This essay interrogates the complex layers of performance, observation, and historical memory surrounding The Baby of Mâcon, a fifteenth-century morality play revived in 1659 under conditions that both emphasised and destabilised its moral and dramaturgical intentions. Staged before an audience comprised of prominent ecclesiastics, merchants, and aristocrats, this essay draws from an ambiguous corpus of 17th-century eyewitness accounts and fragmented archival materials and seeks to navigate the labyrinthine interplay between the spectatorship inherent in its 1659 staging and the questions of authenticity, identity, and representation of the source text. We argue that the Baby operates as a recursive narrative, wherein the distinctions between performer, observer, and historical subject collapse into an uncanny simultaneity of meaning and artifice.
Introduction: Witnessing the Witnessed
The 1659 performance of The Baby of Mâcon remains one of the most perplexing and contested events in the annals of European theatrical history. Recorded ostensibly as a “play” but remembered as a cataclysmic moral intervention, this text/performance hybrid transgressed every boundary when it was staged in an unnamed provincial court of a once-prominent Duchy. The play purportedly offered a rare glimpse into the moralised grotesquerie of fifteenth-century religious dramaturgy, a genre steeped in theological didacticism and visceral spectacle, yet, as the sparse and contradictory records of the event suggest, the revival transformed into a volatile performance where truth and illusion vied for supremacy before ultimately destabilising the boundaries of its own purported “reality.” The primary audience, ensnared in the play’s diegesis, became actors, subjects, and, ultimately, victims of its unfolding. As recorded by Guillaume Saint-Aubert, a noted scholar of the region of Tuscany, “The audience ceased to be an audience; it became an offering. What we observed was neither artifice nor truth, but some beastly composite of both.”[1]
While modern historiography has sought to ascribe the incident a coherent moral or cultural significance, such efforts have often reproduced the very ambiguities they aim to resolve. It is the purpose of this essay, then, to examine the 1659 staging not as a faithful reproduction of its fifteenth-century source material but as a palimpsestic text, constructed and reconstructed across layers of theatrical and historical performance.
Contextual Foundations: The Play within the Play
The fifteenth-century origins of The Baby of Mâcon are themselves shrouded in uncertainty, though scattered ecclesiastical records suggest its composition as a piece of exemplum theatrica attributed to a figure referred to only as le Spectre in one contemporaneous pamphlet intended for a monastic audience in Burgundy circa 1460. The plot, ostensibly concerned with the miraculous birth of a child in a town which has been infertile for a generation and the subsequent commodification of its sanctity by his sister who claims to be his Virgin Mother, adheres to a broadly moralistic framework. Yet the text’s tonal volatility—oscillating between grotesque satire and visceral horror—aligns it more closely with the transgressive dramaturgy of farce than with the devotional aspirations of traditional morality plays.
By 1659, the cultural landscape of performance had shifted dramatically, and the decision to revive The Baby under the aegis of a provincial duke’s court speaks to the enduring fascination with theatricality as a locus of power and transgression. However, contemporary accounts, such as the fragmented treatise “Memoriae Ludorum” by the anonymous “P.V.” (possibly a pseudonym for Pierre Voieverte, a court chronicler), suggest that the 1659 staging was less an act of faithful reproduction than a deliberate distortion. P.V. notes, for instance, that “the players became not actors but agents of calamity, their masks veiling neither the truth nor its undoing”[2].
Spectatorship as Performance
The line between the fictive and the real, already tenuous within the morality play’s dramaturgy, was rendered even more precarious by the metafictional framing imposed upon it by its seventeenth-century interpreters. Documents from the period indicate that spectators were seated in concentric tiers, with the innermost circle populated by courtiers disguised as townsfolk—a decision that effectively collapsed the distance between observer and performer. As P.V. observes, “As the play reached its conclusion, and the players took a bow, members of the court similarly then turned to the rest of the crowd and bowed. The audience beheld itself beholding: a mirror reflecting not the divine but the profane”[3].
[…] the act of watching became an act of participation, and the audience—like the child—was both objectified and implicated.
This recursive dynamic reaches its apotheosis in the infamous scene of the now-Child’s murder and subsequent vicious dismemberment, during which the boundary between dramatic action and corporeal violence becomes irretrievably blurred. While some historical commentators have argued that the child’s “death” was simulated and represented by an articulated mannequin—a device not uncommon in the more visceral traditions of Catholic drama—P.V. ambiguously describes “the weight of flesh and the flow of blood, as though the holy were made horrid and the horrid made holy”[4].
Modern scholars have debated the implications of this quotation, with some arguing that it alludes to a collective suspension of disbelief among the audience, while others interpret it as evidence of an actual child’s murder staged under the guise of performance. The truth, as always, remains elusive and lost in the mists of time. What is clear, however, is that the spectators’ role in the play extended far beyond passive observation, implicating them in the moral and physical violence enacted on stage: the act of watching became an act of participation, and the audience—like the child—was both objectified and implicated.
The Audience as Protagonist: Complicity and Catharsis
The radical innovation—and enduring horror—of The Baby of Mâcon lies in its treatment of the audience. Far from passive witnesses, the attendees are drawn into the play’s moral vortex, becoming both its protagonists and its victims.
The actors routinely break character to address the audience directly, accusing them of sins that parallel those depicted onstage. The faux Virgin Mother’s denunciation of the church elders, for example, is accompanied by an unscripted interrogation of the clergymen in attendance, who are described as “visibly shaken” in the Mâconnais Codex, an anonymous and incomplete historical fragment. This deliberate erosion of the fourth wall is not a mere dramaturgical flourish but a calculated assault on the notion of theatrical remove.
Furthermore, the play weaponises its own artificiality, using the audience’s initial detachment to entrap them. As historian Anne-Marguerite Lemaître writes in her “Treatise on Performativity and Punishment”; “The audience’s willingness to believe they are ‘safe’ from the events onstage becomes the very foundation upon which their destruction is built.”[5]
Thus, the gang-rape-to-death of the false Virgin Mother following her murder of and subsequent dismemberment of the miracle Child, represents not only the apex of dramatic violence but also an intrusion of that violence into the audience’s reality. Saint-Aubert, in a passage notable for its reluctant clarity, observed, “As the chorus of peasants demanded their share of the child’s flesh hoping that his body will bring them good fortune, thy assembled nobles and merchants looked to one another, uncertain whether to applaud or avert their gaze. Before long, some clutched the false knives offered to them, completing the blasphemous act.”[6]
According to one eyewitness, the play concluded with the actors portraying the fanatical townspeople descending into the audience, their bloodied costumes staining the garments of those seated nearest the stage. “T’was tho the play nvr ceased,” the witness remarks, “for we became a complicit part and were aft’rward set forth into the world, haunted by what we had witnessed.”[7].
This deliberate conflation of performance and reality exemplifies what theorist H. Von Kleist later termed the theatrum abyssum, or “theatre of the abyss,” in which the audience is forced to confront its own complicity in the spectacle of suffering. Such moments reveal the 1659 Baby not as a passive relic of fifteenth-century dramaturgy but as a transgressive and volatile medium through which its performers and spectators alike became implicated in the moral and physical violence it purported to critique.
Historiography and the Posthumous Witness
The historiographical reception of The Baby of Mâcon mirrors the performance’s internal paradoxes. Scholars have debated for centuries whether the accounts of the 1659 event represent a literal record of a theatrical performance or an allegorical rendering of seventeenth-century anxieties. The archival silence surrounding the playwright has further fuelled speculation about the production’s origins and intent.
Furthermore, the fragmented and often contradictory nature of the historical record poses significant challenges for modern scholars attempting to reconstruct the 1659 performance. Primary sources such as P.V.’s Memoriae and Saint-Aubert’s Epistles are rife with rhetorical flourishes and theological digressions respectively, reflecting their authors own entanglement in the moral and epistemological ambiguities of the haunting performance. Yet the most compelling historiographical lens may be the one that embraces the event’s irresolvable contradictions. The Mâconnais Codex, for example, frequently shifts between eyewitness testimony and allegorical prose, presenting the audience’s reactions as both literal and symbolic. One passage describes how a merchant, upon witnessing the repeated rape of the false Virgin, “wept as if his own mother had been slain, though his tears fell like gold coins, staining the floor with avarice.”[8] Such accounts defy any straightforward interpretation, instead inviting readers to inhabit the liminal space between historical record and dramatic fiction.
At its core, the play and its revival engage in a dialectic of complicity and critique, implicating actors, spectators, and historians alike in the violent spectacle it portrays.
Compounding this difficulty is the absence of a definitive script or prompt book which no doubt contributed to the play’s disappearance. It is therefore theorised that the 1659 staging relied heavily on improvisation and site-specific practices, creating a production that was, by its very nature, ephemeral, unique and unreproducible. This lack of textual stability further undermines any attempt to situate The Baby of Mâcon within a coherent historical or theatrical tradition, leaving scholars to grapple with a narrative that resists closure at every turn. Thus, without a script or a clear lineage of performance, The Baby of Mâcon became a phantom text: its legacy preserved only in the fragmented and often contradictory accounts of those who witnessed its singular, catastrophic revival. Perhaps this is why contemporary post-structuralist interpretations have framed the performance as a proto-modernist deconstruction of narrative authority. As Lemaître provocatively asserts, “The Baby of Mâcon is less a morality play than a morality trap, in which the audience’s own ethical frameworks are dismantled before their eyes.”[9]
Complicity, Critique, and Conclusion
The 1659 revival of The Baby of Mâcon defies conventional categories of theatrical performance and historical narrative. Its meta-theatrical layering—fifteenth-century text reframed within a seventeenth-century court performance observed through the fragmented lens of modern historiography—creates a kaleidoscopic interplay of meaning that resists resolution.
At its core, the play and its revival engage in a dialectic of complicity and critique, implicating actors, spectators, and historians alike in the violent spectacle it portrays. The theatrical fourth wall, traditionally a barrier between the realms of fiction and reality, becomes a porous membrane through which ethical horrors bleed into the lived experience of its audience. This deliberate entanglement of the observer in the moral and physical violence of the performance challenges the very act of spectatorship, rendering the audience culpable in the sins it ostensibly seeks to condemn.
The aftermath of the 1659 performance offers significant insight into why The Baby of Mâcon has never been revived or recorded as being performed since. While contemporaneous accounts describe the event in vivid, unsettling detail, the collective response from those who witnessed the performance appears to have been one of profound shock and moral revulsion. P.V., in a final, haunting note, observes that “those who sat and watched, and those who stood and played, alike departed with their spirits torn, their words silenced, as though they had glimpsed the abyss and found it gazing back.”[10]
This emotional and moral destabilisation likely contributed to the play’s cultural effacement. The performance, rather than reinforcing moral orthodoxy, destabilised it, transforming its intended critique of greed, corruption, and sanctimony into a scathing indictment of the very structures—ecclesiastical, political, and theatrical—that sought to contain its meaning. The trauma of this destabilisation, compounded by the blurred boundaries between performance and reality, rendered the play a dangerous artifact, its revival a potentially subversive act.
“There are plays that heal, plays that wound, and plays that destroy. The Baby of Mâcon belongs to the lattermost, and such destruction leaves no room for repetition.”
Henri de Rouvray, Traités Dramatiques
Moreover, practical and political considerations may have ensured its disappearance from the theatrical repertoire. The Duke’s court, under whose auspices the performance was staged, faced widespread criticism in the wake of the event. Accusations ranged from blasphemy to sedition, with some contemporary commentators alleging that the Grand Duke of Tuscany himself, in crossing the fourth wall between audience and player directly, suggested to the character of the Bishop that the Daughter be raped to circumvent the forbidden execution of a virgin thus blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction even further.
Finally, one must consider the play’s thematic and aesthetic excesses, which defy the conventions of both fifteenth- and seventeenth-century dramaturgy. The violent dismemberment of the murdered miracle child, the gang rape of the false Virgin, and the collapse of the moral framework underpinning the narrative leave no space for redemption or resolution. Such unrelenting bleakness, coupled with the play’s assault on the audience’s moral and psychological defences, renders it fundamentally incompatible with the purposes of most theatrical traditions, which seek to educate, edify, or entertain. As theatre theorist Henri de Rouvray observes, “There are plays that heal, plays that wound, and plays that destroy. The Baby of Mâcon belongs to the lattermost, and such destruction leaves no room for repetition.”[11]
Thus, The Baby of Mâcon remains an anomaly in the history of European theatre: a performance so volatile, so transgressive, that it has become unperformable, its memory a whispered echo of an event too disturbing to be repeated. Yet, in its singularity lies its power, for the absence of a revival ensures its continued resonance as a cautionary tale—a stark reminder of theatre’s capacity not only to reflect reality but to dismantle it, leaving its participants, both performers and spectators, irrevocably transformed and questioning the very nature of their reality.
As historians, we are left with the uncomfortable task of parsing these layers, fully aware that our interpretations may themselves be part of the play’s ongoing performance. In the words of the anonymous chronicler of the Mâconnais Codex, “What we remember is not the play, nor the players, but our own faces, reflected back at us from the stage.”[12]
[1] Guillaume Saint-Aubert, Epistles on Moral Tragedy and the Divine Theatre (1661), p. 27.
[2] P.V., Memoriae Ludorum, trans. Marguerite D’Anjou (Rouen: Presses du Soleil, 1683), p.34
[3] P.V., Memoriae Ludorum, trans. Marguerite D’Anjou (Rouen: Presses du Soleil, 1683), p.39
[4] Ibid., p.57
[5] Anne-Marguerite Lemaître, Treatise on Performativity and Punishment (1722), p. 89.
[6] Saint-Aubert, p. 46
[7] Mâconnais Codex, fol. 140v.
[8] Mâconnais Codex, fol. 118v.
[9] Anne-Marguerite Lemaître, Treatise on Performativity and Punishment (1722), p. 97
[10] P.V., Memoriae Ludorum, trans. Marguerite D’Anjou (Rouen: Presses du Soleil, 1683), p.62
[11] Henri de Rouvray, Traités Dramatiques (1972), p. 141
[12] Mâconnais Codex, fol. 132r.
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