Abstract
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the dominant type of formal theatre in England was the Mystery Cycle. In many of the larger cities a series of short plays on episodes from the Bible were performed sequentially outdoors, during one day in early summer, by members of the trade guilds, for the delight and instruction of the general public and the prestige and renown of the guild and its members. The audience was free to come and go from the performance in the absence of formal theatre buildings and admission charges. Many of the ‘actors’ performing the plays were known to the audience either personally, as friends, neighbours, relatives or professionally, as butchers, tailors, builders, etc. and the performances took place on a day when the normal activities of work and trade were suspended for the holiday of which the plays formed part. The plots of the plays were well known to the audience and there was no suspense involved as to the final outcome. Many, if not all, of our contemporary conventions and expectations of plays and play-going were absent or directly inverted. This was not the only form of drama available in the period, but it received the most financial attention and creative commitment from those who performed it and the most official attention and approval from both civic and religious authorities who provided a physical, temporal and moral space for it to play in and supported the themes it promoted. This kind of drama lasted for at least two hundred years.
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Notes
Cf. Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘The Procession and Play of Corpus Christi in York after 1426’, in Leeds Studies in English NS, vii (1975), 55–62.
Alan H. Nelson, in his The Medieval English Stage (Chicago, 1974), offers a different interpretation of the evidence with respect to the relationship between the procession and the plays.
Cf. V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford, 1966 ), p. 51.
A cycle of Cornish plays has also survived in a slightly different form from the four English plays. The cycle is edited and translated by Markham Norris as The Cornish Ordinalia ( Washington, DC, 1969 ).
Nelson, Medieval English Stage and Martial Rose, The Wakefield Mystery Plays (London, 1961) are the principal opponents of true-processional staging. However, Nelson has since retracted his objections, which have also been effectively countered by
Margaret Dorrell in her article, ‘Two Studies of the York Corpus Christi Play’, in Leeds Studies in English NS, vi (1972), 63–111.
Cf. R. A. Beadle, York Plays (London, 1982), pp. 429–33 and 425–7.
See below, Chapter 5. The Mercers’ Indenture is printed in Peter Happé (ed.), Medieval English Drama (London, 1984 ), pp. 29–30.
Cf. The Shearman and Taylors’ Pageant, in Hardin Craig (ed.), Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays EETS, ES 87 (Oxford, 1957/67), 11.204–25 and Processus Noe in
A. C. Cawley (ed.), The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester, 1958/71), 11. 370–2.
Cf. Meg Twycross, ‘Transvestism in the Mystery Plays’, in Medieval English Theatre, 5. 2 (1983), 123–80.
Cf. Richard Rastall, “Alle Hefne Makyth Melody”, in Paula Neuss (ed.), Aspects of Early English Drama (Cambridge, 1983 ), pp. 1–12.
Cf. Nelson, Medieval English Stage p. 139 and Hardin Craig, Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays xxiii. Cf. also the arguments used by the Norwich Guild of St Luke for assistance in the production of their pageants in 1527 in Norman Davis (ed.), Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments EETS, SS 1 (Oxford, 1970), xxvii.
Cf. Alan D. Justice, ‘Trade Symbolism in the York Cycle’, in Theatre Journal xxxi (March 1979), 47–58 and Beadle, York Plays p. 30.
Eleanor Prosser, Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays (Stanford, 1961). Under the auspices of the University of Toronto, the REED (Records of Early English Drama) series has been set up ‘to locate, transcribe and publish systematically all surviving external evidence of dramatic, ceremonial, and minstrel activity in Great Britain before 1642’. The first volume in the series, the York records, appeared in 1979 and since then the volumes on Chester, Coventry, Newcastle and other cities have been issued.
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© 1991 Christine Richardson and Jackie Johnston
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Richardson, C., Johnston, J. (1991). Mystery Plays. In: Medieval Drama. English Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21180-7_2
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