ABSTRACT
In the Middle Ages the Christian history documented in the Bible was re-enacted in England in various ways – in religious ritual, in the art that adorned churches, cathedrals and devotional manuscripts, in literature, and in community theatre. Few scripted plays have survived, although we are fortunate in having two more-or-less complete Mystery Play cycles originally performed by local guilds in the cities of York and Chester. Both cycles present a narrative of God’s dealings with humanity in a series of separate episodes that, in combination, span biblical time from Creation to Doomsday. Another fragmentary cycle from Coventry, represented by only two extant episodes, may have excluded Old Testament material and focused on re-playing the past of the New Testament from the Annunciation to the day of reckoning. There are a number of stand-alone play-texts dramatizing the stories of Noah, Abraham and Isaac, and the Resurrection, as well as what I have termed elsewhere Creation to Doomsday “look-alike” texts (Rogerson, 2015, 43). One of these, the Towneley manuscript, appears to have been compiled from several sources and “arranged chronologically as a cycle for a reader” (Epp, 94), while the other, the N.Town manuscript, was likewise designed for reading and consists of a Mary Play and a two-part Passion Play (Meredith, 1990, 2). Alexandra Johnston (2015) has made a further study of the N.Town volume, concluding that it derives from a number of stand-alone play-texts attached to the Mary and Passion Plays. 1 On the subject of Passion Plays, Pamela King argues on the basis of N.Town and records of plays now lost that they constitute a “distinct genre of early community-based biblical drama” (86). Clearly, as Johnston’s chapter in the current collection also demonstrates, there was no lack of biblical performance in England in the period. In what follows I consider a selection of revivals of these early plays and of modern analogues that, consciously or otherwise, emulate the medieval process of performing the Bible. I am designating this process “biblical re-enactment”, a form of the practice of “historical re-enactment” that enjoys considerable popularity in the twenty-first century. 2
That the faithful of the Middle Ages regarded the Bible as history is indisputable; indeed, medieval Christians aspired to write themselves into the history of hope and salvation that the sacred text presented. There are innumerable examples to support this claim: 3 the Apocalypse cycle executed between 1405 and 1408 by eminent glazier John Thornton for the Great East Window of York Minster is a case in point. Sarah Brown explains that the window’s “vision of world history from Creation to the end of time was carefully crafted from a long tradition of Apocalypse imagery, deeply informed by theology and faith” (43), but she stresses that it
contains some “unique” features, one of these being the replacement of the biblical angels of St John’s vision of the seven churches of Asia (Revelation 1: 11, 20) with “bishops, representative of ecclesiastical authority and more appropriate for the east window of a metropolitan cathedral and mother church of the northern province” (40). The fusion of biblical past with medieval church history lends credence to the medieval present, affording it a place in a still-living history that the Great East Window re-enacts and, by extension, offering a place there for viewers. The central contention of the current chapter is that this harmonizing process also operated in medieval English biblical theatre and does so in modern adaptations of and analogues to that theatre. Iain McCalman and Paul Pickering have noted that historical re-enactment is “for the benefit of the present” (11). The discussion below demonstrates that the same claim can be made for biblical re-enactment, medieval and modern. I take particular issue with some recent pronouncements by David Wiles in The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History (2013), where he dismisses the biblical plays of the English Middle Ages as “not part of our theatrical repertory”, having nothing to do with the “development” of “what we do now” (56, original emphasis). Referring to their modern production, he further marginalizes the genre as being “with rare exceptions . . . performed only as academic experiments, religious community ventures or folkloric curiosities”. 4 He excludes biblical drama – performed over a period of at least 200 years straddling the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – from English theatrical history, partly because of its unavoidable “religiosity” that he finds “primitive” (56), insisting that Shakespeare “has become the reference point for creating a sense of ” that history (55, my emphasis). Others disagree. On the occasion of the 1985 production of The Mysteries , Tony Harrison’s successful adaptation of medieval biblical drama, Peter Hall, then director of the National Theatre, commented that the enterprise had “reclaimed (the plays) for our times and shown them for what they are: an essential part of our dramatic heritage” without which “Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have written in a very different way for a very different theatre” (n.p.). The Mysteries project was a major undertaking by the National, beginning with The Passion performed on the terrace outside the theatre on Easter Saturday 1977, with the Creation to Nativity sequence ( The Nativity ) added in 1980 and, completing the Creation to Doomsday structure, Doomsday in 1985, when the production was televised by Channel 4 at Christmas. Hall had a vested interest in promoting The Mysteries as he did, but it should be noted that a number of recent scholars have drawn attention to continuities between medieval theatre, a largely amateur community activity, and the plays presented by professional companies in the early purpose-built London playhouses. Helen Cooper, for example, points out that there is an “element of enactment – of subordinating the word to the deed, supplementing speech with embodiment – that the plays written for the sixteenth-century public theatres carry over from the cycle plays” (2006, 19). Cooper is not alone in valorizing medieval theatre: Michael O’Connell, to give one further example, argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre enjoyed a “significant legacy” from biblical drama (177), and claims that the “stagecraft and . . . influence” of Passion Plays “continued to impart a sense of significance in the blood that would remain a striking visual image on the professional stage” (178).5
