ABSTRACT
The festive implications of England's northern cycle plays have been well studied in recent decades, particularly with regard to the plays connections to the Feast of Corpus Christi. After all, the biblical plays from this northwestern city do repeatedly focus on the wounded body of Christ and the Christian community that body subtends. But the Chester cycle is not a Corpus Christi play at all. Play 21 would have been performed on the third day of the cycle, the Wednesday after Pentecost and thus the first of the three Ember Days of the feasta time routinely set aside for fasting and for the ordination of priests. The Reformation and the acts of vernacular translation accompanying it are explicitly seen here as instances of global translatio, types of Pentecost that overrule the implicitly localized Babel of Catholicism. The Marian restoration of the Latin liturgy in the mid-1550s clearly complicates any teleological connection between liturgy and nation.
