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, two sculptures, a song 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 replaces the poem's ‘scatty’ Kempe with Kempe the visionary. 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.
The final act puts Kempe on trial, accused of having a lewd and blasphemous vision of being God’s wife and bedfellow. 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.
Kempe the Careworn,
Kempe the Strong
Kempe has inspired a number of sculptures, all markedly different. Elizabeth Hogeland's mask, on the left, shows Kempe careworn and poor in middle age, with husband and children all making demands.
By contrast, the representation on the right, from Spain, shows a younger Kempe full of composure and fortitude! (See the complete statue here.)
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For thy great pain have mercy on my little pain
- a novel by Victoria MacKenzie
In MacKenzie's novel Kempe 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. MacKenzie makes their meeting the climax of her novel, and she gives the anchoress a distinctive view of Kempe's complex psyche:
'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.
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
