Some notes from our director, Laura-Elizabeth Rice, on where her work with The War in Heavenbegan, getting to know source material, and what she’s learned so far about angels and devils.

In the beginning was the word…

Well, in the theatre, the beginning is the word: the script. Ours, for The War in Heaven and the rest of the Mystery Plays, is a brand-new translation by Dr. Alan Heaven. As a word geek, I’m enjoying getting to know a new iteration, thinking about the words that are chosen, hearing them out, rolling them around in my mouth, considering the echoes of the original, and contemplating why different translators make the choices that they do. Of course, the Mystery Plays are themselves the product of adaptation, of the stories of the Bible, filtered through medieval tradition and understanding. How much tradition of the ancient world influenced the Bible is a much deeper theological debate than I’m willing to entertain, but suffice to say that by the time we’re looking at Mystery Plays today, there is not one “beginning” point but many.

I decided, however, to start with the place that medieval people would have considered the source text, which is the Bible. There are, of course, many different translations of that, too; for the sake of purity, I should probably have consulted one of the earlier Latin iterations- likely the Latin Vulgate- but, confession!, I don’t read Latin particularly well. As a creature of the twenty-first century, instead I hit the internet for one of those webpages that shows various versions side by side, for comparison. Of course it cannot include all the variations of Biblical translation, so I cannot say that any of my discoveries are conclusive. But hope they can be considered a starting point for understanding the play that I hope I can bring out for actors and audiences!

God as a concept seems simultaneously completely obvious (an omniscient, all-powerful entity), and completely ineffable, even- especially- if one is not a person from, or of, a faith tradition. But that, at least, is an answer I could give if someone needed a definition. Yet I realised that if I were asked, “What is an angel? What is a fallen angel?” I actually wouldn’t have a good answer. I’ll come back to this at a later date, but the point now is that I wanted to know exactly what the Bible had to say about them, since their actions drive the play. 

Angels are scattered throughout the Bible- a search suggested there are approximately 300 references to them, depending on which translation you’re looking at- and yet they are never very well defined. The word “angel” means “messenger”, and that’s the capacity in which they appear most frequently, as interlocutors between God and people. Sometimes they are corporeal and sometimes they aren’t, but when they do have a physical presence, they have hands and faces, and sometimes accessorize with a sword or a staff. They can interact with people physically as well as vocally. They’re impervious to fire, and can appear and disappear. One of the few absolutely stated facts about angels is that they don’t have marriages, although whether this implies that they have genders or not isn’t clear. Particularly interesting in terms of the workings of a war in heaven, they don’t just intercede with humans to bring messages; they’re also often God’s agent of smiting, striking people down when they’ve displeased the deity. They also don’t die, which certainly has implications for the outcome of a war in heaven, and perhaps why being sent to Hell is their punishment for rebellion.

Fallen angels aren’t really called such, at least not in any of the translations that I’ve seen, and Satan gets fewer than 50 namechecks. But there are several occasions when Satan (his name means “the tempter” or “the accuser”) hangs out with angels, sometimes those held up in contrast to him, and sometimes with the implication that he has angels which belong specifically to him, separate from God’s. Satan can “masquerade as an angel of light”, which one can read to imply that he is an angel in opposition to light- i.e. an angel of darkness- or perhaps that he is no angel at all. After all, he’s also equated in Revelation with a dragon and a serpent. There is altogether quite a bit less in the Bible about fallen angels or Satan than one might assume, given the weight they carry culturally in both the Middle Ages and today. 

The War in Heaven is, traditionally, called “The Fall of Angels” in the medieval plays. Along with the creation of Heaven, it’s part of the first play in all four cycles. I had therefore assumed, as medieval people seem to have done, that this was a story from the earliest idea of time, in Genesis. But in the Bible, it makes only a brief appearance, in the book of Revelation (12:7-9), at the end of the Bible. There is an earlier allusion (Luke 10:18) where Jesus says he “saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”, but there is no further detail of the context in which this occurred. And since Jesus isn’t born until the New Testament, presumably the angelic fall wouldn’t be contemporaneous with the creation of the world. I actually quite like the circularity of this, as if the end is in the beginning and the beginning is in the end.

I was surprised that these characters, and the story of the war in heaven, did not feature more prominently in the Bible, given how strong the narrative, and subsequent artistic, traditions seem to be. On the one hand, creating them dramatically almost from whole cloth is a real challenge! On the other hand, it also means the possibilities are endless… almost. It’s still medieval drama, after all! For now, what it really tells me is that I have a lot more research to do, because clearly a great deal of tradition had built up around these characters and events prior to and during the Middle Ages. And that, reader, is part of our play…..