Abstract
Arnold Wesker’s Blood Libel (1991) dramatizes the ways in which Thomas of Monmouth builds up ill-informed, racist propaganda against Jews in his Life and Miracles of William of Norwich. By staging Wesker’s play, students confront the challenges of depicting prejudice for the ultimate purpose of enlightening audiences about the continued threat of anti-Semitism. This hands-on guide offers advice for producing Wesker’s play, as well as addressing such topics as advertising, casting, and publicizing this challenging work. Staging provocative plays requires foresight so that actors do not reinstate the prejudices on display in works such as Blood Libel; they must move beyond the text’s surface points to explore its deeper, more resonant meanings, so that their audiences may appreciate these nuances as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Rachel Cooke, “Arnold Wesker: ‘I’ve never understood my reputation for grumpiness,’” The Guardian 21 May 2011; Web.
- 2.
Ian Shuttleworth, “Blood Libel: Norwich Playhouse,” Financial Times 1 Feb. 1996.
- 3.
Arnold Wesker, Arnold Wesker’s Historical Plays (London: Oberon, 2012); hereafter cited parenthetically.
- 4.
Such seemingly deliberate and sacrilegious mock crucifixions were later reported in several Jew-baiting episodes throughout medieval Europe, for example in Mainz and the Rhineland. On this subject see Ivan G. Marcus, “A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis: The Culture of Early Ashkenaz,” Cultures of the Jews, ed. David Baile, 2 vols. (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 2.154.
- 5.
Thomas of Monmouth, The Life and Miracles of William of Norwich, trans. Augustus Jessop and M.R. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896). All further references will be given to this edition and translation.
- 6.
Triumph of the Will, dir. Leni Riefenstahl, 1935.
- 7.
Hyam Maccoby, The Disputation (Richmond, UK: Calder Publications, 2001).
- 8.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963).
- 9.
Arthur Miller, The Crucible, Collected Plays, 1944–1952 (New York: Library of America, 2006).
- 10.
Judy Chicago, Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (New York: Penguin, 1993), 57.
- 11.
Max Stafford-Clark, Letters to George: The Account of a Rehearsal (London: Nick Hern Books, 1989).
- 12.
My personal favorite is The Merchant of Venice, dir. Michael Radford (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures, 2005).
- 13.
Augustine, City of God, trans. and ed. Marcus Dods (New York: Hafner, 1948), book 18, chapter 46.
- 14.
James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 217.
- 15.
Heather Blurton, “The Language of the Liturgy in the Life and Miracles of William of Norwich,” Speculum 80.4 (2015): 1053–75, at 1053, quoting from Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964), xi.
- 16.
Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
- 17.
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 7.
- 18.
Arnold Wesker, As Much as I Dare: An Autobiography, 1932–1959 (London: Century, 1994), 460.
- 19.
Dan Conoghan, “Cathedral Pays Tribute to Victims of Christians,” Daily Telegraph 27 Jan. 1996: A4.
- 20.
Lisa Zunshine, “The Secret Life of Fiction,” PMLA 130.3 (2015): 724–31, at 729.
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Binnie, E.A.G. (2017). The Norwich Blood Libel Mounted Once Again: A Pedagogy for Tolerance in Arnold Wesker’s Blood Libel (1991). In: Krummel, M., Pugh, T. (eds) Jews in Medieval England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63748-8_11
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