The Lamb in the Crib

Religion really is a funny thing, isn’t it? Something so deeply engrained in the hearts and minds of hundred of thousands can be turned in a generation or two quite completely around. The speed, for instance, in which Northern Africa was converted to Islam in the seventh century, for instance, or the readiness of post-Temple era Jews to adapt the rabbinical model and live without sacrifices both point to the necessary swiftness of adaptation. Those of us who have spent our lives studying English literature expect a sort of reflexive anti-Catholicism, almost an assumed, passive thing by Victoria, lacking vitriol and smacking of a more social unease regarding them. Was it their disloyalty to the Queen in refusing to join the Church of England? Well, no, because, as much as the dissenters were the same in that way, that weren’t as thoroughly disregarded in public life as the Catholics. As recently as 1906, long after Catholic Emancipation, Hilaire Belloc was forced to make a public statement in defense of his religion during his first campaign for Parliament, saying that if he was defeated because of his religion, he would have been glad not to serve them. So it’s always a little surprising to realize that, not only was Catholicism the state religion of England before 1531, but it was in fact a vibrant and living faith there, fueling popular culture and worming its way into the arts on all levels, sometimes with the utmost subtlety.

Any religion worth its bones and scapulars should probably infuse itself into popular imagination, wrapping itself in the culture and, like a seed crystal, transforming the culture it touches. Religions screw around with everything they touch, and they should, because they’re whole-worldviews; Christianity made Western civilization very anthropocentric, and laid down the rails of scientific investigation and the format of the university. So it’s not surprising that when, in the early throes of the English Reformation, when the Church of England and zealous Protestants (to make a distinction both real and academic) tried to wipe clear away any vestiges of Catholicism that still might be clinging to the mind of Joe Commoner, they did at best a superficial job. They scraped away references to Mary off the vellum of the mystery collections, removed entire (hypothetical) plays about her death and assumption into Heaven, and yet left the plays structurally untouched, allowing for a far subtler Catholicism to remain intact.

The Second Shepherd’s Play is a recounting of a part of the traditional nativity narrative. The biblical account from the Gospel According to Luke is remarkably brief, spanning a mere eleven verse recounting the seeing an angel, witness the heavenly celebration, and going to Jerusalem to see the newborn messiah. The medieval play in the Wakefield cycle, however, is far longer than that, clearly containing material added by the anonymous author, the so-called “Wakefield Master,” It’s version of the story involves an elaborate subplot about a trickster and magician named Mak stealing one of their lambs. It is this subplot in particular I want to talk about.

While I’ve found it odd that a sorcerer is going to be as dull as to steal and have his wife hide it, that’s the play, so let’s stick to it. In this entirely non-biblical tale, Mak has made off with a small lamb in the night, which the shepherds, three in number, discover only in the morning upon counting the herd in question, and go off in search of the stolen lamb. Itself reminiscent of another part of Luke, the parable of the “Lost Sheep,” (“What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it?”), just to point out deeper echoes, the shepherds end up at Mak’s house, and accuse him of the theft.

This petty, medieval Loki, though, has had his wife Gill hide the poor thing in swaddling clothes, cradling it like a baby, and claiming it’s a sleeping child when the shepherds confront the thief. When the unfortunate ungulate lets out what must have been a desperate cry for help, an plaintive plea to be rescued from these lying maniacs addressed to those three dedicated pastorali, but was in reality little more than a bailing, boastful baaaa, the shepherds insist it must be their sheep. No, no, no, Mak’s wyf insists. She would sooner eat the child than wake it from its rest. This is, of course, exactly her intention.

Let’s consider this. It is, at first light, a simple side-narrative, oddly disconnected from the rest of the text. Watching it unfold, you wonder, what the hell is this? Is this just an excuse to devote an entire play to the visit of the shepherds? In The Killing of Abel, much time was devoted to exploring Cain’s relationship with God and with his brother, to understanding who Cain was and what was going through his head when he killed his brother, to God’s reaction and response. There was a whole story immediately relevant to the text. But in The Second Shepherd’s Play, the connection is not plainly evident, but shows up if you’re willing to look at it as a religious play for religious people with a specifically Catholic imagination. The two halves are profoundly interrelated.

The story of Mak and Gill precedes the announcement of the birth of Christ by the angels, but also prefigures it. This simple narrative is the nativity writ small, placed on a much smaller corporal canvas, a shadow of things to come. If we start with the simple Lamb>Lamb of God>Jesus correlation, we can begin teasing images out of the text; the shepherds, having sought the lamb, find a parody of the nativity, a false mother holding a lamb in swaddling clothes. They will, of course, soon find announced a greater lamb with a true mother, and the gifts they intend to bring for the child before the deceit is found mirrors the gifts brought to Christ and the image of worship and oblation. Further, the lamb was hidden from them, referencing the poor and secret birth of the Messiah where he couldn’t be found.

I was struck, though, by essentially Eucharist elements. The image of the lamb as something sacrificial is prominent in the Scriptures, and immediately evokes the story of the Exodus as well as Christ’s identification as the Lamb of God. But what does it mean to be the Lamb of God? Gill is quite explicit on her intentions to eat the lamb on her lap, drawing the connection together by calling it “the child” or “the baby.” There are two contexts where eating a human is not absolutely barbaric; the first is when it’s really an animal, this lamb here, and the other in the Eucharist. In the sixth chapter of The Gospel According to John, where the lamb imagery is most prevalent apart from The Revelation, Jesus says his “flesh is true food, and his body true drink,” and in the Sarum Rite of the Mass, used through most of England through the sixteenth century, the invocation of Jesus as “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” is repeated three times. It was an image that permeated medieval Catholicism and would have been the immediate referent if the audience knew what was to come soon after. They’d know; after  all, like any good religion, their Catholicism filled up the whole world.

You Don’t Even Call Me Godfather.

Am I the only one who finds the bright blue of the box distracting, almost comical?

I read the other day about a wonderful project, a labor of love years in the making, something that has sorely needed doing, because what we already had was insufficient. I remember when they were cleaning up St. Peter’s Basilica, you know, the big church in Rome where the Pope does his thing. No, not St. John Lateran. The big one! Yeah, that one. Anyway, it was for countless years a gleaming ediface of white, reflecting the sun, shining in afternoon. But they cleaned it up, stripped away what turned out to be decades upon decades upon decades of soot and grime, and found underneath it a richly-painted building covered in Renaissance pastels. It was mochas, creams, teals. While it had always been beautiful, we had forgotten how beautiful it really was.

Fear not, space cadets, because a similar work of grandeur has been unveiled: the restore, remasted, Godfather Trilogy! The original DVD release was done as a direct scan from a shoddy print, covered in dust, scratches, tears, itself a copy of a copy of a copy, rather than a new print from the original negative. But all that copying had destroyed the film’s original visual tone; it was overly dark in some scenes, washed out in others. The entire product looks like everyone is surrounded by countless, unswattable mosquitoes. It lacked the original releases “brassy yellow.”

But now, three years and seven-million dollars later, it’s been restored, for release on DVD and Blu-Ray. Slate is going so far as to call it a DVD killer, the ultimate reason for people with Hi-Def TVs to toss their old players for a shiny new Sony machine, and has a wonderful account of the process by which the film was damaged and by which it was saved.

Luckily, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had a print of The Godfather that was in perfect condition. (This was the approved master print that Technicolor stored with the academy when the film was complete. It had never been shown in a theater.) So, when Harris & Co. did the digital color correction, they could use this print as a reference. They also worked side by side with Allen Daviau, a brilliant cinematographer who, in turn, consulted by phone with Willis himself. (Harris is a stickler for this sort of thing. When he restored Hitchcock’s Vertigo, he asked Jaguar to send him a color chip from the 1957 model of one of its cars—the same car that Kim Novak drove in the film—so that he could match the shade of green exactly.)

This sort of fastidiousness—and the seven-figure budget that Paramount allotted to the project—paid off. These discs are gorgeous. Take that opening scene of The Godfather Part II, the close-up of Pacino. The mosquitoes are gone; Pacino’s flesh tones are burnished. His facial expressions are complex, ambivalent; on the old DVD, his face looked stiff, expressionless. And now you can see dark wooden shelves behind him; in the old DVD, there was just an amorphous blackness.

As an Italian-American, I have a legal obligation to be excited about this, but I can assure you, I would be so even if the law didn’t enforce Italian stereotypes. If you’ll excuse me, I have to make spaghetti.