SOURCE: "Hroswitha and the Feminization of Drama" in Women in Theatre, edited by James Redmond, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 49-58.

[In the following essay, Schroeder observes proto-feminist themes in Hroswitha's plays, especially "the thematic pattern of feminine weakness overcoming masculine strength."]

Most non-specialists who think about Hroswitha at all tend to think of her largely as a freak of literary history, a kind of duck-billed platypus standing outside the normal flow of evolution—in this case, the evolution of Christian drama in the Middle Ages. Yet our perception of her as a sideshow exhibit—the tenth-century nun who wrote religious plays in imitation of Terence—can prove an obstacle when we come to examine her actual accomplishment: the mere existence of Hroswitha's plays seems odd enough to keep us from finding out if they are anything more than oddities. This paper, ignoring literary history, will take Hroswitha for granted as a phenomenon and focus instead on how, in both her plays and her prefatory comments to the plays, she exploits her own feminine self-consciousness for dramatic and ironic ends.

In the preface and dedicatory epistle to her plays, Hroswitha seems to present herself as an earnestly naive, self-deprecating, artistically insecure but dutifully pious female. She claims that her work, which she calls 'the little work of a weak little woman' ('opusculum vilis mulierculae'), scarcely merits the praise it has received; all credit, rather, is due the giver of the grace which works in her, since her apparent knowledge surpasses her 'muliebre ingenium', her womanly wit.¹ What she has done comes from God, though it would be wrong to deny that with God's help she has acquired a bit of knowledge, since she is a creature capable of learning ('quia sum animal capax disciplinae', p. 236). Indeed, in a sense her works testify more strikingly to God's grace than they would had she been a man, since women are believed to be more intellectually sluggish than men ('quanto muliebris sensus tardior esse creditur', p. 236). The plays themselves, she claims, show how 'feminine fragility conquers and overcomes with confusion the strength of men' (p. 234). These comments suggest that she is acutely conscious of her own position as a woman writer and of her theme as, essentially, a woman's theme.

Though some have taken Hroswitha's demure disclaimers at face value, the tone of the prefatory material is almost certainly ironic. Peter Dronke goes so far as to say that in the preface 'she says little of what she really means, and means almost nothing of what she says'.² But while we sense that what Dronke calls her 'weak little woman pose' is indeed a pose, masking considerable self-assurance, her irony is somewhat more complex than would be the case if, for example, Margaret Thatcher were to use a similar ploy to announce a new plan to stamp out the Trades Union Council. Hroswitha's irony is both verbal and dramatic; if on one level she 'means almost nothing of what she says', on another she is forcing us to re-evaluate the very words she is using: seeming weakness becomes strength, as seeming strength reveals its underlying weakness. In this her preface adumbrates, and is illuminated by, the recurrent, ironic overturning of established values in the plays themselves.

Thus, as Dronke shows (particularly in his analysis of Dulcitius), the thematic pattern of feminine weakness overcoming masculine strength—the Christian virgins, for example, dismaying their powerful and pompous pagan oppressors—is prefigured in the preface by Hroswitha's own confrontation with Terence.³ Terence, like the Roman oppressors, is powerful, male, and pagan; Hroswitha is a weak little ill-educated Christian woman. It is interesting how she emphasizes the comparative weakness of her own language ('vilitas dictationis', p. 234); all she really has in her favor is a devotion to Christ. Her relationship to Terence encapsulates the same cluster of oppositions which she says her plays exemplify: female-male, Christian-pagan, weakness-strength. And just as her characters, with God's help, succeed against seemingly overwhelming odds, so, by implication, Hroswitha herself manages the unlikely feat of writing plays worthy of comparison with those of her classical predecessor. In her plays, as Dronke says, 'the ultimate victory is a victory of God, but Hroswitha sees it "especially" ('praesertim') as a feminist triumph. Weak women show their power, strong men go under.'⁴ Hroswitha seems to see herself participating in an analogous triumph.

Yet in a sense this identification of weakness and femininity is something of a sleight-of-hand trick by Hroswitha. The pervasive pattern is indeed seeming weakness conquering seeming strength, but in only two of the plays—Dulcitius and Sapientia, the two dramas of virginal martyrdom—do we find the weak, the feminine, and the Christian explicitly united. The others are dramas of conversion in which, I would argue, we are induced to see fragilitas as metaphorically feminine even when it manifests itself in men. At the outset of Gallicanus, for example, Gallicanus, the leader of the Roman troops, is pagan, masculine, and apparently powerful, yet he is victorious in battle only when, his defeat seemingly assured, he surrenders himself to the True God and his foes, the Scythians, collapse like a punctured tire. Worldly power has given way to worldly weakness (he gives up his position, gives away his wealth, and goes off to become the disciple of a holy man), paganism has given way to Christianity, but his feminization is by association only, as if the offstage prayers of Constantia, Artemia, and Attica had, in a sense, contributed to unmanning him. Returning from his paradoxical victory, he dramatizes this spiritual feminization by renouncing his earlier desire to marry Constantia, Constantine's daughter, and instead embracing her own vows of chastity. In Callimachus, Callimachus undergoes an analogous conversion. Appalled by Callimachus' lustful advances, Drusiana—another chaste Christian—altruistically dies in order to spare him the shame of being exposed, and in so doing lays the foundation for his own quasi-posthumous transformation into a chaste Christian. Again the male character triumphs spiritually after losing his worldly power; again the agent of conversion is a woman; again the conversion itself is represented as the substitution of the values embodied in the virtuous woman (chastity, renunciation of the world) for the lust and worldly power more native to the man.

Hroswitha's two remaining plays, Abraham and Pafnutius, differ from the others in that their central figures are sympathetic, Christian, unworldly men—earnest grizzled hermits—who undertake the salvation of fallen women. Abraham and Pafnutius may be outsiders to the 'masculine' world of the lovers, but they are, ineluctably, men—men, moreover, who from the outset are steadfast in their piety. In a worldly sense they are weak, and their weakness ends up defeating the more obviously powerful worldly lures that have seduced Thaia and Marns, but in what way do these plays illustrate Hroswitha's stated theme of 'feminine fragility' overthrowing the 'strength of men'? The possible answers to this question, though they may be tenuous, nonetheless cast some light on a non-obvious 'feminine' quality in Hroswitha's dramas generally.

On one level, of course, the two hermits can be seen as agents for restoring Thais and Maria to their true natures—the native purity which they have lost as a result of mingling with the world of men. Both women are depicted as essentially good. Maria has endured an oppressively pious upbringing by the holy Abraham and has fallen only after being seduced by a lecher disguised as a monk. Thais professes an unquestioning belief in God; as she burns her ill-gotten treasures she tells her lovers that for the first time in her life she is sane—a sanity misinterpreted as lunacy by those still enamored of the luxury which she is so spectacularly relinquishing. By accepting the false (and, implicitly, masculine) values of the world and the flesh, both heroines have been, in a sense, turncoats to their sex, and the old hermits are vehicles for their refeminization. We might thus regard the triumph in these plays as the triumph of Thais and Maria over a kind of abstracted Idea of the Male—an Idea subsuming, for Hroswitha, sex, glitter, and general spiritual perversion.

But Abraham and Pafnutius are also representative of another quality, so pervasive in Hroswitha's plays that we take it for granted, as a given: the extraordinary subordination of institutionalized rules to a kind of spiritual spontaneity. Her plays are set in the days of the early church not simply to provide her with the opportunity to meet Terence on something like his own ground, nor because that period provided the richest source of hagiographical material; her non-dramatic works show that she could come much closer to contemporaneity. Primitive Christianity seems to appeal to her in large part because she can depict it as a golden age of religious individualism, without ecclesiastical structures or hierarchy, without regulations or rituals (apart from baptism). The abbess in Pafnutius is the only real representative of a Christian institution, and she speaks of her 'exiguatatem habitationis' (p. 342), emphasizing her lack of pomp or the trappings of power. When the converted Gallicanus returns triumphantly to Rome he bypasses the pagan shrines and goes instead 'ad domum sancti Petri' (p. 253); this may be a kind of kenning for a church, but it has a decidedly domestic and personal flavor. He then, as we have noted, relinquishes all his earlier institutional ties. Constantine, in the same play, must have posed a problem for Hroswitha: he is at the same time Christian and emperor. But, as we shall see later, he lacks the trappings of power or pomp that Hroswitha gives to her pagan emperors. He pleads rather than commands; his worries—in the face of possible disaster for the Empire—seem largely personal; he makes no effort to impose religious conformity on his pagan general. Conversion, it seems, must come from within; God is available to the willing individual without the need for any formal mediation.

This non-institutionalized view of religion is connected, as well, with Hroswitha's almost proto-Abelardan ethic of intentionality. When, in Dulcitius, Sissinius threatens to punish Irena by hauling her off to a brothel, Irena points out that it is better for the body to be besmirched than to worship idols, and that in order to sin it is necessary that the soul consent. When Abraham, casting around for some way to retrieve his fallen niece, tells his fellow hermit Effrem of his plan to seek her out disguised as a potential lover, Effrem asks him what he'll do if meat and wine—which Abraham has vowed to avoid—are put before him. 'I shall by no means refuse, that I may remain unknown', says Abraham, and Effrem assures him that God knows what is in our hearts and understands our intentions ('qua intentione unaquaeque res geratur, intellegit', p. 311). In spite of her surface depravity, Thais is redeemed by her belief in God. And the notion that good intentions count for more than pedantic adherence to rules is applied by Hroswitha, in her preface, to herself: in order to carry out her intentions, Hroswitha admits that it has been necessary for her to write about things 'which are not permitted us to hear', but had she not done so she could not have accomplished her purpose. Although we are right to distrust general claims about what is 'characteristically feminine', I think that, in these plays, we almost subliminally perceive this preference for the relational and the spontaneous over the regulated and the institutionalized as in some sense a 'feminine' characteristic. It certainly forms a fourth element in Hroswitha's central set of oppositions: it is the powerful pagan males who seem obsessed with enforcing their rules, and the weak Christian women whose role, as often as not, is to subvert those rules and institutions. In this sense Abraham and Pafnutius take their place on the feminine side of the opposition.

Now that I've stretched the concept of the feminine beyond what the normal elasticity of the term may be able to tolerate, I'd like to examine in some detail the ironic inversion of expectations in Sapientia, the most straightforwardly 'feminist' of Hroswitha's plays and the play in which her central oppositions are most clearly exemplified. Sapientia begins with a dialogue between the emperor Hadrian and his flattering lackey Antiochus, who immediately establishes his institutional loyalty and identity ('My Lord Emperor, what desire has your servant but to see you powerful and prosperous? What ambition apart from the welfare and peace and greatness of the state you rule?') and emphasizes his alacrity in calling attention to any dangers which might threaten the state. Hadrian wonders what new dangers have appeared:

Hadrian. Come, if you have discovered some new
     danger, make it known to me.
Antiochus. A certain alien woman has recently
come                to this city with her three
children.
Hadrian. Of what sex are the children?
Antiochus. They are all girls.
Hadrian. And you think that a handful of women
   threaten danger to the state?
(p. 358; Plays, pp. 133-4)

As readers or audience we surely share Hadrian's surprise at the bizarre disproportion between Antiochus's fawning buildup and the nature of the threat itself, a disproportion that emphasizes Hroswitha's central contrast between worldly power (male, pagan, institutionalized) and seeming weakness (female, Christian, relational). Hadrian's response also echoes the pet word, 'muliercula', by which Hroswitha refers to herself in her preface: 'tantillarum … muliercularum aliquid', some very small little women, a double diminutive. The danger to the Roman state comes not simply from females, but from females shrunk to an extreme of insignificance.

Antiochus goes on to justify his fears: this woman is disrupting the concord ('concordiam') of the state with the dissonance ('dissonantia') of her religious practice. And her disruption has been effective: 'Our wives hate us and scorn us to such an extent that they will not deign to eat with us, still less share our beds.' The institutional harmony of the state is being subverted by the sort of threat that Hadrian's pomp and power are completely unsuited to deal with: this one intrusive woman is infecting all the women of Rome, and the result is marital discord. The largely impersonal institution of the state, Hroswitha implies, rests on the largely relational institution of marriage; women, by exercising their power over the latter, can help bring down the former. Christianity is presented as a feminine attack on the male power structure.

The play thus establishes its polarities at the outset, and establishes as well the ironic technique by which Hroswitha undermines our obvious expectations. The first part of the play, in fact, involves a kind of demolition, one after another, of Hadrian's misconceptions about women. He begins by assuming they are weak, but finds that Rome is being threatened by a feminist conspiracy. He goes on to assume that they are easily manipulated. When Sapientia and her daughters are brought before Hadrian, the emperor decides to persuade rather than threaten, and Antiochus agrees: 'the frail sex is easily moved by flattery' ('fragilitas sexus feminea facilius potest blandimentis molliri', p. 359). But as we have seen, Hroswitha has a tendency to use 'fragilitas' ironically, and the women turn out to be triumphantly impervious to flattery. Indeed, Hadrian is far more swayed by Sapientia's fair appearance than Sapientia is swayed by his 'fair speeches'; she seems to have a principled contempt for rhetoric as opposed to truth. But Hadrian, a slow learner, persists in his misconceptions and continues to chat up Sapientia in a greasily avuncular way: what are your children's names? How old are they?

This last question opens the floodgates for Sapientia's brain-teasing response, a long passage of complex numerical gibberish that leaves Hadrian totally mystified. Charity, she begins, 'has lived a diminished evenly even number of years; Hope a number also diminished, but unevenly even; and Faith an augmented number, unevenly even'. When Hadrian says that this answer leaves him in ignorance, Sapientia continues: 'Every number is said to be "diminished" the parts of which when added together give a sum which is less than the number of which they are parts. Such a number is 8. For the half of 8 is 4, the quarter of 8 is 2, and the eighth of 8 is 1; and these added together give 7.' And so on and so on. It has been common to regard this speech as an unfortunate bit of showing off on Hroswitha's part—Christopher St John, in the 1923 translation of the plays from which I have just quoted, apologizes in a footnote: 'It has been my duty to preserve this rather tiresome numerical discourse, which no doubt Roswitha introduced to impress the "learned men" to whom she submitted her work' (Plays, pp. 139-40). But a reader more charitably willing to admit that Hroswitha may have known what she was doing can find the passage both amusing and dramatically relevant. Essentially, it strikes me as another undercutting of Hadrian's smug assumptions about women: not only are they weak, harmless, and easily swayed by flattery, they are also stupid and ignorant. But Sapientia's speech leaves Hadrian gasping: 'Your answer leaves me in ignorance.' 'I am not familiar with these terms.' 'Little did I think that a simple question about the age of these children could give rise to such an intricate and unprofitable dissertation.' Sapientia is indeed showing off, but her speech has a double purpose within the play itself: to point Sapientia's own moral—that the exposition reveals God's wisdom in giving human beings the ingenuity to figure out such mathematical formulations—and to point as well the implicit moral that men would be better off not underestimating women. I suspect, in fact, that Hroswitha may have been laughing at the Christopher St Johns among her own circle of learned men.

But Hadrian is too dense to draw the second moral; like the tormentors in Dulcitius he is an obdurate buffoon unable to recognize that he is supporting a lost cause. And, like most self-important buffoons, he proves particularly vulnerable to mockery. When, unable to move Sapientia, he turns to bullying her daughters, they jeer at him for his foolishness. This serves to enrage Hadrian, and Antiochus calls them crazy for their insolence. In this he echoes Thais' inversion of seeming lunacy and seeming sanity in Pafnutius; it is in fact Hadrian and Antiochus, clinging in spite of everything to their own misguided notion of what works, who emerge as the true lunatics. Their tortures prove no more effective than their blandishments; Faith frisks on a heated gridiron and swims in boiling pitch before joyfully allowing herself to be decapitated; Hope, threatened by scourging, tells Hadrian that the more cruelty he shows 'the greater will be your humiliation'; Charity, the youngest of the lot, continues to make fun of Antio-chus' stupidity ('Although I am small, my reason is big enough to put you to shame', p. 371) and mocks the disparity between Hadrian's professions of power and his actual helplessness ('A mighty man! he cannot conquer a child of eight without calling fire to help him!'). After that helplessness has been dramatized by the death of five thousand of Hadrian's men in the fire intended for Hope, she too is beheaded; the play ends with Sapientia, surrounded by matrons, burying her dead daughters and praying for her own death. But, as Hroswitha shows, for this sisterhood of Christians death is victory, and the victory of God is at the same time clearly a 'feminist triumph'.

Sapientia, generally thought to be the last play Hroswitha wrote, is the play which articulates most explicitly her proto-feminist themes: all the women are good, Christian, seemingly weak but really strong, seemingly defeated but really victorious, anti-institutional; all the men are the reverse. The very starkness of the opposition helps us see how, in a play like Gallicanus, she can implicitly feminize a story in which the moral division between men and women is much less clearcut, and in which the apparently central characters are at the same time powerful men (or men, at least, who hold positions of institutional power) and sympathetic Christians. I'll conclude, then, by looking at the beginning of Gallicanus to see how she deals with the character of Constantine, whose dual role as emperor and Christian makes him a particularly interesting challenge.

In the speech with which he opens the play, Constantine sounds, at least, every inch the emperor. Like Julian, Diocletian, and Hadrian—his pagan counterparts—he establishes his role rhetorically, by giving orders: his general, Gallicanus, must hasten off to subdue the Scythians. But Gallicanus balks. Hesitantly, afraid of Constantine's anger, he says that if he is successful in his campaign he wants to marry the emperor's daughter, Constantia. Constantine's answer seems to surprise everyone. He isn't angry—the expected and appropriate imperial response—but says instead that he must first seek his daughter's consent. That is, instead of answering as emperor—his public persona—he answers as father; but as father he once again subverts expectations. Summoned, Constantia approaches with apparent submissiveness:

Constantia. I am here, my lord. Command
   me.
Constantine. I am in great distress of mind.
   My heart is heavy.
Constantia. As I came in I saw that you were sad,
   and without knowing the reason I was
   troubled.
Constantine. It is on your account.
Constantia. On my account?
Constantine. Yes.
Constantia. You frighten me. What is it, my
   lord?
Constantine. The fear of grieving you ties my
   tongue.
(p. 246; Plays, p. 6)

In spite of Constantia's continued filial honorifics, these few lines in effect succeed in reversing the relationship between the characters: she arrives expecting to be commanded, but quickly discovers that in fact her father is an inarticulate suppliant. Constantine himself is quite conscious of his problem in reconciling his imperial role with his role as father and Christian: 'For if, as is my duty as your father, I permit you to be faithful to your vow, as a sovereign I shall suffer for it. Yet were I to oppose your resolution—which God forbid—I should deserve eternal punishment' (p. 247).

It is at this point that Constantia comes to the rescue with her own plan: let Gallicanus believe that she agrees to the match, then trust to God to get them out of the dilemma should he happen to defeat the Scythians. Her suggestion is doubly interesting in light of Hroswitha's general thematic patterns. Unable himself to make a wise decision, Constantine has given the real power to direct events to his daughter: his apparent authority is a kind of façade. And Constantia's trickily expedient solution (tell Gallicanus what he wants to hear and worry about the consequences later) contrasts with Constantine's rather blinkered adherence to rules (a vow is a vow; one's word is one's word). We have noted already how Hroswitha seems willing to subordinate rules to intentions, cavalierly disregarding regulations if the cause is good. Moreover, Constantine's faith in God seems mediated by his faith in his daughter, who needs to remind him that God can resolve the apparent impasse he is confronting.

One effect of these opening scenes, then, is to make us redefine our sense of Constantine's character and role. His initial appearance of power ('Go get those Scy-thians!') has dissolved like a soap bubble in the face of Gallicanus' haggling and Constantia's real authority. In contrast to the Hadrian of Sapientia, Constantine shows himself a good Christian in part by showing himself an ineffective emperor—ineffective, that is, according to normal, 'masculine' managerial standards. The opening of Gallicanus, like the opening of Sapi-entia, also forces us to re-evaluate the relative importance of the two levels of action, the public and the private. In both plays, the emperors, victims in a sense of their masculine fondness for the institutional, initially misperceive what's going on: Hadrian can't accept that a few women pose a threat to the state, while Constantine thinks that his important conflict is with the Scythians, the external enemy. But where Hadrian fails to learn from the instructive women, and preserves to the end his illusion, or delusion, of being in control, Constantine is touchingly eager to relinquish real authority to his daughter (and, incidentally, to God), and to acknowledge the primacy of the domestic over the political. Ironically, Constantine, whom critics tend to treat with dismissive contempt for his 'weakness', in fact proves far more effective than the 'strong' Hadrian.⁵ The feminist-Christian conspiracy, a menace to Hadrian's state, is the salvation of Constantine's.

Hroswitha, then, has reconciled the apparent conflict between Constantine's conflicting roles (powerful emperor and sympathetic Christian) by showing that the imperial role is an empty shell: the 'real' Constantine is the concerned father and worried Christian eager to seek guidance from his wiser and more faithful daughter. He is thus, I would claim, feminized. Not only does he acknowledge the power of women to control events; he also fits into the feminine side of the equation so explicitly delineated in Sapientia, and takes his place among those virtuous men whose virtue comes from their rejection of the characteristic set of 'masculine' values (love of power, love of sex, love of rules). The pattern of seeming (and feminine) weakness conquering seeming (and masculine) strength thus encompasses Constantine as it does Sapientia and as, indeed, it does Hroswitha herself.

Notes

¹Hrotsvithae Opera, ed. H. Homeyer (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1970), p. 235. Unattributed parenthetical citations are to this edition. References to Plays indicate the translation is from The Plays of Roswitha, trans. Christopher St John (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966).

² Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 69. It will be obvious that I agree almost wholly with Dronke's discussion. It should be noted, though, that in this paper I use the more commonly recognizable titles for Hroswitha's plays rather than the fuller and more authentic titles used by Dronke.

³ Ibid., pp. 78-9.

⁴ Ibid., p. 71.

⁵ For an example of such dismissive contempt in a recent critic, see A. D. Frankforter, 'Hroswitha of Gandersheim and the Destiny of Women', The Historian, 41 (1979), 295-314.