Quick Reference Guide to Medieval English Drama
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Liturgical |
Secular |
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Generic names |
religious drama, ordo, officium, representatio |
mystery play, cycle play, saint=s play, miracle play, morality play, interlude, ludus, game, play, jeu |
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Who wrote them? |
Members of religious orders (priests, monks, nuns) |
Sometimes priests, sometimes members of guilds, sometimes professional scribes or clerks--the evidence isn=t clear |
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When were they written and performed? |
As early as the 8th century and as late as the 16th cent. |
Apparently began in the 13th century and well into the reign of Elizabeth I--perhaps till 1574 or later |
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Where were they performed? |
In religious spaces, like the naves or porches of churches |
In public spaces (platea), like courtyards, innyards, squares, halls; later (apparently) on wagons called “pageants” drawn through cities; sometimes in special performance spaces |
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Who performed them? |
Members of religious orders (priests, monks, nuns) |
Members of commercial groups, members of amateur and later professional acting groups, members of noble households; usually males. |
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Who was the audience? |
Members of religious orders (insiders who already knew the stories) |
Members of the public, who may or may not have known the stories |
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How were they performed? |
Often sung |
Usually spoken or recited; but ANo singing!@ |
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In what language were they written? |
Usually in Latin, with some vernacular inserts, and usually in prose |
Usually in the vernacular, often with a bit of French or Latin for trimming, and often in verse |
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Where are the texts preserved? |
In religious records, and in a few 12th and 13th century private copies |
In civic records, mostly of the 15th and 16th centuries, and in some later (mostly 15th & 16th century) private copies |
Mystery Plays take as their subject the whole history of Christian existence, from the Creation to the second coming. They celebrate the mystery of Christian teachings through the dramatization of selected episodes from the Old and New Testaments and relating those episodes to the everyday life of their audiences.
Four major cycles of mystery plays survive from England: York, Chester, Wakefield, and N-Town (or Towneley). Evidence survives of other cycles in East Anglia, the North, and even in Cornwall. They are provincial rather than metropolitan in origin, but not unsophisticated in technique.
Some non-cycle mystery plays survive. And there are plays about the lives of saints, the Pater Noster, etc., all generally lumped together as miracle plays.
The mystery plays were produced regularly, usually every year at Whitsuntide or Corpus Christi. They usually took three days to put on the full cycle. Last recorded performance of a full cycle is at Chester in 1575. Shakespeare could certainly have seen them in his youth. The plays were put on by members of various craft guilds: each guild was assigned to a certain story that was relevant to its members (for instance, the Shepherds did the annunciation, the carpenters did the nailing to the cross, etc.) Performers were average working people, who squeezed in rehearsal etc. into their regular lives. Each guild was responsible for maintaining its pageant wagon for performances. (The full group of 30 or more plays is called the Play in Middle English; each separate episode is called a pageant. The wagons developed sophisticated stagecraft, with trapdoors, pulleys and hoists in the roofs, etc, enabling rudimentary special effects. The wagons were pulled from station to station in the streets of the city, and the performance is given at each station.
People apparently came from miles around to see the plays; they were big business for the drawing town. Margery Kempe and her husband went to see the York plays, for instance. Amazing to think what kind of civic coordination and commitment it took to pull these off.
Second Shepherd’s Play
By the Wakefield Master, a reviser who worked over the old play texts somewhere in the second half of the fifteenth century. In a sophisticated metrical form called the thirteener, rhyming abab abab cdddc. Uses humor and repetition to reinforce the typological lesson of the appearance of the angel to the shepherds—the singing of the shepherds, and then of Mak and Gill, prefigures the Gloria the angel will use to announce Christ’s birth. The parallel of the sheep in the manger, ready to be sacrificed for Mak and Gill’s dinner, with Christ and his forthcoming sacrifice, is reinforced by the Bible lesson repeated by the three shepherds near the end of the play.
Note what’s done for audience appeal: complaining about taxes, scolding wives, bad weather; broad humor, snoring jokes; burlesque of tossing Mak in the blanket; puns and double entendres. The religious significance is there, but the first part of the play almost obscures it with its humorous approach. Only when we see the second part, where the three shepherds stumble into the manger in Bethlehem, do we see that the lesson they learned about charity and forgiveness prefigures a similar but greater lesson.
Compare the tone with which Mak describes his shenanigans or the voice Gill uses with both Chaucer and Langland. The Wakefield Master is much more like Chaucer in his subtlety; rather than condemning and convicting the sinners, he invites us to laugh at them.
Morality Plays by definition focus on moral instruction through dramatic action that is broadly allegorical, and by definition timeless (fewer historical references). Only five survive, so we are not sure how much we can generalize about the genre. But they clearly are a precursor of the Tudor interlude.
Most morality plays focus on evil—humor in presentation of devils, showing the delights and temptations of sin. But Everyman focuses on the opposite: on good. Very little humor in it, very little broad comedy. Worth asking how this is different from plays like Secunda Pastorum or from didactic works like Piers Plowman.
Compare to confession of sins in Piers Plowman: focus is on confession and contrition as a means of salvation.
Watch for indications of what we now call dramatic form: introduction, complication, climax, resolution; soliloquy.
Also note the lively dialogue: while not always funny, it’s realistic, colloquial, vivid.
Clare Kinney UVA http://faculty.virginia.edu/engl381ck/10_18.html
This form offers dramatizations of Old and New Testament miracles and the spiritual mysteries of Christianity, most particularly Christ's redemption of fallen humanity through his Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Performance of the mystery cycles was linked to the Feast of Corpus Christi, which takes place 57 days after Easter. The feast commemorates the bodily sacrifice of Christ in his human incarnation.
The mystery cycles cover the Christian story from Creation to Day of Judgement: from a medieval Christian perspective, this is "the one true Story."
The selection of episodes from the Old Testament is made according to the theological patterning known as typology, in which certain Old Testament events were read as imperfect prefigurations of later events in the New Testament (e.g Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Isaac in OT anticipates the actual sacrifice of Christ in NT).
The cycles seem to have arisen in the late 14th century. Because their
doctrine is Catholic, they cease to be performed after the English church splits
from Rome in the mid-16th century and are not revived until the 20th century.
Surviving Texts
Virtually complete texts of mystery cycles survive from
York (48 plays);
Chester (24 plays);
Towneley (near Wakefield in Yorkshire) (32 plays);
and N-town (42 plays).
Local clergy probably assisted in the writing down and revising of play scripts. The so-called Wakefield Master is probably responsible for 6 plays in the Towneley cycle including 2 versions of the Shepherds' Play.
Performers and Performance Conditions
Mystery cycles were performed by craftsmen's guilds--societies which combined the functions of professional & charitable organizations and were also religious fraternities. Their performance involved many members of the community and a great deal of civic energy and effort.
Cycles were performed over the course of single day. Either
using moveable carts or wagons (pageants, from the Latin pagina, wagon)
or on specially erected scaffolds, often with an addition playing space (platea) at ground level
The platea is, in effect, negotiable space: here and everywhere.
The Uses of Familiarity?
The main emphasis in the cycles seems to have been on making present and immediate the events of scripture.
The symbolic playing space fuses the Holy land of centuries ago with contemporary England, creates a continuum between the familiar and the mysterious.
The Corpus Christi festival celebrates God made man, while simultaneously, in the mystery plays, ordinary men have a part in embodying God, in making present the logos, the word of God, in their own bodily actions.
In the mystery plays scriptural events are frequently supplemented with characters & episodes which are bawdy or comic and sometimes draw upon popular and folk traditions (e.g., in the Noah's Flood plays or in the Joseph and Mary plays) or display a dark naturalism, as in the York Crucifixion play.
A question: are Medieval notions of what constituted spiritual texts much
broader than our own?
The Second Shepherds' Play
represents Yorkshiremen (and by extension their Yorkshire audience) as being present at the birth of Christ. There are contemporary references, horseplay, Mak the trickster, a parody of a nativity followed by a real nativity. It's another example of serious game, significant play.
Background
These were not presented in cycles, but as individual dramas with allegorical plots, possibly performed in market places, in inn yards, or in the halls of large private homes.
In these dramas, qualities normally thought of as abstractions become
embodied in particular persons (both Good Deeds and Worldly Goods are speakers
who have their own separate conversations with Everyman).
They have no "character" beyond their predetermined spiritual status in the plot. Sometimes they seem to be externalizations and embodiments of qualities within the protagonist; sometimes they are personifications of social phenomena.
An allegory (from the Greek allos, other) usually involves some kind of spiritual or psychic event being translated into other terms which invite interpretation.
he earliest surviving morality play is The Castell of Perseveraunce (1425). Everyman was written c. 1500. No manuscript has survived, but we have an early printed text, c.1530. NB: Everyman is the first work you've read that we know only from its printed text.
Recall that the mystery plays fuse the here and now with the scriptural moment: Yorkshire shepherds witnessing Christ's nativity in The Second Shepherds' Play. In the morality plays we have a variation on this strategy: the repentant Everyman, trying to bring his own life into consonance with the life and death of Christ, lets Christ's words speak through him as he prepares to meet his God.