Writing ‘The Fire of Love’

I first met Kings Lynn’s medieval visionary Margery Kempe when I was an undergraduate. 50 years later I still don’t feel that I know her well.

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Being scarcely literate, she had to dictate her Book, and it’s the first known autobiography in English. A manuscript copy was found in 1934 and published both in Margery’s Norfolky Middle English and in modern translations.

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My own translation appeared in 1995, and the way it was marketed showed conflicting views of Margery’s life and character. The UK edition bore a pious artwork on its front cover; the US edition sported raspberry-coloured vulgarity, attracting the hurried hands of travellers at airports and railway stations. (It sold five times better than the UK edition.)

As if by way of compromise, the cover of the latest edition, published by Gracewing, shows drunken pilgrims in muted colours! (Margery travelled to distant shrines in very varied company, besides frequenting Norfolk centres like Kings Lynn, Walsingham, Norwich and Yarmouth.)

Margery often seems unaware of her effect on others. On the outskirts of Lynn, she encounters half a dozen nursing mothers and asks them the sex of their babies. Knowing that baby boys set her screaming in honour of the infant Christ the mothers preserve the peace by professing that all are girls! In other incidents, far from Lynn, her fellow pilgrims set off without her, evidently wanting relief from her religious injunctions. Saintly or sanctimonious, Margery stuck to her noisy ways.

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I started my play 30 years ago as the task of translation came to an end, and Margery speaks in the play with even less inhibition than she does in the Book. She shares her visions with particular intensity. Thus when the first act climaxes in midwife Margery delivering Christ and the second in her presence at the crucifixion we see and hear the total unquestioning involvement of her whole being. No birthing mother or crucified Christ appears onstage, so the power of her conviction must make them as real for the audience as they are for her. Premièring the play in March 2025, the Wells-next-the-Sea Theatre Society have risen to the challenge! 

The final act features Margery’s trial for blasphemy, turning especially on her claim to intimate relations with God. Set against this enormity is the poignancy of Margery’s dependence, for defence, on her senile husband, John, with his proneness to embarrassing spoonerisms.

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Their married love emerges at many points in the Book and in my play is most keenly felt when the two are taken from the courtroom in different directions, John pathetically calling out, ‘You ain’t going to hang my wife on no giblet. I won’t get no more dumplin’s like hers.’

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The play leaves the audience to reach their own verdict. Speaking for myself, I have to say that there’s hardly a single aspect of Margery Kempe on which I’ve made up my mind. Perhaps that’s what sustained my creative engagement with her for 50 years!

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For more about The Fire of Love and the enigmatic Margery Kempe click here, or read the script with a view to a possible performance use the form below, giving details of your theatre, drama group or church and the role you play in it. Be sure to include your full address, with the name of your country if it’s non-UK. 

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Tony D Triggs   top.note@yahoo.co.uk