Twelfth Night Revels, Revelations, and the Death of Rabelais – Religion & Liberty Online

In the Christian calendar, the Feast of the Epiphany marks the coming of the Magi, whose journey signals the first revelation of the Incarnation to the wider world. With Epiphany, the days of Christmas end, though the afterglow of the Nativity lingers until Candlemas, on February 2: the feast of the presentation of the Christ Child in the temple, when the Church recalls another recognition. In that day’s reading, Simeon turns to Mary and declares, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel … that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

The Incarnation upsets a long-settled order—or else it reorders, upsettingly, a long-settled disorder. Either way, God, newly present as man in the world, has come to turn out the human soul like a pocket before the clothes go into the wash. It will be painful, as Simeon also warns Mary: “Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.” Yet this, mysteriously, is the work of redemption. Through it, all creation will be restored to its right order. And it is toward this further revelation that the Epiphany points.

In an odd twist of chronology, the Twelve Days of Christmas include the commemoration of Herod’s massacre of the Holy Innocents, on December 28—an event that in the biblical narrative occurs after the departure of the Wise Men into their own country. Epiphany, therefore, the showing-forth of the sweet infant Incarnation, dawns with the slaughter of children still fresh in its memory, as though to prefigure the sword through Mary’s soul and the recognition that the road to eternal life leads through death.

Liturgical time defines itself by these conflations. In the midst of life we are in death. In the midst of death we are in life. In Advent we think of the Eschaton. The Solemnity of the Annunciation, falling often in Lent, orients us toward Christmas. In the darkness of the Great Vigil, Easter begins by remembering the Fall. “Death and life have contended,” says the Sequence Hymn of Easter morning. But in Christ’s restoration of the sin-fractured order of reality, are death and life truly enemies and opposites? Or do they belong to the same warp and weft of reality, a whole cloth? Do they, as St. Paul assures the Colossians, “hold together” in Christ?

The persistent question of how “all things hold together” drives the work of the playwright Jane Clark Scharl. Her one-act Sonnez les Matines, the first play in a proposed trilogy whose protagonist is the 16th-century humanist François Rabelais, pits two theological systems—not untrue, but as accounts of Christ holding all creation together in himself, perhaps not true enough—against the capacious imagination of Rabelais. Scharl’s new play, The Death of Rabelais, again invokes the imagination as the means by which oppositions, apparently intractable, are reconciled. As one character, Lavigne the wine-merchant, bitterly puts it,

We speak of God and death
as foes, and say we know which one will win …
We say that God has conquered Death; we mean
he has consumed it, and so it has become
A part of him.

This is the truth at the heart of the play. But where Lavigne perceives something malign in this consummation, the play proclaims it as the central mystery of the Gospel. Even Death, the old enemy, has been woven into that love that makes all things live.

Scharl’s imagination is clearly drawn to cusps and times of transition: the night of Mardi Gras, as in Sonnez les Matines, and in The Death of Rabelais the eve of the Epiphany, or Twelfth Night. Appropriately, the play begins with three travelers on the road, a mismatched set of Magi abroad in a sadly starless night. In the course of the play, this triangulation of characters will shift and reorder itself, revealing not only many secret thoughts, but also an unexpected trinity. 

If liturgical time defines the parameters of The Death of Rabelais, the timeline of the English dramatic tradition also makes itself felt. Among the literary ghosts who haunt this play, the most obvious is Shakespeare, whose own Twelfth Night provides one oblique frame for the actions of Scharl’s characters. Like a Twelfth Night party, Shakespeare’s Illyria is ruled by disorder and dissembling. Grace and redemption are on offer, but only for those who embrace their human folly. Throughout that play, a clown speaks truth in jokes, riddles, and songs. It’s fitting, then, that Rabelais first appears in a tattered jester’s cloak and a “slapdash” cap of bells, as though he meant to play Feste in the most cobbled-together of amateur productions. This is in fact his truest role, and his road will end in his playing it.

Overlaid on this spectral frame of Twelfth Night, however, is the ghost of what might seem its opposite: Shakespeare’s great existential tragedy King Lear. The disordered weather of the opening scene is Lear’s: a freakish blizzard, complete with thunder and lightning, that turns the French vineyards to a blasted heath. Rabelais resembles Feste, but also, as he struggles along in the storm, Lear’s Fool. Likewise, the girl dressed as Death, overtaking Rabelais on the road, has the grave-spoken quality of Lear’s one honest daughter, Cordelia. “Unhappy that I am,” Cordelia tells her father, “I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth.” Neither can this strange girl say more, or less, than she means: “I’m only Death.”

Both Rabelais and his friend the Friar, the third traveler in the storm, assume that the girl in her Death costume accompanies the other. And in the first real tragicomic misapprehension of the evening, triggering all subsequent action, neither man recognizes that she is grave-spoken in more senses than one. In his jester’s motley, Rabelais has put on his true self as a disguise. But this girl is not even pretending to pretend: She is Death itself, and she has come, as she says, to “feast” before daybreak on one doomed soul.

Cunningly disguised in his ordinary habit, the Friar is a meddler, orchestrating outcomes for his own amusement. Later this trait will assume more serious implications, and a hidden self will emerge from hiding. But his first trick, persuading his companions to change costumes, makes him also, against his own grain, an agent of revelation. In a curious—and perhaps oblique—turn on the practice of casting the same actress in a production of Lear as both Cordelia and the truth-telling Fool, Death and Rabelais become curiously allied.

Life and death, jokes and truth, may seem to contend as enemies. But in the mysterious order of things, as this exchange implies, opposites belong to each other. “Is not Death a very babe,” asks Rabelais, “the last and littlest of God’s many children?” It’s a potent question to pose in the play’s liturgical moment, when God has just entered the world as an infant, to die and put death to death, and the death of the Holy Innocents has figured as part of that plan. So, in the world of the play, death and laughter are not opposites and foes but two faces of the same reality and two aspects of its goodness.

The Friar, meanwhile, continues to indulge his appetite for what, in Shakespearean comedy, is known as gulling:pranking people in order to humiliate them in some amusingly revealing way. Guiding his companions to a house filled with people, known to him but strangers to them, he sends them in unannounced and steps back to enjoy the ensuing confusion.

The scene already is one of unhappy disorder. Martine, engaged to marry Alain, whom Violette loves, really loves Violette’s brother Robert—but also knows the Friar from of old. Lavigne, the wine merchant, “as dry as he is sweet,” loves nobody. All these characters wear disguises that suggest the opposite of their inner selves: Lavigne the Pilgrim, Martine the Queen, Alain the King, Violette the Priest. Robert, most strangely of all, wears the costume of a pregnant woman whose belly and breasts recall a pagan fertility idol. With the unexpected entrance of Death dressed as a Fool and Rabelais dressed as Death, it is as though a pack of tarot cards, albeit with a few unorthodox additions, had been completed. The future seems to await its own foretelling, and with that foretelling, the fulfillment of its outcome, inevitable but still, despite the inescapable presence of Death, unknown.

Like the Epiphany itself, The Death of Rabelais entails the disclosure of hidden things. In the course of the play’s action, “the thoughts of many hearts are revealed.” In Act II, the mechanism by which more secrets come to light is a play. If both Twelfth Night and King Lear are ghostly presences in The Death of Rabelais, so is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, whose play-within-a-play is intended as a mechanism of revelation in the service of justice, with inexorably tragic consequences. Scharl, too, envisions a world in which justice seeks its fulfillment, order its reclamation from disorder. Her play-within-a-play, imagined and directed by Rabelais—still dressed as Death but playing the role of Providence—abounds with grace at its most seemingly chaotic. But as physicists tell us, even in its apparent randomness, chaos generates a pattern.

This play-within-a-play reaches further back in time than Shakespeare, to access the medieval tradition of the mystery play. Throughout England, cycles of these plays, presented by a town’s guilds of craftsmen, marked the summertime feast of Corpus Christi with their retellings of biblical and extra-biblical stories: the Creation, the Fall of the Rebel Angels, the Fall of Man, Noah’s Flood. Narrated, and invented, by Rabelais-as-Death-as-Providence, this mystery play begins with the story of Job, whose righteousness God allows Satan to test. But this Job is also the beggar Lazarus, of the parable Jesus relates in Luke 16:19–31, whom the play’s Devil restores to an Adamic, unfallen state that he might not curse God before he dies but rather forget him.

In trajectory like that of liturgical time, one biblical narrative morphs into another, in a sequence of events simultaneously familiar and unexpected. In this retelling, every character, already in costume, assumes yet another guise that discloses his or her most true identity. As the stories reshuffle themselves in the retelling, so do allegiances and attachments among the characters. By the time the mystery play has given way to an even older entertainment, a game of riddles, everyone’s mask has slipped, and secrets prepare to spill themselves.

The Death of Rabelais begins with travelers on the road, a strange Magi-like trio. By the end of the play, beyond the house’s threshold, another road presents itself: the “lonely road” of death. Although, from the beginning, Death has been stalking her prey and must “feast” before she departs, her mission allows for the exercise of free will. The outcome, as Epiphany dawns, paradoxically fulfills Death’s unwavering purpose even as it surprises. “All revelations are a gift,” Death says, “… and may become / the very nature of a soul’s salvation.” As one character chooses to follow Death upon her road, the original Magi-like trio of the Friar, Death, and Rabelais becomes another threesome of travelers setting forth in the dawn, a strangely suggestive trinity.

From beginning to end, The Death of Rabelais both echoes and amplifies the central concern of Scharl’s Sonnez les Matines: the capacity of grace to encompass oppositions of time, death, and human freedom. Above all, it declares the Christian imagination’s power to make things new—not to alter but to reveal afresh their inmost truth. All things hold together in the mind of the one who imagines them into being. If Death prevails in the end, it is as the door to more life. Meanwhile, despite its portentous title, The Death of Rabelais is only the second play in a trilogy. Lovers of Rabelais may hope to hear him laugh again.