Abstract
English medieval mystery plays flourished during the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries. They were performed in cities and country towns as out-of-door productions, at first at the time of the feast of Corpus Christi (first Thursday after Trinity Sunday), but later over the Whitsun holiday. An early characteristic of the Corpus Christi celebration was an elaborate procession in which the Host was carried aloft in the company of the district’s chief ecclesiastical and lay representatives clad in their ceremonial robes.
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Notes
Norwich Grocers’ Play, version A, in Norman Davies, ed., Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 10.
York Mystery Plays, ed. Lucy T. Smith (New York: Russell and Russell, repr. ed., 1963), p. 27.
Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, Records of Early English Drama: York (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 55–56.
The Chester Mystery Plays 1, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 362.
Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 296.
The Towneley Plays, ed. George England (London, Oxford University Press, 1897), p. 3.
Ibid.
R. W. Ingram, Records of Early English Drama: Coventry (Toronto: Manchester University Press), p. 247.
The N-Town Play 1, ed. Stephen Spector 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 252.
Frances Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926), p. 91.
Martial Rose, The Wakefield Mystery Plays (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), p. 530.
Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), p. 307.
Lawrence M. Clopper, Records of Early English Drama: Chester (Toronto: Manchester University Press, 1979), p. 95.
Hardin Craig, Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (London: EETS, 1957, repr. 1967), pp. 507–11.
The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 168–69.
James Tobin, George Herbert (St. Ives: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 29.
Rosamund Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952)
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© 2001 Stewart Gordon
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Rose, M. (2001). Robing and Its Significance in English Mystery Plays. In: Gordon, S. (eds) Robes and Honor. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-61845-3_16
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