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Masterplots, Fourth Edition

Abraham and Isaac

First produced: Fifteenth century

Type of work: Drama

Type of plot: Mystery play

Time of plot: Antiquity

Locale: Beersheba

The Story:

Abraham, offering a prayer of thanksgiving to God, counts his blessings—his land, his peaceful life, his children—and tells of his delight in his favorite child, Isaac. He stands praying in a field near his home in Beersheba. After the prayer, he calls to Isaac to return to their home.

God, in Heaven, summons an angel and tells him that he intends to test Abraham’s steadfastness by asking him to sacrifice Isaac, and he orders the angel to announce his wish to Abraham. Meanwhile, Abraham prays again, asking God what gift or offering might please him most. The angel then appears and tells Abraham that God commands the sacrifice of Isaac as an indication of Abraham’s love for the Lord. Abraham immediately experiences great inward conflict. He keeps repeating that Isaac is the most loved of all his children, that he would rather sacrifice anything else of his, including his own life, than to offer up Isaac. At the same time, he is aware that God’s will must be obeyed and that the sacrifice, no matter how painful, must be made. Abraham then calls Isaac, who is praying, and tells him that they must perform a sacrifice for the Lord. Isaac declares his willingness to help. Abraham feels his heart breaking as they walk toward Mount Vision to make the sacrifice.

On their arrival at the mountain, Isaac asks why Abraham seems so concerned. The boy begins to quake at the sight of the sharp sword in his father’s hand because, aware of his father’s acute misery, he guesses that he is to be the offering in the sacrifice to the Lord. Abraham then tries to explain to Isaac that they must follow God’s commandment, having no other choice. Isaac prays to his father, asking him to spare his life and wishing his mother to be there to intercede for him. Isaac also wonders what crimes he committed that his life should be demanded by God. Abraham, in his misery, explains that God’s will must simply be obeyed. At last, Isaac understands and yields to God’s will. He asks, however, that Abraham not tell his mother he was killed. Instead, she is to believe that he went into another land.

Resigning himself to death, Isaac asks for his father’s blessing. Abraham gives his blessing, laments further, and proceeds to bind Isaac’s hands. Abraham then repeats his hope that he could be sacrificed in Isaac’s place, but the brave Isaac reminds him that God must be obeyed and asks that the killing be done quickly. Abraham covers Isaac’s face with a cloth and makes ready to lift his sword. Just as Abraham is about to strike Isaac, the angel appears and takes the sword from Abraham’s upraised hand. The angel says that Abraham proved his willingness to obey God’s command, an act that fully displayed Abraham’s mind and heart. Therefore, the angel continues, Abraham will not be compelled to sacrifice his son, but might substitute a young ram, tied nearby, for the offering. Abraham is overjoyed and, after the angel’s departure, gives thanks to God for Isaac’s deliverance. Isaac welcomes his reprieve, but only after Abraham assures him that God will regard the ram as a worthy substitute. Isaac, at his father’s bidding, runs to bring the ram. Returning with it, Isaac expresses his happiness that the beast, rather than he, is to be sacrificed. When Abraham offers up the ram, Isaac still shows a great fear of Abraham’s sword and does not wish to look at it.

After the sacrifice, God again speaks to Abraham, acknowledging his goodness and promising that his family will multiply. Abraham then returns with Isaac to their home, recounting on the way his pleasure that his favorite child is spared. Isaac is also grateful, but he mentions his fear and states that he never wants to see the hill again. Abraham and Isaac thank God and show great relief to be returning home together. Abraham praises the gentleness and understanding of his young son.

The play’s commentator, the Doctor, then appears on the scene to make explicit the moral of the story: that one should follow God’s commandments without quarreling. The Doctor asks how many in the audience would be willing to smite their children if God so commanded. He thinks that several might do so, although the children’s mothers would wail and protest. The Doctor then says that God will mend everything for those truly willing to follow his commandments—those who serve God faithfully will be certain to benefit from their loyalty.

Critical Evaluation:

One of the fifteenth century mystery plays performed by guild members in various towns in England, Abraham and Isaac tells the biblical story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. The Brome version of the play is distinguished from others by its greater length and its fuller development of the characters of Abraham and Isaac. The mystery plays, although often simple in both plot and design, helped to provide the background and tradition from which Elizabethan drama later emerged. The play is in verse, sometimes written in five-line stanzas rhyming abaab, sometimes in eight-line stanzas with alternate rhymes, these stanzas often ending in a shortened line. Sometimes there is no clear rhyming or stanzaic pattern. It is difficult to determine whether the play was originally written in a more careful poetic pattern, now lost through successive copying and oral repetition, or whether it was originally written in a form close to the present version.

Abraham and Isaac is a type of work that could have been created only in an age of faith. Dealing as it does with the ultimate subject of human duty to God, it depends for its effectiveness on a set of shared assumptions between playwright and audience about the omnipotence and omnipresence of God, humanity’s relationship to God, and God’s justice. The slightest hint of skepticism or rationalistic questioning of values—for example, asking why God’s commandment should be obeyed blindly when it appears so arbitrary and unjust, or how one can be sure that this is truly the word of God—would be fatal. As it is, the playwright handles his subject not only with a perfect consistency of tone but also with great clarity, with dramatic power, and, most important, with considerable insight into the human dimension.

The central issue of the play is made clear at the outset when God says, “I shall assay now his good will,/ Whether he loveth better his child or me./ All men shall take example by him my commandments how to keep.” This issue never deviates thereafter. The play is an exemplum, or moral tale, as shown by the Doctor’s appearance on stage at the end to reinforce the moral and to make the personal application to the audience explicit. The dramatic power of Abraham and Isaac derives largely from the manner in which the degrees of ignorance of father and son become knowledge. The audience, from God’s first speech and also from its own knowledge of the Bible, knows the significance of the events to come, making dramatic irony possible. Abraham is ignorant of God’s will for an appropriate sacrifice until the angel partially discloses it to him. His knowledge makes him heavy with grief, and so he tries to keep Isaac ignorant of the dire event to come until it is no longer possible to conceal it. When Isaac becomes aware of God’s will, he acquiesces immediately, and the plight and subsequent behavior of father and son in their state of partial knowledge become poignant in the extreme. Finally, this partial knowledge of God’s purpose is revealed as true ignorance when the angel stays Abraham’s hand and informs him of God’s real purpose in demanding the sacrifice of Isaac. The full knowledge thus acquired provides characters and audience with new insight not only into God’s power and authority but also into his beneficence.

If the play were merely an exemplum, it would no longer interest the reader except on the level of didacticism and as an indication of medieval attitudes toward God. This play, however, is an intensely personal work; the playwright is not simply a dramatic preacher, but a man who shares and makes his audience share the agony of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham’s love for his son is one of the first dramatic facts established in this play. The loving father’s anguish and near despair as he is torn between his reverence for his God and his love for his son are powerful even on the printed page. Isaac does even more to create audience sympathy. By turns he shows the reader his innocence, his filial love, his devoutness, his trustingness, his anxiety at the sight of Abraham’s sword, his fear, his resignation to the will of God, his courage (even exceeding his father’s), his mildness under sentence of death, his concern for his mother, his plea for a quick death, and finally his joy at his deliverance. He also displays his lingering fear of the knife and the hill on which he so narrowly escaped slaughter. All of these psychologically sound changes of mood, material for a play of far greater length, are handled with a dramatic skill that is economical, convincing, and moving.

Further Reading

1 

Collier, Richard. “Poetry and Instruction.” In Poetry and Drama in the York Corpus Christi Play. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1978. Collier shows that the moral is explicitly drawn in the Abraham and Isaac plays by the Brome play’s Doctor, the Chester play’s Expositor, and in the dialogue of the York play.

2 

Davidson, Clifford. “The Sacrifice of Isaac in Medieval English Drama.” In History, Religion, and Violence: Cultural Contexts for Medieval and Renaissance English Drama. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002. This collection of essays on medieval English drama includes an analysis of the various Abraham and Isaac plays.

3 

Foster, Verna A. “Early English Tragicomedy: From Providential Design to Metatheatre.” In The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. Foster analyzes the Brome Abraham and Isaac, as well as other medieval mystery plays, describing how they exemplify early English tragicomedy.

4 

Mills, David. “Religious Drama and Civic Ceremonial.” In Medieval Drama. Vol. 1 in The Revels History of Drama in English. New York: Methuen, 1983. Mills discusses how the verisimilitude of the Brome Abraham and Isaac threatens the exemplary quality of the drama. He also notes that the play was probably not part of a cycle.

5 

Rendall, Thomas. “Visual Typology in the Abraham and Isaac Plays.” Modern Philology 81, no. 3 (February, 1984): 221-232. Focuses on the way in which medieval staging underlined the typological overtones in the plays. Rendall points out the parallel staging between the Old Testament and New Testament plays.

6 

Williams, Arnold. “The Literary Art of the Cycles.” The Drama of Medieval England. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1961. Shows how scriptural exegesis is needed to understand the mystery plays’ use of biblical material. As an example of this, Williams notes that the Abraham and Isaac play is one of the types of the sacrifice of the cross.

7 

Woolf, Rosemary. “Types and Prophecies of the Redemption.” In The English Mystery Plays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Compares the Abraham and Isaac plays with the Noah and Moses plays of the mystery cycles. Woolf considers the Brome, Chester, and Ludus Conventriae Abraham and Isaac plays the most accomplished among the cycles.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"Abraham And Isaac." Masterplots, Fourth Edition, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MP4_10029560000003.
APA 7th
Abraham and Isaac. Masterplots, Fourth Edition, In L. W. Mazzeno (Ed.), Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MP4_10029560000003.
CMOS 17th
"Abraham And Isaac." Masterplots, Fourth Edition, Edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno. Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MP4_10029560000003.