Manjue, Adam!

While medieval liturgical plays and troubadour songs share similarities in origin, structure, and music, they also differ markedly, as they are prepared and performed with a different intended effect on the audience. First, the plays, as opposed to the songs originated from religious source material, meant to educate an audience on piety and morality.  The troubadours, literate and of whom most were theologically schooled, mostly dealt with courtly love, often satirically or erotically coded.  Where the cantos celebrate refined love, the plays ignore it.  Second, the plays include detailed stage directions.  Like in the manuscripts that we saw at Special Collections, every action is expressly spelled out.  [It probably is not until the 15th century with Moliere that stage directions allow more flexibility to the director and the actors.]  Significantly, the stage directions are in Latin, while the play is written in vernacular, perhaps suggesting that the educational level of the directors and actors surpasses that of the audience.  Like the troubadour songs, the vernacular content is innovative and encourages a non-ecclesiastical audience.  Does the use of vernacular in the plays enable them to be less religious, while keeping the biblical characters?  These stage directions, which included attire, set, movement, speaker, and analysis, are distinct to the plays.  As a reader of the text, we can easily picture the action.  Absent in troubadour songs, interpretation of gestures during performance is open.   Third, both troubadour songs and the liturgical plays involve music, performed by travelling actors, singers, and poets.  However, the troubadours sang monophonic melodies, while the stage directions in the plays indicate a chorus. In the Adam and Eve, Auerbach reading, the author explores not only the role of Eve on Adam, but indeed investigates the reversal of the roles.  This exhibit of the relationship reminds me of the trobairitz’s ability to shift the domna from the object to the subject.  Here, Eve suddenly displays a will of her own, and strongly urges Adam to take a bite of the apple: “manjue, Adam!”  “Eve is master of the situation” (130), just as the trobaraitz brings the woman from the absent to present, prevailing in her songs.  Adam does not take a bite of the apple from fear of Eve or even the desire to taste it, but rather from a “desire to prove and assert himself: is he man to be afraid of doing what a woman has successfully done?” (130).  The reversal of roles in both the play and in trobairitz songs utilizes performativity in the embodiment of the woman.