Everything Old Is New Again—Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim on the Off-Broadway Stage:
A Review of Two Headed Rep’s Production of Nadja Leonhard-Hooper’s The Collision and Amanda Keating’s The Martyrdom at New York’s 59E59 Theaters.
Kevin J. Harty
La Salle University
harty@lasalle.edu
1501 Woodcut by Albrecht Dürer of Hrotsvitha
presenting a copy of her Gesta Oddonis to Emperor
Otto the Great as the Abbess Gerberga looks on.
The tenth-century German canoness, Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim, can lay claim to many firsts. Among other distinctions, she is the first Germanic woman writer. She is the first woman historian. She is the first writer since antiquity to compose dramas in Latin. She is the first woman Germanic poet. She is the first Western writer to comment on Islam. But, despite these many accomplishments, we know little of the particulars of her life, other than that she was a canoness at the Benedictine Abbey in Gandersheim in the tenth century, that she was a pupil of the Abbess Gerberga, that she was well-informed about the politics of the Ottonian courts, and that her works—the so-called Liber Primus, Liber Secundus, and Liber Tertius—were either ignored or lost for half a millennium until they were published in an 1501 edition with woodcuts by Dürer. The Liber Primus (The Book of Legends) contains eight hagiographical legends. The Liber Secundus (The Book of Drama) contains six feminist Christian dramatic responses to the Roman comedies of Terence. The Liber Tertius contains two historical works. The first charts the rise of the Ottonian dynasty, while the second records the history of Gandersheim Abbey. Nadja Leonhard-Hooper’s The Collison imagines what the life of a cloistered medieval woman might have been like, and Amanda Keating’s The Martyrdom presents a new adaptation of what is generally considered Hrotsvitha’s funniest and most successful “comedy,” Dulcitius (the Passio Sanctarum Virginum Agapus Chioniae et Hirenae), about the martyrdom of three Christian virgins during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian.
The Collison, and What Came After, or, Gunch is set in a tenth-century abbey in Grebenstein. The abbey is poor, understaffed, and overshadowed by the nearby abbey of Gandersheim. There is, at least initially, an abbess, two nuns (Sister Anise and Sister Gudrun), and a troubled and troubling novice named Gunch (“How do you solve a problem like Gunch?”). The abbess seems a stern disciplinarian—a by-the-book kind of nun. Anise and Gudrun struggle to do their best. Gunch seems hopeless. She can neither read nor write, prizes her pet chicken, and seems more concerned with earthly pleasures than heavenly ones. The abbey is also more than a bit of an also-ran. Illuminated manuscript editions of the Bible fly out the doors of the abbey in Gandersheim—72 complete Bibles in three years. Grebenstein’s record is only 69 such manuscripts. Not helping matters is the fact that the plague has killed off a dozen nuns at Grebenstein, so the abbey is in danger of dissolution.
Gunch soon becomes central to the plot when a meteor falls from the sky and lands right on top of the abbess, whose remains—feet only displayed from under the edge of the meteor—suggest the fate of the Wicked Witch of the East after Dorothy’s house lands on her in The Wizard of Oz. A second much smaller meteor than falls, lodging a triangular shard of rock into Gunch’s head. After lingering for several days, Gunch dies, only to be almost immediately resurrected in what holds the potential for being a first-class miracle. Resurrected Gunch is a nun on speed. Suddenly she can read and write—and is ambidextrous. Using both hands, she copies and illuminates three complete Bible manuscripts in two days—“two pages per minute.” So industrious does she become that the abbey runs out of vellum. But further complicating matters is the fact that Gunch’s manuscripts deviate from the accepted Biblical narrative. That she has the animals naming Adam—not vice versa—in a move reminiscent of Ursula Le Gunn’s 1985 short story, “She Unnames Them,” may be the least heretical, blasphemous, and plainly obscene textual emendation that she introduces into the copies of the Bible that she dashes off armed with a quill in each hand.
From the start, the play relies on farce and slapstick to propel its plot. The resurrected Gunch only raises the comedic level. The abbey has become a source of scandal to the villagers in Gandersheim, so the Bishop of Worms is headed to the abbey for a visitation meant to sort things out and to punish any offenders.
Emma Ramos (Sister Gudrun), Layla Khoshnoudi (Sister Gunch), Lizzie Fox (Sister Anise)
in The Collision. Photo: Ashley Garrett
And the male presumption is that every woman is guilty of whatever crimes and sins she may be accused. The bishop is the stock misogynistic authority figure who is found in Hrotsvitha’s plays, and the fate that awaits the three nuns is not unakin to that faced by the three Christian virgins in Hrotsvitha’s Dulcitius. The three nuns hatch a farcical plot to deceive the bishop and to stave off their deaths, which, of course, fails. But there is a sort of happy ending when the bishop is killed by a rock that falls on his head (in a lapis or saxum ex machina ending?), and the sisters survive to live another day.
The Collision has some theatrical potential, but it is, for starters, too long. It also seems unsure of its genre. Elements of the farcical bump heads with comments on religion, especially on the role women can play in the life of the Church, and with asides on narrative theory—"a story is a snake, and we are mice inside it still alive.” Leonard-Hooper may want to mimic a Hrotsvitha play by mixing comedy with reflections on serious religious issues, but her play consistently fails to do so with any success. The idea of three nuns trapped in a medieval abbey when a giant meteor falls and flattens the abbess offers ample material for a short comedy skit, or a longer Gothic tale of horror. Leonard-Hooper unfortunately hasn’t written either such a skit or such a tale.
Amanda Keating’s The Martyrdom is a more successful homage to Hrotsvitha. The play’s full title outdoes that of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade in length: The Martyrdom of the Holy Virgins Agape, Chionia, and Irena, by Hrotsvitha, the Nun of Gandersheim, as Told throughout the Last Millenium by the Men, Women, Scholars, Monastics, Puppets, and Theater Companies (Like This One) Who Loved Her, or: Dulcitius. Hrotsvitha’s play is the story of three virgins whom the Emperor Diocletian wishes to marry off to his loyal retainers, provided the three women renounce Christianity. The women refuse, and they are soon imprisoned in a kitchen by Governor Dulcitius who intends to rape them. Under the cover of night, Dulcitius sneaks into the kitchen but is struck mad by God, so the governor, in a scene of pure slapstick (tenth-century or otherwise), starts to fondle and embrace the pots and pans in the kitchen. When he emerges, he is disheveled, covered with soot—in a medieval moment of the use of blackface, which Keating cuts from her adaptation of the play—and totally unrecognizable to his soldiers or to anyone else. Diocletian then turns to another lieutenant, Sissinus, who, after much difficulty, finally manages to burn the two older virgins at the stake and to have the youngest killed with an arrow shot through her neck. Dulcitius is a comedy in both the traditional and in the medieval sense. Villains are comically portrayed, easily flustered, and totally inept. There is, as I noted, an element of pure farce and slapstick in the kitchen scene. And most importantly for medieval audiences, there is the ultimate happy ending. The three virgins eagerly embrace their martyrdom because it immediately promises an everlasting heavenly reward.
In adapting Dulcitius, from a new translation of the original Latin text by Lizzie Fox, Keating breaks the play up into discreet scenes, each presenting parts of Hrotsvitha’s script from productions staged in different time periods from the medieval to today. The play then becomes a sort of multi-media college lecture on Hrotsvitha and the historical reception of her play. Further emphasizing the narrative and didactic components of the adaptation, each of the scenes in Keating’s play is followed, as the fourth wall disappears, by a direct address to the audience filling them in on the history of stage productions of Hrotsvitha’s play.
The play opens with Hrotsvitha herself stage center preparing to submit the script of her play to the Reading Committee of the Men’s Monastery of St. Emmeram in Regensburg. (The most complete text of the works of Hrotsvitha is the Emmeram-Munich Codex, which dates from when Hrotsvitha was still alive or from shortly after her death.) Happily, the monks find nothing troubling or heretical about the script, and they give it their imprimatur and nihil obstat. In the next scene, we are in fifteenth-century Buda under siege by Ottomans. A group of nuns decides to put on Dulcitius to inspire the citizens of Buda to resist the invaders. To do so, they change the names of the villains in the original play to those of various Ottomans leading the attack on Buda. Keating’s adaptation of her source takes a position in one of the continuing debates about Hrotsvitha’s plays: were they written to be performed, or were they closet dramas? From Keating’s point of view, Hrotsvitha’s plays were indeed performed in the tenth century and have continued to be so, even today. To speak directly to their audience, the Hungarian nuns translate the play from Latin and adapt the script further to reflect the real concerns of that audience, who potentially face mass martyrdom should the Ottomans succeed in capturing Buda.
The next scene in The Martyrdom takes us to a French production of Dulcitius in 1880s’ Paris which used marionettes to stage the play. The production was inspired by Anatole France, who had previously written a novel that adapted one of Hrotsvitha’s plays. More importantly, the production addressed the late-nineteenth debate between French and German scholars about whether the play was ever staged, or even stageable. The Germans thought not, with one scholar going so far as to suggest that, because she was a woman, Hrotsvitha could not have even written the play and or any of the other works attributed to her. The French answer was obviously the opposite, and this production using puppets suggested that attempts to attack Hrotsvitha in general, or her work in particular, were simply very poorly disguised examples of nineteenth-century European misogyny.
A rebuttal to misogyny also informs the next scene in Keating’s play which is taken from a 1914 production of the play in London by the Pioneer Players. The group was founded by Edith Craig, the daughter of the famous stage actor Ellen Terry, who was a member of the production’s cast. The production’s script was based on the first translation of Hrotsvitha’s work into English published under the pen name Chris(topher) St. John by Craig’s lover, Christabel Marshall. This production had all the markings of a suffragist call to action, Craig and company being outspoken advocates for the rights of women to determine their own destinies and to vote. The women in Hrotsvitha’s play may have died for their faith, but their spirits live on to inspire women in the early twentieth century in their struggles for equality.
A feminist agenda also underlies a 1960 production of the play at the University of Michigan under the direction of Sister Mary Marguerite Butler, then a graduate student in theater. Butler’s doctoral dissertation, subsequently revised and published as a monograph, attempted to ensure that Hrotsvitha would finally receive her rightful place in the canon, while also offering Hrotsvitha’s life and work as a role model for college-age women at the time. Keating’s adaptation then concludes with her own production itself in a moment of pure metadrama. The actors bring the play to its finale by reciting a litany of praises for Hrotsvitha and her plays from across more than a millennium.
As I indicated earlier, The Two Headed Rep’s production of The Martyrdom has all the hallmarks of a multi-media college lecture on Hrotsvitha and her groundbreaking career as a woman dramatist and writer. As such, it is a timely and useful reminder of how literary history has consistently silenced the important voices of people whom the canon has marginalized. Hrotsvitha’s name means “strong voice.” Too often the strong voices of women like Hrotsvitha have been relegated to footnotes or to incidental mentions. As we continue (belatedly) to open up and reconstruct the literary canon, Hrotsvitha’s is a strong voice that needs to be heard and that tells us a great deal about the less than quiet lives of desperation which at least some medieval women led.
