Abraham, a play;

by Hrotsvitha

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Genres: Drama

Nook

First published January 1, 1922

About the author

On ancient Roman plays, German nun and poet Roswitha (Hrotsvitha) (circa 935-circa 1000) modeled dialogs that represent an early stage in the revival of European drama.

With a name also spelled Hroswitha, Hrotsvit, or Hrosvit, this a 10th-century German secular canoness and dramatist, born into nobility, lived and worked in a community, the abbey of Bad Gandersheim in modern-day Lower Saxony, Germany. She attests her name as Saxon for "strong voice."

After antiquity, some critics consider her, who wrote in Latin, as the first person to compose drama in Latin-influenced western Europe.

Hrotsvit studied under Rikkardis and Gerberg, daughter of Henry the Fowler, king. Otto I the Great, emperor and brother of Gerberg, penned a history, one of poetical subjects of Hrotsvit in her Carmen de Gestis Oddonis Imperatoris , which encompasses the period to the coronation of Otto I in 962.

Gerberg introduced her, noted for her great learning, to Roman writers. Work of Hrotsvit shows familiarity with the Church Fathers and classical poetry, including that of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, and Plautus, and she modellded her own verse on that of Terence. Several of her plays draw on the "Apocryphal gospels." Her works form part of the renaissance of Otto.

Reviews

[Zadignose]

Well, this is what you get when you read a play written by a tenth-century Saxon nun who knew her play would never be performed. It's simple-minded, crude, it has almost no bearing on actual life in the world, and it's... a little crazy.

Now, while it's simple, admittedly it's not quite as simple as Woody Allen's hygiene play from Love and Death (which you can see here at around the 2:25 mark... that's a play that's worth the 30 seconds it takes to watch). But it comes close.

As a reading experience, it's partially redeemed by being very short and containing a few interestingly odd quotables. E.g.

"...if you keep yourself un-corrupted and a virgin, you will be made equal to God's angels. You will be freed from the burden and toil of the body, and there in the midst of the heavenly host, you will traverse space, treading upon the clouds, tracing the circle of the Zodiac, and never slackening your step until at last you sink to rest in the arms of the Virgin's Son, in His Mother's bridal chamber!"

However, I promise you that my summary, which will spoil the whole thing, will be more entertaining than the play itself.

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So, basically, a hermit-monk named Abraham has a dilemma when his granddaughter is orphaned at the age of eight. Yeah, Abraham apparently has a grown son who just died along with his wife, plus Abraham has been sort of a foster dad to his granddaughter for some time... guess he had a life before he turned monkish. So he drops in to chat with his fellow-hermit who lives in a nearby cell (so... they're mostly hermetic...) and chats, since Ephraim is needed as a sounding board and as a counselor who will say pretty much what Abraham would have said anyway. Here's the dilemma: this eight year old child should not be allowed to fall into sinful ways. So they decide to make her stay a virgin for life and become a nun.

They talk to her for about two minutes and she's persuaded. She knows she would be an ass to refuse to become a nun. This is not my own crude humorous way of spinning the tale, the actual quote is "MARY, (emphatically). Anyone who rejected a chance like that would be an ass!" Problem solved.

New dilemma, four years later. Mary has unfortunately grown to be twelve, and therefore (while living as a nun in a cell right next to her hermit-grandfather) she has suddenly fallen in love with a pimp (disguised as a monk)...

"Your story horrifies me!"

...and she has since run off to become a prostitute, because the sin of falling once was so great "...[having] given up all hope of ever being able to earn pardon, she deliberately chose to re-enter the world and minister to its lusts."

Fortunately, Abraham has another acquaintance who is in the world and sometimes travels, so he asks the guy to find his granddaughter. Two years later he finally locates her in a brothel where she has been ministering to the lusts of uncountable numbers of men.

Abraham has a plan. He will dress as a man of the world, and approach his granddaughter in the guise of a lover, pay her pimp to get her alone, and shame her. She won't recognize him, of course, because he will be wearing a hat. But she does almost recognize him by his smell.

All goes well. When he gets Mary alone and removes his outer disguise, revealing his monkish attire and tonsured head, she is utterly humiliated, and then returns to God. Abraham is sure to point out the extent of his own sacrifices on her behalf:

...Have not I, a professed hermit, for your sake kept company with roysterers and, to avoid risk of detection, even cracked jokes with them?

Though she almost commits the greater sin of disbelieving God's power of grace to redeem such a low sinner as herself, she swears to obey her grandfather in everything, goes back to being a nun, and everyone praises God.
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Now, admittedly I didn't read this in Latin so... oh, who am I fooling, there's no way this is any better in the original.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hrothsvita is a super interesting playwright, in part because there's no agreement on whether or not her plays were (or were meant to be) performed during her lifetime. There are some indications that they could have been, but given the medieval Church's opposition to theatre, it's also entirely possible that these were just written to be read/studied as a guide for learning Latin. Personally, I think they probably were performed, though likely just by students or nuns at the convent where Hrothsvita lived. And the ending of Abraham contributes to my belief that they were likely performed.

The play is about a hermit named Abraham, who decides to raise his young ward Mary in the ascetic lifestyle, but when she is seduced by a false monk, she despairs and runs away, becoming a prostitute to support herself. Abraham sends his friend to go find her, and when the friend tells him what's become of Mary, Abraham disguises himself as a client and goes to the brothel, eats a feast, and then takes Mary to a bedroom where he reveals his true identity and convinces her to abandon her life of sin and trust that through repentance God will forgive her. Mary agrees, though initially she despaired of earning God's forgiveness. Abraham takes her back to the caves, and she does penance, to the approval of Abraham and his friend Ephrem.

The thing in this play that makes me think this was meant for performance is the ending, where Abraham and Ephrem are talking about how good a model Mary's penance is for others who would see her suffering or hear her cries. Mary isn't actually in the scene, on paper anyway. She has no lines in the scene, which allows her to be absent. But, Abraham and Ephrem talk about SEEing her wearing a hair shirt and fasting, about HEARing her prayers for forgiveness, and about how seeing and hearing these things would be a great lesson for anyone about the glory of God. If we consider that this is a pedagogical play--it was a teaching tool--then it's very odd to have people in the play saying how effective a model Mary's behavior is if we're not seeing Mary's behavior on the stage. This becomes much more effective if behind Abraham and Ephrem we see the performer playing Mary doing the things the hermits are describing, so that the dialogue tells the audience how we should be reacting to this penitence. And personally, I think Hrothsvita was clever enough that she would recognize that.

[Brandon Skanes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this was certainly something!

[Rachel]

I feel like I can’t really properly rate this — and probably other upcoming medieval texts i’ll be reading — because I just know they’re not my thing. I’m reading them for class and otherwise I wouldn’t go near them. So while I don’t vehemently hate this, it was just a slightly boring and average reading experience, where I know i’ll get much more out of it once we discuss it in class.