ABSTRACT
Whitsuntide was a propitious time for the pageants and plays that we know were sponsored by town or parish in Britain. The prime example must be found in the Chester plays, transferred to Whitsuntide, the week following Pentecost, in the early sixteenth century. There should be no puzzlement about why the civic authorities of this town of perhaps five thousand people at this time thought this Church festival to be an appropriate time for a cycle that embraces the entire history of the world from the beginning to the end, from alpha to omega, as the encapsulation of all things and events within the mind and will of the Creator God. Such a range involved expansion in Tudor times of Chester’s civic play as it had existed in its earlier incarnation as a drama on Corpus Christi-a drama that very likely, as Lawrence Clopper has argued, was “more a Passion play than a cycle.”1 As such, it was likely a play in several parts or segments performed at a single station-appropriate enough, of course, for a celebration of the Eucharist.
