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The Stage Life of Props

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By Andrew Sofer

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2003 Andrew Sofer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0472068393

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Playing Host

The Prop as Temporal Contract on the Medieval Stage

Hyt semes quite, and is red:

Hyt is quike and semes dede:

Hyt is fleshe and semes bred:

Hyt is on and semes too:

Hyt is God body and no more.

--"Sacrament of the Altar" (ca. 1450)

I have defined a stage property as an inanimate object that is visibly manipulated by an actor in the course of performance. But it is not enough for an object to be handled by an actor; it must also be perceived by a spectator as a prop--in other words, as a sign. Indeed, theater can be defined as that mode of perception in which spectators consent to see things as representing things other than themselves: an actor as King Lear, a chair as Lear's throne, and so on. According to the Prague structuralists, "All that is on the stage is a sign." Simply by virtue of being placed on stage before an audience, objects acquire a set of semiotic quotation marks, so that a table becomes a "table." Thus the prop's status as a prop does not depend on the actor alone. An object becomes a stage prop only when it is perceived as such by a spectator who is consciously observing an actor--in other words, when an act of theater is taking place.

The unconsecrated eucharistic wafer (oble) is the ur-prop of post-classical western European drama, but it became so in spite of itself. For the medieval participants in the Catholic Mass, the consecrated wafer (Host) was not--could not have been--a prop, and it is the difference between the two objects, so outwardly similar, that drove a crucial wedge between the ritual action of the Mass and the theatrical representation of a play. Unlike its Jewish antecedent, the Passover matzo that represents the unleavened bread hurriedly consumed by Hebrew slaves before their Exodus from Egypt, to the communicants of the medieval church the consecrated wafer was no mere sign-vehicle standing in for an absent signified. According to the doctrine of "real presence," Christ's body and blood were actually present in the sacramental wafer and wine; the priest who conducted the Eucharist presided over not representation, but transubstantiation. "Hoc est corpus meum" (Matt. 26:26): Christ's words indicated that the Host was no sign, but the very substance of Christ's flesh.

Yet by 1500, the image of the Host circulated beyond church walls. Staged by clergy in Easter liturgical drama, and paraded through town by the great Corpus Christi processions, the holy wafer migrated to the hands of lay actors in the Last Supper plays that formed a key part of the play-cycles surrounding the feast. The Host also appeared in miracle plays that were designed to demonstrate transubstantiation to a laity possibly ignorant of doctrine and thus apt (in the church's view) to view the Host as symbol rather than as miracle. On occasion, such plays became the property of itinerant troupes of professional or semiprofessional lay actors, who performed them beyond the strict confines of the church. Indeed, the late-fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament calls for a Host, "sacred [consecrated] newe," to be stolen from a church altar (l. 379). Was this a prop--an unconsecrated oble--or the Host itself? More intriguingly, what was it the play's spectators thought they saw, and how did they interpret this theft? Half a century before Luther's theses launched the Reformation, the Church's most sacred object appeared as a prop in the hands of actors, its ambiguous status seeming to hinge as much on the perception of spectators at a play as on the decisive words and actions of a priest officiating at Mass.

The oble's oscillation between sacred object and theatrical property concerns me here not only because of the paradox whereby an object whose physical essence after consecration confounded semiosis became, for a time, the Church's most spectacular sign. Despite the Host's official status as emblem of doctrinal orthodoxy, once exposed to the gaze of a heterogeneous crowd at a lay theatrical performance the small, wheaten oble embodied a contingent contractual relationship between actor and spectator rather than an unambiguous sign of Christ's presence in the sacrament. By examining three medieval stagings of the Host, I seek to trace the oble's passage from sacred "non-sign" to a theatrical object that is at once sacred and a representation of the sacred. I then explore an analogy between three post-Reformation theological understandings of the Host and three ways of understanding how all props signify on stage. The Host is particularly useful for this purpose because the bloody eucharistic debates of the Reformation prefigure the current critical fault line between semiotic and phenomenological approaches to stage properties. I thus aim to clarify just how--and for whom--an object becomes a prop.

From Communal Bread to Priestly Wafer: Staging the Mass

Sacred objects have been in use for thousands of years. According to one historian, ancient Egyptian gods were carried out of the temples in festival processions as early as 2600 B.C., while a surviving "production notebook" specifies properties needed to stage scenes performed for the Egyptian Jubilee of Senwosret I circa 1918-1875 B.C. Sacred objects are so ubiquitous in ritual drama as to defy attempts to pin down their temporal or geographical origins. Indeed, such an intimate connection exists between ritual objects and the sacred that it is virtually impossible for the scholar to tell where the sacred ends and the theatrical begins.

While recent scholarship has rejected the theory that drama evolved from liturgy into liturgical drama and thence into the Corpus Christi plays, moving from church to churchyard to marketplace in a Darwinian process of secularization, it is generally accepted that a key strand of western European drama, the drama of worship, derived from the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, and specifically that of the Mass. At the root of the Mass lies the sacrament of transubstantiation, which became official church doctrine in 1215. In 1311, Pope Clement V instituted the feast of Corpus Christi to celebrate the miracle. The centerpiece of the festivities was a procession in which representatives of both temporal and spiritual realms accompanied the Host through the town to the church. Not a prop, the Host was nonetheless a portable object that displayed as well as embodied the miracle of Christ's bodily presence.

The popular Corpus Christi and Passion plays, which grew up around the festival of Corpus Christi, threatened to upstage the Host itself. Staged in the vernacular by lay actors (unlike the earlier liturgical drama), and featuring spectacular events such as Christ's Passion and Harrowing of Hell, the Corpus Christi plays dramatized the Eucharist's eternal significance for the human race. Instead of performing Host miracle plays, which dramatized the sacrament's temporal power to work wonders, the guilds chose instead to present the history of the world from Creation to Judgment. Procession and pageant diverged and may even have competed for the townspeople's attention; in at least one case, that of York in 1426, it was requested that the plays should be postponed to the Friday vigil of Corpus Christi so as not to disturb the feast, but by 1477 the reverse had taken place.

If the Corpus Christi plays flowered under the watchful eye of the church, the church no longer exclusively determined the meaning and use of its symbols, which often took on a secular cast as they were "translated" into the vernacular. As the plays ranged beyond the liturgy and even Scripture itself, apocryphal properties and figures appeared, such as the "poll ax" borne by "Pilate's son" in the Smiths' pageant at Coventry. Moreover, each craft guild vied to display its most appealing wares on its pageant wagon. If the plays' subject matter was still vetted by the church, the drama itself now delighted and advertised as well as instructed. Horseplay and special effects abounded; in the York Mercers' play, nine small red angels "renne aboute in the heuen" when pulled by a cord, thus paving the way for a thoroughly irreverent use of props. In Russell A. Fraser's apt summation of the two-way traffic between spiritual and secular concerns on the early modern stage, "the rude handling of sacred totems is what the drama is all about."

In the sixteenth century, the Host would become a crucible for the tension between "presence" and "representation" that has returned to haunt contemporary performance criticism. The Host had long occupied ambiguous terrain, however. As O. B. Hardison has demonstrated, by the time liturgical drama emerged in the tenth century, the Mass itself had become a "sacred drama" in two senses. First, the priest and other officiating clergy took on an enhanced mimetic role by using gesture, movement, and tone of voice to reenact the key events of Jesus' last days. If they were not fully "acting" in our modern sense, there were moments in the service when the clergy were clearly to be understood as imitating or representing Christ. Second, instead of participating in a ritual act in which no clear distinction existed between participant and priest, former communicants became passive spectators at an overwhelmingly visual event, which came eventually to be dominated by the priest's Elevation of the Host. While the words (and hence the ostensible meaning) of the service did not change, the Mass itself began to look like a piece of theater in which the priest was more like the suffering Christ than the congregants, much to the dismay of antitheatrical clerics such as Aelred of Rievaulx. A brief survey of the Host's transformation from communal bread to priestly wafer shows that the seeds of the church's anxiety that the Host might be interpreted as a merely symbolic property were planted within the Mass itself, which carefully staged the Host in order to demonstrate the real presence of Christ in the sacrament to those who no longer understood the words of the liturgy.

By the fifth century, the Latin Mass had replaced the more informal Greek "Eucharist" (thanksgiving), a celebratory re-creation of Christ's Last Supper in which communicants shared bread and wine in a communal meal. At the close of the sixth century, Pope Gregory I standardized the form of the Mass and insisted that a union of visible and invisible realms took place within it. According to Gregory's doctrine of the real presence, the living Christ was present in person when the bread and wine were consecrated. In part, this doctrine was a response to the heresy of Arianism, which held that Christ was not divine but merely an exceptional mortal--and thus implied that the Mass itself was a form of theatrical imitation, if not deliberate deception. Gregory wished to banish the specter of idolatry from the Mass once and for all.

Yet the visible traces of the bread and wine continued to haunt the church, whose pastoral mission increasingly stressed the reality of transubstantiation. In fact, the church's efforts to deny that bread and wine remained after consecration as symbols of Christ's body and blood only led the Mass further in the direction of theater by enabling communicants to view the ceremony as a form of sacred spectacle. Thus in the ninth century, Amalarius, bishop of Metz, encouraged officiating clergy to dramatize each incident within the Mass for the populace, which had by then lost the ability to understand the classical Latin in which the service was conducted. Officiants wore elaborate vestments that stressed their privileged intercessory function as they acted out Christ's Passion. The symbolic act of giving communal thanks had become a priestly re-creation of Christ's sacrifice.

As the meaning of the sacrament shifted, the physical dynamics of the Mass altered as well. Placed in the nave, celebrants were progressively distanced from their receding Host. In the Romanesque churches and basilicas of the early Middle Ages, the Mass had been staged so as to include the congregation. A clearly visible altar stood well forward of the semicircular apse, which closed off the eastern end of the church (the side which symbolically stood for Heaven and the Resurrection). The bishop's chair and the choir were situated behind the altar and faced the congregation; the officiant stood behind the altar in full view of the people. Standing or seated members of the congregation moved directly to the altar and received the bread into their hands and drank directly from the cup. The bread and wine used in the Mass were selected from offerings brought by the congregation itself, a tradition that stressed the communicants' participation in the sacrament.

With the coming of Gothic church design, however, congregants were doubly separated from their Host by an altar rail (which prevented them from approaching the altar) and by a rood screen, which divided the profane nave from the holy choir. The screen's latticework now obstructed the congregation's view of the chancel, the holy domain beyond the nave. The altar was moved back to the rear wall of the apse, and the choir placed in choir-stalls between the altar and the congregation. The officiating priest now stood in front of the altar rather than behind it, with his back to the communicants and at a far greater distance from the congregation, symbolically mediating between Christ and his sinful people.

As befitted the newfound emphasis on the mystery of the sacrament, sacred "props" accumulated around the Mass. In England, housling-cloths were placed under the chins of communicants to prevent crumbs of the consecrated Host spilling from unworthy mouths. In France and Germany, a curtained canopy over the altar, known as a baldachin, veiled the holy Easter chalice until just before its Elevation and removed it from the eyes (and unconsecrated hands) of communicants. Reliquaries and decorated panels adorned the rear of the enlarged Gothic altar. To use a theatrical analogy, the thrust stage of the simple early church mensa was replaced by a canopied, miniproscenium stage, which shielded the Host from a people now starved for contact with their savior.

Most crucially, the visual appearance of the Host was transformed in the middle of the ninth century, when leavened bread was replaced by small circular wafers placed on the tongues of kneeling communicants. This avoided the risk of mold (and hence the unnerving suggestion of bread-ness after the consecration) and ensured that no consecrated crumbs would be spilled. The preconsecrated wafer was called an oble, while the consecrated bread and wine were now known as the "Host," or "sacrificial victim." A whole new set of regulations emerged dedicated to the proper creation, care, and handling of the fragile disk whose consecrated crumbs could easily be lost, and scholars debated what to do in cases where mice ate leftover crumbs or sick people vomited up the Host. The priest no longer shared his bread but placed it on a paten, or bread plate, and consigned his communicants' wafers to a separate ciborium, or breadbasket. A straw, or fistula, was used to prevent profane lips from touching the sacred chalice until it was made superfluous in the twelfth century by the theological decision to have the priest alone drink the wine. This decision was justified by the new doctrine of concomitance, which taught that the total nature of Christ was present in each particle of the two "species."



Continues...

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Excerpted from The Stage Life of Props by Andrew Sofer Copyright © 2003 by Andrew Sofer. Excerpted by permission.
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