Mystery Plays, so-called because they dealt with religious mysteries, were an important and vibrant part of the cultural life of many communities throughout western Europe in the later middle ages. Based on biblical subject matter embellished by some apocryphal and legendary material, they dramatise a theological view of cosmic history in which a pattern can be discerned in events: the pattern of Creation and Fall, Redemption and Final Judgment. Individual dramatic incidents play out their significance within that larger pattern. For this conceptual scheme we can usefully find analogies in iconography, for instance programmes of stained glass and wall painting which filled medieval churches, and in other texts, both in Latin and in the European vernaculars, such as paraphrases of the bible, meditations on the Gospel narratives, and world histories, some of which provided direct source material for our English plays.

Mystery Plays should be distinguished from liturgical drama in Latin. Liturgical plays were part of a church service, the actors were the clergy, the audience was the congregation, the dialogue was sung in Latin, accompanied by symbolic action, as a part of the liturgy. Mystery Plays, on the other hand, were composed in English, performed by lay people, and staged in various ways in a variety of settings. The two forms continued alongside, but distinct from one another, woven into the fabric of religious observance and secular life throughout the land in pre-Reformation England.

It has been suggested that another sense of the word ‘mystery’, that of a trade or craft (from Latin. ministerium), may have had some influence on usage, because in some places in England the local trade guilds were the organisations responsible for putting on the plays. But this was not the case everywhere, and not in France, where the title, in the form Mystère, is well attested.

Among the surviving texts in English we have four large, composite dramas whose action spans Christian world history from Creation to Last Judgment, hence the modern term ‘cycles’ has come to be used of them.

Two of these are known to have been devised and written for particular cities, York and Chester, for performance on specific occasions. In York, the occasion was the Feast of Corpus Christi. In Chester, Corpus Christi was originally the occasion, but in later years the performance moved to Whitsuntide and then to Midsummer. In York and Chester the mystery play performances were big civic events, under the authority of the Mayor and Corporation. They contributed not only to the city’s reputation but also to its prosperity, by the number of visitors and trading opportunities they attracted: the Proclamation of a performance at Chester in 1532 announces it as ‘not only for the augmentation and increase of holy and catholic faith . . . but also for the common wealth and prosperity of this city’. High standards were expected, and fines could be exacted for poor performance.

Our two other ‘cycle’ texts cannot be clearly linked with a specific place. The Towneley Plays are named after the family who later came to own the manuscript. Dialect forms in the text place it in the West Riding of Yorkshire, but we don’t know where it was originally written, or where or how the plays were performed. The name ‘Wakefield’ appears twice in the manuscript, and for a long time it was assumed that all of the plays in the manuscript came from Wakefield, in Yorkshire. It is known from the town records that Wakefield did indeed have mystery plays of some kind in the mid-sixteenth century, but the link with the plays in this manuscript has come to be regarded as increasingly flimsy. Although the plays in the manuscript extend from Creation to Doomsday, it is now viewed as a collection of ‘stand-alone’ plays or sequences of plays, from several origins, and with different staging requirements. It includes two alternative versions of the biblical story of the angelic announcement of Christ’s birth to the shepherds. One of these, The Second Shepherds’ Play weaves together a comic plot of sheep-stealing with the story of the Shepherds’ visit to Bethlehem. The presence of this exuberant play, with its pithy and irreverent language and vigorous farcical action, alongside scenes characterised by affective, lyrical and devotional language, illustrates the range of tone and emotion in these plays as a whole.

The so-called N-Town Play is a complex and varied compilation, including material not found in other surviving English medieval drama, in particular, plays dealing with the conception and early life of the Virgin Mary based on apocryphal and legendary sources familiar at the time through Latin and other vernacular re-tellings. The N-Town Play is preserved in a manuscript copied in the second half of the fifteenth century in a dialect of some part of East Anglia, which is probably also the area from which the plays originated, though they cannot be linked with any particular place. The enigmatic modern title is drawn from the text itself, where the opening proclamation, listing the plays to follow, refers to a forthcoming production of them in ‘N-town’, which is assumed to stand for the name of a performance venue, and may indicate that the plays had been written for circulation round various towns. As with Towneley, it is quite likely that the contents of this manuscript may never have been performed in its entirety at any one time. A mistaken association with Coventry – which did indeed have plays, but not these particular ones – caused some confusion in the early modern scholarship of this manuscript.

In fifteenth and sixteenth-century Coventry, the mystery plays were evidently a vigorous and important part of civic life. There as in other cities such as York and Chester, the production of the plays was the responsibility of the trade and craft guilds. These guilds existed primarily to protect the economic interests of their members, but were also quasi-religious fraternities, some with a special devotion to a saint or an episode in the life of Christ, as for example the Shearmen and Tailors’ devotion to the Epiphany. Unfortunately the texts of the plays are lost except for two, The Shearmen and Tailors’ Pageant and The Weavers’ Pageant. The former survives in the early nineteenth-century transcript by the antiquarian Thomas Sharp of a play manuscript later destroyed by fire. The latter survives in a manuscript copied for the Weavers’ guild in 1535. The surviving records are not sufficient to describe either the full shape and content of the play cycle as a whole or the assignment of individual plays to guilds, or the precise course of the processional route. Almost certainly there was reshaping and reorganisation of all these aspects of the cycle during the history of its production from sometime in the early fifteenth century to 1579. The two surviving play texts present the Nativity and Infancy of Christ. The pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors includes the Annunciation, the visits of the Shepherds and Kings, and the encounter between the Kings and Herod, concluding with the Massacre of the Innocents. It is perhaps best known for the poignant Coventry Carol, one of the precious few examples of music for performance surviving within a play text itself, with a stage direction indicating it is to be sung by the mothers of the children slain on Herod’s order. The Weavers’ pageant covers the presentation of the infant Jesus in the Temple and the episode of the boy Jesus before the Doctors. Like all our other surviving examples, these plays from Coventry move confidently through a wide range of themes and tones: devotional, appealingly comic, burlesque, macabre, joyful and solemn. Presented in conjunction with the annual Corpus Christi fair, the plays brought both spiritual and economic credit to the city. The Coventry Leet Book (an official record of the city’s governing body) refers to ‘the good name and fame’ brought to the city by the plays. Those attracted to the plays included aristocratic and royal visitors: Richard III came to see them in 1485, shortly before the battle of Bosworth, and is said to have commended them highly, as did his successor Henry VII. Allusions to the Coventry plays in other fifteenth and sixteenth-century writings indicate their popularity. Shakespeare might have seen them when he was a boy in Stratford-upon-Avon; he was fifteen years old when the Corpus Christi Plays were performed in Coventry for the last time in 1579. He was clearly familiar with the presentation of Herod as a ranting tyrant found in The Shearmen and Tailors’ Pageant and other medieval plays, and he expected his own audience to be familiar with it too (see Hamlet III. 2. 12−14: ‘I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagent – it out-Herods Herod’).

Single plays survive from other places, e.g. a play of the Creation and Fall of Man from Norwich, and a play of Noah’s Flood from Newcastle on Tyne. There is very good reason to assume that many more plays existed than have survived. Work on documentary records, for instance those of local civic governing bodies and trade guilds: regulations, account books, inventories, property agreements of various kinds and so on, indicates the range of varied and lively dramatic activity throughout the period to 1642, when the puritan government closed the London theatres. This is an expanding area of research which has been very productive in recent decades.

Much of the impact of the plays is created by the staging possibilities. Although we don’t have eye-witness accounts from the period, or acting texts with detailed stage directions, there is enough evidence of various kinds for us to imagine and reconstruct some of the possible settings. Documentary records from York and in Chester indicate that there the primary acting platforms were wheeled wagons moved about to different locations in the city in what is now known as’ processional staging’, i.e. an individual play was repeated at several stations. Audiences might stay in one place and watch the plays in succession or move between stations as they chose. The wagons obviously had to be accommodated in the narrow streets of a medieval city, but strong enough to support actors and in some cases some complex stage machinery, for instance, an inventory of the York Mercer’s Doomsday pageant from 1433 includes a device for lowering and raising Jesus at his second coming, and puppet angels that ran about the heavens. In the language of the time, the word ‘pageant’ can refer either to a short play or tableau or to a moveable platform or wagon stage. In York, the City Corporation records preserve details of the route and the stations at which the pageants were played. From Chester we have less specific information, but the evidence indicates a processional performance with three stations which varied over time.

A wagon stage can provide more flexible performance space than might at first be supposed. Modern revivals have helped to show ways in which a not very large stage can be made to accommodate a series of what in modern parlance we would call ‘scenes’, and can provide for more than one dramatic location, particularly if different levels were used, with possible extensions like steps and ramps. We should also bear in mind that the use of a single wagon as the principal stage does not preclude the additional use of adjacent structures, whether an existing feature of the location or a specially constructed platform. And of course the street could be used as an acting area where appropriate. One of our rare occasional manuscript stage directions, in the Coventry play at the point where Herod finds his plan frustrated by the departure of the Kings, stipulates that Herod should rage ‘in the pageant and in the street also’.

As well as this kind of processional wagon staging, there is plenty of evidence for performance in open acting areas with multiple stages or platforms, in what has become known as ‘place and scaffold staging’. ‘Place’ was the Middle English word for a flat, enclosed area where some kind of show or spectacle took place, and Middle English ‘scaffold’ meant a platform or stage. This method of staging is ideal for large-scale plays with a broad sweep of action and movement and interplay between multiple locations. It is considered highly likely that it was used for at least some parts of the N-Town Play.

The lack of eye-witness accounts means that we have little indication of audience response apart from the evident popularity and cultural importance attested by continuing performance of the plays throughout the period, but we should to bear in mind that, especially in an open-air performance in daylight, as we know to have been the case for a significant proportion of our surviving plays, an audience would be mobile, visible, and sometimes very close to the action. Lines of the text quite often address the audience directly, thus engaging them in the action and giving them a role within it, not simply as spectators, but as participants who, by imaginative engagement, consent temporarily to take illusion for reality.

Janet Cowen 14/5/26