"The Devil in the Medieval Theatrical Flesh": A presentation by Jody Enders
Jody Enders is a professor of Theater and French at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her recent work includes Medieval Theater of Cruelty (Cornell, 1998) and Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago, 2002).
If we believe several contemporaneous chroniclers of Metz, there survived in 1485 a living testimonial to the dangers of medieval religious drama. As is the case with so much of the extant evidence of the medieval stage, we know that a play - probably a Passion play - was performed that year in the French city of Bar-le-Duc for one reason only: something illegal, immoral, or at least exceptional happened in its wake. In this case, that "something" was what we could call today a marital rape. One of the men playing a devil returned home, still in costume, and forced himself sexually on his wife (who had tried repeatedly to resist him): "It then came to pass that she was pregnant and...gave birth and was delivered of a body which was, from the mid-torso down, the form of a man, and, from the mid-torso up, the form of a devil. People were much astonished by this thing. And no one dared baptize the child until a trip had been made to Rome in order to determine what was to be done with it."
This legendary incident speaks volumes about at least four crucial pieces of the medieval theatrical puzzle: 1) the ecclesiastical anxiety about the theater; 2) the long-standing fear that theatrical roles could not be slipped on and off like costumes; 3) the persistence of rape in some of the earliest extant evidence of French medieval theatrical production; and 4) the elusive connections between bodies and embodiment, which survives here, in the vestigial traces of medieval theatrical living and dying, as not just a text, not just a performance, but a body: a deformed and monstrous body, itself both body and embodiment, the ultimate metaphor for the allegedly monstrous legacy of theater itself.