Peg Padnos Professor Christopher Lee Lit 506 24 Feb 201 All the Streets a Stage: The Merging

of Comedy and Affective Emotion in the Artistry of Mystery Playwrights

A play lives in its ability to create. . . an electric current between the actor and his audience. J. L. Styan (xiii)

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. As audiences swelled, performances moved from sanctuary to churchyard. Since tombstones proved troublesomeone can imagine people stumbling over them, perhaps using them for perchesmore relocation ensued: to the market place, the village green, any convenient field (Child xvi). Thus, by the time the English Mystery plays blossomed into full flower, the clergy had ceased to be actors (Bates 38). Performers took to their roles with dramatic flair(Child xvii). Latin slipped from their lips, and lines, often in alliterative verse, were recited in the vernacular (Bertrin and Remy). 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 (Bates passim). As for the playwrights, they found themselves engaged in constant revision (Beadle and King passim), 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). In addition, there seems to have been a need to set forth the truths of Sacred Writ in pleasing, worthy, and illuminating ways (Tydeman 25).

Padnos

Hence, the thesis of this paper: Leaving the precincts of the Church set in motion myriad changes in both stagecraft and content of the Mysteries, whose purpose was to teach the whole of salvation history to the illiterate masses. In light of this, both content and stagecraft responded to audience traditions and expectations as well as to the ecclesiastical imperative to teach the unlettered and save their souls. Put another way, stagecraft supported content, even as content enhanced stagecraft. Indeed, it could be argued that without such symbiosis, the Mystery Plays would not have survived for as long as they did. A few words about the elements of stagecraft seem in order. These include the traditions and expectations of the audience, the work of the theater artists, and the contributions and innovations of the playwright (Styan xiv). This is, in effect, a summary of stagecraftan umbrella term encompassing the physical practicalities or conventions of dramatic presentation and performance. Besides audience and cast, key elements also include the physical medium or stage; the written play (i.e. realism, structure, plot, language); scenery, costumes, and props (Styan xiv). Stagecraft would not be complete, however, without the implementation of the collective creativity of scores of playwrights, what, in effect, created the electric current between actors and audience referred to in the epilogue (Styan xiii). Admittedly, stage directions are generally sparse in Mystery Plays (Greenblatt 450). That said, the combined work of literary scholars and art historians has filled in many gaps. Set during the summer, usually around Whitsuntide or on the Feast of Corpus Christi (Greenblatt 448), the Mystery Plays were so numerous that they began in the early morning, perhaps around 4:30, and lasted till well past midnight (Beadle and King xvi). In the eponymous York Plays, for example, 48 plays were gathered into one cycle, from the Fall of the Angels to

Padnos

Creation to Judgment Day (Child xix). To fill in the gaps, new plays were added; existing dramas were constantly revised (Child xix). As mentioned before, the Mystery Plays were financed by the guilds, organizations of master craftsmen who put their wealth and prestige on the line with these performances (Beadle and King ix). Assignments within the cycles presupposed the sanctity of a crafts daily labour (Beadle and King xvi). Thus, The Wedding Feast at Cana was assigned to the vintners; The Last 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 passim). Again, as mentioned previously, 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. This arrangement allowed for adaptation to a particular plays 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 street, intentionally breaking the fourth wall between cast and onlookers. To the delight of audiences, for example, devils issuing from the afore-mentioned hell compartment would seize upon and torment spectators (Child xxi). Indeed, it seems to have been particularly easy for the playwrights to insert comic scenes involving the devil. Of all the personages in the Redemption saga, he was the most real. . . not a figure of the remote past but busy in daily life (Tisdel 334-35). Though it may seem strange to a Twenty-first Century audience, in the medieval mind, the devil was their own familiar fiend, perhaps as compelling laughter as Saturday Night Lives Satan-chasing Church Lady.

Padnos

The fact that the plays were in the streets allowed for the intrusion of other comedic situations and characters. Noahs Flood is an example. Part of the Chester Cycle, it shows Noahs trouble in urging his scolding, shrewish wife to board the ark (Child xvii). Cains ploughboy, is another example. Unknown to the writers of Genesis, he was familiar to medieval playgoers as Garcio, a boy of saucy speech (Bates 56). With the famous Second Shepherds Play, thought to be the work of the Wakefield Master (Greenblatt 449), there is the farcical interlude of Mak, the sheep stealer, which has no real connection to the Nativity (Child xxii). There is a connection, however to folklore, as Clarence Griffin Childs has written (28). Maks rustic spellBut about you a circill,/As round as a moon,/To I have done that I will/Till that it be noon/That ye lie stone-still (ll. 40005)may have been adapted from a favorite comic buffoon (Child 28). That said, a crucial question emerges from this example of tomfoolery. Why did the writers feel free to insert this piece of realistic low comedy into a Nativity play? (Child xxix). At least three reasons seem plausible. Perhaps the looser milieu of street theatre lowered any inhibitions that they might have felt in a church or churchyard setting. Perhaps, too, the fact that the performers were not priests allowed them to remind the people of their pagan past. In the words of F.M. Tisdel, perhaps In the end, popular custom proved stronger than ecclesiastical decree (330). And perhaps, as Katherine Lee Bates has written, the devotional spirit of the plays notwithstanding, [T]he rude, laughter-loving tastes of the populace so wrought up the playwrights as to bring about the introduction of distinctly common episodes into sacred history (47). Regarding the affective imagination, there is no better example than The York Crucifixion. Here, brutality is emphasized and tolerated, making this particular pageant well

Padnos

nigh intolerable (Bates 83). Bereft of human compassion, four soldiers hammering nails into Christs body use their craftsmanship to make the torture grimly effective in its authenticity (Roston 15). Indeed, they are ordinary men engaged in what they see as ordinary work (Greenblatt 439). This unrelenting depiction of sadistic torture seems bent on impress[ing] the Christian with a sense of horror which should lead him to both compassion and repentance (Roston 17). With ordinary men doing the deed, speaking the common speech, how could onlookers not feel moved? How could they not recall the tortures of hell awaiting them if they failed to respond fully and emotionally to Christs agony (Roston 17). The dialogue in this play well represents the teaching mission of the church. But there may be yet another reason why the scene is so prolonged. This has to do with the players from the pinners guild. On the one hand, they were charged with exhibiting the sanctity of their labor, as mentioned earlier. On the other, they were producing a scene of some technical difficultyattaching the actors body securely to the cross, then having to raise the cross and slot it into the waiting mortise, preventing it from falling, ensuring, in effect, a flawless performance. Thus, an example of stagecraft and content working symbiotically. In this short glimpse of the medieval world of Mystery Plays comedy and tragedy have sat side by side, along with stagecraft and script. (Regrettably, other creative enhancements typology (i.e. prefiguration), anachronism, song and dancehave not been discussed, due to the limitations of a short paper.) Nonetheless, from this effort, it is hoped that the reader might be able to imagine the heady excitement of a pageant day: the still dark streets abuzz with tension, the cast and crews hurrying to their wagons waiting at the citys edge, the audience hustling to their vantage points by lantern light (Prosser 3). 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

Padnos

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 Wakefield market-square and on from street to street until evening falls (Bates 87).

Padnos

Works Cited Bates, Katharine Lee. The English Religious Drama. New York: McMillan & Company, 1893. Web. 19 Feb 2013. www.questia.com Beadle, Richard and Pamela M. King. York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Web. 19 Feb 2013. <books.google.com> Bertrin, Georges and Arthur F.J. Remy. Miracle Plays and Mysteries. The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. Web 19 Feb 2013. <www.newadvent.org> Child, Clarence Griffin. The Second Shepherds Play, Everyman, and Other Early Plays. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910. Web. 19 Feb 2013. <books.google.com> Greenblatt, Stephen, Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages: Volume A. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print. Prosser, Eleanor. Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays: A Re-evaluation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961. 22 Feb 2013. Web. <books.google.com> Roston, Murray. Biblical Drama in England from the Middle Ages to the Present Day. London: Faber & Faber, 1968. Web. 14 Feb 2013. <books.google.com> Styan, J.L. The English Stage: A History of Drama and Performance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Web. 20 Feb 2013. <books.google.com> Tisdel, Frederick Monroe. The Influence of Popular Customs on the Mystery Plays. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 5.3 (1905) : 323-40. Web. 20 Feb 2013. <www.jstor.org> Tydeman, William. An Introduction to Medieval English Theatre. Cambridge Companion to English Theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Web. 20 Feb 2013. books.google.com>