The Soul on Stage

Sometime in the late summer of 1151, in a small house perched on the confluence of the Nahe and the Rhine, a fifty-three-year-old Benedictine abbess finished a play whose central technical problem was the embodiment of an idea. Hildegard of Bingen did not call it a play. She called it an ordo — an ordering, a sequence, something that might be danced as readily as spoken. She set the entire text to her own music — except for one part, deliberately, offensively: the Devil, who could only shout. To sing, in Hildegard's cosmology, was already to be saved.

The Ordo Virtutum is not the only medieval text that turns virtues into characters. It is not even the strangest. But it is the earliest one we have in which the procedure is so fully realised that you can stage it tomorrow with twenty performers and a curtain, and an audience that has never heard of a morality play will follow the plot. The trick — and it is a trick, a piece of dramaturgical technology as specific as the invention of perspective — is that abstract qualities are presented as people who walk, sing, get tired, refuse to leave, demand things. They are not represented. They are embodied.

1. The technology of personification

Personification is older than the play. Prudentius wrote his Psychomachia — Battle for the Soul — around the year 405, and in it Patience, Chastity, Faith and the rest fight Wrath, Lust, and Idolatry in a literal field. The poem was wildly popular in the medieval manuscript economy: there are over three hundred extant copies, many lavishly illustrated. Generations of readers grew up looking at marginal drawings of Faith trampling Idolatry with a spear.

But a drawing of Faith on a page is a closed loop. You learn what she looks like; you don't learn what she sounds like, or whether her gait is slow, or whether her tone in conversation with Despair is patient or weary or tart. The morality play opened the loop. Once Faith was an actor — once she had a body that arrived from one side of the stage and a voice that addressed the audience directly — she became, for the duration of the performance, a person. And persons, unlike allegories, can be argued with.

The medieval audience was being trained, repeatedly and corporately, to imagine its own interior as a populated room.

2. Why the Devil had to lose

The Devil of the moralities is one of the most narratively mishandled characters in Western theatre. He is given the best entrances, the funniest lines, the loudest costume, the most elaborate prop (the smoking hellmouth, which most towns rebuilt annually because the previous year's had set itself on fire) — and the worst arguments. He always loses. He must always lose. The genre cannot survive his victory. A morality play in which Pride wins is a morality play in which the audience walks home wondering whether the play was right about anything.

The result is a peculiar long-running publicity problem. The Devil, dramatically, is irresistible. He gets the costume the children remember. Marlowe noticed this; so did Milton; so did every Hollywood villain casting director from The Wizard of Oz forward. But because the institutional sponsors of the form (the church, the guild, the town corporation) cannot allow him to be persuasive, he is given lines that no thinking person would actually be moved by. In the Ordo his big rhetorical move is to call the soul stupid. In Mankind, the Vice characters are reduced to scatological farting jokes. The most famous Devil speech in English medieval drama is a complaint about how cold it is in hell.

Hence the title of this site. The Devil, over eight centuries of religious theatre, has been given an extraordinarily bad press agent — one whose entire job has been to ensure that the most visually thrilling character in every scene also delivers the stupidest sentences in it. It is a remarkable, sustained feat of narrative management. And it is the same feat being performed, for the same reasons, in every superhero film made in the past twenty years.

3. Embodiment as pedagogy

What the morality play knew — and what Pixar's Inside Out rediscovered, and what the entire genre of self-help personality tests is a degraded form of — is that abstract concepts are inert until you give them a body. The reason "you should be more patient" produces nothing is that "patience" has no face. The reason a five-year-old who sees Joy and Sadness on screen can, three years later, name when she is feeling sad instead of angry, is that sadness now has a face.

Medieval Europe was not stupid. The peasant in the courtyard who watched Anima fall to her knees did not literally believe a quality named Patience was a sixteen-year-old girl holding a stone. He knew it was a costume. He knew it was Margery the baker's daughter, who had been chosen because she had the patience to hold the stone all the way through the long second act. What he learned was something narrower and more useful: he learned what patience looked like. He learned that patience, in his own room, could be addressed as if it were a person. He learned that the loud thing in him that wanted to hit his brother had a name, and a costume, and a voice, and could therefore be argued with rather than simply obeyed.

This is moral instruction by way of theatrical externalisation, and it is one of the more underrated cognitive technologies of the medieval period. It made interior life negotiable. It gave ordinary people a vocabulary for self-government that did not require literacy.

4. The cost

What the morality play gave with one hand, it took with the other. The cost of teaching a population to picture its interior life as a room full of arguing strangers is that, eventually, people start to believe the strangers are real. Once Despair has a face, you can convince yourself you are visited by Despair rather than experiencing despair. Once Pride has been thrown out of the soul by Humility, people will accept, for centuries, theological accounts of guilt and possession in which what is actually a person's emotional weather is described as a battle between agents.

The witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries — many of them staged for crowds in the same town squares that had hosted Corpus Christi pageants the century before — drew directly on this trained imagination. If Despair is a person, why should Despair not also have a secret tenancy in the body of the woman down the road? The morality play taught a continent to think morally in third person; that grammar then produced its own monsters.

5. The form survives

The performances stopped in most of Europe by the mid-16th century — banned by the Reformation in Protestant areas, curtailed by the Council of Trent in Catholic ones, made commercially obsolete by the rise of the professional theatre in any case. But the grammar survived. It survived in Shakespeare's stage devils and in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. It survived in nineteenth-century melodrama and in the silent-film convention of intertitled archetypes. It survived above all in the Hollywood three-act, which inherited from the morality play the assumption that a coherent story is one in which a single protagonist's interior conflict can be externalised into characters who do battle, and whose victories and defeats correspond to changes inside the protagonist.

The medieval audience already knew this. They knew that the Devil losing on stage was a public ratification of the possibility that he could be made to lose at home. The point of the performance was not metaphysical accuracy. The point was to make a courageous interior life look like a workable engineering problem rather than a private failure.

6. What we still owe the form

Anyone who has tried, in the last decade, to talk in public about politics, gender, race, climate, religion, or any of the other matters on which moderns have inherited strong feelings and weak vocabulary, has watched the morality play return in a degraded form. The cast list of contemporary political theatre — The Coastal Elite, The Forgotten Worker, The Activist Mob, The Silent Majority — is the same cast list as Mankind, with the same dramaturgical function: to take a confusion of interests and present it as a parade of named figures whose relative volume on stage corresponds to whose side the audience is being invited to take. Social media is the wagon stage. Each platform rolls past a viewer's attention with its own day's pageant.

What the moralities did better than any subsequent form is that they ended. The wagon left. The pilgrim walked home. The cast removed the costumes. The point of staging Pride as a person was to remind the audience that Pride was not a person — only a thing in them that could be costumed for a couple of hours so that it could be looked at, and then put back where it came from. Our own theatre of externalised abstractions has lost the wagon. The pageant does not leave. The performers do not change clothes. The audience never goes home. We are stuck with the costumes, and we begin to mistake them for the world.

7. Coda — the abbess's note

At the end of the Ordo Virtutum, after the Devil is bound and Anima is lifted to her feet, Hildegard adds a sung postscript. The Virtues, the Soul, and the Patriarchs all address the audience directly. They say, in essence: do not forget that you saw us. Do not forget that what you saw was a kind of help.

O vos, qui videtis… — "O you who see…"

It is a small, almost embarrassed appeal. The play knows what it has done. It has put names and voices on the things in you that you fight with at night. It is not asking you to believe those names are real. It is asking you to remember that the fighting can be staged — that the loud thing has a counter-voice, and that the counter-voice, with enough practice, can be sung.

— Finis —