The Comedy of Joseph’s Trouble

 Here are my thoughts on a question raised in class, ‘what should we do with comedy’?

 Horace Walpole said, “The world is an old acquaintance that does not improve upon one’s hands. However, one must not give way to the disgust it creates. My maxim, and practice too, is to laugh, because I do not like to cry.” and “I desire to die, when I have nobody left to laugh with me … Rabelais brightens up to me, as I see more of the world; he treated it as it deserved, laughed at it all, and (as I judge from myself) ceased to hate it; for I find hatred an unjust preference.” On the other hand, Saint Benedict rejected laughter as nothing more than a source of iniquity and stated in the Rule that monks should never laugh. Which way should we go?

 The Trouble is interesting because it contains many of the dramatic conventions of tragedy despite the content not being tragic at all. It contains, for example, a sudden reversal of fortune (in Aristotle, peripeteia) preceding its discovery by the hero (anagnorisis) in a long, tragic soliloquy. However, the tragic peripeteia – Joseph being cuckolded – is untrue, and the conventional anagnorisis, which the audience knows is farcical, occurs at the start of the play, rather than during the middle or final third. The true anagnorisis, which is Joseph’s discovery that Christ is the son of God, does occur at the usual point: around the beginning of the final third; but only after we have listened to his long soliloquy and the unfolding of a drama surrounding his farcical realization. This inversion of the traditional tragic devices renders the Trouble into a kind of anti-tragedy, where the tragic denouement is at the beginning, and the characters work themselves towards the realization that everything was fine all along.

 This structure must be contextualized by the fact that the foibles of Joseph are foregrounded against the background of divine history unfolding: namely, the Conception of Christ as one episode in a wider drama that encompassed all of human history. This is because the Trouble would entirely lose its comedic value if the reader/listener didn’t already know that Christ is the son of God. If the reader thought that Joseph was actually cuckolded, then the opening soliloquy could only be read literally. It would entirely lose the comedic flavor of passages such as

The bargain I made there,
That rues me now full sore,
So am I straitly stead.

 In the context of divine history, this passage is comedic partly because Joseph is worrying about a nonexistent problem, and partly because he is so wrapped up in his own ‘bargain’ that he cannot see the most important event to ever occur even though it is unfolding directly in front of him: the salvation of humanity. Likewise, if we believed that he was actually cuckolded, then we would sympathize with his soliloquy. The anti-tragedy would thus become tragedy, until it wasn’t, at the point when Gabriel revealed the truth to Joseph. The universal drama would become totally confused, we would not have understood the comedic mode from the outset, and we therefore would have missed the comedic idea of later passages such as

To Bethlehem bus me it bear;
For little thing will women dere;
Help up now on my back.

 This passage is comedic because Joseph is absorbed in regaining his manhood while the central event of the universal drama is playing out in front of him. It is the power of this contrast, of the tension between an apparent cuckolding (Joseph) and the unfolding of divine history (Mary, in her aloofness), and the verisimilitude of the domestic dispute, that draws the reader/listener into the drama. 

 The comedic mode is therefore indispensable in situating the Conception within the framework of divine history. If we already know that Christ is the son of God and that the historical moment of the Conception occurs against the backdrop of a divine history unfolding, then the pseudo-cuckolding of Joseph, given the rubric of the Trouble, needs to be funny. Otherwise, we would sympathize with his soliloquy and would therefore allow the actual divinity of Christ to recede from our interpretation of the drama. Likewise, it is the very tension between the mundane and worldly (Joseph losing his manhood) and the universal and divine (the divinity of Christ, represented by Mary’s withdrawal from the central dialogue) that resonates so profoundly with an audience that itself is suspended between contemplation of the worldly (Joseph) and contemplation of the divine (Mary); this, after all, is the situation of any Christian audience that is not living under Benedict’s rule in which laughter and ‘disturbing thoughts’ (Anselm) are under perpetual interdict. The comedic mode draws laughter from that tension – as one plucks a stringed instrument – and thereby dissipates it. The reality of Christ’s divinity within the context of the wider drama thereby becomes fuller and more profound.

 We may ultimately interpret the comedic mode in the Trouble as an attempt to negotiate the sublimity of the Conception and the drama with a popular audience. In this context, we can appreciate that comedy serves as an ideal medium through which to enter into the knowledge of that sublimity on a more authentic, and therefore genuine, level. A distinctly English feature of this cycle is its earnestness: the York author makes no attempt to explicate the mysteries. He speaks to (or perhaps with) his audience, but does not lecture them. And the audience in turn does not disguise its limited understanding of the mysteries or its inherent propensity to flee from that which it does not understand: it understands how Joseph could have thought that he was cuckolded, but not how Christ could have been born without pain, for example, so the latter is portrayed naively, while the former is portrayed realistically. The comedy of the Trouble is a way of overcoming this limited knowledge by drawing its audience into the Conception through the thing that it understands – a domestic dispute – while not denying the things that it doesn’t. It therefore presents an honest depiction of the meaning of the Conception for York as much as it does the Conception itself; the Conception thereby becomes at once a divine and a distinctly Yorkish affair, to the extent that the author does not erase the fact that he and his audience are provincial.

 So, perhaps the comedic flavor is necessary for the Trouble because of its rubric: it begins with Joseph learning about the pregnancy, and so his worries needed to be farcical because they were situated within the context of the universal drama. But why choose this rubric? Why not just organize the plot in such a way that would not require comedy?

 For me, it seems that the answer is because the author is being honest about the content of the Gospels. In Matthew, “Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together” and “was found with child”. The implication is clearly that contemporaries would have believed that Joseph had been cuckolded. Joseph “thought on these things”, but apparently only understood the truth after “the angel of the Lord appeared to him in his sleep” and told him to “fear not”. Importantly, Matthew places no emphasis whatsoever on the idea of infidelity: the social implications are entirely implicit, except in the line where Joseph, “being a just man”, is not “willing to expose” Mary. The scenario in Matthew, therefore, only represents Joseph as a just man who wanted to protect his wife, not as the confused old man of the Trouble who is somehow a side-character in his own marriage. Now, the Trouble entirely invented the ill-informed confrontation between husband and wife. But, it was honest in imagining the social circumstances that would have surrounded the affair as Matthew described it. That is, the author imaged the scene (in which he and has audience believed implicitly) playing out in the way that he knew, thus producing an admittedly Yorkish drama. But situating the actual events of the Gospels within the social framework understood by the author does not represent an intentional dissimulation of the canonical text. It represents an attempt to recreate the actual events of the Gospels in the context of the author’s own era, since divine history is always unfolding, even in York. The truth of the drama was thus realized through its provincial verisimilitude: Matthew’s story was funny because it was true.

 Finally, all of this should have an acceptable limit. The exploitation of comedic tension by the Trouble is only possible because, as the editor says, ‘the laughter does not reach Mary’. It is the contrast between Mary’s purity and Joseph’s shortsighted worldliness that produces the tension, and so the former is just as critical to preserve as the latter is to invent.

 So what should we think about Benedict’s Rule? A fundamental claim of the Enlightenment is that it encourages people to live as they are, rather than as they should be. This claim is not to be taken seriously, partly because it means that the Enlightenment must ultimately reject any normative principle of spiritual improvement, which is unacceptable. Nonetheless, it is a powerful claim, and it is therefore important to recognize that it can only be made because of authors like Benedict. In the end, his Rule may be suitable for training monks, but perhaps not for living well: our situation is what it is – removed from God – and while we may disagree with the Enlightenment on many counts, we must admit that it is beyond our power to fundamentally alter our situation. Perhaps the greatest strength of the Trouble is that it greets its audience as they are, in their limited understanding, in their Yorkishness, and not ‘as they should be’; but only to the same extent as God greets Anselm in his own ‘inner chamber’.

-Henry Stratakis-Allen

Edit: I wanted to add this picture of the Mérode Altarpiece (ca. 1425), which I had in mind while reading the Trouble. Obviously, we can note the presence of two contemporary donors on the left panel, the unabashedly Dutch setting, and Joseph’s depiction as a storefront carpenter in the town square, absorbed in his work, and apparently oblivious to the unfolding of the (literally) central drama in the middle panel. Joseph looks down at his carpentry, away from the center, while the donors peer into the room and perform an act of devotion. The artist has honored Joseph with a bright blue turban (the pigment was expensive at the time), and yet there is something vaguely comedic in his unawareness. All of this is occurring outside of time, and yet within a familiar setting.