Nakley Susan
Lit Med. 2015 Fall;33(2):302-25. doi: 10.1353/lm.2015.0022.
Late medieval culture tends to value pain highly and positively. Accordingly, much medievalist scholarship links pain with fear and emphasizes their usefulness in the period's philosophy, literature, visual art, and drama. Yet, key moments in The York Play of the Crucifixion, The Second Shepherds' Play, and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge trouble the significance of pain and its relationships with punishment and performance; these works admit the unreliability of pain and fear, even as they harness the formidable power pain holds throughout Middle English literature. This essay analyzes passages from all three texts to demonstrate their deep skepticism about the signifying power of pain alongside their abiding investments in pain's utility. I argue that these texts ultimately challenge Middle English drama's dominant discourses of patriarchy and empire by way of their representations of pain.
中世纪晚期文化倾向于高度且积极地重视痛苦。因此，许多中世纪研究的学术成果将痛苦与恐惧联系起来，并强调它们在该时期的哲学、文学、视觉艺术和戏剧中的作用。然而，《受难的约克剧》《第二个牧羊人剧》和《奇迹剧论述》中的关键情节对痛苦的意义及其与惩罚和表演的关系提出了质疑；这些作品承认痛苦和恐惧的不可靠性，尽管它们利用了痛苦在整个中古英语文学中所具有的强大力量。本文分析了这三部文本中的段落，以证明它们对痛苦的表意能力深感怀疑，同时也始终坚信痛苦的效用。我认为，这些文本最终通过对痛苦的呈现，挑战了中古英语戏剧中父权制和帝国的主导话语。
