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Staging The Life of Job: A Performance Experiment
Elisabeth Dutton and Cathy Hume
On the manuscript page, The Life of Job looks like a narrative poem written in Middle English rhyme royal stanzas. It survives uniquely in Huntington Library MS HM 140, a paper manuscript dating from around the 1470s, and the poem’s language suggests it may have been written close to that date.1See Fig. 1. For a full description, see C.W. Dutschke Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library 2 vols (San Marino CA: Huntington Library, 1989) 1 185–90. The manuscript seems to have originally been made up of three separate booklets, with The Life of Job (fols 93v–96v) the only item in the second booklet.2See William McClellan ‘The Transcription of the “Clerk’s Tale” in MS HM 140: Interpreting Textual Effects’ Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994) 89–103. The manuscript opens with Lydgate’s Life of Saint Alban and Saint Amphibal, and an abbreviated version of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, followed by shorter pieces by these poets; the third booklet includes the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye – a text about English mercantile interests – an incomplete Latin Apollonius of Tyre, and various short prayers and treatises, including one offering advice to apprentices. In the manuscript, there is no title for The Life of Job, nor any description or note about it. However, there are extensive Latin marginal glosses – highly unusual for a Middle English poem – which carefully demonstrate how it is authorised by the Bible.3For a more detailed discussion of the poem, see Cathy Hume ‘The Life of Job: Bible Translation, Poem or Play?’ New Medieval Literatures 18 (2018) 211–42. There is an edition by G.N. and R.R. Raymo ‘A Middle English Metrical Life of Job’ in Early English and Norse Studies presented to Hugh Smith in honour of his sixtieth birthday edited Arthur Brown and Peter Foote (London: Methuen, 1963) 77–98; the edition used here is from Biblical Stories in Middle English Verse edited Cathy Hume (TEAMS Middle English Texts Series, in preparation).
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Description: ‘A page of manuscript in a fifteenth-century hand, written in stanzas, and...
Fig. 1: San Marino, CA: Huntington Library MS HM 140, fol. 93v.
Online at <https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/p15150coll7/id/18988/rec/2>.Image reproduced in compliance with <https://www.huntington.org/library-rights-permissions>.
The poem mostly adheres closely to the Vulgate Book of Job, although it ignores most of the discursive, questioning material from that Book, leaving just the narrative frame where God allows Satan to test Job, who experiences a series of catastrophes and is ultimately rewarded for his patience.4In this focus on narrative the Life of Job resembles the History of Job, which Caxton includes in his 1483–4 Golden Legend. Caxton gives the names of Job’s friends (omitted from the Life) but then simply notes that their conversations are discussed in Gregory’s Moralia and are therefore ‘passed over’ here. Some similarities of vocabulary between Caxton’s History and the Life may suggest a shared influence from the Wycliffite Bible. Another of Caxton’s sources was Guyart des Moulins’ popular Bible historiale or possibly a later adaptation of that text. For Caxton’s Job, see Caxton’s Golden Legend edited Mayumi Taguchi, John Scahill, and Satoko Tokunaga, 2 vols EETS OS 355 and 357 (2020) 2 124–7; for discussion of Caxton’s sources for Old Testament stories, see 1 xxxi–iii, and on Job specifically, 2 189–91. The poet borrows several Latin terms from the Bible into its aureate language, so that Satan runs around the Earth ‘in his perambulacion’ (line 30), and ‘aureall’ (line 165) is used to describe the golden gifts Job receives at the end of the story. On the other hand, the poem incorporates several legendary accretions to the story that are not in the Bible, such as Job being visited by doctors and minstrels. It also makes one substantial innovation of its own: God upbraids Job for having spoken harshly to his wife, and Job asks God’s pardon.5 As far as we can make out, the manuscript is likely to have been copied, and assembled in its current form, in London: by 1521 it was owned by a London armourer, William Marshall.Dutschke Guide 190.
Despite the lack of speech headings or stage directions demonstrating that The Life of Job was intended for performance, the poem is full of hints suggesting just that. Deictic language continually gestures towards a context outside the poem itself: words such as ‘here’, ‘lo’, and ‘now’ seem to indicate accompanying action; characters are often referred to as ‘this’; and tenses alternate between present and past in ways that suggest an alternation between staged and narrated events. At the same time, references to music and feasting are added to the biblical story, suggesting a performance context of music and a communal meal. There is music both at Job’s family feasts (‘myrthes in instrumentes with armony at the fest | Where Job his children were gadred togeder’, lines 57–8) and when minstrels visit him on the dunghill (‘This sore syk man syttyng on this foule dongehill, | There cam mynstrelles before hym pleying meryly’, lines 120–1). Feasts are discussed as a moral obligation at lines 15–17, where ‘holy Job … techith his sonnes … To kepe theire festes’, and the feast at the conclusion of the poem is so grand that it is ‘ryall’ (line 162). Finally, whereas in the Bible gifts of golden earrings and sheep are given to celebrate the restoration of Job’s fortunes, these become ‘grete yftes … that weren aureall’ (line 165) in the poem, which sounds more like the spectacular gift-giving that concluded contemporary mummings such as the Mumming for the Goldsmiths of London.6 All this led CH to suggest that the poem could have been written for a performance at a feast. She speculated that the feast might have been the annual celebration of a guild, since the ethics presented in the poem seem to accord with guild ideals of mutual aid and harmony, and since the celebration of the Office of the Dead – with its liturgy centred on Job – was so important to guilds.See discussion in Hume ‘Life of Job’ 239–40.
After she presented these ideas at the 2020 METh conference, ED offered to collaborate on developing a performance; a couple of grant applications later, we had secured Arts and Humanities Research Council funding that would support the performance and the making of a film to document it.7The play production and filming were supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council grant AH/Y005112/1. Camilla Adams’ documentary and archival films of the Winterbourne performance are at <https://youtu.be/IK3My_DqvE8> and <https://youtu.be/wYo4JwsOuP4>. Steve De Hailes at the University of Bristol, then a postgraduate intern, carried out an initial survey of possible performance venues in medieval buildings near Bristol, leading us to choose Winterbourne Medieval Barn, in a village northeast of the city. The Grade II listed barn, built by local lord of the manor Thomas de Bradeston in 1342, is now used as a community heritage site that regularly hosts both wedding breakfasts and musical and theatrical performances. It is roughly cruciform, with entrances at the end of each of the cross’s arms: the leg of the cross is paved and is the main area used for dining; the head of the cross is unevenly cobbled, covered with rush matting, and unsuitable for tables or seating, although performers can move around in it.
There were, in the end, three performances of our Life of Job: the first, a ‘workshop’ matinee performance, in a lecture theatre at the University of Bristol, as part of the 2025 Medieval English Theatre conference; the second an evening gala performance, open to the public, with accompanying feast, at Winterbourne Barn; the third a lunchtime staging, also open to the public, at Le Port, an outdoor café arts venue as part of the Medieval Theatre Festival that accompanied the 2025 conference of the Société Internationale pour l’étude du théâtre médiéval in Fribourg, Switzerland. In the lecture theatre the audience were at tiered desks looking down onto a small frontal performance space; in the Barn the audience were seated at a horse-shoe of dining tables, all on one level, with Job and his wife on a low dais just beyond the open end of the horse-shoe and the acrobats moving in the resultant traverse; at Le Port, a semi-circle of audience faced a semi-circular playing-space, again all on one level. (See Figs 2–5.) What follows here is an account of the evolution of our production: we will conclude with a brief discussion of the audience’s experience of Life of Job that focuses on the Winterbourne Barn performance, but also includes some observations about the effects that these different occasions and venues had on the experiences of our audiences.
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Description: Interior of a barn with visible timber beam ceiling and stone slab floor. Two long...
Fig. 2: The Winterbourne Barn audience seating. Photo credit Camilla Adams
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Description: View of the speaker’s area of a lecture theatre from a raised point of view in...
Fig. 3: The Lecture Theatre where the METh workshop performance took place, showing the tight playing space with the ‘God’ stepladder, and the raked audience seating. Photo credit Camilla Adams
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Description: The same barn as in FIGURE 2. At the far end two costumed actors in dialogue at the...
Fig. 4: The Winterbourne Barn playing space, showing Job’s feasting table and the collapsed house. Photo credit Camilla Adams
Description: _8-Dutton_+_Hume_Fig_5_Le_Port_Job_cropped_400dpi
Fig. 5: Le Port playing space. Photo credit WOMARD
The Life of Job resembles other texts known to have been used for performance, notably Lydgate’s Mummings. ED had previously directed, with Meg Twycross and Olivia Robinson, the Mumming for the Mercers of London.8See Meg Twycross and Elisabeth Dutton ‘Lydgate’s Mumming for the Mercers of London’ in The Medieval Merchant: Proceedings of the 2012 Harlaxton Symposium edited Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (Harlaxton Medieval Studies 24; Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2014) 310–49. Where the Mumming, with its glowing river beds, crystal rocks, and miraculous catches of fish, calls for a spectacular set or props, The Life of Job describes spectacular actions so challenging to stage as to seem almost perverse – but if this was designed as a similar festive performance, presumably that was part of the point. Medieval performers apparently undertook to realise material spectacle with creative delight: this is abundantly suggested by the exploding ovens and bleeding hosts of Croxton, Joseph’s miraculously flowering rod in the N. Town Mary Play, and Belial with the fireworks ‘in hys handys and in hys erys and in hys ars’9 in the Castle of Perseverance – to mention only a very few: the list is huge. That these ‘special effects’ were meant to be spectacular, rather than ‘convincing’ in the modern, naturalistic sense possible on film, has been clearly laid out by Richard Beadle.Richard Beadle ‘Mimes and Miracles: Medieval English Theatricality and its Illusions’ in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England edited Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 32–42. Thus the extraordinary narrative of The Life of Job, with its animal rustling and slaughter of people and livestock, its collapsing house, its visions of God and angels, and its bizarre scabs turning to gold, strengthens rather than weakens the likelihood that the text was the basis of some kind of performance.
But whereas the Lydgate Mumming, with its through-line of a Mediterranean journey, lent itself to a continuous dance, the episodic nature of The Life of Job required something different. Acrobats and jugglers seemed best able to achieve the effects that were required,10We are grateful to Lucy Deacon for first suggesting the use of acrobats and jugglers to develop the piece. and although modern circus training and techniques cannot be assumed to be identical to those of the past, jugglers and acrobats of various kinds were involved in a wide range of medieval performances.11Philip Butterworth discusses a wide range of acrobatic ‘feats of activity’, including tumbling, vaulting, and tight-rope walking or ‘dancing on the rope’, which are mentioned in civic records, although most of his examples are decades later than the manuscript of Life of Job: see Philip Butterworth Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge UP, 2005) 26–48. Closer in date is the Spaniard who in 1501 entertained the king by tumbling and dancing on ‘a great kabill’ (line 911), sometimes hanging from the rope ‘by the tooes’ and sometimes ‘by the teethe moost marvelously’ (lines 923–5): The Receyt of the Lady Kateryne edited Gordon Kipling EETS OS 296 (1990) 74–5. The Chamber Books of Henry VII and Henry VIII record payments to ‘tumblers’ and ‘tumblers opon the rope’ in 1495 (BL Add MS 7099 fol. 27) and 1498 (TNA E101/414/16 fol. 19r, fol. 50v, fol. 51r), and to ‘theim that played vpon their stiltes’ in 1507 (E36/214 fol. 91v). Stilt-walking, an acrobatic trade skill that was put to dramatic use by the Chester Painters and Glaziers, is discussed by John Marshall ‘“Walking in the air”: the Chester Shepherds on Stilts’ Medieval English Theatre 29 (2007) 42–59. From the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, ‘juggling’ was a term also associated with magic tricks, used to describe entertainments and later also in anti-Catholic polemic to condemn the Mass: see Butterworth Magic on the Early English Stage 2–25. By 1552–3, Revels Accounts describe the Lord of Misrule attended by ‘Iuglers / tumblers/ fooles / friers’: Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary edited Albert Feuillerat (Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1914) 59–60. Acrobats and jugglers are harder to find earlier in the fifteenth century because fifteenth-century records tend to be in Latin, and their terminology is difficult to interpret.
Actors were required, both for the narration and for the roles of Job and Job’s wife, who from the beginning we imagined as performers who would be staged, for much of the action, as feasters, watching acrobatic feats with the audience themselves. Just as the original audience of The Life of Job might be imagined at a feast, so the repeated references to Job’s household feasting invite a staging that draws the audience into the action as guests at Job’s table. However, both Job and his Wife are given direct speeches, albeit brief ones: this was an important difference from Lydgate’s Mumming, in which only the Narrator’s voice was heard. Of course, it would have been possible simply to have the Narrator ventriloquise Job and his wife, but their brief interjections offered intriguing possibilities for variety in the play’s soundscape. Music was also clearly essential to the play’s acoustic effect, and the presence of musicians as characters within the narrative provided additional incentive for recruiting live performers who could interact with the action and where necessary adapt to it.
We therefore planned a ‘stage’ in which Job’s family would feast at a table facing a feasting audience, and drew up a rough ‘sound plan’ for the piece, indicating, on the basis of direct references in the script but also with attention to the varying rhythm of the verse narrative, where music might begin and end, change character or pause. Most obviously, references to festivity and musicians called for upbeat music; sometimes the deictic ‘Here’ seemed to suggest a pause; sometimes comments on Job’s patience, or indeed Job’s short direct speeches expressing his faith, suggested moments where music might be interrupted; most clearly, a shift between the penultimate and last verses of the narrative, from celebration to comment on Job’s mortality, indicated a shift from lively melodies to sombre sounds. The sound-plan was supplemented by a rough plan of the action, indicating which moments in the narrative should be accompanied by acrobatics or juggling. The acrobatic team (Tamar Fynn, Annika Loll, Marcus Pumphrey, and Harry Taylor-Page, led by Gwen Hales) then developed ideas for the spectacle, while the music team (Kira Thomas and William Summers) sourced music of appropriate date to meet the requirements: music for Satan to roam the earth, feasting music, mournful music, etc. We worked with the actors (Jed Trimnell as Narrator, Anthony Wilks as Job, Aurélie Blanc as Job’s Wife) as they prepared the text, clarifying meaning where necessary and agreeing on a lightly modernised pronunciation that allowed us to retain the Middle English diction. An early idea to project the Latin glosses, as a way of both visually rooting the production in the manuscript and emphasising the Life of Job’s own insistence on its biblical sources, was soon abandoned: it is logistically complicated to manage projection and action, and the aim of our production was to imagine the experience of The Life of Job’s early audiences, not its readers.12 Then the artists came together in the three days of rehearsal leading up to the first workshop performance at the Medieval English Theatre Conference in March 2025.
 
1     See Fig. 1. For a full description, see C.W. Dutschke Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the Huntington Library 2 vols (San Marino CA: Huntington Library, 1989) 1 185–90. »
2     See William McClellan ‘The Transcription of the “Clerk’s Tale” in MS HM 140: Interpreting Textual Effects’ Studies in Bibliography 47 (1994) 89–103. »
3     For a more detailed discussion of the poem, see Cathy Hume ‘The Life of Job: Bible Translation, Poem or Play?’ New Medieval Literatures 18 (2018) 211–42. There is an edition by G.N. and R.R. Raymo ‘A Middle English Metrical Life of Job’ in Early English and Norse Studies presented to Hugh Smith in honour of his sixtieth birthday edited Arthur Brown and Peter Foote (London: Methuen, 1963) 77–98; the edition used here is from Biblical Stories in Middle English Verse edited Cathy Hume (TEAMS Middle English Texts Series, in preparation). »
4     In this focus on narrative the Life of Job resembles the History of Job, which Caxton includes in his 1483–4 Golden Legend. Caxton gives the names of Job’s friends (omitted from the Life) but then simply notes that their conversations are discussed in Gregory’s Moralia and are therefore ‘passed over’ here. Some similarities of vocabulary between Caxton’s History and the Life may suggest a shared influence from the Wycliffite Bible. Another of Caxton’s sources was Guyart des Moulins’ popular Bible historiale or possibly a later adaptation of that text. For Caxton’s Job, see Caxton’s Golden Legend edited Mayumi Taguchi, John Scahill, and Satoko Tokunaga, 2 vols EETS OS 355 and 357 (2020) 2 124–7; for discussion of Caxton’s sources for Old Testament stories, see 1 xxxi–iii, and on Job specifically, 2 189–91. »
5      As far as we can make out, the manuscript is likely to have been copied, and assembled in its current form, in London: by 1521 it was owned by a London armourer, William Marshall.Dutschke Guide 190. »
6      All this led CH to suggest that the poem could have been written for a performance at a feast. She speculated that the feast might have been the annual celebration of a guild, since the ethics presented in the poem seem to accord with guild ideals of mutual aid and harmony, and since the celebration of the Office of the Dead – with its liturgy centred on Job – was so important to guilds.See discussion in Hume ‘Life of Job’ 239–40. »
7     The play production and filming were supported by Arts and Humanities Research Council grant AH/Y005112/1. Camilla Adams’ documentary and archival films of the Winterbourne performance are at <https://youtu.be/IK3My_DqvE8> and <https://youtu.be/wYo4JwsOuP4>. »
8     See Meg Twycross and Elisabeth Dutton ‘Lydgate’s Mumming for the Mercers of London’ in The Medieval Merchant: Proceedings of the 2012 Harlaxton Symposium edited Caroline M. Barron and Anne F. Sutton (Harlaxton Medieval Studies 24; Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2014) 310–49. »
9      in the Castle of Perseverance – to mention only a very few: the list is huge. That these ‘special effects’ were meant to be spectacular, rather than ‘convincing’ in the modern, naturalistic sense possible on film, has been clearly laid out by Richard Beadle.Richard Beadle ‘Mimes and Miracles: Medieval English Theatricality and its Illusions’ in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England edited Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 32–42. »
10     We are grateful to Lucy Deacon for first suggesting the use of acrobats and jugglers to develop the piece.  »
11     Philip Butterworth discusses a wide range of acrobatic ‘feats of activity’, including tumbling, vaulting, and tight-rope walking or ‘dancing on the rope’, which are mentioned in civic records, although most of his examples are decades later than the manuscript of Life of Job: see Philip Butterworth Magic on the Early English Stage (Cambridge UP, 2005) 26–48. Closer in date is the Spaniard who in 1501 entertained the king by tumbling and dancing on ‘a great kabill’ (line 911), sometimes hanging from the rope ‘by the tooes’ and sometimes ‘by the teethe moost marvelously’ (lines 923–5): The Receyt of the Lady Kateryne edited Gordon Kipling EETS OS 296 (1990) 74–5. The Chamber Books of Henry VII and Henry VIII record payments to ‘tumblers’ and ‘tumblers opon the rope’ in 1495 (BL Add MS 7099 fol. 27) and 1498 (TNA E101/414/16 fol. 19r, fol. 50v, fol. 51r), and to ‘theim that played vpon their stiltes’ in 1507 (E36/214 fol. 91v). Stilt-walking, an acrobatic trade skill that was put to dramatic use by the Chester Painters and Glaziers, is discussed by John Marshall ‘“Walking in the air”: the Chester Shepherds on Stilts’ Medieval English Theatre 29 (2007) 42–59. From the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, ‘juggling’ was a term also associated with magic tricks, used to describe entertainments and later also in anti-Catholic polemic to condemn the Mass: see Butterworth Magic on the Early English Stage 2–25. By 1552–3, Revels Accounts describe the Lord of Misrule attended by ‘Iuglers / tumblers/ fooles / friers’: Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary edited Albert Feuillerat (Louvain: Uystpruyst, 1914) 59–60. Acrobats and jugglers are harder to find earlier in the fifteenth century because fifteenth-century records tend to be in Latin, and their terminology is difficult to interpret.  »
12      Then the artists came together in the three days of rehearsal leading up to the first workshop performance at the Medieval English Theatre Conference in March 2025. »