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SEL 55, 2 (Spring 2015): 447–464

ISSN 0039-3657

© 2015 Rice University

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Allegory Plays

JODY ENDERS

On 8 September 1991, the FOX television network unveiled a morality play for modern times. The brainchild of the seasoned comedy team of Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas, it was called Herman’s Head.1 Suffice it to say that its allegorical modus ope-randi was lost on Rick Kogan, who reviewed the sitcom for the Chicago Tribune.2 Lambasting the entire premise as “Bad Enough to Give Viewers Headaches,” Kogan had no patience at all for what he deemed the absurdity of an incarnated psychodrama.3 How preposterous, he complained, that audiences would attend the scene of a conflict played out between four dramatis personae (Animal, Angel, Genius, and Wimp) as they debated one another within the psychic and theatrical space of Herman’s head:

“Herman’s Head” … is a comedy in name [only], the story of an upwardly mobile young man (William Ragsdale) who yearns to be a writer but is stuck in the research department of a magazine. He’s cute and vapid. Perhaps his lack of personality can be explained by the fact that his head is filled with conflicting feelings and emotions. These, however—and very unfortunately—take human form … Four people live inside Herman’s head. Scenes of Herman living his life alternate with scenes of the four head-dwellers discussing and trying to influence how Her-man lives his life. My head has a piece of advice for Fox concerning “Herman’s Head”: Chop it off.4

Imagine now that Kogan had said that about Everyman.

Jody Enders is a prizewinning theater historian and the author of five books, including The Medieval Theater of Cruelty (1999), Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (2002), and Murder by Accident: Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions (2009). Her Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries: Twelve Medieval French Plays in Modern English (2011) is the first of five projected volumes of performance-friendly English translations.

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For the purposes of this essay, Kogan’s hatchet job serves as an apt framing device, offering a surprisingly productive point of access to the subject of staging allegory. Although it is difficult to tell which aspect of the show Kogan disliked more—the moral/allegorical or the theatrical—the verdict was in for poor Herman and his head (notwithstanding the fact that regular cast members such as Yeardley Smith and Hank Azaria went on to become stars). Allegory no longer played in the 1990s, nor did it come across as particularly playful. So what happened? What was the problem exactly? And why is it still a problem today at the very sites where premodern allegory used to experience its greatest utility: in the classroom and in allegory’s principal generic incarnation for the stage known as the moral play or morality play? Why is the typi-cal response, “Oh no! Not a morality play!”?

What happened, I think, is a function of the enduring yet wrong-headed idea that, by dint of its frequent use as a tool of the intellectual elite, allegory is by nature not funny. In that respect, the endurance of a false critical dichotomy between the comic and the serious has hardly helped matters much. It is as if medievalists, early modernists, and even consumers of popular culture remained in a kind of Robertsonian time warp of all-caritas-all-the-time at the expense of the fun stuff—the concupiscientia.5 It is almost as if allegory had entered current habits of thought as defined by what it is not: not theater, not accessible, and not funny.

In this brief polemic, I draw upon two exemplary rhetorical treatises—the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria—in order to show that those as-sumptions are false.6 They are also ahistorical, propagating an inappropriate severance of allegory from the virtual and actual theatrical practices that informed its status as entertainment and even comedy. One can certainly empathize with the plight of so many of our students; premodern allegory is not exactly light reading. But my point is this: moral allegory no longer plays, and it needs to.

I submit that allegory plays in both senses of the term; it plays for the stage as good drama, and it plays in the sense that its authors, producers, directors, actors, and—that’s right—its audiences had some fun with it. Over time, both senses of play have been lost in translation and, literally, in translatio (which is also the term for metaphor in the Rhetorica ad Herennium [4.xxx–iv.45]). Both senses can be recovered once we reintegrate a bona fide, mnemotechnically inspired rhetoric of performance into the

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theory and practice of allegory. As we shall see, the rhetorical and mnemonic conception of allegory as prototheatrical or theatrical practice allows us to reincorporate the patently ludic dimensions into allegorical theater and theatrical allegory.7

In recent years, there has been a spate of insightful rethink-ings of allegory and mnemonics alike; so, fortunately, we have moved beyond some of the more rigid, neo-Aristotelian approaches to the tenor-and-vehicle description of the metaphors that un-dergird its figural universe.8 Still, allegory remains difficult to define.9 In a way, it is like pornography—we know it when we see it. My goal here is neither to define or to redefine allegory nor to proffer a verdict as to whether it is a genre, mode, style, figure, or something else. Instead, I make two interrelated arguments.

On one hand, rhetorico-mnemotechnical performance practice promises to remedy one of the more curious aspects of a preva-lent yet oddly tautological approach to allegory in which allegory is viewed almost as an allegory of itself. That is to say, allegory is oftentimes characterized as dramatic or theatrical but not as drama or theater per se. Rather, the assumption is that allegory functions—or best functions—as so-called closet drama. Not only is the closet-drama approach representative of the very thinking that long obscured something like the origins of liturgical drama: the problem is that allegory is not exclusively about reading.10 Thus, I seek to recuperate a part of allegory’s quintessence that for far too long has been neglected—its inherent theatricality. Allegory is often enacted; and, for better or worse, performance changes everything, as it makes ever-shifting interpretations vis-ible to others at the very moment of interpretation.

On the other hand, as turgid, pedantic, and obscurantist as much premodern allegory might seem, its rhetoric could be and often was funny, most notably when brought to life by myriad modes of performance. Allegory is as allegory does. And it does a lot, some of which played for laughs, regardless of whether such humor was always intended.11 Contemporary students, teachers, and scholars often assume (subconsciously at best and preten-tiously at worst) that just because a text was written in Latin, Old English, Middle French, or Old High German, its author, allegorist, rhetorician, playwright, or chronicler must be taken oh-so-seriously. But what we find esoteric nowadays was not necessarily esoteric during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One example I often use when teaching is the eleventh-century hagiographic narrative of Saint Alexis.12 On the face of things, what could be more allegorical than the extensive symbolics of an

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exemplary saint’s life? And yet, perversely perhaps, I have always longed to teach it as a comedy:

that God give them a son to His liking.

is born.

bride: Get thee away from me, woman! I abhor sin! Now, what I’d really like to do is go and live under a staircase. A decade or so ought to do it.

I may not be alone.In a word, the humor of allegorical performance and the per-

formance of allegorical humor can profit from a more playful yet contextualized rhetorical approach. Such an approach has the added advantage of shedding new light on the morality play, a genre that many modern audiences still resist.13 Making sense of allegory entails making sense of the rhetorical touchstones that nurtured medieval and Renaissance literary creation, per-formance practice, and exegesis and is even relevant to spirited post-postmodern debates about the value of surface reading. There is no understanding of how allegory communicates with-out recourse to the rhetorical tradition in general and to its performance-driven memory arts in particular. There is plenty of drama in psychodrama; and I do mean drama in every sense of the word, including the colloquial meanings elaborated online in the Urban Dictionary, beginning with the not-so-charming, nonanachronistically misogynistic tenor of “something women and especially teenage girls thrive on.”14 There was more than enough drama to go around in the morality play.

The art of memory was the classical rhetorical site at which learned speakers and writers—lawyers, theologians, authors, politicians, poets, musicians, and others—mentally rehearsed their oratorical performances to come during delivery (actio). As the fourth part or canon of rhetoric, memory (memoria/ars memo-randi) was, as the pseudo-Cicero put it, the “guardian” (custos) or “treasure-house” (thesaurus) of all three rhetorical genres and of all five rhetorical canons (including itself): invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, all as practiced in forensic, delibera-tive, and epideictic oratory (Rhetorica ad Herennium, 3.xvi.28).15 For rhetoricians, memory work was as much about preservation as it was about genesis, embodiment, and actualization, as when

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Longinus praised the power of the image (as both “mental pic-ture[]” and “Imagination”) to represent any “idea which enters the mind from any source and engenders speech.”16 Above all, it was about the law, at least in terms of its theoretical underpinnings. The forensic or juridical context was paramount to mnemotech-nics inasmuch as it was the site of the articulation of most early rhetorical theory proper.

The better to adjudicate crimes, early rhetoricians relied upon memoria as a means of concretizing, interpreting, and, most im-portantly, virtually performing—on an imaginary stage complete with lighting, sets, and backgrounds—the enacted argument at hand.17 Early jurists had long trained in the ars memorandi by staging a mental scene, a personal psychodrama in which per-sonifications (in the form of costumed characters) stood in for the argument and veritable plot of the social conflict that was expected to reach denouement and resolution in the trial. In one of the most oft-cited passages of one of the most widely disseminated texts of the European Middle Ages, the pseudo-Cicero underscores those properties in the Rhetorica ad Herennium of ca. 84 BC: “We ought, then, to set up images [imagines] of a kind that can adhere lon-gest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likenesses [similitudines] as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague, but doing something [agentes imagines]; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we dress some of them with crowns or purple cloaks, for example, so that the likeness may be more distinct to us” (3.xxii.37).18 Ever since the imagines agentes made their entrances, garbed in costume to incarnate argument, they functioned as inchoate dramatis personae in their own right. At the same time, since they personified features of the rhetor’s argument, their presence marked the allegorization of thought.

By that logic, the history of rhetorical mnemotechnics is of a piece with that of the performance of personification, a symbolic system that cues audiences that they are in the presence of al-legory.19 Thus, it has been logical to associate memory arts with psychodrama, in which the splintered psyche of a given individual or community becomes the site not only of forensic conflict but also of all conflict faced by that community. I contend, however, that mnemotechnics further cues audiences that they are in the presence of theater. In the words of Theseus from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, if “imagination bodies forth / the forms of things unknown,” then the process by which “the poet’s pen” gives “shape,” “name,” and “habitation” to “airy nothing” was called mnemotechnics.20 Its figurative writing represented the veritable

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genesis of character and of the symbolics of dramatic conflict for both the page and the stage.

Especially in the learned milieus in which allegory plays out, one cannot address that art form without bringing law and the-atricality into the picture of how things signify. Mnemotechnics involved literal acts of foresight, serving as a series of operations by which speakers translated thought into allegorical imagery as well as theatrical action (actio). On the multiple memory stages of their minds, they preconceptualized the literal, gestural, and figural body language of delivery as a virtual psychodrama that had long been analogized to playacting per se, hence my earlier characterization of the phenomenon as protodramatic.21 Those mental dreamscapes lent themselves just as readily to Frances A. Yates’s architectonics as to Mary Carruthers’s books and crafts as to classroom pedagogy as to metatheatricality and actual theatri-cality.22 Perhaps nowhere is that process more suggestive than in the writings of Quintilian, one of the premier theorists of rhetoric and education.23 In the first-century Institutio Oratoria, he urged that litigators add impersonation (prosopopoeia) during delivery to their forensic repertoires for greater emotional return: “And as their plea would awaken yet greater pity if they urged it with their own lips, so it is rendered to some extent all the more effective when it is, as it were, put into their mouth by their advocate: we may draw a parallel from the stage, where the actor’s voice and delivery [ut scenicis actoribus eadem vox eademque pronuntiatio] produce greater emotional effect when he is speaking in an as-sumed role [persona] than when he speaks in his own character” (6.i.25–6, emphasis added).

More germane still to the present inquiry, Quintilian advised that orators use their memories to generate the visions (visiones) or fantasies (phantasmatae) that made dreams a reality. In a stun-ning statement, he articulates a vision of “dreaming,” allegorically conceived, as acting: “When the mind is unoccupied or is absorbed by fantastic hopes or daydreams [somnia], we are haunted by these visions of which I am speaking to such an extent that we are travelling abroad [peregrinari], crossing the sea, fighting, ad-dressing the people, or enjoying the use of wealth that we do not actually possess, and seem to ourselves not to be dreaming but acting [nec cogitare sed facere]” (6.ii.30, emphasis added). This was the stuff of such later literary events as Chrétien de Troyes’s romantic interior monologues, Hamlet’s play within a play, and even Joris-Karl Huysmans’s nineteenth-century virtual reality of travel that, in A Rebours, could be done without ever leaving the train station.24 Thanks to the history of rhetoric, we know

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that allegory is the mnemonically inflected, psychodramatic, and theatrical performance of dreaming as acting.

Therefore, the ars memorandi substantially illuminates the theatrics of allegory in that it demonstrates—literally, corporeally, and materially—that, for any author trained in rhetoric, allegory is always already staged. More precisely, given the patently forensic tenor of most early rhetorical theory, the ars memorandi demon-strates that allegory is dramatic conflict always already staged. We might find it useful, then, to speak of a memory-driven theater of allegory, an allegorically driven theater of memory, and a theatri-cally driven memory of allegory. It is high time to deemphasize the interiority of these mental operations and to reemphasize the dramatic nature and virtual performativity of psychodrama.

For all the critical talk of psychodrama, once the imagistic, mnemonic representation of conflict is incarnated and embodied during delivery, the imagines agentes are as real as any actors, legal actores, or actants on any stage. (Note the philological com-patibility of actio, actores or prosecutors, and auctores or authors/authorities.) As such, they grant almost unprecedented access to a genre like the morality play. After all, the discovery, argument, and performance of the psychological conflicts that ground char-acter in a just and civil society represent the quintessence of both memory and allegory, which build and corporealize the thinking subjects of morality plays. For instance, the crucial link between memory, allegory, moral literature, and psychodrama has been rightly emphasized by such scholars as Yates, Rosemond Tuve, and Charles Muscatine. For Yates, “[t]he imagines agentes would have been moralised into beautiful or hideous human figures as ‘corporeal similitudes’ of spiritual intentions.”25 Corporeal simili-tudes are the stuff of the morality play. Similarly, for Tuve, the personification of abstractions constituted allegory in its “most natural form.”26 Equally “natural,” though, was that a forensically driven mnemotechnics would inspire the dialogic, contrapuntal form of the psychomachia and its descendants in the morality play. Still more dispositive is Muscatine’s astute remark that “the introspective atmosphere attending the birth of allegory” was related to the “widespread tendency for the monologue signal-izing mental conflict to break down into two or more voices” that “interact dramatically … to produce an allegory of the mind’s ac-tion.”27 And yet, there is something distinctly untheatrical about Muscatine’s allegorical drama. There is also something ahistori-cal about the concomitant absence of theatricality from allegory.

Consider this: for the pseudo-Cicero, allegoria or permutatio is a figure of diction as well as the transitional trope between

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“Figures of Diction” and “Figures of Thought” (4.xxxiv.46). He writes, “Allegory is a manner of speech denoting one thing by the letter of the words, but another by their meaning [est oratio aliud verbis aliud sententia demonstrans]” (4.xxxiv.46, emphasis added).28 Despite appearances, this definition of allegory is not about binaries, dichotomies, or tenors versus vehicles, especially in light of the tripartite nature of the process the pseudo-Cicero goes on to outline. Rather, it is about simultaneity and the literal demonstration—the performance—of meaning. Denotation is not the same thing as demonstration, a medieval mode of embodied logic that is key to the theatrics of visual culture. Those theatrics become more and more apparent as the pseudo-Cicero draws upon ideas of genesis, acting, role playing, imitation, imperson-ation, exaggeration, and, of course, argument. What initially seems a dichotomy of letter versus spirit quickly emerges as positively interdisciplinary. With multiple examples of reported and enacted speech, he concentrates on the disjuncture between appearance and reality, internal and external manifestation: “[Allegory] assumes three aspects: comparison, argument, and contrast. It operates through a comparison when a number of metaphors originating in a mode of similarity in the expression are set together as follows: ‘For when dogs act the part of wolves [funguntur], to what guardian, pray, are we going to entrust our herds of cattle?’” (4.xxxiv.46, emphasis added).

Notwithstanding Katherine Eisaman Maus’s excellent work on inwardness in the Renaissance theater, it is my contention that allegory is no mere psychodrama for the page.29 In the same way that rhetoric itself was an open hand rather than the closed fist of dialectic, mnemonic psychodrama turned not only inward to-ward philosophy, epistemology, religious meditation, and nascent theories of psychology but also outward toward performance.30 Indeed, it is the very function of theater to render visible what is normally invisible. That includes the psychic operations of the mind at work and at play. When the fragmented, imagistic psyche of a large variety of dreamers also turned outward, that was likewise the very essence of the morality play, a genre whose popularity remains ill understood to this day. That fragmented psyche may now look forward historically to that other splintered psyche with which we began: Herman and his head.

Believe it or not, the process described above was rehearsed in Herman’s Head, which premiered with the following voiceover. A latter day expositor takes viewers through the genesis of another splintered psyche:

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VOICEOVER. This is Herman Brooks. Herman is just like the rest of us. Every day he has to make all kinds of decisions like what to wear, whom to date, and when to panic. Now, these decisions should be easy but if you take a look inside Herman’s head, you’ll see why he sometimes has trouble making up his mind.[His personalities introduce themselves, starting with Ge-nius]. GENIUS. I’m Herman’s intellect. Without me he couldn’t hold his job, pay his rent, or tie his shoes.ANGEL. I’m Herman’s sensitivity. Without me he wouldn’t feel tenderness, honesty, or love—the good things in life.WIMP. I’m Herman’s anxiety, and I keep him out of trouble. And believe me, there’s trouble everywhere. ANIMAL. I’m Herman’s lust. Without me he’d miss out on all the good stuff. You know, fun, food, babes.VOICEOVER. Sometimes they agree. Ummm, usually they don’t. But this struggle is going on inside all of us and it’s all going on inside Herman’s head.31

Yates, Muscatine, or, for that matter, Kogan could scarcely have described allegorical psychodrama any better. Except Kogan didn’t get it. In fact, he was incredulous: “These characters/emotions act out their personalities in a setting that looks nothing at all like the inside of anything but a theater made to look like a frat house. The jokes are telegraphed and forced, the acting so aggressively emotive that it made me cringe.”32 Interestingly enough, the wrong-headedness of Kogan’s objections is akin to many unproductive musings about allegory and theater alike. His allusion to histrion-ics is of no small import. For all the introspection, didacticism, and moralizing discussed ad infinitum by critics of many stripes, something has been missing. An overall failure to consider the actual staging of allegory has inured us to the possibility that allegory, histrionic or straight, could be funny.

To understand the full meaning, scope, and comic potential of allegorical thinking and enactment as expressed in rhetori-cal treatments of memory and delivery, it is helpful to return to Quintilian’s theory of dreaming as acting, all the while bearing in mind the pseudo-Cicero’s allusion to exaggeration. But, as with all these techniques, it is time to stop thinking about lists of figures of speech and to start seeing and hearing the personified figures of speech. An allegory, writes the pseudo-Cicero, is “presented in the form of argument when a similitude is drawn from a per-

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son or place or object in order to magnify or minify [augendi aut minuendi] as if one should call Drusus a ‘faded reflection of the Gracchi’” (4.xxxiv.46, emphasis added). More relevant still, in the next breath, he makes room for irony, mockery, parody, and the playfulness of the ludus, all of which draw sustenance from say-ing the opposite of what one means. One can almost hear these instances of reported speech, the true meaning of which could only have been enhanced by vocal tone and inflection: “An allegory is drawn from a contrast if, for example, one should mockingly [inludens] call a spendthrift and voluptuary frugal and thrifty. Both in this last type, based on a contrast, and in the first above, drawn from a comparison, we can through metaphor make use of argument. In an Allegory operating through a comparison, as follows: ‘What, says this king—our Agamemnon—or rather, such is his cruelty, our Atreus?’ In an Allegory drawn from a contrast: for example, if we should call some undutiful man who has beaten his father ‘Aeneas,’ or an intemperate and adulterous man ‘Hip-polytus’” (4.xxxiv.46, emphasis added). Please hear withering irony in the tone of my own words for this printed (or virtually printed) page, if you like. I don’t need to be a persona to assure you that it’s better in person. As we, too, transition to the comical, parodic, or farcical properties of allegory, imagine now the voice of Forrest Gump as the pseudo-Cicero makes his own rather inelegant segue, the classical rhetorical equivalent of “And that’s all I have to say about that”: “This is substantially all I have thought it necessary to say on the Figures of Diction. Now the subject directs me to turn next to the Figures of Thought” (4.xxxiv.46).33

All he has to say is not all there is to hear or to see.Regarding Quintilian’s observations on dreaming as acting:

they’re true. He concludes his discussion by speculating that it must surely “be possible to turn this form of hallucination to some profit [hoc animi vitium non transferemus ad utilitatem]” (6.ii.30). So it makes sense that critics tended to focus on the profit side of the equation by situating allegory almost exclusively in the realm of didactic and often religious dream visions. (Heaven knows there were more than enough of those to go around, as any reluctant reader obliged to progress through the Pilgrim’s Progress would likely agree.) However, the corresponding tendency to neglect the playful side of symbolic action has greatly hampered our ability to view, access, enjoy, and teach allegory as the living, breathing performance that it clearly is (and for which the ars memorandi had been designed). That design includes comedy, as the pseudo-

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Cicero himself had once emphasized in the part of his memory art that everybody forgets.34

After the celebrated description of the imagines agentes cited above, the author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium goes on to make a statement that comes as no surprise to any reader of Aristophanes. Images are more memorable “if we somehow disfigure them [deformabimus], as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking; or by assigning certain comic effects to our images [aut ridiculas res aliquas imaginibus adtribuamus], for that too, will ensure our remembering them more readily” (3.xxii.37, emphasis added). Granted, the relentless violence of mnemotechnics, notably in multiple, rhetorically sophisticated Passion plays, encourages a focus on deforming and disfiguring the body.35 But it is significant that the pseudo-Cicero associates comic exaggeration with allegorical process, precisely the kind of hyperreal, Punch-and-Judy-like disfigurement that gracelessly graced the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century stage of hundreds of farces.36 Given that the gallows humor of farce was ubiquitous in premodern Europe, there is no reason to poison the wells with the notion that comedy is an inferior rhetorical or literary strategy. As Mikhail Bakhtin once cautioned, “To ignore or to underestimate the laughing people of the Middle Ages … distorts the picture of European culture’s historic development.”37 It seems that some-thing else was similarly distorted when media critics ignored the laughing people of the 1990s.

With its propensity toward play, exaggeration, and even histrionics, staged psychodrama could be fun. Early allegorists indubitably had a sense of humor about the whole thing, and so should we. If we don’t, chances are we’re missing something. Nor is a tendency to focus exclusively on the psychological or even psychoanalytical dimensions of psychodrama liable to enhance our appreciation of its multiple theatrical and potentially hilarious enactments. Morality played. Literally. Or do I mean figuratively? The fungibility of the term “play” is frustrating and a little bit fabulous. And the classical and medieval writers who theorized it exploited that sense of play. Recall that, on the late medieval page or stage, pilgrims progressing through time and space are just as likely to find themselves in the company of fools. I mean, really: Cousin can’t go along to Everyman’s reckoning because “No, by our Lady! I have the cramp in my toe.”38 Seriously? Likewise for Herman’s Head: allegorical incarnations debate the protagonist’s activities as if in a theater? But of course.

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Allegory, morality play, and farce are not so very far apart, largely due to a key principle that any actor, producer, or director knows by heart: performance is ever mutable and of the moment, subject to change and changing everything. The site-specific vocalization and materiality of theater regularly transform the iconic into the farcical, the religious into the sacrilegious, and the tragic into the comic (if such binaries even apply to early litera-ture). One day, in a given community, a joke is no longer funny because of an unplanned resemblance to a contemporaneous, catastrophic event (as would be the case for a staged shooting on the day of the Newtown massacre). Alternatively, a tragic theatri-cal scene plays as hysterical because of some equally unexpected and unintended event or activity (from my own experience, the Virgin Mary’s crown falls off during her dramatic entrance at the denouement of a miracle play).39 Thanks to delivery, inflection undercuts meaning—mime renders the serious ridiculous, or vice versa. There is another possibility, too, haunting though it is for medievalists and early modernists to consider. Maybe Kogan didn’t get all of it wrong.

Just because a given play has survived and entered some-body’s canon, that doesn’t mean that it was any good. Loath though literary critics might be these days to issue verdicts about artistic value, not every moral allegory need be a sterling specimen of its kind, which returns us to Kogan’s indictment of what he deemed a patently inferior specimen. By the time Herman’s Head joined the allegorical tradition, something had plainly gone dead and humorless—at least for Kogan—compromising what was once a lively and popular theatrical mainstay and highlighting myriad problems of transhistorical interpretation. Was Herman’s Head a bad show? I don’t know: was Everyman a bad play? Maybe me-dieval audiences thought Everyman was a drag. Word-of-mouth and performance records are a lot easier to access in the twenty-first century than in the fifteenth, so we do know that Herman’s Head did find enough of an audience to warrant three seasons. By today’s standards, that is quite the long run. We also know that there is a vast discrepancy between what audiences enjoy and what critics revere. Witness the field of some ten films now nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, the better to account for popular taste than to reward it honorifically. Neverthe-less, Kogan was right about at least one thing: Herman himself, a milquetoast, was incredibly boring. Dramatically speaking, he was much less than the allegorical sum of his parts. That, in turn, may assist us in coming to some conclusions about rhetoric, al-legory, theatricality, and the morality play.

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What the morality play may ultimately suggest is that, while interior life is absolutely fascinating, the human vessel of the psychodrama is a relative bore. But that doesn’t mean the the-atrical enactment of that vessel’s interior drama—rich in all the resources that live theater has to offer—is also a bore. Far from it. Thanks to the allegorical staging of character—or the staging of allegorical character—that interior life might well be the most interesting thing going on. The coexistence of a highly complex, splintered psyche with a flattened, seemingly one-dimensional protagonist—be it religious Everyman or secular Herman—is one of the more intriguing features of character, characterization, and moral character in the genre devoted to exploring and embodying that very coexistence: the morality play. The theatricality of al-legory even permits us to dispense with the old critical chestnut that didactic literatures, by dint of their focus on exemplarity, are confined to flatness of character (or, in farce, flatulence of character).40 Multidimensionality is everywhere on display in a morality play; it all depends on where one looks, which includes where and how one looks for plot. Even in terms of the allegori-cal expressionism of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, character and personality are engendered simultaneously with speech and action. Conformatio, expounds the pseudo-Cicero, “consists in representing an absent person as present, or in making a mute thing or one lacking form articulate, and attributing to it a defi-nite form and a language or a certain behaviour appropriate to its character [persona]” (4.lii.66, emphasis added).41 FOX’s Herman is just as arbitrary a vehicle for a chaotic psyche as is Aristote-lian plotting for the random chaos that is Everyman’s—or Every-woman’s—life. The rhetorico-mnemonic theatrics of allegory do not exactly coincide with the classic Aristotelian imitation of an action.42 Instead, a morality play is plotted around the imitation of a mental conflict, the action of which can best be described as thinking. It all sounds pretty deadly. Certainly Kogan thought so when he dismissed the entire premise of Herman’s Head and called it a “savage dud.”43 But was it?

By 8 September 1997, no one thought this sort of thing deadly at all when viewers entered another televised psyche, as they were treated to the embodied, song-and-dance mental routines of the daydreaming Ally McBeal.44 Nor am I aware of any critical shellacking of the morality-play moment of Seinfeld, in which “Brain-Jerry” plays chess with “Penis-Jerry” à la Seventh Seal to determine whether the comedian ought to have sex with a woman whom he finds a big yawn.45 Nor, from a more serious perspective,

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did massive aesthetic objections arise about another psychodrama in performance, this time the vocalization of mental conflict in the ongoing drama that is psychotherapy. The HBO Series, In Treatment, did nothing if not stage a latter-day morality play by bringing a psyche to life in dialogic—read, therapeutic—form.46 Character, this time represented by words rather than by alle-gorical personae, was embodied nonetheless by the protagonists, pilgrims making their own progress toward a more secular self-discovery. What was In Treatment if not—to borrow Muscatine’s phrase—an “allegory of the mind’s action,” fashioned to instruct and entertain an audience of TV viewers? I more than willingly acknowledge that no one in his or her right mind would consider Seinfeld the epitome of modern didacticism, but perhaps that was true of early allegory too. More in Seinfeld, less in In Treat-ment, morality plays, more or less playfully, in the morality play. And, as morality plays, its embodied allegories look inward even as their drama looks outward, encouraging audiences to look inward as well. Replicating the cyclical phenomenon codified by mnemotechnics itself, the morality play plays the better to as-sign internal conflict and its enacted resolutions to the collective memories, bodies, spirits, and future performances (staged or unstaged) of the community in attendance.

Obviously, in an essay such as this, one can barely scratch the surface of an entire rhetorical theory of allegorical practice. But one thing is clear: memory brings together what should never have been torn asunder, allegory and theatricality. In the final analysis, allegory is key to our understanding of theater; theater is key to our understanding of allegory; and the critical history of allegory contains invaluable materials about incarnation, em-bodiment, psychodrama, and actual drama from Aristophanes to Shakespeare. Allegory’s literary and cultural practices were limited neither to heavy-handed didacticism nor—however per-spicacious the insights of Joel B. Altman—to the “play of mind” alone.47 Mnemotechnical theory completes both the interpretive and the material picture of allegorical practice, demonstrating the-atrically why personifications lend themselves readily to settings as varied as the Bible, forensic oratory, the Roman de la Rose, the moralité or moral play, a play within a play designed to catch metatheatrically the conscience of a king, or, say, a twentieth-century sitcom.48 Allegory is as allegory does, and, in doing what it does, it imagines, embodies, and plays out dreaming as acting on the stage of the world, where morality truly plays.

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NOTES

I would like to thank Joseph Campana for organizing such a stimulat-ing seminar on “Staging Allegory” at the 2013 Shakespeare Association of America conference in Toronto and Alan C. Dessen for the many conversa-tions that followed.

1 Andrew Guerdat and Steve Kreinberg, Herman’s Head, exec. produced by Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas, Witt/Thomas/Harris Productions and Touchstone Television, FOX Network, 1991–94, TV series.

2 Rick Kogan, “‘Herman’s Head’ Bad Enough to Give Viewers Head-aches,” Chicago Tribune, 8 September 1991, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1991-09-08/features/9103070811_1_rick-lawless-ken-hudson-peter-mackenzie.

3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., emphasis added. 5 See D. W. Robertson Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval

Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 3–51 and 125–30. 6 [Cicero], Ad C. Herennium de Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium),

ed. and trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (1954; rprt. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977); and Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols., Loeb Classical Library (1920; rprt. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989). Subsequent references to Ad C. Herennium de Ratione Dicendi (Rhetorica ad Herennium), hereafter Rhetorica ad Herennium, and The Institutio Oratoria of Quintillian, hereafter Institutio Oratoria, are from these editions and will appear parenthetically in the text and notes.

7 For this conception of allegory, I draw especially on Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); and Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992). I make the argument about the “protodrama” of mne-motechnics—i.e., that forensic delivery constituted a veritable program for dramatic conception, performance, and reception thanks to such components as privileged space, costume, staging, ritual conflict, audience participation, spectacle, dialogue, action, and, most important, impersonation—in “Dra-matic Rhetoric and Rhetorical Drama” and “From Legal Ritual to Dramatic Representation in Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” in Jody Enders, Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, Rhetoric and Society (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 19–68, esp. 44–54 and 69–128.

8 In the 1970s, many scholars were trained in the formalist neo-Aristo-telianism of such critics as Norman Friedman, Form and Meaning in Fiction (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1975).

9 Within the scope of this essay, I can barely scratch the surface of the massive bibliography on allegory, which requires acknowledgment of the foundational work of Angus Fletcher on “symbolic action” in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 147–80. In my discussion of allegory, I rely especially on Jane K. Brown, The Per-sistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner

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(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Blair Hoxby’s elegant and erudite “Allegorical Drama” in a terrific anthology well worth reading in its entirety, The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010), pp. 191–208; and Brenda Machosky, ed., Thinking Allegory Otherwise (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2010).

10 Consider Karl Young’s reticence to name the liturgy an origin of medi-eval drama even after positing the advent of impersonation, in The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 1:80–1. O. B. Hardison Jr. displays a similar reticence in the first two essays of Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 1–79.

11 I propose a taxonomy of such vagaries of intention and reception in Murder by Accident: Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 143–62. The overall argument of that book is that there is no such thing as the intentional fallacy when it comes to theater.

12 The most accessible edition and translation of this text appears in Frede Jensen, The Language of the Eleventh-Century “Vie de Saint Alexis”: A Philological Commentary, Molière & Co. (Newark DE: European Masterpieces, 2003). I have recently explored the seriocomic in “Comically Incorrect,” ROMARD 51 (2012): 75–82.

13 Still stimulating in this regard is Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986).

14 Urban Dictionary, s.v. “drama,” 1 October 2005, http://www. urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=drama.

15 The most helpful introductions to the rhetorical tradition in general remain George Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1999); and James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (1974; rprt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981).

16 Longinus, On the Sublime, ed. and trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe, in Aristotle: The Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style, Loeb Classical Library (1927; rprt. Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1946), p. 171, xv.1.

17 “At hand” is actually a pun. One mnemotechnical model was the hand, as famously illustrated in the context of musical theory and practice by Guido d’Arezzo. See Karol Berger, “The Guidonian Hand,” in The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, ed. Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 71–82.

18 Yates revolutionized our approach to this passage in The Art of Memory, pp. 10–2.

19 Helpful introductions to personification systems include Maureen Quil-ligan, e.g., who rightly stresses the debt of allegory to personification (The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s “Cité des Dames” [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991], p. 160); and Gordon Teskey (Allegory and Violence [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996], pp. 1–55).

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20 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kas-tan (Walton-on-Thames UK: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998), pp. 887–910, V.ii.14–7.

21 See Enders, Rhetoric, pp. 4–18. 22 For the premier theorists of the rhetoric of medieval pedagogy, see

Copeland, Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent: Lollardy and Ideas of Learn-ing, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); and Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the “Poetria Nova” across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 2010).

23 The Institutio Oratoria circulated widely in premodern Europe as a veritable manual for the education of youth, especially books 1–3, in what was called the mutilist tradition. See Murphy, pp. 123–6.

24 See, e.g., Chrétien de Troyes, Cligés, in Arthurian Romances, trans. William Kibler (New York and London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 128–35; Shake-speare’s Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, III.ii–iii; and Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against the Grain (A Rebours), trans. John Howard (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1922), pp. 204–8; or online at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12341/12341-h/12341-h.htm, accessed 27 January 2015.

25 Yates, p. 77. 26 Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their

Posterity (1966; rprt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977), p. 26. 27 Charles Muscatine, “The Emergence of Psychological Allegory in Old

French Romance,” PMLA 68, 5 (December 1953): 1160–82, 1165–6 and 1168. 28 “Figures of Diction” are treated in 4.xiii.19–xxiv.46, and “Figures of

Thought” are discussed in 4.xxxv.47–lvi.69. 29 I refer primarily to the conceptual work of Katherine Eisaman Maus’s

introduction to Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 1–34. My point is that Maus’s focus on law, theology, rhetoric, and spectatorship can also be understood—and, in some cases, better understood—through the allegories of mnemotechnics.

30 Isidore of Seville, for example, cites Varro to examine the famous dic-tum of the open hand versus the closed fist in book 2 of the Etymologies (see Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies: The Complete English Translation of “Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX,” trans. Priscilla Throop, 2 vols. [Charlotte VT: MedievalMS, 2005], 1:2.xxiii.1). According to Murphy, Isidore borrows the dictum from Cassiodorus, who attributes it to Varro (p. 73).

31 Andrew Guerdat and Steve Kreinberg, “Pilot,” Herman’s Head, season 1, episode 1, directed by Andy Cadiff, aired 8 September 1991, TV series. This was the setup for each episode. Thanks to YouTube, it is possible to watch the entire premier episode, uploaded in four parts: “Herman’s Head-Series Premiere Episode-1991-Part 1 of 4,” YouTube video, 6:23, posted by “kevinsethjames’s channel,” 23 July 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE489rs0fPA; “Herman’s Head-Series Premiere Episode-1991-Part 2 of 4,” YouTube video, 6:39, posted by “kevinsethjames’s channel,” 23 July 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjHwvDGbYUQ; “Herman’s Head-

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Series Premiere Episode-1991-Part 3 of 4,” YouTube video, 8:08, posted by “kevinsethjames’s channel,” 23 July 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TWUcTXbVw; and “Herman’s Head-Series Premiere Episode-1991-Part 4 of 4,” YouTube video, 3:25, posted by “kevinsethjames’s channel,” 23 July 2008, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFpNx8xb-UU.

32 Kogan, emphasis added. 33 Forrest Gump, directed by Robert Zemeckis (1994; Hollywood CA:

Paramount Pictures, 2001), DVD. 34 For fun with mnemotechnics and allegorization alike, it doesn’t get any

better than Umberto Eco’s brilliant “An Ars Oblivionalis? Forget It!,” trans. Marilyn Migiel, PMLA 103, 3 (May 1988): 254–61.

35 On mnemonic figuration and disfigurement, see my Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 120–9.

36 I discuss the resemblance of slapstick farce to Passion play scourg-ings and crucifixions in The Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries: Twelve Medieval French Plays in Modern English, ed. and trans. Enders, The Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 18–21.

37 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984), p. 6.

38 Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, ed. A. C. Cawley (1956; rprt. New York and London: Penguin, 1993), p. 209.

39 I play this theory out in Enders, “In Flagrante Theatro,” in Murder by Accident, pp. 143–62.

40 See The Farce of the Fart (Farce nouvelle et fort joyeuse du pect), in Enders, The Farce of the Fart and Other Ribaldries, pp. 65–85.

41 For a superb discussion of this passage, see James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification, Literature, Culture, Theory 6 (Cambridge: Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 13–5. I analyze this passage at some length in Medieval Theater of Cruelty, pp. 73–6.

42 Aristotle, The Poetics, ed. and trans. Fyfe, in Aristotle: The Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style, pp. 1–118, 21–3, 1449b.

43 Kogan. 44 David E. Kelley, Ally McBeal, 20th Century Fox Television and David

E. Kelley Productions, FOX Network, 1997–2002, TV series. 45 Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, “The Nose Job,” Seinfeld, season 3,

episode 9, directed by Tom Cherones, aired 20 November 1991, TV series.46 In Treatment, Sheleg, Closest to the Hole Productions, and Leverage

Management, HBO, 2008–10, TV series.47 Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Devel-

opment of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), p. 6. 48 Shakespeare is one of Brown’s preferred access points in The Persis-

tence of Allegory, pp. 88–100.