Backbiter article

Backbiter and the Rhetoric of Detraction

Hayes, Douglas W. Comparative Drama 34.1 (2000): 53-78.

Hayes sets up his examination of the detractors, and Backbiter in particular, by looking at Backbiter’s role in The Castle of Perseverance, a text pre-dating the N-Town plays. Using language, Backbiter moves back and forth across the strict lines between good and evil, blurring those lines. Hayes compares his place as a representative of “sins of the tongue” to Augustine’s understanding that rhetoric can be a force for evil as much as for good.

 

In the N-Town plays, Hayes says, the detractors use their ambivalent rhetoric for complicated purposes. The very presence of these characters forces the audience into an interpretive position by disrupting the sense of pure historical portrayal and reminding the audience of the dramatic setting. By addressing the audience, the detractors insert the audience into the biblical moment and force it to face the questions the biblical characters faced. Thus, the detractors put the audience in a position of attending to arguments against central tenets of Christian orthodoxy. When the detractors receive God’s wrath in payment, the audience knows which side of the argument is correct, but maintains its interpretive position; now the audience members have made an interpretive choice, and are no longer mere spectators to the biblical story. Still, Backbiter seems to escape unscathed, and may return.

 

In my paper about who determines correct belief, I had already planned to argue something similar about the role of the dramatic setting to make the audience interpret and judge heresy. Hayes’ article, by focusing on the detractors, points out a specific way that the plays do so. I plan to expand on his that the detractors force the audience to decide (with guidance) what is correct belief, arguing that the presence of God’s judgment at the end of the plays motivates the audience to become self-regulating in belief and to regulate the heterodox beliefs of others.