Resumo de Morality Play - Barry Unsworth

In this bleak, carefully crafted novel, published in 1995, the time is December in the latter half of the fourteenth century, the place is northern England, and the smell is rot. As for the narrator, he is Nicholas Barber, a priest who left his diocese in Lincoln the previous May without his bishop?s consent and who, hungry and cold and lonely, defies Church teaching and joins a troupe of players just after one of their members has died. On their way to a command Christmas performance in Durham, they stop at a town both to bury the dead man in a churchyard and to perform a Play to refill their purse. When The Play of Adam fails to bring the receipts they hoped for, they decide, at the urging of their leader, Martin Bell, to risk performing a play about the murder of a local boy, Thomas Wells, whose body was found at the roadside and buried fast and for whose murder the beautiful deaf-mute daughter of a heretical weaver has already been tried and condemned. This play, performed on an afternoon in the yard of an inn, generates considerable interest, especially through the ending the players improvise for its first performance, in which they implicate a monk, the local nobleman?s chaplain, who supposedly found the boy?s purse in the weaver?s house. In a later performance, by torchlight on the night after the first one, the players, still improvising, go so far as to implicate the nobleman himself, Sir Richard de Guise, being prompted to do so when, during the performance, mounted men bring the monk?s hanged body into town. The players soon find themselves under arrest and imprisoned in the local castle. The next day, they watch a tournament in which the nobleman?s son, Sir William, is supposedly too lovesick to contend, and in which another knight suffers a hard fall from his horse. After sunset, commanded by Sir Richard, the players perform their play about Thomas Wells again, this time with only the nobleman himself and his steward as the audience. Emboldened beyond the last vestige of prudence in this dangerous situation, Martin, as Superbia, accuses Sir Richard face to face of murder. The nobleman?s daughter, however, interrupts the performance to say that the wounded knight, dying, needs a priest to administer Extreme Unction and the chaplain cannot be found. Sir Richard sends Nicholas under guard to that knight?s chamber, where Nicholas, after administering the sacrament and then seeing the knight die, slips out a second door, escapes from the castle, and walks through snow to the town. There, at the inn, he seeks the King?s Justice and tells the story of the imprisoned woman?s innocence and Sir Richard?s guilt. A nighttime exhumation of Thomas?s body reveals that he was sodomized and strangled, with his neck broken, and that he had been infected with the plague sometime before his violent death. More concerned with bringing Sir Richard under the king?s rule than with saving the innocent and punishing the guilty, the cynical Justice nevertheless points out that the person who murdered Thomas Wells and other boys from the area was Sir William, for whom the monk was procurer and who by this time must have died of the plague. The Justice frees the innocent woman and promises to free Nicholas?s fellow players. Declining the Justice?s offer to reinstate him in his bishop?s favor, Nicholas realizes that everyone is a player and that his part in life now lies not in Lincoln with his bishop but with his friends, who, unlike other persons, know that they act their parts.

Resumos Relacionados