large-scale set pieces such as the Digby Mary Magdalene as well. The concrete reality of the performance space requires a physical location for each stage that performers will utilize and a way to represent--visually or performatively--locations referenced in dialogue but not performed upon. …