Information about Mystery Plays

Mystery plays and Miracle plays are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song. They developed from the 10th to the 16th century, reaching the height of their popularity in the 15th century before being rendered obsolete by the rise of professional theatre.

Origins

The plays originated as simple tropes, verbal embellishments of liturgical texts, and became slowly more elaborate. As these liturgical dramas became more popular, vernacular forms emerged, as traveling companies of actors and theatrical productions organised by local communities became more common in the later Middle Ages.

The Quem Quœritis is the best known early form of the dramas, a dramatised liturgical dialogue between the angel at the tomb of Christ and the women who are seeking his body. These primitive forms were later elaborated with dialogue and dramatic action. Eventually the dramas moved from church to the exterior - the churchyard and the public marketplace. These early performances were given in Latin, and were preceded by a vernacular prologue spoken by a herald who gave a synopsis of the events.

In 1210 the Pope forbade clergy to act in public. So the organisation of the dramas was taken over by town guilds, and several changes followed. Vernacular texts replaced Latin, and non-Biblical passages were added along with comic scenes. Acting and characterization became more elaborate.

These vernacular religious performances were, in some of the larger cities in England such as York, performed and produced by guilds, with each guild taking responsibility for a particular piece of scriptural history. From the guild control they gained the name mystery play or just mysteries, from the Latin mysterium (meaning handicraft and relating to the guilds).

Mystery plays are now typically distinguished from Miracle plays, which specifically re-enacted episodes from the lives of the saints rather than from the Bible; however, it is also to be noted that both of these terms are more commonly used by modern scholars than they were by medieval people, who used a wide variety of terminology to refer to their dramatic performances.

The mystery play developed, in some places, into a series of plays dealing with all the major events in the Christian calendar, from the Creation to the Day of Judgment. By the end of the 15th century, the practise of acting these plays in cycles on festival days (such as Corpus Christi, performed on the Feast of Corpus Christi) was established in several parts of Europe. Sometimes, each play was performed on a decorated cart called a pageant that moved about the city to allow different crowds to watch each play. The entire cycle could take up to twenty hours to perform and could be spread over a number of days. Taken as a whole, these are referred to as Corpus Christi cycles.

The plays were performed by a combination of professionals and amateurs and were written in highly elaborate stanza forms; they were often marked by the extravagance of the sets and 'special effects', but could also be stark and intimate. The variety of theatrical and poetic styles, even in a single cycle of plays, could be remarkable.

English mystery plays

There are four complete or nearly complete extant English biblical collections of plays; we may no longer call all of them "cycles." The most complete is the York cycle of forty-eight pageants; there are also the Towneley plays of thirty-two pageants, once thought to have been a true 'cycle' of plays acted at Wakefield; the N Town plays (also called the Ludus Coventriae cycle or Hegge cycle), now generally agreed to be a redacted compilation of at least three older, unrelated plays, and the Chester cycle of twenty-four pageants, now generally agreed to be an Elizabethan reconstruction of older medieval traditions. Also extant are two pageants from a New Testament cycle acted at Coventry and one pageant each from Norwich and Newcastle-on-Tyne. Additionally, a fifteenth-century play of the life of Mary Magdalene and a sixteenth-century play of the Conversion of Saint Paul exist, both hailing from East Anglia. Besides the Middle English drama, there are three surviving plays in Cornish, and several cyclical plays survive from continental Europe.

These biblical plays differ widely in content. Most contain episodes such as the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation and Fall of Man, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, Abraham and Isaac, the Nativity, the Raising of Lazarus, the Passion, and the Resurrection. Other pageants included the story of Moses, the Procession of the Prophets, Christ's Baptism, the Temptation in the Wilderness, and the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin. In given cycles, the plays came to be sponsored by the newly emerging Medieval craft guilds. The York mercers, for example, sponsored the Doomsday pageant. The guild associations are not, however, to be understood as the method of production for all towns. While the Chester pageants are associated with guilds, there is no indication that the N-Town plays are either associated with guilds or performed on pageant wagons. Perhaps the most famous of the mystery plays, at least to modern readers and audiences, are those of Wakefield. Unfortunately, we cannot know whether the plays of the Towneley manuscript are actually the plays performed at Wakefield but a reference in the Second Shepherds' Play to Horbery Shrogys ([1] line 454) is strongly suggestive. In "The London Burial Grounds" by Mrs Basil Holmes (1897), the author claims that the Holy Priory Church, next to St Katherine Cree on Leadenhall Street, London was the location of miracle plays from the tenth to the sixteenth century. Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London (c 1500 - 1569) stopped this in 1542^[1].

The most famous plays of the Towneley collection are attributed to the Wakefield Master, an anonymous playwright who wrote in the fifteenth century. Early scholars suggested that a man by the name of Gilbert Pilkington was the author, but this idea has been disproved by Craig and others. The epithet "Wakefield Master" was first applied to this individual by the literary historian Gayley. The Wakefield Master gets his name from the geographic location where he lived, the market-town of Wakefield in Yorkshire. He may have been a highly educated cleric there, or possibly a friar from a nearby monastery at Woodkirk, four miles north of Wakefield. It was once thought that this anonymous author wrote a series of 32 plays (each averaging about 384 lines) called the Towneley Cycle. The Master's contributions to this collection are still much debated, and some scholars believe he may have written fewer than ten of them. A cycle is a series of mystery plays performed during the Corpus Christi festival. These works appear in a single manuscript, which was kept for a number of years in Towneley Hall of the Towneley family. Thus the plays are called the Towneley Cycle. The manuscript is currently found in the Huntington Library of California. It shows signs of Protestant editing — references to the Pope and the sacraments are crossed out, for instance. Likewise, twelve manuscript leaves were ripped out between the two final plays because of Catholic references. This evidence strongly suggests the play was still being read and performed as late as 1520, perhaps as late in Renaissance as the final years of King Henry VIII's reign. This fact says something about the power and influence of the medieval mystery play — the genre was still popular when Shakespeare was a small boy, and he might very well have grown up watching such plays before writing his own.

The best known pageant in the Towneley manuscript is The Second Shepherds' Pageant, a burlesque of the Nativity featuring Mak the sheep stealer and his wife Gill, which more or less explicitly compares a stolen lamb to the Saviour of mankind. The Harrowing of Hell, derived from the apocryphal Acts of Pilate, was a popular part of the York and Wakefield cycles.

The dramas of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods were developed out of mystery plays.

Modern revivals

The Mystery Plays were revived in York in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain. More recently, the N-Town cycle of touring plays have been revived as the Lincoln mystery plays.

References

See also

• Medieval theatre
• Easter drama
• Passion play
• Wakefield Cycle - a collection of thirty-two mystery plays performed in medieval and early Renaissance England.
• York Mystery Plays - a collection of forty-eight mystery plays

External links

• The Official Lincoln Mystery Plays Website

Home of the Lincoln Mystery Plays with full details of 2008 production and how to get involved!

• The Official Chester Mystery Plays Website

The new website of the Chester Mystery Cycle, with booking information and news of the next performance beginning June 28th 2008.

• Chester Mystery Plays 2003 performance

Free downloadable media clips from the Chester Mystery Cycle performance of 2003, featuring full mp3 audio track 'Christ Theme' and short video excerpt from the performance.

• The Lincoln Mystery Plays; A Personal Odessey

Keith Ramsay's full account of reviving the N Town plays in Lincoln over a 22 year period. Forward written by Dame Judi Dench.

• Records of Early English Drama (REED) at Victoria University of the University of Toronto
• The York Mystery plays
• 2002 and 2006 York Mystery Plays
• A simulator of the progress of the pageants in the York Mystery plays
• The Lichfield Mysteries
• The York Cycle as performed in Toronto in 1998
• The Players of St Peter who have been performing these plays in London since 1952
• Texts:
• The Towneley (Wakefield) Cycle in Middle English. Available from Michigan or Virginia
• The York Cycle in Middle English. Available from Michigan or Virginia
• The York cycle modernized by Chester N. Scoville and Kimberley M. Yates
• The n-Town cycle modernized by Stanley J. Kahrl and Alexandra F. Johnston
• The Chester Cycle in middle English

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