English Mystery Plays

by

Frank Napolitano

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0207

Introduction

The English mystery plays of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries depicted short biblical or apocryphal episodes of Christianity’s salvation history. For generations, scholars believed that the standard format for the mysteries was the all-day (or multi-day) “cycle” of performances, produced by local craft guilds, on moving, one- or two-story “pageant wagons” at different stations throughout a city. The spectacle of wagons rumbling down narrow cobblestone streets, with actors embodying angels, demons, and members of the Trinity, would have captivated the town’s inhabitants. Many scholars rightly hold these performances as parts of the “popular culture” of the late-medieval city. While this conception of the mystery plays in performance likely remains accurate for the plays that survive from the northern cities of York and Chester, we now know it does not represent the majority of the plays that survive from this period. It may, in fact, have been the exception, rather than the norm. Some of the surviving texts that follow cyclical form may have been assembled for private reading and devotion, or even for governmental oversight of popular expressions of devotion. Our uncertainties about these plays’ creation and how audiences experienced them extends to the use of the term “mystery” itself. Scholars disagree on the term’s origins as well as its appropriateness for the texts that survive. “Mystery” may have come to us through one of several Old French or Middle English terms and may derive from the Latin mysterium (rite, worship) or from ministerium (occupation). Many scholars avoid the word mystery altogether and prefer “biblical,” “miracle,” “craft,” or “civic” in its place. Some of the sources in the General Overviews section take up this debate directly, and readers will see many of these variations in the following citations. However, since none of them serves as a one-size-fits-all label for the texts under discussion, these annotations alternate their use as deemed appropriate. This bibliography’s multiple sections attempt to provide the reader with a sense of the major scholarly conversations surrounding these texts. After a series of General Overviews about the subject, the reader will find sections on each of the main play collections, generally known as the York Cycle, the Towneley Plays, the N-Town Plays, and the Chester Cycle. Subsequent sections focus on particular lines of critical or theoretical inquiry, on the manuscripts themselves, and on how scholars prepare and present these texts for study.

General Overviews

As a comparatively young field, scholarship of the mystery plays has spent much of its first century determining where the plays came from, what their purposes were, and how they fit into theater history. For an explanation of these origins and purposes, see Johnston 2008. Scholars have even vacillated on what to call these performances as is evidenced by Solberg 2016. When antiquarians began studying the mysteries in the late nineteenth century, they did so in the spirit of their time, heavily influenced by Darwinian theories of evolution. Under such a paradigm, the mystery plays seemed to fit in neatly on the evolutionary chain between the brief dramatic episodes of medieval liturgical drama and the fully developed, secular drama of Shakespeare and his early modern contemporaries. Chambers 1903 provides an early example of this type of scholarship, and his focus on documentary evidence still greatly influences modern scholarship. Hardison 1965 challenged this Darwinian model and began a conversation about the dynamic relationship among the plays, the liturgy, and social order that was continued in James 1983. Prosser 1961 and Kolve 1966 both focus on the plays as artistic as well as religious or cultural endeavors. While the focus of Prosser 1961 on the plays’ negotiation of church doctrine remains influential, Kolve 1966 offers statements about laughter, game, and typology that provide excellent inroads for students new to the plays. Stevens 1987 and Woolf 1972 take very different yet informative approaches. While the former examines the literary and dramatic strengths of each major play collection, the latter studies what it considers to be the best examples of each episode, thus constructing a curated, “ur-cycle” of plays of various origins. The latter approach was later taken up by Bevington 1975, listed under Anthologies, as a standard for anthologies. For an insightful survey of these and other critical approaches, see Happé 2008.

• Chambers, E. K. The Medieval Stage. 2 vols. London: Clarendon Press, 1903.

  Chambers’s study remains foundational to the study of medieval theater, despite its goal of doing so to understand major precursors to Elizabethan drama. Chambers promotes the theory—later disproven by Hardison 1965—that civic theater evolved directly from liturgical drama. While acknowledging medieval drama’s variety, Chambers also maintains that the creation-to-doom cycle was the standard format from which all others deviated.

• Happé, Peter. “A Guide to Criticism of Medieval English Theatre.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. 2d ed. Edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher, 326–360. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

  Happé’s survey of critical approaches to medieval drama ranges from the antiquarianism of the nineteenth century to contemporary focuses on political, performative, iconographical, textual, and archival research. The essay aptly communicates the development and limitations of our current understandings of this complex field.

• Hardison, O. B. Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965.

  DOI: 10.1353/book.68457

  Chapter 1, titled “Darwin, Mutations, and the Origin of Medieval Drama,” challenged the so-called “evolutionary” theory positing that civic theater developed directly from mimetic components of the liturgy. Hardison’s monograph also began a discussion on the dynamic relationship between ritual and drama that scholars continue to explore today.

• James, Mervyn. “Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval Town.” Past and Present 98 (1983): 3–29.

  DOI: 10.1093/past/98.1.3

  James argues that the plays contributed to the social order of a medieval city by enacting the inherent tensions in metaphorical conceptions of the city as a body mirroring the body of Christ. Stressing both interdependency and hierarchy, the schema illustrated the necessary balance between social “wholeness” and conflict. The drama’s egalitarian aspirations challenged the Corpus Christi procession’s hierarchal arrangement, but it also highlighted the economic and social inequalities among the participating guilds.

• Johnston, Alexandra F. “An Introduction to Medieval English Theatre.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. 2d ed. Edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher, 1–25. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

  Johnston provides a historical overview of the occasions, goals, and sponsors of liturgical, civic, festive, and ceremonial drama in medieval England. She also introduces the reader to the archival evidence that has informed so much of what we know about these plays’ performance and eventual suppression.

• Kolve, V. A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966.

  Articulates important dramatic and devotional principles that continue to inform discussions of the biblical plays. Perhaps Kolve’s greatest achievement is his recognition of the plays as works of rich artistry and complexity. His ideas on typology and game remain foundational to modern scholarship of medieval drama, but see Ashley 1998 (cited under The York Cycle) and Meredith 2008 for challenges to the universality of didactic or typological readings.

• Prosser, Eleanor. Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961.

  Prosser’s study, which examines the drama qua drama, stands as a useful corrective to the purely antiquarian or literary approaches to drama prevalent from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Focusing on the Christian doctrine of redemption, Prosser illustrates the dramatic integrity of the plays by examining their treatment of religious principles with which the average audience member would have been familiar.

• Solberg, Emma Maggie. “A History of ‘The Mysteries.’” Early Theatre 19.1 (2016): 9–36.

  DOI: 10.12745/et.19.1.1178

  Solberg traces the etymological roots of the term “mystery,” as it is applied to religious “ritual and spectacle” (p. 17), from its Latin and Greek routes through the Enlightenment. In so doing, she shows that the term “mystery” was used in the late medieval, Early Modern, and Enlightenment eras to refer to religious rites, theatrical representation, and the specialized knowledge of trades.

• Stevens, Martin. Four Middle English Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

  DOI: 10.1515/9781400858729

  Stevens approaches each of the four major play collections as complete cycles of significant literary achievement. Organized according to cycle, each chapter combines literary analysis with extensive attention to manuscript evidence to illustrate each collection’s unifying themes. Noting that very little, if any, evidence links the extant play texts to actual performance, Stevens eschews any discussion of the plays’ performance histories.

• Woolf, Rosemary. The English Mystery Plays. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972.

  Woolf organizes her comparative treatment of the four main play collections chronologically through salvation history. Focusing on iconography and privileging literary and theological concerns, these astute readings remain essential to our understanding of the plays’ artistic and didactic functions.