Moving Statues, Teleportation and Rape: some Space/Time Considerations in the Staging of Medieval Drama

Martin W. Walsh

Medieval dramaturgy and the mentality which informs it remain rather alien to the modern student of drama. The present essay focuses upon one aspect of this dramaturgy, the use of statues, and of actors embodying statues, together with the peculiar kinds of dramatic action that seem, not coincidentally, to develop out of them. These dramatic actions, in turn, reveal a good deal about the medieval outlook on space and time. It is curious how a full-sized statue in its shrine, surely a symbol or permanence, of sacred statis, easily becomes activated in these plays to directly influence events at considerable removes in time and geographic locale. These magical "activations" occur, moreover, in the context of major violations and displacements – heterosexual abduction, baby-snatching, homosexual rape.

These medieval statues, moreover, seem quite removed from those we are familiar with in more recent drama. There is about them nothing of the Pygmalion myth, most notably employed by Shakespeare at the end of The Winter’s Tale. Nor are we dealing with a crude folkloric bogey, as with the Commendatori, musical or otherwise, of the Don Juan theatrical tradition.

Our sample of plays will be taken from three languages, French, Cornish, and Latin, from as many centuries. We have a very active statue in the French miracle, La nonne qui laissa son abbaie (The Nun who Left her Convent) of 1345. An episode in the late fifteenth-century Cornish Beunans Meriasek (The Life of St. Meriasek) with the heading "Interlude of Mary and the Widow’s Son," presents a curious "commodity exchange" of living and sculpted personae negotiated between Christian and pagan Celtic spaces. Finally, we shall look at those twelfth-century St. Nicholas pllays where the saint’s image plays a part in the action, the Iconia Sancti Nicholai itself, later developed by Jean Bodel into Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, and the Filius Getronis (The Son of Getron), which has the most startling use of the moving statue in the sampling. The practical question of how these particular statue-effects and their attendant actions were accomplished is also of some interest. What is offered here, then, are some theoretical considerations on medieval space/time in the theatre based on what has to be admitted as, to a large extent, speculative reconstructions of original stagings.

I.

The Nun Who Left her Convent introduces us to a typical convent life of prayer, counseling and worship, featuring an abbess and two nuns, who circulate between dormitory, refectory, and chapel stage-sets or "mansions". A chevalier has fallen in love with the younger of the two nuns, and ambushes her with his amorous intentions when he finds her alone in the chapel. She repulses him more than once but at the same time gives him reason to hope that she will eventually elope with him. The knight and his squire return at nightfall and wait in hiding outside the chapel. It is at this juncture that the statue of Nostre Dame, evidently a prominent feature of the chapel playing-area becomes activated. In the heavenly playing-area (elevated, we must assume) Our Lady and the Archangels Gabriel and Michael decide to intervene. They descend to the chapel, the angels singing a rondel to the Virgin (Tres doulce vierge debonnaire), a conventional feature of most fourteenth-century miracles de Nostre Dame.

What happens next inn the chapel is not specified but a recent English editor of the text, Nogel Wilkins, is surely correct in supplying the stage direction, "Nostre Dame takes the place of her statue." This however is easier said than done. No doubt we have an actor costumed identically with the image in the chapel. Removing a five-foot or taller statue would certainly not be dignified for the Mary-actor, but we do have those two accompanying archangels to act as stage-hands. The most efficient action would be for the Mary-actor to screen the statue while the angels clear it off-stage through the curtained rear wall of the statue’s shrine or alcove. The important thing is that the live impersonation of Mary be in place when the Nun returns to the chapel, now not a place of sanctuary, but the site of perilous flirtation, an occasion of sin. The young women is trembling with dread, having left the other nuns asleep in the dormitory. As is her custom, she cannot pass the "statue" without saying an Ave. But turning then to the outer door of the chapel, beyond which waits her knight, the Nun finds the "statue" barring her way:

Egar! me fault il demourer? See here! You mean I have to stay?

Mere Dieu, que peut ce ci estre? Sweet Virgin, what can this then mean?

Vostre ymage s’est venu mettre Your very statue I have seen

Si droit au travers de cest huis Displace itself to block this door

Que nullement passer ne puis So I can pass through no more!

(ll.362-366)

Naturally, she thinks twice about her projected course of action and returns to her bed. The knight returns to his castle empty-handed. This action is repeated in a somewhat abbreviated form, over what we must take to be the following night, and, having turned back the wayward Nun twice, Our Lady return to Heaven with the angels singing the rondel, Dame du royal empire, no doubt discretely replacing the Mary-statue in the process.

Now medieval, in common with folkloric narratives the world over, seldom work on a repetitive pattern of two, but rather of three. Sure enough, after yet another and even briefer interview in the daytime chapel, the Knight appeals once more and the Nun tries again. This time, according to the venerable "rule of three", she refrains from kneeling before the image on her way through the chapel:

Sanz dire ave, ne kyrielle No kyrie, no ave more

Devant l’image de Marie; Before our Lady’s effigy.

Trop m’a fait estre en cuer marrie She’s caused too much distress to me;

Dont plus saluer ne la vueil No greetings this time, then, I say,

Ne tourner devers li mon oeil. I’ll not as much as look that way.

(ll.583-87)

"Miraculously" she now passes through the outer doorway unopposed, into the arms of her lover. Thus the outrage is allowed to take place through the dismantling, literally, of the elaborate theatrical device of the living statue.

Years pass before the next exchange of dialogue, instrumental music perhaps providing a bridge. The Nun, now the Knight’s wedded wife, has given birth to two sons. With her family she moves into a larger stronghold in her husband’s desmene, as the Knight departs for the wars. He returns some ten years later. Details of baronial life –meals, entertainments, business – contrast sharply with the routine of the convent in the first half of the play. Despite the simultaneous presence of their playing areas or "mansions", the action in the great castle, whatever its supposed geographic relation to the convent, is literally worlds apart. The Knight’s protracted military service offstage, moreover, opens the play out to barely imaginable and dangerous geographic spaces

And yet both space and time are nothing in the perfect simultaneity of Heaven. With the now middle-aged lovers finally reunited, in fact on their first night back together, Our Lady restores the triplicate pattern violated by that young Second Nun so long ago –and yet only a few minutes of the playing time before. What last appeareds as a moving statue now manifests itself as a simultaneous dream warning the lovers in no uncertain terms. They immediately hasten to the convent where the woman is redeposited and the Knight departs, not without a scene of some pathos, to become a monk. This precipitous reparation for the initial abduction was no doubt meant to outweigh the lesser evil of totally abandoning the two children, who have a poignant little scene of their own, waking up in the much-too-quiet castle. But after all, they have the gruff old squire and some promised blood relations to care for them. The play ends in the chapel before the image of Our Lady, that same miraculous image that the Nun failed to activate on that fateful night so long ago. She had propelled herself on a useless trajectory through time, space, and carnal relationship, but now she, like the statue, like Nostre Dame herself, is back where she belong. The tumblers are reversed and the safe-lock of the convent existence, that truer model of human existence, is secured.

II.

The Cornish episode of a century later presents a totally different use of the statue-as-prop and as-character, and yet the underlying premises are similar. We are in the legendary Britain of King Massen (the Emperor Magnus Maximus, 383-388 A.D.) at a time when missionary saints like Meriasek had vast regions of paganism still to conquer. Massen is preparing to hunt in the forest, and in another segment of the earthwork ring that serves as the playing-area, a boy persuades his mother to let him join the King’s retinue. The Mother repairs t yet a third mansion, a chapel with an image of the Madonna and Child. She prays:

(p.91)

Thus the Son’s subsequent act of homage before King Massen is paralleled by the tacit contract between the Mother and the one whom the statue represents.

A nameless Tyrant is coursing the same forest and, evidently from the opposite end of the "Round," Massen’s retinue spy his movements. There follows a slapstick interlude between the Tyrant and his three "Executioners" leading to a grotesque sacrifice in a pagan "temple", again, best imagined at the other end of a diameter through the "Round: before Lady Chapel. The Tyrant and his henchmen throw down before the idol of "Mohammad" a white bull’s head, a ram’s head (somewhat ripe) with gilded horns, a horse’s head, "three ravens with marvelously swollen crops", and a dead cat, a curious mixture indeed of Celtic memories and generic "paganism"." Thus another, if parodic, contractual relationship is established with higher powers.

The Tyrant’s and Massen’s retinues eventually intersect and a battle ensues during which the King is worsted and the Widow’s Son made captive. The boy is thrown into prison where he will be starved into abjuring "Christ, the son of Marian." Later the Tyrant threatens to hang, draw and quarter him if he will not renounce his faith, which the Son steadfastly refuses to do. Word gets back to the Mother that her son has been dragged off to remotest heathendom. Although we are still, ostensibly, in ancient Cornwall or adjacent coasts, the Son’s durance is imagined as a Saracen captivity, infinitely far away. The Mother of course repairs to the chapel and earnestly prays to the image. The action switches back briefly to the Tyrant and his Jailor, then back again to the Mother still on her knees and now at the end of her patience:

The rubric then reads: "Let her go away with the Jesus." This is an altogether curious moment. It is hard to imagine a detachable statue specially constructed just for this play, for the detachability must not have been of great surprise to the audience. Rather, we must have here a recognizable, albeit unusual, cult object, a Madonna displaying herv child in some fashion (riding in the crook of her arm as it here appears), with the Jesus a separate, detachable figure which could then be employed in creche ceremonies, cradle-rockings, or whatever, during the Christmas season. Recall St. Francis famous use of the Bambino in his Nativity devotions, this class of sculptural curiosity recently having been explored by H.W. van Os. The Cornish Mother indeed treats the Christ Child statue in the manner of Francis:

But instead of in a creche, she will loch the image in a coffer. There seems to be no contradiction in the distracted woman’s mind between a living baby and a surety bond:

Thus church robbery, which the woman herself admits is a perilous sin, becomes a kind of baby-snatching in a bold act of compensatory sympathetic magic. And most surprisingly, for us, Mary chooses to act only after this violation of her image. It seems the contractual relationship between votary and intercessor needed this violation of the double-image’s spacial integrity. Prayers were evidently not enough in and of themselves. The locking up of the Christ child in the coffer is thus nearly simultaneous with Mary’s plea to her grown-up Son, the King of Heaven, to allow her to free the Widow’s Son from durance. With the aid of two angeld she appears as a great light in the Tyrant’s prison, passes through the doors and strikes off the boy’s leg-irons. The ultimate source there is, clearly, the prison escapes related in The Acts of the Apostles. The Cornish Son is instantaneously teleported back to his Mother and the final, "obligatory scene" shoows us the restoration of the Christ CHild image to the Madonna statue. Again, everything is back where it truely belongs. We have here a most curious exchange of symbolic commodities, in a short interlude that is a web of contractual relationships. Here a violation done out of wounded Hope and excessive Faith cancels out the one done in real geographic space and historical time.

III.

The twelfth-century St. Nicholas plays in the Fleury Playbook represent the first major development in Latin liturgical drama away from strictly Biblical sources. Indeed their sources are unabashedly legendary. In the Iconia sancti Nicolai a Jew, who secretly venerates an image of Nicholas, leaves it to protect his unlocked house and the treasure chest. Scholars agree that the iconia is more likely a portable statue than an icon in the Byzantine sense, as it is in the stained-glass panel devoted to the tale in Rouen cathedral. It would no doubt have been placed on or overlooking the coffer. Three thieves now slip into the Jew’s house and realize to their amazement that they will not even have to lug away the great chest since it too is unlocked. They make off with the treasure. When the Jew returns he bemoans his loss and threatens first to whip and then to burn the Nicholas image (Primo flagellabo te, postque flagella cremabo). This activates the heavenly Nicholas who of course should look exactly like the statuette. He surprises the robbers and coerces them into restoring the Jew’s property. We have the same sort of, one is tempted to say, "primitive" mode of exchange as in the Cornish interlude. Only the physical threat to the image seems to enable Nicholas to fulfill his role as guardian of his devotee’s property. One violation, or threat thereof, cancels out a greater, the plundering of personal treasure. Indeed, Nicholas the apparition promises to pass on the scourgings (verberum) threatened his image if restitution is not made at once. No living statue is involved here, but we have again this odd insistence upon the efficacy of the sculpted image to do work, not simply function, as St. Thomas would have it, as an outward sign directing our dulia or veneration toward the appropriate heavenly intercessor. Richard Trexler in a recent article documents just such punishment of images for failure or efficacy, in, of all places, Renaissance Florence.

Jean Bodel of Arras took up the dramatic core of the Latin play at the end of the same century and through his genius transformed the rather arbitrary and implausible tale of the Jew and his Christian image into one of the acknowledged masterpieces of medieval drama. Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas is architectonically laid out around two pylons, an impressive pagan statue and a personal, portable Nicholas image. The pagan statue episodes frame, and the Nicholas statue episodes divide the long central section of the so-called "tavern realism". With even more theatrical flair than the Cornish playwright, Bodel introduces us first to Tervagant, an ugly, goldplated idol, the object of disappointed rage and cringing obsequiousness on the part of the moody Saracen King. This pagan god is an altogether extraordinary theatrical creation. It is required to smile and then weep before the eyes of the King, and, presumably, before the eyes of the audience as well. As a prop it evidently involved some elaborate puppetry or, as Richard Axton suggests, was actually inhabited by an actor with some kind of body-mask. The marvels of Tervasgant are in marked contrast to the pedestrian image of Nicholas which the Saracens capture on the battlefield along with its keeper, the white-haired and hooded "Good Man" (Li Preudom), evidently the chaplain of the defeated Christian army. The pagans are allowed repeatedly to make jokes on the image’s "horns", i.e. Nicholas’ mitre, and the King eventually puts the statue’s professed efficacy to the test by having it watch over his unguarded treasure. He even proclaims his decision to the general populace, among whom are a trio of low-lifes inhabiting a very Gallic wine-tavern. Bodel here turns the rather arbitrary device of the Latin play to good theatrical account. The gaudy Tervagant and the modest wooden statue of Nicholas become, structurally speaking, antagonist and protagonist, and the various events of this richly imagined "pagan" world take place within the overall context of their struggle.

Bodel gives ample textual indications that the Nicholas statue is placed directly atop the Saracen king’s treasure boxes. The drunken thieves indeed have to remove it and lay it on the floor to make off with their booty. The sacred image is thus violated in plain sight of the audience. Bodel, however, does not take this opportunity to "activate" the Saint himself. More theologically correct, he brings Nicholas on the scene only after the Good Man, given one night’s respite before being tortured to death prays fervently to his patron. Though Nicholas’ appearance to the thieves in the tavern is exceedingly brief, only 25 lines (ll.1281-1306), his language is indeed memorable: Malfaiteour, Dieu anemi…Fil a putain, tou estre mort. The thieves are suitably cowed, promptly return to the treasure, and reposition the toppled Nicholas statue. The miracle of the restored treasure, discovered next morning, leads immediately to the conversion of the Saracen King and his emirs (all but one from "beyond the Withered Tree", who violently resists). Tervagant is then heard to lament in gibberish:

The King interpets this as Tervagant’s anger and grief over his conversion and he orders his Seneschal to hurl the statue from the "synagogue". Again evidently in sight of the audience, the Seneschal topples it down from a height, taunting it in the while:

Thus the action perpetrated against the Nicholas image is duplicated, but with positive Christian results, evidently to the complete destruction of the Tervagant stage-device. This climax serves to point up the specific distinctions Bodel is making between his animated statues, pagan and Christian. Tervagant is a genuine marvel, no doubt activated by an in-dwelling demon, recalling such wonders of the ancient world as the groaning statue of Memnon. The Nicholas image is conceived differently, in a different economy of spiritual energy, as a kind of on-switch for the real and active presence of Nicholas inn the world. In the one case black magic is contained within the sculpted image, in the other genuine spiritual forces are organized around it. The very portability of the Nicholas image is then meaningfully set off against the stasis of the pagan statue in its "synagogue". Captured, mocked, cast upon the floor, the Nicholas image, almost qa type of Christ’s passion and resurrection, ultimately triumphs over its spectacular rival enshrined in the "high place". We lose sight of the Nicholas image at the end of the play. Presumably it remains in the "treasure room". But it would only be logical for the Good Man, before his final line calling for a Te Deum, to install his much-travelled statuette in the shrine recently vacated by Tervagant. If the Emi of the Withered Tree is to be integrated at all into the group of noble converts, then it must be through experiencing the fall of his idol and the palpable triumph of Nicholas. It would not, in any case, make good theatrical sens to have the Nicholas statue "off-stage" during the plays final tableau.

Within this broad contrast of graven images, Bodel creates a subtle equivalence of two sorts of "paganism", the one obviously exotic and oversize, subject to precipitous conversion on a heroic scale, the other more mundane and humane-scaled, represented by the tavern dwellers who, despite their salutary shock from the Beyond, remain basically unregenerate. It is the tavern, however, that triumphs as far as the Western comic tradition is concerned. And so despite his briljant contrapuncutal use of the activated statue, Bodel, at least from a twentieth century perspective, appears to have undermined his own ostensibly religious purpose.

IV.

If in the Jeu de Saint Nicolas edification succumbs to entertainment, this is not the case in our final example, the most ambitious of the Latin Nicholas plays, Filius Getronis, a work which proves that the older liturgical drama could also achieve considerable subtlety. Its dramatic action is essentially that of the Cornish interlude, the kidnapping of a young boy by pagans. Its geography, however, is more particularized and imagined on a larger scale. On one side of the playing area we have pagandom represented by Rex Marmorinus in alta sede, quasi in regno suo, on the other, the city of Excoranda with the ecclesia Sancti Nicolai slightly on the east of it. As his name suggests, Marmorinus is a "Man of Marble," a worshipper of idols. He launches a raid upon the people of Excoranda as they are processing to the Church of St. Nicholas on what is evidently his feast day (6 December), the probable occasion of the play itself. In a panic Getron and his wife Euphrosina flee with the others back to the city, abandoning their son Adeadatus to the invaders. Although it is never made explicit, the several textual references to the sea indicate that Marmorinus’ realm is to be imagined as across an expanse of ocean, the whole incident perhaps also reflecting memories of Viking raids in the Loire Valley of the not too distant past. Be that as it may, the action of violation again takes place before the very eyes of Nicholas, for how else do we identify his chapel other than by the conspicuous presence of his statue? One could argue further that the most efficient and theatrically most effective staging would be to have his "statue" played by a live actor, who is held in reserve until the eleventh hour.

At the court of Marmorinus, King of the Agareni, the Boy is interrogated as to his family, land, and religion. Although he will not tolerate abuse of his own god, Apollo, Marmorinus proves to be no ordinary theatrical tyrant, as in the Cornish interlude. Indeed, he seems to be genuinely interested in the Boy and his bakcground.

Back in Excoranda meanwhile, "Euphrosina, having realized that her son had been forgotten, returns to the chapel of Nicholas." This action is typed with Mary and Joseph’s search for the lost child Jesus, and the playwright achieves a very skilful telescoping of time here. A year seems to pass with Euphrosina’s lamentations and repeated rejections of the advice from the Consolatrices (ll.411-84). Getron himself at last offers:

It was at the very same feast of Nicholas that the raid and abduction took place, now almost a year to the day. Euphrosina had vowed not to partake of meat or wine until her son’s return. After her intercession before the statue of Nicholas, she returns to her home and prepares, as the rubric states, "a table, and on the table bread and wine, from which the clerics and poor may refresh themselves.: Her "hunger-strike" is turned, then, from a private and desperate act to a public and purposeful ritual.

With her work of charity and abstinence in progress on one side of the playing area, the scene shifts once more to Marmorinus’ court where the king is, simultaneously, suffering from an unnatural keen appetite:

His ravenous hunger is followed by inordinate thirst, with the attendant desire to make the Son of Getron his cupbearer. The rubric is interesting here: "And so let the boy, hearing these things, sigh deeply and say to himself:

Not otherwise abused, or even imprisoned, the Boy’s evident despair at this juncture has to be seen in the light of the King’s ravenous hunger and thirst, these unnatural appetites serving as surrogates for more illicit desires, only partially censored by the playwright. The myth of the Rape of Ganymede is lying just beneath the surface here, and may well have been obvious to the more learned members of the original audience. The little play is indeed moving to an exciting climax cued by these sudden appetites of Marmorinus and the perturbations of his reluctant cupbearer. Adeodatus sighs deeply recalling that it is a year to the day since his abduction. The Feast of St. Nicholas has come round again and the coincidence is fraught with dramatic energy.

As Clyde Brocket points out in a recent article on the Nicholas plays, the Boy employs the cantilena or vocal signature of Nicholas himself. Adeodatus becomes, as it were, the Nicholas- or Boy-Bishop, patron of all Innocents in the very court of the tyrant. Marmorinus, moreover, is closely observed at this climactic juncture. He is all tender solicitation and jealous possessiveness:

Pro qua causa suspiras taliter? For what cause do you sigh like this?

Suspirare te vidi fortiter. I saw you sigh heavily

Quid est pro quo sic suspiraveris?What is it that has made you sigh thus?

Quid te nocet, aut unde quereris?What harms you, or for what reason do you lament?

…………………………

Quid te juvat cordis anxietas? What will inquietude of heart avail you?

Nemo potest te mihi tollere No one can take you from me

quamdiu te non velim perdere as long as I do not wish to lose you

It is this boast of absolute possessiveness which finally activates Nicholas. The astonishing rubric follows:

At the moment of his greatest peril, on the eve of his rape by Marmorinus, one would argue, Adeodatus is ravished away by his patron saint, violently plucked out of a false and evil context (apprehendat is the verb) to be restored to his true one. One would prefer to see the Boy lifted bodily by the Nicholas actor from behind and transported literally through the air, figurated across seas, back to his home city or "mansion", with Adeodatus hardly knowing what hit him. Nicholas departs as swiftly and anonymously (quasi non compertus) as his later avatar, Santa Claus. Simply leading the Boy by the arm would seem a rather flabby way to realize this key moment, and certainly unworthy of this extremely well-crafted play. (Though one should not draw direct causal links, the visual arts also repeatedly emphasize the violence of the intervention in portraying the scene. In a panel by Giottino, for example, Nicholas plucks the boy up by the hair, flying into the picture frame from the upper left on a strong diagonal.) Ravishment for ravishment, measure answers measure. The Getron playwright, indeed, seems to be very aware of the shock and wonder his teleportation effect should achieve. Our rubric continues: "Then let some of the citizens say to the boy:

Puer, quis es, et quo vis pergere? Boy, who are you, and were do you wish to go?

Cuius tibi dedit largitio Whose largess gave you that cup of wine?

Puer: The boy:

Huc venio, non ibo longius I come hither, I will go no further.

sum Getronis unicus filius. I am the only son of Getron.

The wine cup is a masterly touch: concrete evidence of a sojourn at Marmorinus’ distant court and evidence, too, of the instantaneous quality of Nicholas’ rescue. The tumblers of the liturgical year lock back into place releasing a spiritual energy that obliterates vast distances and renders impotent the strongest of human desires, possession. Dazed on the streets of Excoranda, the Boy holds the Cup of Ganymede now transformed into the Chalice of Salvation.

As far as one can tell, the statue-effects here examined are not at all common in medieval drama as a whole. There are far more instances of heavenly personages simply descending from their elevated spaces to intervene directly in human affairs. Are the statue-effects then pure medieval fantasy? On the contrary, they are rather touches of realism, from a medieval point of view, for in the post-apostolic world miracles across time and space are not accomplished by prayer alone, by Faith in the abstract, but by complex negotiations involving images, shrines, pilgrimages, etc. There is an irreducible concreteness to the medieval belief-system which views the painted wood or stone as something like a relay switch or computer terminal where the real, actual intersection of sacredand secular takes place, through which bizarre miracles like teleportation are mere childplay. Just as the saint’s shrine presupposed the concentration upon it of great physiological and spiritual distress, so too the activating statue required major violations of social cum spacial integrity. When things get particularly out of joint, particular images are moved to restore order.

And lest this mentality be thought a matter of our remote past, one might briefly mention a recent celebrity in the West of Ireland – the moving statue of Ballinspittle, Co. Cork. This wholely undistinguished image of Our Lady does not deliver messages or particularly comfort the afflicted – all she does, apparently, is rock from the shoulders. And yet because this is a statue of the Virgin, and not Parnell or Daniel O’Connell, a tremendous amount of energy has been released in the community of believers and the spiritual geography of the Emerald Isle must consequently be remapped.

From a theatrical point of view, such matchings of the costumed actor with the sculpted model, or indeed impersonations of the statue by the actor, must have been unusually satisfying effects – and very easily done, theatre being usually most powerful where the most efficient. What could be easier, technically speaking, in the theatre than raising a corpse or healing a blind man? Even distorted cripples and lepers could easily be healed on stage by slight-of-hand untrussings or removals of partial face- or body-masks. Living statues, or stage props activating the heavenly personae, were probably of the same order. Their very simplicity was their power. They created a concentrated force-field on the stage which was simply the mirror of medieval reality.