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KAMPHUIS

Ashton Kamphuis
THEA 211-001
Prof. Neal Brasher
November 10, 2015
All the Street is a Stage | Mystery Plays

The Medieval Period started around the sixth century and lasted through the sixteenth

century. During the Medieval Period, there was no political power or ruling system, so the

Roman Catholic Church took control of the populous (Beadle and King xvi). In response to this,

Christian values became prominent in the culture and the Church was present in every aspect of

daily life.The Church also controlled the arts (Wickham 91). Medieval drama grew from Church

liturgy (Child xii). Starting with the Mass and Easter dramatizations, the theatre of the Middle

Ages evolved as the Nativity and other Bible stories were added to the canon. Out of this came

the mystery plays, which are a cycle of plays representing the different stories in the Bible from

the Creation story and the Fall of Lucifer to the Pentecost and the Last Judgment Day (Beadle

and King xvi).

The English mystery cycles, also known as Corpus Christi plays or miracle cycles,

dominated the English stage throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and are regarded

by many critics as the most genuinely popular theater in English history (Wickham 91). Reflecting

the central role of the Church in medieval society, the plays dramatize the biblical stories and

apocryphal legends that form the foundation of Christian faith, from the Creation story through

the Last Judgement (Wickham 91). To a medieval town the performance of a mystery was an

event of immense interest. . . . the magistrates ordered all the shops to be closed, and forbade all

noisy work. The streets were empty, the houses locked up, and none but solitary armed watch-

men, specially engaged for the occasion, were seen about the residences. All were gathered in the

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public square” (Child xix). English mystery cycles were often performed in conjunction with the

feast of Corpus Christi, set during the summer, usually around Whitsuntide (Greenblatt 448).

The Mystery Plays were so numerous that they began in the early morning before sunrise, and

lasted till well past midnight (Beadle and King xvi). In the eponymous York Plays, for example,

forty-eight plays were gathered into one cycle, from the Fall of the Angels to Creation to

Judgment Day (Child xix). To fill in the gaps, new plays were added; existing dramas were

constantly revised (Child xix).

Community participation was a fundamental characteristic of the performances. The

trading guilds took on the task of producing the plays, organizing them into lengthy cycles and

creating pageant wagons that rolled through the tight street grids of medieval towns (Child xix).

Assignments within the cycles presupposed the sanctity of a craft’s daily labour (Beadle and King

xvi). Thus, The Wedding Feast at Cana was assigned to the vintners; TheLast Supper, to the

bakers; The Nativity, to the tile thatchers; The Crucifixion, to the pinners, or nail makers. The

guildsmen themselves were cast as the actors (Beadle and King xv). This also came about when

Pope Innocent III in1210, issued a papal edict forbidding clergy from acting on a public stage

(Beadle and King xvi). Critics have observed that performances of the dramatic sequences may

have served a combination of social purposes in medieval society, helping to promote local guilds

while also educating the public in the Christian tradition (Greenblatt 448).

The plays were presented on so-called pageant wagons,wheeled platforms with two floors.

The lower curtained level contained dressing rooms and other compartments, while the upper

platform was the actual stage (Child xix). This arrangement allowed for adaptation to a

particular play’s requirements, such as a flame-belching hell on the street level below (Child xix).

Increasingly, in fact, the very action of the dramas moved between the pageant wagon and the

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street, intentionally breaking the fourth wall between cast and onlookers (Child xix). One of the

characters that frequently broke the fourth wall was the entrance of Satan on the devil into the

scene. Since Satan was known as sly, scheming and deceptive by the people the playwrights would

make his entrances a “crowd jump moment” (Beadle and King xv). The actor would either hide

himself in the crowd then enter scaring the audience, jump out at them or appear behind a

curtain. This is an extremely intresting way to set the tone of a character. Even if an audience

member knew nothing about the Bible, this entrance would clearly communicate the character of

Satan in so many dimensions.

The playwrights of these mystery cycle plays found themselves engaged in constant revision

becoming progressively freer to produce more lively and realistic scripts, to the point of inventing

scenes that were not even in the Bible (Child xvii). The fact that the plays were in the streets

allowed for the intrusion of other comedic situations and characters. Playwrights felt free to add

their own form of dramatization to “help the story along”. Noah’s Flood is an example. Part of

Chester Cycle, it shows Noah’s trouble in urging his scolding, shrewish wife to board the ark

(Child xvii). Cain’s plough boy, is another example. Unknown to the writers of Genesis, he was

familiar to medieval playgoers as Garcio, a boy of saucy speech (Child xix) This practice has

become common in Biblical dramatizations in today’s writings, especially in children’s Biblical

dramas. Their accessibility to unlettered citizens was also a key feature of the plays, which were

written in the vernacular rather than Latin.

Four cycles of plays survive—the York Plays, Chester Plays, Towneley Plays (also known as

the Wakefield Cycle), and N-Town Plays (also known as the Ludus Coventriae, or Hegge Cycle)

(Child xix). Every one of these cycles dramatizes important scenes from the Old and New

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Testaments of the Bible and incorporates elements of apocryphal legends in order to illustrate

the expansive Christian theme of the fall of man and the redemption of the Son.

Although it is the primary belief that cycle dramas evolved as an extension of dumb-show

pageants associated with the feast day, others believe that the plays evolved prior to the

establishment of Corpus Christi. They believe it is a result of the combining of elements of

vernacular folk drama with liturgical dramas connected with the Catholic mass (Child xix). As

with many medieval and historical writings, our knowledge of the original performance methods

and authorship of the plays is often speculative. This is due to the many alterations that may have

been incurred during the copying of the manuscripts by scribes or variations made from

performance to performance.

Although the plays were popular and successful during the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries, performances declined during the early sixteenth century as a result of suppression

associated with the Protestant Reformation (Child xix).The nineteenth-century critics William

Hone and Thomas Sharp, for example, contributed extensive historical research toward an

understanding of the English mystery cycles, but said little about the nature of the plays

themselves as works of literature (Beadle and King xvi). Considered among the first important

critics of medieval drama, E. K. Chambers in 1903 examined the plays from an evolutionary

perspective, viewing them as forerunners of what he believed to be the more highly developed

plays of Shakespeare (Prosser 38). During the twentieth century, critics such as G. R. Owst, H.C.

Gardiner, A. P. Rossiter, Glynne Wickham, O.B. Hardison Jr., V.A. Kolve, and Rosemary Woolf

have helped to elevate the reputation of the English mystery cycles by emphasizing, for example,

the skillful and complex quality of performances, and the interplay between social recreation and

worship in the dramas (Prosser 38).

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One of the remaining cycle plays still performing today is the Oberammergau Passion Play.

This particular passion play has been performed since 1634, every ten years as a tradition by the

inhabitants of the village of Oberammergau, Bavaria, Germany (Prosser 38). It has been

criticized as being anti-semitic, but it is the earliest continuous survivor of the age of Christian

drama (Shapiro 6). “A full day of drama follows the rising sun. Finally, after dooms have been

meted out to all souls, while the demons seize upon their victims, with scoff and threat, the saints

sing the Te Deum and the last pageant carriage, leaving behind it pale faces and quivering nerves,

rolls out of Oberammergau market-square and on from street to street until evening

falls” (Morgan 125).

Beadle, Richard and Pamela M. King.York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling.

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Web. 8 November 2015.

Child, Clarence Griffin.The Second Shepherds’ Play, Everyman, and Other Early Plays.

Boston:Houghton Mifflin, 1910. Web. 4 November 2015.

Greenblatt, Stephen, Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle

Ages:Volume A. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print.

Morgan, Charles, and Roger Morgan. Dramatic Critic: Selected Reviews (1922-1939).

London: Oberon, 2013. Print.

Prosser, Eleanor. Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays: A Re-evaluation.

Stanford: Stanford UP, 1961. Print.

Shapiro, James. Oberammergau: The Troubling Story of the World's Most Famous Passion

Play. New York: Pantheon, 2000. Print.

Wickham, Glynne William Gladstone. The Medieval Theatre. 3rd ed. Cambridge

[Cambridgeshire: Cambridge UP, 1987. Print.

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