Reviewed by:

• Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama by Daisy Black
• Christopher Swift

On the subject of late medieval English plays, Daisy Black’s Play Time: Gender, Anti-Semitism and Temporality in Medieval Biblical Drama gambols among three important critical inquiries from the last few decades. The author conducts close readings of four canonical dramas and situates her readings in conversation with a dazzling array of theorists and historians in medieval studies. Her original contribution to the study of medieval biblical drama is her engagement with gender and critical race studies to uncover subjective experiences of time that disrupted the linear, supersessionary models from the Bible. Black argues that rebellious, heterodox, and ignoble characters, and the incongruous juxtaposition of stage and scriptural time, offered audiences unique experiences of familiar religious stories. By staging these alternative renditions in pedestrian spaces outside the jurisdiction of the Church, the lay producers disrupted the typology of Christian history.

Informed by Carolyn Dinshaw, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Kathleen Davis, among others, Black employs spatial and somatic metaphors for understanding diverse theatricalizations of time. Black focuses on characters in English drama who subvert the Christian supersessionary model by expressing the sense of time as it pauses, meanders, repeats, remembers, and folds in on itself. She writes that “negotiations of time lie behind some of the most fraught depictions of conflict staged between biblical characters” (12), describing the ways in which the subjective experiences of time by those characters resist orthodoxy. Since conventional typologies of Christian history underscored the inevitability of the sacrifice of Christ, moments that undermined these typologies would have been compellingly affective. Importantly, Black demonstrates how these irregular figures of temporality confounded hegemonic constructions of gender and antisemitic tropes from the period. Alternative temporalities in the plays were revealed in scenes of conflict between men and women, Christians and non-Christians, and characters sacred and profane.

The dramatization of the domestic relationship of Joseph and Mary in the N-Town manuscript is the subject of chapter 1. As was typical in many medieval narratives, Joseph’s Jewishness is characterized by his impotent, aging body and doubts about Mary’s miraculous pregnancy. In the drama, the antisemitic attribute of intractable literalness contrasts with the ethereal, vessel-like quality of Mary. Joseph’s Doubt resolves when Joseph abandons his carnal attachments and enters into Christian time as the adoptive father of the unborn Christ. While some critics have argued that the play is a conventional reprisal of the inferiority of Hebrew law, Black’s careful parsing of the text suggests that “what might have been a straightforward, linear conversion narrative snags on the ambiguous nature of Christian time” (66). Ambivalence is at the heart of Christian preoccupation with supersession of the New Testament over the Hebrew Bible, a hermeneutic that builds on Jewish history while attempting to obscure it. Rather than undermining an immutable doctrine, the plays exploited theological fragilities inherent in biblical typology. In chapter 2, the character conflicts between Noah and his wife in the York Noah undermine supersessionary time by blurring the lines between past and present. Noah’s wife is a “disruptive voice,” who, like other female-gendered characters from the Bible, expresses disobedience toward her husband and to God. Black first aligns herself with interpretations of the character as an “unruly other” who is ultimately disciplined by the diluvian story. She then complicates this reading by showing how Noah’s wife’s refusal to forget the quickly vanishing past undermines her husband’s attempt to move forward, as God erases (nearly all of) creation.

In her discussion of multiple, queer experiences of time in the Towneley manuscript’s Second Shepherds’ Play, Black makes a meaningful contribution to the study of one of the most well-known plays of medieval England. Without diminishing the value of the other subjects of the book, this chapter was, for me, the most engaging. In wonderful detail, Black illustrates Christian anxieties about flesh, sexuality, reproduction, and consumption beneath Eucharistic and incarnational symbology. In the play, a Bahktinian [End Page 132...

 审阅者：

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  播放时间：黛西·布莱克中世纪圣经戏剧中的性别、反犹太主义和时间性
•  克里斯托弗·斯威夫特

以中世纪晚期英国戏剧为主题，黛西·布莱克（Daisy Black）的《游戏时间：中世纪圣经戏剧中的性别、反犹太主义和时间性》是过去几十年来三个重要的批判性探究之一。作者仔细阅读了四部经典戏剧，并将她的阅读置于与中世纪研究中众多令人眼花缭乱的理论家和历史学家的对话中。她对中世纪圣经戏剧研究的最初贡献是她对性别和批判种族研究的参与，以揭示破坏圣经中线性、取代模式的主观时间体验。布莱克认为，叛逆、异端和卑鄙的人物，以及舞台和圣经时间的不协调并置，为观众提供了熟悉的宗教故事的独特体验。通过在教会管辖范围之外的步行空间上演这些另类表演，非专业制作人扰乱了基督教历史的类型学。

受卡罗琳·丁肖、乔纳森·吉尔·哈里斯和凯瑟琳·戴维斯等人的启发，布莱克采用空间和躯体隐喻来理解时间的不同戏剧化。布莱克关注的是英国戏剧中的人物，他们通过表达时间的暂停、蜿蜒、重复、记忆和折叠的感觉来颠覆基督教的替代模式。她写道，“圣经人物之间冲突的一些最令人担忧的描述背后隐藏着时间的谈判”（12），描述了这些人物对时间的主观体验是如何反抗正统的。由于基督教历史的传统类型学强调了基督牺牲的不可避免性，因此破坏这些类型学的时刻将具有令人信服的情感。重要的是，布莱克展示了这些不规则的时间性数字如何混淆了那个时期的性别霸权结构和反犹太主义比喻。戏剧中的另类时间性在男人和女人、基督徒和非基督徒、神圣和世俗人物之间的冲突场景中得到体现。

N 镇手稿中约瑟夫和玛丽的家庭关系的戏剧化是第一章的主题。正如许多中世纪叙事中的典型一样，约瑟夫的犹太身份的特点是他无能、衰老的身体以及对玛丽神奇怀孕的怀疑。在戏剧中，难以处理的字面意义的反犹太主义属性与玛丽空灵、容器般的品质形成鲜明对比。当约瑟夫放弃了肉体的依恋并进入基督教时代，成为未出生的基督的养父时，约瑟夫的怀疑就得到了解决。虽然一些批评家认为该剧是对希伯来法律低下的传统报复，但布莱克对文本的仔细解析表明，“本来可能是直截了当的、线性的转换叙事，却阻碍了基督教时代的模棱两可的本质”(66) 。矛盾心理是基督徒关注新约取代希伯来圣经的核心，希伯来圣经是一种建立在犹太历史基础上的解释学，同时试图掩盖它。这些戏剧并没有破坏不可改变的教义，而是利用了圣经预表学中固有的神学脆弱性。在第二章中，《约克诺亚》中诺亚和他妻子之间的性格冲突模糊了过去和现在之间的界限，从而破坏了替代时间。诺亚的妻子是一个“破坏性的声音”，她像圣经中的其他女性角色一样，表达了对丈夫和上帝的不服从。布莱克首先将自己的角色解释为“不守规矩的他者”，最终受到洪流故事的约束。然后，她通过展示诺亚的妻子拒绝忘记迅速消失的过去如何破坏了她丈夫继续前进的尝试，从而使阅读变得复杂，因为上帝抹去了（几乎所有）创造物。

布莱克在讨论汤利手稿的《第二牧羊人戏剧》中多重、奇怪的时间经历时，对中世纪英格兰最著名的戏剧之一的研究做出了有意义的贡献。在不削弱本书其他主题的价值的情况下，这一章对我来说是最吸引人的。布莱克以精彩的细节阐释了基督徒对圣体圣事和道成肉身象征下的肉体、性、生殖和消费的焦虑。剧中，一位Bahktinian【完132页】