Margery Kempe
&
The Fire of Love
Agony and Ecstasy
Kempe has meant all sorts of things to all sorts of people - poets, novelists, playwrights and sculptors as well as scholars. What was she? - an 'Apprentice Saint,' a 'crazy mixed up kid,' a 'sanctimonious bluebottle'? Featured below are a poem, a play, a sculpture and a novel that offer still further responses.
Medieval Mystic Margery Kempe in Tesco
- a poem by Laura Varnam
Of course she’s one of those shoppers who thinks she won’t need a trolley but halfway round her basket’s on the lino and she’s losing tins of custard powder & baby formula and she’s crushing the body and blood of Christ under her arm while John Junior tucks into a doughnut she hasn’t paid for yet and there’s an unexpected item in the bagging area and it’s Christ again wanting to talk about his glory and she just wants to get home and put the kids in front of CBeebies to keep them occupied before He starts on about how lonely it is in heaven. She clutches a multipack of paper towel and its whiteness gives her hope.
The Fire of Love
- a play by Tony D Triggs
Like the poem, The Fire of Love draws on Kempe’s autobiographical Book but instead of a ‘scatty’ Margery Kempe it depicts a woman either self-possessed or possessed by her visions, and these are acted out at length. Thus as midwife at Jesus’ nativity she’s focussed, efficient and professional, telling the teenage mother ‘the Lord need a wider way than that. Tha’s no more’n a keyhole!’ but making her ‘a nice hot drink’ straight after the birth.
In a later vision she sees Jesus’ crucifixion, and relates it with details starker and more intense than those of the gospel accounts. After his death she tries in vain to comfort his disconsolate mother. This time there’s no easy answer, no ‘nice hot drink’ to meet the need.
The final act puts Kempe on trial, accused of having a lewd and blasphemous vision of being God’s wife and bedfellow. Her Book is quoted against her, and the judge seems to have a prurient relish for the passage in question.
Older than Kempe and somewhat senile, her husband John attempts to defend her but loses his temper. Grabbing ‘them new-fangled spetricals' perched on the judge’s nose he stamps them to pieces saying they make what’s bright and blessed look foul and black. ‘I tell you this,’ he cries out as the curtain falls: ‘You ain’t going to hang my Marge on no giblet!’
In the poem it's Margery's mind that's chaotic; in the play it is John's.
This sculpture by Elizabeth Hogeland depicts Kempe the careworn. No longer dressed for prideful public appearances, she appears to be bearing the middle-aged stresses she reveals in her Book. Now in relative poverty, she has broken nights dealing with John's incontinence - probably followed by demanding days as she copes with young children.
For thy great pain have mercy on my little pain
- a novel by Victoria MacKenzie
Neither poem nor play makes a measured assessment of Margery Kempe. She is the poem and she's certainly the dominant voice in the play. By contrast, MacKenzie's novel puts Kempe in perspective. She speaks for herself but is also seen through the eyes of the anchoress Julian of Norwich. The two share the novel on equal terms, addressing the reader alternately.
Julian was a real-life contemporary of Margery Kempe and Kempe sought her views as to whether her locutions with God were genuine. To judge from the Book Julian responded circumspectly, with ifs and buts.
MacKenzie makes their meeting the climax of her novel, and her fictionalised account conveys - more strongly than Kempe's - the anchoress's circumspection about her visitor:
'Her voice swanned and preened and boasted, yet there was another note to her song. Margery Kempe was the loneliest woman I had ever met.'
Thus this character gives an objective tone to views about Kempe's personality, with implications for all that she professed and did.
Covers of MacKenzie's novel, hardback left and paperback right. The title is a cri de coeur that Kempe or Julian might have uttered in prayer.
Read more of Laura Varnam's Kempe-inspired poems here.
Buy the script of The Fire of Love on Amazon.
Read more about Victoria MacKenzie here.
Tony D Triggs