Dramatic Adaptations and Worldview Translations: The Implied Metaphysics of Roger Howard’s Margery Kempe. A Ballad Play (1978) and Heidi Schreck’s Creature (2009)
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Johannes Wally
Abstract
This essay explores the implied metaphysics of two dramatic adaptations of The Book of Margery Kempe (late 1430s): Roger Howard’s Margery Kempe. A Ballad Play (1978) and Heidi Schreck’s Creature (2009). The essay’s premise is that adapting a medieval text requires authors to engage in an act of ideological translation. This act of translation is likely to be indicative of the plays’ respective implied worldviews, of which the implied metaphysics is a central component. The essay analyses the plays’ crucial scenes and compares them to the corresponding sections of the medieval pre-text. Thereby it establishes that Howard, drawing on a Marxist understanding of history, presents Margery’s story as one of social emancipation. In contrast, Schreck, inspired by feminist theology, frames Margery’s journey as one of female self-actualisation. Despite their clear ideological thrusts, the metaphysical assumptions implied by each text are not straightforward. Howard’s play seems to allow for a metaphysical reality, whereas Schreck’s play seems to offer a postmodern take on medieval spirituality. The essay suggests that this incongruity of the plays’ implied worldviews might, at least partly, stem from their discursive features. It closes with some general remarks on how plays might imply worldviews.
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Artikel in diesem Heft
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Late-Victorian Decadence as Mode, Theory and Attitude
- Vernon Lee’s Decadent Vision of History: Waste and Possibility
- Absinthe as a Cypher for Decadence and Catalyst of Degeneration in Marie Corelli’s Wormwood: A Drama of Paris
- Aestheticism and Decadence in the Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Closed Buds of Decadence: Reproductive Idleness in the Poetry of Alice Meynell and Rosamund Marriott Watson
- “All Things to All Men”: Decadence as Represented in Lionel Johnson’s Early Literary Journalism
- Dramatic Adaptations and Worldview Translations: The Implied Metaphysics of Roger Howard’s Margery Kempe. A Ballad Play (1978) and Heidi Schreck’s Creature (2009)
- The Neoliberal Impasse: Economy in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
- Eating the Archive: Food Recipes, Migrant Women, and Decolonizing Multiculturalism in Alibhai-Brown’s The Settler’s Cookbook
- I’m going home, Riv? Yes, Richie. I’m a take you home... African American Homeplaces and Resistance in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing
- Reviews
- Sarkowsky, Katja, and Mark U. Stein (eds.). 2021. Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts. Leiden/Boston: Brill Rodopi, 262 pp., 14 figures, 5 tables, € 117.70.
- Jens Martin Gurr. 2024. Understanding Public Debates: What Literary Studies Can Do. New York, NY: Routledge, x + 209 pp., £ 145.00/$ 190.00.
- Pamela Buck. 2024. Objects of Liberty: British Women Writers and Revolutionary Souvenirs. Early Modern Feminisms. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 202 pp., 13 colour and 13 b-w images, $ 150.00.
- Naomi Levine. 2024. The Burden of Rhyme: Victorian Poetry, Formalism, and the Feeling of Literary History. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 255 pp., 3 halftones, $27.50.
- Emily Horton. 2024. 21st-Century British Gothic: The Monstrous, Spectral, and Uncanny in Contemporary Fiction. London/New York/Dublin: Bloomsbury Academic, 272 pp., £ 85.00.
- Miles P. Grier. 2023. Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery. Writing the Early Americas. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, xv + 325 pp., 15 illustrations, $ 100.00.
- Allan Hepburn (ed.). 2024. Friendship and the Novel. Montreal/Kingston et al.: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 297 pp., $ 110 CAD/€ 143.95.
- Debamitra Kar. 2025. Conflict Zone Literatures: A Genre in the Making. London: Routledge, 196 pp., £ 145.00.
- Pramod K. Nayar. 2024. Vulnerable Earth: The Literature of Climate Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, x + 295 pp., £ 90.00.
- Heather Alberro, Emrah Atasoy, Nora Castle, Rhiannon Firth, and Conrad Scott (eds). 2025. Utopian and Dystopian Explorations of Pandemics and Ecological Breakdown: Entangled Futurities. London: Routledge, 232 pp., £ 145.00/ $ 190.00.
