Performance Issues in the Christos Paschon

The Christos paschon [1] is among the longer twelfth-century Greek poems, [2] the most extended dramatic treatment of the story of Holy Week in either east or west in the period. [3] It is in fact three plays [4] with eleven included laments, [5] preceded by a hypothesis and concluded by two prayers. It claims to be Euripidean and fifty-two percent of it is made up of lines, half-lines, and longer passages from, largely, four plays: Medea, Hippolytus, Rhesus, and Bacchae. [6] It is unique; it is also a problem text.

Some problems are of long standing, not all of which have been solved. Neither dating nor authorship has yet been satisfactorily decided. Twenty-five manuscripts survive from the middle of the thirteenth century on, all attributing the work to Gregory of Nazianzos. Since Hunger, the text has been redated to the twelfth century, though the date has been contested by Tuilier and Garzya. [7] Though the contextual argument for the twelfth century may seem overwhelmingly persuasive, [8] it is circular: we could go on finding more and more twelfth-century dialogues, laments, dramatia, or centos, but it would not solve the problem of the authorship. Gregory was much read and admired in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, [9] but he was not an author of that period. [10] We need a new collaborative approach to solving this problem, but in what follows I continue to assume a twelfth-century date.

The other problem which has beset the text is that it is a prize witness of those who wish to argue for a Byzantine theater. This is an old dispute, which has by now arrived at a consensus: there was no liturgical drama in Byzantium. Venetia Cottas and George La Piana in the 1930s attempted to build dramatic elements in the kontakia of Romanos and dialogue in the sermons of Proklos and Germanos into a development which after the Paschon and the Cyprus Passion Cycle culminated in the Service of the Furnace, adding other tantalizing fragments like Liutprand’s sighting of something which looked like an ascension drama, the ascension of the prophet Elijah that is. [11] But recent students of hymnography and homily as well as of the service are clear that there was no dramatized performance, [12] and though Walter Puchner continues to argue against it, [13] his opposition has long since faded away. As Przemek Marciniak has made clear, this does not mean that there was no performance in Byzantium, just that there is nothing comparable with the Latin liturgical drama of the medieval west—and in his recent book Andrew Walker White has explained why. [14]

Even before these issues have been solved, more problems have presented themselves. For one thing, the treatment of the gospel and apocryphal narrative in the text has never been set in the context of other literary treatments of the gospel narrative, or indeed of commentary material on the gospels and in particular attempts at gospel harmony. [15] For another the nature of the cento has only recently been questioned. Does it represent a serious reading of the source texts or a mindless mosaic of Euripidean fragments? [16] A further issue is whether the text should be regarded as sacred or secular. Most scholars, whether students of classics, Byzantine Studies, or theater, have been very uneasy with the combination of sacred drama with what appears to be secular cento. There is a sense that no one is quite sure what to do with it. It belongs neither in one world nor the other, and it is ironic that a text which is regularly classed as secular (it is in Hunger, not in Beck, twice in fact, under “Cento,” and under “Dichtungen in dramatischer Form”) [17] is indeed the most extended mimetic treatment of the Easter story that we have in Byzantium or in the contemporary west.

I should make it clear what I mean. I do not mean whether it is possible to perform the text today: it has quite often been performed in the last sixty years, not least in Athens. [18] Nor do I mean simply whether it was possible for the play to be performed in the twelfth century: this is a legitimate question to which we will return. More generally I am looking for evidence that the author thought in terms of performance and that performance is implied or enabled in the text. This may involve examining whether the text is a play, whether it is a tragedy, but also whether performability lies somewhere other than genre. It may also involve asking to what extent the author was aware of fifth-century BCE tragedic conventions.

Walter Puchner has spent a very distinguished career returning to this issue. In a series of studies has made his position clear: “an analysis informed by theatre studies could easily show that the poet is unaware of what it means to stage a play.” He adds “the poem is neither a tragedy meant for production in a theatre nor any other form of drama. Rather it is a cento in dialogue form, which uses quotations from tragedy and imitates some of the dramatic conventions of tragedy without fully understanding their implications.” [19]

Puchner’s classic article in the Austrian Academy Anzeiger for 1992 was dedicated to Wolfram Hörandner, and as well as discussing the performability question produces various arguments to support the twelfth-century dating. In a Festschrift of 1990, he had floated some of these ideas in the course of a demolition of the concept of a Byzantine theater, and revisited them in many subsequent essays and books. A recent example is a lecture in Vienna in June 2017 on “Christos Paschon, Passionspiel oder christliche Tragödie?” [20] His views shift slightly from one publication to another (it lacks knowledge of antique stage conventions/it incorporates convention but is unaware of scenic implications; it is not a drama/it isn’t a tragedy but might be a passion play; it is a cento/it is a dialogic planctus Mariae), but in general the same issues appear again and again. The play (or as he would prefer cento) confuses messenger speech with teichoskopia; it fails to mark points where characters enter and exit; there is a lack of stage directions; Christ appears several times after the Resurrection with contradictory narratives; narrated offstage action conflicts with onstage action; figures mentioned in the fifth messenger speech briefly become real characters, there is quick change between narrator of and participation in scenes (e.g. Mary in the Longinos scene). Above all there is no single location on stage and there are time lapses and time-wraps: there is no continuous delivery.

What we can see is that he has a very clear view of what constitutes tragic performance, which could probably only have happened in fifth-century BCE Athens. We should also note that the argument that there was no full staging in twelfth-century Constantinople and so it could not have been fully staged is circular. Many of his points are indisputable (no single location, no continuous time, difficulties with entrances and exits), some I cannot agree with.

So I asked Andy Walker White to look at the text from the point of view of an actor-dramaturg. He went through the text line by line, offering a stage-eye view of the problems. They are for example journeys: Mary takes ten lines to get with the women to the cross I.690–700. This is absolutely right (though he doesn’t mention the women taking five lines to get to the house of Mary at III.2475–2480), and you can see the verbs of motion taking her there. He is also worried about proxemics: Is Mary’s vantage point at the tomb close enough to see everything while far enough away to be safe? And he also notes problems with entrances and exits, though he singles out Joseph of Arimathea’s entrance at 1134 as signaled by John Theologos (and in fact all of the messengers are announced by the chorus). He also has some time issues: he thinks the treatment of the Jewish revolt at 1575–1585 conflicts with other references (there are laments for Jerusalem II.1597–1601 and II.1700–1711 but they are also set in the future). He also points to the passage of the night in 100 lines, 1910–1997 (surely τὸ κνέϕας at III.1906 is the half-light of dawn?), and the separation of earthquake at I.855 and opening of the tombs at I.1105–1109 by 125 lines, a stretch of the gospel narrative. He notes the problem of Peter’s appearance (offstage? A fourth, nonspeaking, character?) at 813 and is inclined to bring him on (the Theotokos addresses him anyway at 815) but doesn’t address the issue of Nikodemos who is a fourth, non-speaking character, nonspeaking that is until he suddenly does speak at 1466–1468. He proposes a second chorus of High Priests entering at 2270 and worries about how they can change costumes from women of Galilee, last heard at 2173 (I believe that the Chief Priest is a speaking character, with Pilate and head of the guard). He also notes the sudden shift from messenger speech to enactment of this scene and back again, but unlike Puchner he sees it (as do I) as highly innovative, a kind of jump cut, easy to stage nowadays, trickier in this text. [21] He is also concerned about what he calls the mismatch between “described” and “present” where Christ is “present” until I.837 and then “described” by the Theotokos (he is alive until I.837, and then lament 5 shows her slowly realizing, by I.853, that her son is dead), another at 1073/1214 with the piercing of the corpse which is described not staged, twice. He sees this problem again at the Deposition 1255–1268 which he says is described not enacted (there is indeed a lot of talking about movement in the second play and only ritual action). Again, sometimes I agree with him but sometimes I do not.

So I went through the text again and drew out what I see as problematic in addition or in particular. Some of these issues could be solved in performance, some remain problematic. If Puchner’s views are those of a theater historian, and Walker White’s those of a scholar-dramaturg, mine are author-centered, for the author set himself a really difficult task in terms of time (in which he is constrained by the clear gospel chronology—from daybreak on Good Friday to late on Easter Sunday—from adhering to tragic real time), space (where he is constrained by the sacred geography of Jerusalem and the need to move scene in each of the three plays from a single setting), [22] emotion (where both the emotional trajectory and the emotions to be elicited differ strongly from the tragic norm), [23] and even plot (where dramatic necessity can be a long way from gospel harmony, and the desire to include all gospel episodes). Each of these problems deserves extended treatment, and another, the aural comprehensibility of the cento, probably needs experimental study: the enriching effect of the Euripidean texture needs to be demonstrated practically.

In terms of specifics, there are more issues with entrances and exits than have previously been noted: these include the entrances of the chorus in I, the Theotokos in II, the departure of the Theotokos and women for the house of John at the end of II, the apparitions in III, and the departure of the Magdalen to tell the disciples: Does she make the journey once or three times? These are agenda for elsewhere, but here I want to concentrate on an issue raised by both Puchner and White, the use of both mimesis (representation) and diegesis (narrative) in the text. Puchner sees it as invalidating the identification of the text as a drama; White as reminiscent of a radio play where action must be described. [24] I believe that the play-off between diegesis and mimesis is a significant feature of the trilogy and (with White) a source of innovation.

This example occurs in the third play in the course of the fifth messenger’s report to the Theotokos and women, otherwise known as the comic subplot. Both Puchner and Walker White draw attention to the curious inclusion in the fifth messenger’s speech (2174–2188) of interaction (twenty-two speeches) between Pilate, the guard, and the priests. It is very different in tone from the previous sequence of supernatural appearances: it is male while the main plot of III is female, and it introduces a range of emotions not found in the rest of the trilogy. At the end of the chorus’s speech at 2173, the Fifth Messenger is spotted, and he launches into his speech which begins at 2210 as direct speech with interspersed narrative lines. By 2210 it has slipped into unmediated dialogue in the course of the action. A comparison here is the metalepsis in Romanos’ Abraham and Isaac (what Sarah would say becomes what Sarah said). [25] At 2270 the speaker is signaled in some manuscripts. [26] The episode explains how the guard came to be the first witnesses of the resurrection but were bribed into keeping quiet about it. The male subplot allows for some political satire, as recognizable to a twelfth-century, as to a twenty-first-century, audience: how to manage a coverup never goes out of date. White, I believe, is correct to see this as an innovation rather than a failure to understand tragedy.

This example, noted by both Puchner and White, compares passages at the end of the first play I.1079–1094, and at the beginning of the second, II.1230–1259. At I.1079–1094 the Theotokos reports how one of the tormentors (not named as Longinos) who broke the legs of the thieves thrusts his spear into the side of Christ which spurts two streams of water and blood. The spearsman, panic-stricken, proclaims Christ as son of God and throws himself at the foot of the cross. He beats his chest, embraces the earth, receives the jets in his hand, and anoints his head. The chorus calls for the punishment of murderers and observes the terrifying spectacle of earthquake, shattering of rocks, and the opening of sepulchres. At II.1210–1239 John Theologos describes to Joseph of Arimathea the earthquake, rocks, tombs, and then the Virgin’s reactions to the piercing of her son’s side. He reprises the story of I.1079–1094 with a different focalization: whereas in I we saw the Virgin as largely passionless (at I.1063 the chorus tells her how she can grieve with courage), in II John paints a very different picture: throwing herself at the cross, kissing Christ’s feet, catching in her hands the flow of blood and water from his side, lacing herself around the cross, and it offers two pieces of included Virgin’s lament. John and Joseph are on stage alone, telling us the story so far. The Theotokos enters at 1247 and greets the two friends. [27] This difference between the two accounts deserves extended treatment, but the main difference is of observed action in the present and reported action in the past.

Such a passage is the Deposition II.1258–1308. Here after the Theotokos’ entrance, Joseph II.1258–1268 readies himself and Nikodemos to go up the ladder and detach the body, urging the Theotokos to stay clear. At II.1269 she repeats her self-accusation (as of I.501) that she would be a coward not to look at her unburied Son, and asks to be able to weep over him, bury him, kiss his feet, and embrace his limbs, urging her arms to take him. Joseph is not easily persuaded, believing it to be his job to bury Jesus, along with Nikodemos who has come to his aid, bringing a profusion of perfume for the job. By the end of the speech he urges the Theotokos after all to hold out her arms along with the chorus, weep, and kiss him. She responds by telling him to take the body in his arms, lift up his head, lean him over to the right, and hold up his side. The Theologian adds his instructions to the women to receive him, and promises to put his strength underneath. The Theotokos then addresses her wretched arms and by 1310, alas, alas, we understand that she is holding him in her arms. This running commentary extends the process of deposition over fifty-one lines, with the physical action described just as it might be in a radio play, thirty verbs in those fifty-one lines. Yet we can see it happening on stage—the tension between the men who wish to shield her from the worst and the Theotokos who wishes to do her duty is an important part of the scene—but the sheer physical action of the Deposition is underlined by the commentary. So we are told and we are shown. We don’t have a similar double storytelling from the twelfth century. [28] But there are modern parallels where the combination of narrative and enactment can underline the importance and powerfulness, the unbearable force of the moment. I’d like to suggest for consideration two twenty-first century parallels, one American, one Irish.

Tarell Alvin McCraney’s 2006 play In the Red and Brown Water [29] tells the story of Oya, a runner, daughter, lover, woman of color, who loses her chance to run for Louisiana State in order to look after her dying mother, and, it is suggested, loses, through her running, the chance to have children. She gives up her lover Ogun, the businessman, and is betrayed by Shangu the soldier. As the author says: “the stage directions in a character’s speech are meant to be said as well as played.” Many are entrances and exits:

I would also mention the running scene I.3 with running commentary, Oya’s dream of her mother’s death I.6, the recognition of Elegba’s sexuality II.6, and Shango’s seduction in I.4 and I.7. In 1.4 he shows an interest:

In 1.7 he succeeds:

The devastating climax comes in II.7 where Shango calls on Oya after she learns he has made another woman pregnant, and they converse while she is in the house; she emerges to give him a part of her in remembrance—the ear he “curls and caresses.”

In Marina Carr’s 2015 play Hecuba, [30] characters report in the present tense on events of the past and voice other characters’ words, or even whole conversations, alternating with straightforward dialogue in the present. This allows the expression of thoughts: Agamemnon’s and Odysseus’ views of Achilles, Agamemnon’s admiration for Hecuba, and for Polydoros, the thoughts of Agamemnon and Hecuba before, during, and after sex. Dream stretches into reality as Polydoros’ body is discovered, and Hecuba finds common suffering with Polymestor, whom (in this anti-Euripidean version) she cares for after his blinding.

The sacrifice of Polyxena is narrated by Agamemnon, Hecuba, Odysseus, and Polyxena herself in the present tense.

Agamemnon voices Hecuba’s stoic reaction and request for Polyxena’s body, and his own frustration at the failure of the sacrifice to produce a wind.

The technique of mixing diegesis with mimesis in both plays is more developed, more complex, and more sustained than in the Christos Paschon and involves the voicing of speeches by other characters, but like the Paschon it extends and enriches through diegesis a moment that could simply have been enacted. Both examples show that a combination of diegesis and mimesis can be highly dramatic in the theater and should not be regarded as evidence, on its own, that a piece was unperformable or not written for performance. We might perhaps prefer to think that our author was also an experimental playwright.

So is the Christos Paschon diegesis or mimesis? Is it a play? The hypothesis calls it a drama with prosopa, but then the twelfth-century novels are also called dramata. Lemmata in some manuscripts label it stichoi, others a tragoidia. [31] If we contrast it with treatments of the same biblical events in two other twelfth-century works the difference is obvious: Basilakes’ ethopoiia is just that; Mesarites’ ekphrasis is explicitly emotional, periegetic, interactive, and even includes some direct speech but is not mimetic.

Second, is it a trilogy? We have assumed so far that we are dealing with three plays, on the basis of the suggestion of the editor Tuilier: I Crucifixion, II Burial, III Resurrection. [32] In the Cyprus passion cycle it would be two plays (or eight including episodes mentioned, plus Lazaros and Entry), in Mesarites eight surviving descriptions of mosaics. [33] Support for Tuilier’s suggestion comes from the fact that the first (Crucifixion) section ends at lines 1130–1133 with the end of the Medea, a marker of closure, and also that the three main characters change in each part: in the first the Theotokos, Christ, and John the Theologian, in the second the Theotokos, John the Theologian, and Joseph of Arimathea, in the third, the Theotokos, Mary Magdalen, and Christ, with Pilate, the High Priest, and the captain of the guard in the subplot. It enables the time-gap between the second and the third play and also the repetition of the Longinos episode. It avoids a length at 2602 lines longer than any surviving ancient tragedy; [34] even without the prayers it is 2531 lines.

But we need to ask whether the division actually makes sense. There is an imbalance of length between the first play (1133 lines) and second and third (771 and 625, respectively). 1133 and 1397 (the last two added together) is a better balance but the time-gap comes between II and III not I and II. The second play starts abruptly and with Rhesus rather than Medea, and there appears to be little or no time-gap between I and II. It might also be thought that dividing the subject-matter in this way is a western concept imposed on a unitary poem, were it not for the Cyprus passion cycle and indeed extended passion cycles in twelfth-century art and Mesarites’ ekphrasis. [35] It should be noted though that visual representations of crucifixion and myrrophores clearly reflect I and III, but II is represented by three different scenes: deposition, threnos, and entombment; there is no easy equivalence between painting and play. And we should also ask whether the three plays stand on their own as examples of tragedy; the answer is that the first one does, the second is a succession of ritual events with some conflict between the actors in a constricted atmosphere of fear, and the third play, though it opens atmospherically and offers tension between Magdalen and Theotokos, is constrained by its need to present a gospel harmony and its trajectory of joy. Compared with western treatments (and this subject-matter [36] is traditionally where scholars looked for the beginnings of western medieval drama) complexity and subtlety as well as adherence to conflicting source-texts here all hamper performability. But on balance the arguments fall more convincingly on Tuilier’s side.

Third, is it tragedy? We have seen that even Puchner allows that the author has some sense of the conventions of tragedy. [37] The first seven hundred lines with the Virgin and her women receiving three messengers one after another, and the satisfying deus ex machina (or appearance on the theologeion) of Christ at the house of Mary begin and end the trilogy. And the text is arranged always for three actors and chorus—despite the claim of the hypothesis [38] —and those three actors are different in the three plays: the Theotokos, John the Theologian, and Christ in the Crucifixion play, the Theotokos, John the Theologian, and Joseph in the middle play, the Theotokos, the Magdalen, and Christ in the Resurrection play, and finally the spokesman of the priests, Pilate, and the mouthpiece of the soldiers in the subplot. And it has to be allowed that even where conventions are broken (the central death of Christ on stage, the comic subplot) the breaking may underline awareness of those conventions.

And as for the handling of chorus and actors’ parts, as Psellos had pointed out, [39] Byzantine meter had moved on. It is unreasonable to expect the full array of ancient meters on the page to be read in an accentual performance practice. Yet this leads us to note that the very things emphasized in recent studies of tragedy—dance, music, masks, spectacle, outdoor performance, and dopamine [40] —are to our knowledge not available to the author of the Paschon. Although the balance of the arguments is different here, there is enough to suggest that the author was fully aware of tragic conventions and did well to balance them with the constraints of sacred geography and of biblical narrative—and the variety of biblical narratives.

Fourth, is it Euripidean? It claims to be, and may well be, at least a Byzantine understanding of what was Euripidean. There seem to be various ways in which the author did more than pillage Euripides’ word-hoard. Superficially, like many Euripides plays it begins with protagonist’s speech not the chorus, the plot turns with a recognition, and like some late Euripides it has a happy ending. It is highly emotional, as we have seen, and this is what the Byzantines admired about Euripides. [41] It is concerned with women: the chorus is female, the third play’s protagonist and deuteragonist are female, and the cento texture offers much reflection on the nature of motherhood: Medea, Agave, and Phaidra, even the Muse, may not be the best possible role-models but there is a great deal of problematization about maternity and mother-son relations. [42] Euripides liked messenger-speeches and so did our author: there are five speeches in the Christos Paschon, three in the first play, one in the second, and one in the third. Later Euripides has more than early Euripides, but only one play has more than three. There is a lot of variation in our speeches, some conforming more, some less to the models, for example the convention of a headline delivery followed by more detailed treatment; sometimes our messengers tease the Theotokos and have to have their news dragged out of them. [43] And though there are other reasons for this in our text, the minor role of the chorus is not incompatible with later Euripides. [44]

Finally, is it performable? We can be sure that it was not fully staged as was normal for tragedy in fifth-century Athens. Even theaters that were still functioning in late antiquity [45] were unlikely to be available in the twelfth century. But the performance of tragedy had gone through many changes since then. Trilogies were broken up into individual plays; [46] increasingly, celebrity actors demanded “big entrances, challenging songs, highly emotional speeches or intense arguments,” and interpolated them when needs be; [47] tragedies went on tour round the Greek cities of the Mediterranean with three actors, a flute-player, and a director, relying on local choruses. Festivals gave prizes for actors, and for tragic choruses. [48] From fairly early on private performances performing famous songs and climactic scenes at banquets are attested (the recognition scene from Bacchae complete with Crassus’ severed head), [49] and the third-century Orestes papyrus suggests a concert performance of musical highlights. [50] From the second century CE we hear of individual tragoidoi accompanied by aulos or possibly cithara singing dramatic pieces like the “flying Medea aria,” [51] and increasingly through late antiquity there was a two-way traffic between pantomime (even mime), and tragedy, all thought of as performance media. [52] We do not know when the last full-scale tragedy was staged, but it is clear that other forms of tragedic performance could have outlived it and full staging would have been a revival, not out of keeping with twelfth-century trends [53] but entirely undocumented.

On the other hand, it is highly unlikely that the piece was not performed in some way. It is increasingly believed that Byzantium was a deeply performative society. Clearly hymnography, sermons, all the rhetoric of the period was delivered, and it becomes harder to think of genres which might have been on the unperformed part of the spectrum. Letters were read aloud on delivery. [54] Poems were envisaged as recited on board pleasure boats in the sea of Marmara. [55] The stories that were the building bricks of historiography were ripe for storytelling in groups. [56] The progressive ascetic collections which were the most popular manifestation of the culture of sylloge were read in monastic refectories. [57] A lot of what we thought were religious treatises can be located in the theological disputation of the period. [58] Even commentaries, which we may have thought of as at the most visual and silent end of the spectrum, we have been reminded recently, are profoundly rooted in schoolroom practice. [59]

But in what setting might it have been performed? Many of us would be prepared to accept some kind of performance in the theatra of Komnenian princesses, which is where letters and short rhetorical pieces were read aloud and improvised. The options for performance in the theatron are rhetorical, whatever we understand those to be; [60] given though Psellos’s characterization of John Kroustoulas reading from the menologion, a single performer could assume many parts: “the impersonations of tyrants and the voices and imitations of those opposing them … mimicking different languages, simulating the tongue of barbarians, including Armenian words” in different voices, “often he would employ a rough voice or his voice would become light like a feather.” [61]

Alternatively, though they are not real alternatives, [62] we could think of the rhetoric-rich schoolroom, where schoolboys learned to improvise ethopoiiai of women, like Aphthonios’ model ethopoiia the lament of Niobe and Basilakes’ “What the Theotokos would say.” [63] Though I personally incline to the theatron solution, I admit that a younger, beardless Theotokos might be more convincing in delivery. And the remarkable possibilities of reading a text in a schoolroom have recently been revealed by Marjorie Curry Woods: “medieval school manuscripts … are scripts, that is, meant to be performed aloud.” [64] She cites performance experiments by Martin Camargo and her own experience reading Geta aloud together in class, transforming solo visual reception. [65] In Byzantium too, as envisaged in the Madrid Skylitzes, [66] we could argue that “learning literature was a shared social experience rather than an individual relationship with a physically, visually conveyed text.” [67]

But even if neither of these solutions represents the real performance history of our text, and the only performance was in the mind of private readers (and of course we believe that private reading was seldom individual silent reading in the Byzantium of this period) [68] we have seen enough to understand that this hypothetical noetic audience of the twelfth century was fully able to envisage the performance of a tragedy with chorus, three actors, mechane, or theologeion, and so bring our text alive through phantasia. [69] This hypothetical audience might even have been appreciative of the innovative elements which so puzzle the modern scholar and have made it a problem play.