Eternal play of Mystery
reviews a 500-year-old English tradition in an article that first appeared in The Daily Telegraph on December 7th, 1996
Brian Hunt as Abraham, Wakefield 2001
Medieval religious drama may seem an unlikely crowd-puller for the Nineties. Yet 1996 has brought the Mystery Plays to York, Broomhill in Kent and the City of London Festival, while the RSC is gearing up for a spring production. Next week Londoners will have their annual chance to celebrate Advent with the amateur Players of St Peter, who for the 50th year running enact selected scenes (with myself as a ranting Herod).
It seems we can't get enough of the Mystery Plays, but what are they and why are they so called? We don't know who wrote them and cannot be sure who performed them, but neither these uncertainties nor the imponderables of faith are the "mysteries" of the title. Rather, they are the trade secrets guarded by craft guilds, the bodies originally responsible for mounting the plays. The name transferred to the guilds themselves, and thence to the plays.
From the beginning of the 15th century to the close of the 16th, every English city had its cycle of plays dramatising the Bible story from Creation to Last Judgment. In return for its trading licence, each guild – something between a trade union and a Masonic lodge – was required to prepare, perform and at least partially finance a play. Then as now, industrial sponsorship of the arts had its advertising slant. Goldsmiths would portray the three kings, shipwrights would enact the story of Noah and, less subtly, bakers would distribute free loaves at the Last Supper.
"The purpose was to bring the message of the church into the town," says Olive Stubbs, a senior lecturer in English at the University of East London, who directs the Players of St Peter. "There's something wonderfully English about the whole tradition. The Bible stories are placed in an English context: the shepherds are seen on a northern hill with English weather; Noah is admonished for attempting to build a boat when he's not a member of the guild."
On Corpus Christi day, a movable feast in May or June, townspeople would gather at appointed stations and wait for the theatre to come to them. Wagons called pageants would roll up, laden with actors, who performed and then made way for the next episode. The pageants had fairground elements, with hoists to facilitate ascensions and mechanical angels whizzing about the wooden firmament.
As anyone who has seen a performance will know, the plays range from broad comedy through poetic lyricism to powerful drama. They were so much a part of medieval life that it is not surprising they contain the seeds of later theatrical expression.
"Shakespeare clearly saw these plays: Hamlet instructs the players to 'out-Herod Herod', who is an over-the-top villain of a type that re-emerged in pantomime," says Olive Stubbs.
Only four cycles survive as more than fragments – York, Chester, Wakefield and Lincoln – and their clear differences of style raise tantalising questions about authorship. Janet Cowen, of King's College London's English department, says: "We don't have named authors, so any suggestion of the type of person who wrote them is speculation. There is a tradition that the Chester plays might have been written by friars, but it is no longer credited."
Then as now, industrial sponsorship of the arts had its advertising slant. Goldsmiths would portray the Three Kings, shipwrights would enact the story of Noah and bakers would distribute loaves at the Last Supper
It used to be put about that the Mysteries were some kind of folk art flourishing in the face of establishment opposition. "It seems highly unlikely that such large-scale events went on so publicly if there had been disapproval by the church," says Janet Cowen. "However, by Elizabeth's time we find a kind of censorship, both civil and ecclesiastical, of religious drama. Religion and matters of state were hot political issues, so drama that touched on them was subject to suspicion and prohibition.
"By the last quarter of the 16th century performances were being suppressed in Coventry and Chester. The York manuscript was called in for correction by the archbishop in 1579; from then on its history becomes obscure."
Protestant England was intolerant of the inventive vitality of the Mysteries; they disappeared until the beginning of the 20th century, when scenes from the Mysteries were staged for the first time in 300 years.
However, it was the rebirth of Britain after the Second World War that truly rekindled interest. York and Chester began mounting big productions every four or five years; the Players of St Peter initiated their yearly presentation in London.
New angles are being sought all the time: Bill Bryden's production, a staple of the National Theatre's repertoire in the late Seventies and early Eighties, emphasised the dignity of labour, with God elevated by fork-lift truck; 1996 saw York's first female God and a Muslim Christ at Broomhill.
For her fiftieth anniversary of St Peter's production, Olive Stubbs will be relying on the intrinsic qualities that have lasted 500 years. "They still work as drama," she says, "as religious expression, as entertainment and in telling a story – not only the Bible story but that of their own time. And they comment on what is ultimately good and bad in our own times."
© Brian Hunt 1996
