A History of English Literature

(see p. 26), and with shepherds and kings. The Easter plays began with the entry of

Christ into Jerusalem, with procession and palm branches. In Holy Week, the Gospel

accounts of the Passion of Christ were recited, with clerics and congregation taking

parts, as in Catholic churches today. The resurrection was acted by the women coming

to the empty tomb, where they were met by the angel with the question, ‘Whom do

you seek?’, also put to the shepherds at the manger in Nativity plays. From this semi-

nal question grew a forest of representations, liturgical, musical and artistic – church

windows, carvings, paintings and manuscript illustrations – as well as dramatic.

Drama began in church, with clerics as authors and chief players. The congrega-

tion got into the act with performances on the parvis outside the west door. These

dramatizations of the Bible, from Creation to Doomsday, were popular. Records

survive from France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Ireland and Scotland. A Cornish cycle

survives, and plays from several English towns, with complete 15th-century cycles

from Chester, Wakefield and an unknown town (‘the N. Town cycle’). The York cycle

has 48 plays. After 1311 the feast of Corpus Christi, celebrating the Real Presence of

Christ in the Eucharist, was held on 29 June; this was a long day, upon which a cycle,

The Play Called Corpus Christi, was performed. Each guild staged its play on a

pageant-wagon through the streets. They were amateurs, but payments are recorded.

In a Cain and Abel play, God (who earned one penny) is greeted by Cain’s question

to Abel: ‘Who is that hob [oik] o’er the wall?’

The rich quality of these short plays resists quotation. Much admired are the York

Butchers’ Play of the Crucifixion and the Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play, in

which the sheep-rustler Mak (a Scot?) tries to hide a sheep he has stolen in the

manger of the Christ-child. The Wakefield Master writes complex stanzas in broad

Yorkshire for his shepherds; the raciness of his sacred drama recalls Langland.

Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale often refers to the plays: Absolon, the parish clerk, a girlish

treble, likes to play Herod, a raging tyrant; John the Carpenter has forgotten Noah’s

Flood, a Carpenters’ play with a comic Mrs Noah. More subtly, Absolon travesties

66 2 · MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE: 1066–1500

A performance of a

Mystery play in Coventry

Coventry mystery performance in the 1400s or 1500s

showing a scene from

early in the Passion of

Christ. Handcoloured

19th-century woodcut

reproduction of an earlier

illustration.