Mystery Plays

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.