Chaucer in the Hub!

With the final exam coming up, I thought it was nice to have a little “throwback” to Chaucer and the stories of the Middle English period. Although the two performances are works that we won’t be held accountable for, it was good to be reminded of Chaucer’s rather humorous tone and how that tone helps in the telling of his stories. Also, by being an audience member, I was able to put myself in the shoes of the Middle-English people who would have been watching the plays at the time. The cookies were a nice touch too.

Given that we’ve studied The Canterbury Tales quite a bit, I want to focus most of my reflection on the performance of The Trial of Mary and Joseph. I would have loved to hear some Middle English, but the southern accents were a good touch for entertainment’s sake. I was interested that the southern accents worked so well for this performance as well as with the in-class performances we did of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Perhaps this can speak into the language’s transformation over time; because a southern accent works in both Early Modern and Middle English performances, one might conclude that the English language hasn’t changed that much at all between the two periods.

I also found the whole premise behind the play very interesting to Middle English culture. Today, I think that many people could be offended with plays that “added to the Bible” like The Trial of Mary and Joseph did. And, if I understood Doug correctly, this “myth” or “addition” to the nativity story was widely accepted by Middle English culture. I wonder if this play was a reflection on the nativity story and therefore written to expand Mary’s influence, or if the play was like “The Second Shepherd’s Tale” and was written to entertain and draw people into the discourse of Christianity. I am inclined to believe the latter option.

Lastly (by the way, this is not an exhaustive list), the performance was a good reminder of how Middle English culture often mixed religion and magic. We saw this theme very explicitly in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with the Green Knight’s “game” for Gawain. It appeared in the Trial of Mary and Joseph with the “potion” Mary and Joseph drank to show their chastity as well as with Mary’s healing of the man who wrongly accused her and was in severe pain from drinking the potion.