Abstract
This chapter introduces the Slaughter of the Innocents drama as paradigmatic for many of the biblically based conflicts of Middle English theatre. Drawing on Lacan’s theorisation of the Symbolic, the analysis demonstrates how the Matthean story is staged as a threat to both Herod’s ‘soveraintye’ and patriarchy. The mothers’ argumentum ad misericordiam teaches pious devotionalism, for the Innocents’ bloodshed prefigures typologically Jesus’s, even as maternal fighting fails either to empower the women—enacted by cross-dressed actors—or to elicit the audience’s sympathy for their embodied suffering. Nonetheless, the drama’s fault lines—such as lamenting women’s ‘lot’ or perceiving the unnaturalness of sighting blood—suggest medieval uneasiness about violence, yet without attempting to challenge either the socio-political system or the bloodthirst of atonement theology.
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Ciobanu, E. (2018). The Slaughter of the Innocent(s): The Meek, the Muted and the Discursive Spear of Power. In: Representations of the Body in Middle English Biblical Drama. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90918-9_2
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