Introduction: Prayer as Performance

Summary

The distinction between prayer and ordinary speech is strongly marked in the poetry of late-medieval England. A striking example occurs in the dream-poem Pearl, when the dreamer, speaking to the Pearl-maiden, refers to the Virgin Mary as “þe quen of cortaysye.” The moment he utters these words, the maiden interrupts their conversation in order to pray:

“Cortayse quen,” þenne sayde þat gaye,

Knelande to grounde, folde vp hyr face,

“Makelez moder and myryest may,

Blessed bygynner of vch a grace!”

Þenne ros ho vp and con restay,

And speke me towarde in þat space.

This passage clearly signals the shift from conversation to prayer and back again. When she begins to pray, the Pearl-maiden falls to her knees and lifts up her face, indicating by her change in posture that she is suspending her interaction with the dreamer to speak to someone who is not physically present. Her deliberate reversal of these gestures at the end of her brief prayer, as she stands up and turns back to the dreamer, marks her resumption of their dialogue. What happens while she is kneeling does not follow the norms of human communication. The Pearl-maiden utters a string of epithets that praise Mary as queen, as virgin mother, and as fount of grace, but her purpose is not to convey certain facts to her addressee; the act of reaffirming these traditional descriptors of Mary serves relational, rather than informative, ends. To speak these words is to celebrate Mary’s exalted holiness and to acknowledge the speaker’s dependence on Mary’s grace, such that this act of prayer enables the Pearl-maiden to draw near to the Virgin. As she comes before her addressee in humility and reverence, she adopts a spiritual stance that is at once mirrored and reinforced by her physical gesture of kneeling. The Pearl-maiden’s prayer constitutes a re-orientation of herself, body and soul, toward an addressee who is unseen but powerfully present.

Although the prayer is spoken to Mary, its placement within a poem gives it a much wider audience, and readers of the poem might respond to it on multiple levels. One response would focus on characterization: the prayer offers a glimpse into the inner life of a blessed soul, which could in turn provide a context for interpreting the maiden’s words and actions throughout the poem.