Acting Like a Man: The Solitary Christ and Masculinity

Abstract

Christ is understandably the central figure of the cycle plays; he is also the one recurring male character who is presented in domestic and public settings, in homosocial company, and in solitude, some of which I have discussed. He is the touchstone of male experience in these cycles, representing in one person many of the ideals and anxieties of masculinity that the other pageants have addressed. If he is, on the one hand, an exemplary model of masculinity, he is also a troubling one, for a man who is God as well as human is ultimately inimitable. Christ’s exemplarity and inimitability, as well as the limits of dramatic performance, create a Christ very different from the suffering Man of Sorrows of art and other devotional literature, much of which appealed to, was created for, or was patronized by women; all of which suggests a Christ who is a contested site of social and gendered representation and identity despite the communitarian ideals of the church as body of Christ. Though intending to bring the biblical world and Christ into the contemporary world of guildsmen, the drama paradoxically creates a Christ who is much more distant from the viewing subject than the Christ of other devotional works. Indeed, the Christ of drama is a figure of masculine alienation, divided from the company he shares within the dramatic narrative, and from the drama’s male sponsors and participants who long deeply for union with him. Like the guildsmen who perform him, Christ is made visibly present but also emotionally distant in this most public of art forms, wherein intimacy is sacrificed for the construction of masculine corporate identities.