Mystery play

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.

History

Origins

Mystery plays originated as simple tropes, verbal embellishments of liturgical texts, and slowly became more elaborate. As these liturgical dramas increased in popularity, vernacular forms emerged, as traveling companies of actors and theatrical productions organized by local communities became more common in the later Middle Ages. They often interrupted religious festivals, in an attempt to vividly show what the service was intended to commemorate. For exactly, the Virgin Mary was represented with by a girl with a child in her arms.

The Quem Quœritis is the best known early form of the dramas, a dramatized 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 inside the 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. The actors were priests or monks. The performances were stark, characterized by strict simplicity and earnest devotion.

In 1210, suspicious of their growing popularity, Pope Innocent III forbade clergy to act in public, thus the organization of the dramas was taken over by town guilds, after which several changes followed. French performances quickly usurped Latin, and great pains were taken to attract the viewing public. 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 originated the term mystery play or mysteries, from the Latin mysterium.

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. Particularly By the end of the fifteenth century, the practice 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.

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.

French mystery plays

Mystery plays arose early in France, with French being used instead of Latin after 1210. It was performed on a large scale throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with plays in the fourteenth century focusing on the lives of saints. The shortest of these mystery plays was less than 1000 lines (such as Sainte Venice) and the longest was over 50,000 lines (for example, Les Actes des Apotres). The average, however, was roughly 10,000 lines. Most performances were commissioned and organized by whole towns and governments, with a typical performance spread over three or four days. As there were no permanent theaters in France in the middle ages, mystery plays required their construction for performances. Stages were often built over wide open public spaces, such as town squares or cemeteries. They were promptly torn down at the conclusion of the performances.

English mystery plays

There is no record of any religious drama in England prior to the Norman Conquest. Around the beginning of the twelfth century, the play of St. Catharine was performed at Dunstable, and such plays were common in London by 1170. The oldest extant miracle play in English is the Harrowing of Hell, describing the descent of Christ to save the damned in Hell, belonging to the cycle of Easter plays.

There are four complete or nearly complete extant English biblical collections of plays. The most complete is the York Mystery Plays 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, it is not known 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 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.

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.

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 humankind. 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 both York and Chester in 1951 as part of the Festival of Britain. The Lichfield Mysteries were revived in 1994. More recently, the N-Town cycle of touring plays have been revived as the Lincoln mystery plays.

Famous writers

• Andreas Gryphius
• Hugo von Hoffmansthal
• Calderon

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

The Medieval Mystery Cycles will be performed at the Genesian Theatre in Kent Street, Sydney Australia from July 12 - August 2 2008.

See also

• Medieval theatre
• Easter drama
• Mystery Play of Elx a Catalan mystery play.
• Passion play
• Chester Plays
• 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
• The Official Chester Mystery Plays Website
• Chester Mystery Plays 2003 performance - downloadable media clips from the Chester Mystery Cycle performance of 2003* The Lincoln Mystery Plays; A Personal Odessey - Keith Ramsay's account of reviving the N Town plays in Lincoln
• 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 modernised by Chester N. Scoville and Kimberley M. Yates
  • The n-Town cycle modernised by Stanley J. Kahrl and Alexandra F. Johnston
  • The Chester Cycle in middle English
• [[wikisource:Catholic Encyclopedia (1913)/Miracle Plays and Mysteries "|Miracle Plays and Mysteries]".] Catholic Encyclopedia. (1913). New York: Robert Appleton Company.

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