The Second Shepherds’ Play (Wakefield Master)

• Theme: Nativity through rustic comedy and social inversion.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In The Second Shepherds’ Play, Foucault’s lens reveals a remarkable intersection of sacred narrative and subversive voice—a site where medieval religiosity is transformed into a carnivalesque theatre of care, community, and class critique.

Beneath its surface humor and bucolic setting lies a profound Foucauldian structure: the shepherds, marginalized laborers, narrate their grievances within a system of feudal governance, surveillance, and divine morality. In Volume 2 (The Use of Pleasure), Foucault investigates how ancient ethics were governed not by rigid rules but by modulations of practice—an aesthetic of existence. In this medieval play, that modulation is dramatized in the form of satire and absurdity, revealing a collective ethical negotiation with oppression, hunger, and the divine.

The comedic subplot—Mak stealing a sheep and disguising it as a baby—functions as a parody of the nativity. Yet from a Foucauldian standpoint, this moment suspends the seriousness of dogma to let pleasure, laughter, and inversion emerge as strategies of resistance. Foucault often emphasized that power is most visible not in overt constraint but in subtle rituals of normalization. Here, Mak’s deceit becomes an anarchic inversion of theological authority—a layman mimicking the sacred as survival strategy.

Crucially, the shepherds’ world is governed by moral ambiguity rather than divine clarity. There is no immediate transcendent resolution. Their grievances—cold, poverty, taxation—reveal the disciplinary regimes of late medieval life, where the rural poor were managed not by swords but by sermons, by expected silence rather than explicit threat.

Yet the arrival of the angel announcing Christ’s birth abruptly re-orients the structure from comic disorder to divine intervention. This pivot enacts what Foucault in Volume 3 (The Care of the Self) might call a “turn of subjectivation”—a moment where the self is re-oriented toward an ethical telos, a higher horizon of being. The shepherds go from jesters to witnesses, from worldly sufferers to agents of spiritual insight.

The play, then, is a machine of dual consciousness: it stages both resistance to discipline through humor, and submission to spiritual governance through liturgy. The audience is never just entertained—they are interpellated, called into an ongoing process of self-care within a cosmic order. The play trains them not only to laugh at Mak, but to recognize within themselves the capacity for both sin and salvation.