III
By way of conclusion, it is worth pausing to consider the question of
how Johannes' anthology migrated from Thuringia to the Tirol. Walter
Senn
adopts the romantic but wholly unsubstantiated view that the book was
acquired by Oswald von Wolkenstein during his travels, and that the
minnesinger bequeathed it to the monks at Neustift when he died in August,
1445.
[24] Similarly, Wolfgang
Michael, who has long been intrigued by the possible influence of Goliardic
verse on the development of German religious drama, speculates that the
playbook may have been carried south by wandering scholars.
[25] Although it is true that the
Ludus de
resurrectione concludes with St. John's plea to the audience to
donate
"braten / schuldern und ouch vladen" to the hungry students in their midst
(ll. 1176-77), the three plays are all conceived on such a vast and elaborate
scale as to make them totally unsuitable for performance by a small troupe
of
vagantes. Indeed, Hartl (pp. 130-131) and Neuhauser (p.
5)
are correct to point out that a reference to the prayers of "dy pristere
und dy schulere alle" in the exhortation by St. John cited above (l. 1183)
suggests that the play was staged by a monastic
schola
cantorum.
There is no need to invent such colorful intermediaries as minstrels
or vagantes, however, if one accepts the more mundane
premise
that the Augustinians at Neustift simply acquired the plays from brothers of
their own order in Thuringia. During the fourteenth century, the
Augustinians enjoyed a period of great expansion throughout central
Europe. Even as early as 1300 the order had over forty houses in Germany.
It is surely not without significance that two of the oldest and most
prominent Augustinian houses were those at Gotha and Schmalkalden, in
the very heart of the region which produced not only the three plays in
Innsbruck Universitätsbibliothek Cod. 960, but also a number of
similar plays now preserved elsewhere.[26] What is more, there is
considerable
evidence of direct contact between Thuringia and various Tirolian
monasteries throughout the period in question. In the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, for example, numerous
clerics from central Germany served as bishops, abbots, and provosts in the
Tirol, including such a distinguished figure as Nicholas of Cusa, who was
bishop of Brixen from 1450 to 1458.[27] Walter Neuhauser (pp. 13, 18, n.
29 and
30) records the names of several scribes who found their way from central
Germany to Tirolian monastic scriptoria, and notes that a certain "Georg,
genannt der Heuss" (the Hessian) resided at Neustift in 1384. Taken
together, this evidence suggests that although the plays in the Innsbruck
codex may not have been originally
composed by or for monks,
[28] it is
quite likely that they were collected in the vicinity of Schmalkalden by
Augustinians who eventually carried their small anthology south to their
sister house at Neustift bei Brixen.
It has recently been argued that because every new performance of
a play is tantamount to the creation of a new textual variant, it is
unreasonable to criticize editors who propose fanciful, if dramatically
effective, emendations of the manuscripts which we have inherited.
According to this line of reasoning, it is not the individual extant text, but
rather the dramatic tradition itself—a process predicated on constant
variation from performance to performance—which is the legitimate
object of critical attention:
Therefore, even if the same man composed the baker's speech and the
speeches of the other tradesmen [in the estates satire of the Easter play],
even if he wrote them on the same page, all that is irrelevant. The tradition
allows them to be broken up and placed anywhere in the manuscript or in
a production of the play where they seem appropriate. . . . Hartl's edition
of the Innsbruck Easterplay, then, is not wrong; it is no more than an
indication of another potential variation, which Hartl transforms into a real
variation by creating a text. . . .
[29]
Few would argue that later adaptations and performances are unworthy of
study in their own right. Nor can it be claimed that codicological evidence
alone enables one to make definitive pronouncements about a playwright's
intentions or about how a play may have been staged at any given
performance. Nevertheless, it remains true that manuscript studies can teach
us a great deal about the origin and transmission of medieval plays.
[30] Moreover, as this study has
attempted to
demonstrate, the analysis of scribal errors can be an especially useful test
to help us decide whether a copyist was acting as an independent redactor
or as a scrupulous transcriber of texts which, to him at least, seemed
authoritative, complete, and performable exactly as they had come to his
hand. In the present case, the palpable embarrassment of the scribe who
crossed out his own errors on fol. 38r, only to be mocked for his
carelessness by a later reader, testifies to the fact that
the maker of the Innsbruck playbook understood that his task was not to
alter or improve his source, but to preserve it. While directors and actors
must indeed be free to manipulate texts in order to serve their own
theatrical purposes, historians and editors can surely do no less than adhere
to the same strict standards of textual fidelity which Johannes and his peers
adopted for themselves.
