Category Archives: Academic Curiosity

Pathelin & Jaquinot’s World

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Farces, French Farces, History

For another #FarcesFriday, we’re looking at the context for our plays: what was happening in France in the latter half of the 15th century?

It’s an unfortunate fact of academia that the further along you go, the narrower your world gets. If you compress time, one minute you’re deciding you want to study history, maybe European history, for example, and the next minute your entire world is “mystery plays- summer of 1951- England outside of London”. Now, having a specialism is great! You really fall in love with the specific event that you’re working on. But you miss out on so much else. 

Working on the French farces really brings this home, because they’re still within “medieval drama”, already a very niche field, yet they were totally new ground for me. In fact, I realised that my knowledge of French history altogether is tragically limited, and only surfaces when it bumps up against English history. And I found that sometimes, when you’re looking at a different country or culture from within an academic space, it can be challenging to find the broader events and themes. Thus, I suspect someone who studies French history in depth may take issue with the moments I’m highlighting here, and feel that I’ve missed out on a much wider narrative! If that’s you- let’s talk! I know I have a lot more to learn. But for now, a highlight (or lowlight) reel of what was happening before and during the time our plays were being staged for the first time:

First, let me start by saying that France as you and I know it, isn’t the France that they knew. Calais, the northern port city, had been captured by the English in 1347, and they wouldn’t give it back until the mid-16th century; thus the English had a solid economic toehold on a major trading point. The area surrounding it, as well as an area around Dijon, were considered the Duchy of Burgundy, which was technically part of the kingdom of France, but was ruled by its own wealthy and powerful ducal family. Confusingly, next to that was Burgundy, a part of the Holy Roman Empire rather than part of the French Kingdom. Southeastern France was also part of the HRE, or some of the small states affiliated with Italy. 

France today is known for being fiercely defensive of its language. But in the late medieval period, more people spoke dialects than “proper” French. This puts Pathelin’s scene of feigning madness by speaking in several different dialects into an interesting light: though one ordinary peasant probably wouldn’t have been so multilingual, the country taken as a whole was. 

Without a common language, one thing which may have bound the French together was the turmoil of the previous century. The plague, which had depleted Europe’s population by a quarter to fifty percent, was as far in the past to Pathelin’s time as Queen Victoria’s death is to ours; inevitably its legacy must have lingered, particularly in an ongoing, depleted population. Additionally, as Europe headed into the Little Ice Age, more years saw crop failures that resulted in food scarcity as a semi-regular occurrence.

But, apart from the plague, the thing that probably shaped the era the most was war. The English and French royal families had been connected by marriage and descent ever since William the Conqueror, with lands throughout the geographic body of France actually under English rule. This was always a source of tension, but it came to a head in  1328, when Charles IV of France died without a (male) heir: his closest male relative was Edward III, King of England. The French nobles couldn’t stomach the idea of an English monarch, and instead they gave their crown to Philip VI, a cousin outside of the inheritance patterns but with the required French identity. But the dispute between monarchs, one with the legal right to inherit and the other with the nationality to do so, touched off a disagreement between the two countries that would carry on, in phases and waves, for just over a century, with various parts of France changing hands along the way. Many of the battles celebrated in English history- Crecy, Agincourt- date from this prolonged conflict. The Hundred Years’ War is also famous for the brief but dramatic career of Joan of Arc, an ordinary peasant girl who claimed that visions from God demanded that she help liberate French lands from the English. Joan was executed for heresy in 1431, less than half a century before our plays. And though the final “official” battle of this long was, at Castillon, was in 1453, the Treaty of Picquigny, which formally ended it, wasn’t until 1475- right at the date suggested for Pathelin‘s writing. 

That wasn’t the only significant national crisis of the time, either. Charles VI, who became King of France at age 11, didn’t just offer the country instability because of his young age: he also suffered from periodic mental illness, including the bizarre belief that he was made of glass and could shatter at any moment. Although he died in 1422, well before our plays, his delusions must have contributed to a general sense that the world was a chaotic place. Nor was the war with England the only dispute of the times- the Armagnac-Burgundian Civil War, in which two of the French noble families fought with one another from 1407-1435- added one more dispute to the pile. In 1477, the Duke of Burgundy died and the division of his lands between the king of France and the Hapsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire made for even more minor but unsettling wars. 

Even religion couldn’t be counted on to be a wholly stabilising thing. From 1378 to 1417, there was a dispute between the Roman papacy and a succession of rival popes in Avignon.

Altogether, this “crisis of the late Middle Ages”, as it’s been termed, must have had some impact on ordinary people. I find it fascinating that this was also the period when the practice of law in France was becoming such a prominent career- and that it was also when the writing of farces, particularly by those law students, became so widespread. Did people seek out legal stability where their world felt out of control? Did law students, who may have been especially well informed about political matters, find solace from that world by writing comedy that was in some cases absurd, and in other cases subtle commentary? With so much discord, maybe Jaquinot and his wife’s bickering is just a smaller scale event among larger ones, and perhaps Pierre’s chicanery reflects the feeling that the rules of society were being violated all over the place. I don’t know any of this with any certainty, and it’s fair to add that life was no easier or more stable in England, where conflict with the French sat alongside what we now call the Wars of the Roses (1455-1487), yet we have no tradition of farce in England.

How would this tumultuous century and its predecessor have been perceived by our characters? Jaquinot and his wife are fairly young, so they wouldn’t have the deep memories of all that had transpired, but as we see in our own times, growing up when chaos is the norm can make life very difficult to navigate and one might argue that their squabbling owe something to mental health that’s taken many hits. Jaquinot’s mother-in-law is probably the oldest character in either of our plays, so she’s lived through some things; is part of her egging on her daughter, against her son-in-law, her way of saying, “You have to fight for things in this world if you want to survive”? Most of the characters in Pathelinhave a carefree quality- they’re cynical, jaded cheats, but one gets the sense that they cheat one another almost as a form of entertainment for themselves, with even Guillemette’s pleas about their poverty not truly coming across as desperate. Aignelet, the shepherd-cum-sheep-thief, is the most exposed to desperation, his sheep-eating an act of necessity, but his glee in putting one over on Pierre Pathelin gives him a joyful quality as well. Once again, the characters of our farces are ourselves: we all react differently to living in a world that seems to be falling apart, and how an actor chooses to read their character may or may not reflect the historical moment in which they were created, or the one in which they are being performed.

Director’s Notes: Designing the Mystery

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Design, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

Happy Easter #MysteryPlayMonday! We’ve been busy designing our production of “The War In Heaven”, and our show’s director reflects on what it means to imagine portraying heaven, hell, and their inhabitants.

What does an angel look like? How about a daemon? Or Heaven, or Hell?

I’ve been designing this week, getting the answers to those questions get out of my brain and on to paper, so that they can eventually be brought to life on our Mystery Play waggon. The week when I sketch and model, putting to paper what has been evolving in my brain for months, is always fun. And it tends to be when observations that have been quietly bubbling under the surface coalesce into coherent thoughts.

One of the things that I’ve been ruminating on, both from a directorial standpoint concerned with characters, and an visual one concerned with design, is, wacky angels aside, the discrepancy in visual stability between good and evil. I don’t mean in a philosophical or moral sense, I mean in terms of how we picture them. To whit: if you grew up in a western, Christian-dominant society, I bet when you picture God, you envision an old man with white hair and a beard sitting on a throne, gesturing down from a sunny, white-clouded heaven. Your idea of Hell is probably full of fire. If I say the word “angel”, you’re almost definitely picturing wings. (The latter, I have learned, actually has an interesting history, but the development of angels was mostly pretty early in church history, and the idea of a human-based angel was well in place by the time our Mystery Plays were first being performed.)

Hell and daemons seem to offer much more flexibility to people wanting to get creative. If I had to theorise, I’d surmise that it’s because what the biblical texts offer up in terms of Hellish descriptions are among the more… trippy… parts of that literature. And who can blame Christians of the first thousand years of that faith if they felt that, since canonical texts went well off into the creative weeds when describing Hell, they had license to do so as well? If Ezekiel gets credit for the strange angels (I’m planning to write more about them in an upcoming essay), the John who wrote the Book of Revelation can be given the palm for kicking off the creativity of designing Hell. But it was probably Dante Alighieri who sent the ball well and truly rolling. His Divine Comedy was wildly influential throughout the medieval world, probably because his depictions of Heaven and Hell were so detailed and intriguing. Even today, much of what we colloquially think about Hell is based on his writing. But it’s worth noting that, although he wrote both, you hear a lot more about “Dante’s Inferno” than about “Dante’s Paradiso”. 

I am not an expert in the psychology of medieval people or medieval theology, but my guess is that this is in line with why people find the demons of Mankind compelling: it’s easier, as humans who know ourselves to be flawed, to relate to the troublemakers and their world than it is to relate to the idealised space and beings that the angels can offer. Everyone might want to imagine that they align with the angelic sphere, but deep down suspects that they share more in common with the minor devils and their mischief. Additionally, I wonder if there isn’t a bit of a fear of stepping on toes if one gets God or the angels wrong. (Anybody else thinking of the “Monkey Jesus” incident?) You can’t sin against a demon or the Devil by making wrong choices about how they look or where they live, but perhaps people feel that they could do so if they mess up on Heaven. Or perhaps they just recognise that when something exists to be The Ideal, The Perfect Place, no human imagination could begin to create a vision equal to that perfection. You can’t screw up with demons because, by definition, they’re already messed up.

So where does this leave us with designing these characters and their spaces? With opposite challenges! Hell is so wide open, there are almost no limitations, and that can be harder to imagine than something with parameters. Heaven is so constrained by the need to be pleasant and appealing, but it can’t be boring, since boring would be off-putting, which is why (spoiler!) I’m leaning on the “Heaven” panel of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” for inspiration. With our angels, some practical facts are brought into the equation: we had angels in 2014’s “Baptism” so we already own purpose-built angel costumes, although I plan to add to those. Angels with feathers are depicted in so many places throughout medieval art, particularly in architectural spaces, that I remain comfortable with that choice. Would they have been white? Probably not! But this is where the bridge between the historic and the modern come in contact: people today expect angels to be white and would struggle to understand a red-and-gold feathered person as an angel. Historic drama needs to speak across the divide of time, not steamroll past it, and finding the balance between them being able to follow the familiar symbols of stories that they know, and creating something new and memorable, is a fine line to walk in designing.

I don’t know yet if our set for Hell will feature my favourite item from medieval Hell: the Hellmouth. There are practical considerations that might make the decision. But I absolutely love medieval Hellmouths, and I don’t know why they fell out of fashion as embodied things. We still hear the term “hellmouth”, but we’re not usually picturing the wide-mouthed, grinning, surprisingly benevolent-expressioned creature of medieval manuscripts. (I think I wrote years ago that they remind me of dogs asking for belly rubs, and I stand by that!) I do know that our demons are planned to be interesting and multi-faceted. In keeping with the observation that Hell brings out creativity in ways Heaven doesn’t, Hell will be populated by more variety of creatures than Heaven.

And of course, there is God! God is, literally, impossible to design in the way that the character demands, which means we first have to dispense with seeing the character as representing in any way the actual idea of the theological “God”. The God of the Mystery Plays is first and foremost a human being (there’s probably some serious theological layering about Jesus in this- ironically I am writing this on Easter!) and does not have to be what he also cannot be: all things to all people, perfection and omnipotent. One of the really brilliant things about the Mystery Plays over the past 75 years, however, is that God has been: male, female, white, brown, old, young, a child, Christian and, yes, not Christian! Our depiction has always been and probably will be medieval-inspired, but final decisions will probably me made after casting, so that “God” has a chance to influence “who” they will be onstage. One wants, after all, to be at least a tiny bit creative for the creator!

The brilliant thing about the Mystery Plays is that no two groups, either in the same year or across the past seventy five years, have come up with the same answers to these questions. And all of the modern iterations are wildly different from what was going on in the Middle Ages. When I think about the thousands of different minds that have gone into trying to make sense of these characters and their world, for these plays alone, it’s mind-boggling. One of the seminal books on modern mystery plays is titled “Playing God”, reflecting on the literal practice of the actor doing so, but I think it’s in the way all the different teams create their own little slice of the story, in a way that’s uniquely their own, that is truly a miracle of creation.

A Director Prepares… With Medieval Theology

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

On today’s #MysteryPlayMonday, our “War in Heaven” director talks about how looking at medieval beliefs about our play’s story influence her ideas about the characters & the production.

So much of the drama of the twentieth century was a push towards realism. I don’t mean the way it’s staged, I mean that there has been a trend away from characters who exist primarily as relatively flat “types”, without a lot of nuance or subtext. When modern actors or directors start with a new project, assuming we’re working with an established script-based drama, we sit down and read it and ask it lots of questions- what does that line really mean? Hmm, is my character hiding something in this scene? What does this scene show us about the relationship between those two characters? What is there on the page and what is, metaphorically, underneath the page?

I think it would be selling medieval plays short to suggest that you can’t do that with them, but you do have to wrestle with two things. The first is that it’s obvious that these plays weren’t written by authors thinking about, or intentionally creating, the answers to those questions. (Their work isn’t lacking in complexity- just consider their technical accomplishments as verse drama! But it’s a different kind of complexity.) The second is that, when you start asking anything of the script that isn’t right on the page, you’re inevitably going to bump into questions of theology, some of which various thinkers among the many branches of Christianity have been contemplating and debating for centuries. The medieval playwrights had to know about those debates, how they had been settled, or if they hadn’t, they had to make their own choices about weighty matters in order to write their play.

Let me be clear that I don’t mean you have to be a person of faith yourself, and none of us are medieval Catholics, although the originators certainly were. But you may have to think about their ideas and understandings of medieval Catholicism. That, in itself, leads to other interesting questions, since faith is ultimately personal and interior: knowing what was doctrinally acceptable to the Vatican doesn’t tell us much about how our ordinary medieval tanner understood his faith, much less what that meant to him!

I’ve been thinking especially hard about this as we approach auditions, because this pre-audition time is the one moment that the actors get a chance to look at this play with a completely clean slate and make of it what they will. That’s the exciting thing about auditions (to go with the nervous thing)- actors are amazing at finding interpretations that I hadn’t even considered! I’m not even going to potentially muddy the waters by stating what some of my “character questions” are for the characters they will eventually portray. I will say that I hope they don’t feel the need to go on a crash-course about medieval theology or philosophy. But can’t promise that they won’t end up at least taking a glance at those things during the next few months, either!

An example of the kind of thing I mean is one that does not directly pertain to us, but is an interesting insight into the mindset of medieval theologians. You’ve almost certainly heard the expression: “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” It’s come down to us to mean, essentially, “there are things we can debate until the end of time but it’s not just the answer that doesn’t matter, the question itself has no point because it’s all unknowable.” Well, here’s what I’ve learned as I’ve been reading up on medieval angels. First, that’s a misquote- it’s actually “the point of a pin”- a much smaller space. Second, medieval people didn’t literally debate this issue at all; the question was used later as a way of mocking some of the minutia that medieval theologians had supposedly wasted their time contemplating. What they were actually debating wasn’t as fatuous as this question, taken literally, would suggest: they were debating whether or not angels were corporeal beings, with physical presence. Given how important incarnation is to Christianity (the idea that God became physically present via Jesus is one of the central tenets to the religion), it doesn’t seem absurd that the question of whether other heavenly beings could move between spiritual and physical reality was a concern with wider implications. After all, isn’t the boundary between the physical and the metaphysical at the heart of all religion? We’re alive- corporeal, physically present- and then we’re not- can we exist without that molecular matter? Isn’t that question the basic reason why humanity has developed religion in the first place? Angels on pin-points may have been sarcastic, but its implications weren’t frivolous.

The Mystery Plays don’t have to dig into this question of non/corporeal angels because the plays inherently embrace the physicality of things beyond understanding; the contradiction between recognising that God was unknowable and unseeable, and watching our neighbour portray him, was baked in. But I use this as an example of the kind of theological debate that you inevitably stumble into while trying to make sense of a character. They don’t all resolve so neatly for our purposes, and some of them have very real implications for a potential interpretation of a character. An angel that is physically closer to human form would have a very different character and experience than an angel who exists solely in an ethereal celestial cosmos! (And the original concept of some angels wasn’t close to human form at all, which is a whole other set of questions.)

Another thing that makes complex theological questions inevitable for us, in particular, is that the War in Heaven does not, strictly speaking, exist in the Bible. It’s a story made up from several small parts scattered throughout the Old Testament and Revelation in particular, but it’s not a well-defined event in the same manner as, for example, the Nativity or the Crucifixion. And yet it was very much a concept, as a complete tradition, created out of questions that were debated and argued well before our play was written. The genesis and evolution of the story that inspires our play is the product of all sorts of theological conceptualising, and that inevitably helps shape our concept of God, Lucifer, and their followers.

Bottom line: it’s possible to imagine these characters outside of all this theological framework, but if one is trying to really round them out into a more nuanced, “modern” acting challenge, an actor is probably going to discover that medieval theology was messy, complicated, disputed, and surprisingly interesting. You don’t have to believe in any of it to find medieval belief, and the lengths people would go to define it, remarkable. If, by our modern understanding of character development, medieval writers seem to shortchange their characters, we in turn may be short-changing the complexity of the religious matrix within which they were writing them. Their faith doesn’t have to be ours, but it’s a doorway we can peer through to try and bridge the gap that times leaves between us.

Pathelin: The Franchise?

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Farces, Musings

Are sequels ever as good as the original? Even medieval people kept hoping so! Today’s #FarcesFriday explores the two sequels to Pierre Pathelin and what they tell us about humanity’s insatiable desire to see more of characters they love.

“But is it as good as the original?” That expression, heard every time a new film in a series, or a remake of some older property, comes out, is so familiar as to be a cliche. But it’s a fair question to ask. When an original work is so brilliant, its characters or world so compelling, that people want more of it, they invest in their own ideas of what that next chapter should be. Sometimes it lives up to their hopes; often it feels more like someone is cashing in on their affection for the material without understanding or honoring it. It’s easy for series, sequels, prequels, “origin storys”, remakes, and “reimaginings” to feel so divorced from made you fall in love with the first story that it’s almost unrecognisable. You can only wring so much out of a concept before it becomes something else that you may not love as much.

It feels like a very modern complaint- one I would cite as the reason I never go to the cinema, for example. But let us be fair. Plays get revived constantly. You could spend a lifetime just watching new iterations of Shakespeare and probably die without seeing them all. We, the theatre-folk, aren’t really above artistic recycling. And not only are we not, we also weren’t. Medieval people did it too. Now, we may recognise that Dante was writing Book of Revelation fan-fic, but we probably don’t think medieval plays did that. And yet, Master Pierre Pathelin would beg to disagree. Along with the brilliant original, two other plays survive in which he is one of the central characters. And the Pathelin canon, if one can call it that, doesn’t seem so very different from the modern tendency to wring as much material as one can out of a character that people dearly loved.

The New Pathelin is in parts a moderately close copycat to the “Old” Master Pierre Pathelin. Instead of trying to cheat a cloth merchant out of a bolt of fabric, he’s fleecing the furrier out of his furs, and doing so in exactly the same way: be convincing him of family familiarity that doesn’t actually exist, praising him and his later father to the skies, until the furrier trusts the wily Pathelin more than he should. Pathelin convinces him that he is actually buying the furs for the village priest, who will be responsible for handing over the money to pay for them. Upon arriving at the church, Pathelin then explains to the priest that the furrier has come to take confession, while the furrier thinks he is there to collect payment. Pathelin plays them off one another, sneaks away with his stolen furs, and it is the priest and the furrier to whom the final scene belongs. 

Guillemette is missing- although Pathelin directly reference his swindles of Guillaume Joceaulme, he doesn’t dwell upon his wife- which is shame because their partnership in deception is one of the delightful aspects of the original farce. More importantly from a dramatic standpoint, the brilliant reverse of fortune which is heaped upon Pathelin at the close of the original play, the method of which is one of the glories of its humour, is entirely gone. The priest and the furrier aren’t unfunny, it’s just that the depth of cleverness in crafting the scene isn’t there, and because so much of the opening scene hews so closely to the earlier script, the humour doesn’t feel as fresh. 

The Testament of Pathelin departs from the framework of the previous two plays. Not everyone even considers it a farce: all the way back in 1882, P.L. Jacob, who published the three plays together, considered it a “moral epilogue”, and “a framework imagined to bring out Pathelin’s character and to gather a host of witty remarks, popular proverbs, and foolishness.” The essence of the story is that Pathelin realises he is very near the end of his life, and he needs both an apothecary and a priest. His wife Guillemette is back, and willing to go find them. But there isn’t much the apothecary can do, so the priest instead gets a chance to argue that Pathelin should make his final confession as well as making his will. Pathelin’s joking bequests make the priest think he is delirious; unlike the original Pathelin play, this isn’t deliberate deception, it’s just Pathelin having a facetious list of bequests, and we can either infer that he means them sincerely, even if they are silly, or that he’s just enjoying one last burst of witticism. And then, his affairs complete, Pathelin dies. The play ends with expressions of faith by his wife, the apothecary, and the priest as they stand around him. 

You can’t exactly call it a morality play, but it’s hard to call it a true farce. The unavoidable undercurrent of mortality undercuts what thin humour it possesses. And its humour is one-line moments, rather than a story about a uniquely clever villain-hero. In truth, the main character of the story doesn’t really need to be Pathelin; any slightly unserious man might conceivably end his life on the same note. (If his imminent death had itself been a scheme, that might have been more comically successful, but it would have deprived the writer of its serious, religious finale.)

Though Jacob, for one, seems uncertain of which is the better of these two “continuation” plays, my person opinion is that New beats out Testament (and neither one competes with the original). Its first scene is just too close to the original to be funny a second time, and the priest/furrier scene suffers because it leaves Pathelin behind as a character- presumably audience fondness for that specific character is why there was demand for a second play at all. By the time of Testament, the distance in time and separation from the brilliance of the first writer mean that you kind of wonder why anyone even tried. So many of the things that I would criticise about a modern sequel are present all the way back in the second half of the fifteenth century.

What intrigues me, though, in terms of the sequel/franchise problem of overusing material, no matter how solid its origins, is an almost throwaway line by Jacob in his edition of the three plays: that there were at one time not merely two sequels but “a great number of farces in which the character of Pathelin… appeared” [italics mine]. I don’t know what evidence he had to assert this, but it’s a fascinating question: was there once what amounts to a Pathelin series? Were those plays just copies- medieval drama fan fiction? (In a pre-copyright society this doesn’t seem completely absurd.) It feels safe to assume that they would not be the product of the same author- there is no suggestion that the two known sequels share an author, either with one another or with the first Pathelin play- and so how closely they might have stayed to his particular authorial voice, or his concept of Pathelin as a character, can’t be known. Were the plays connected at all? In both New Pathelin and Testament, Pathelin references his cheating of Guillaume the clothier directly, tying the plays to their source material. But neither play uses the comic value unique to Pathelin’s (claimed) calling as a lawyer, and that lack of reference does change him from being a very specific type of swindler (with a societal commentary about lawyers inherently attached) to a more garden-variety rogue. Did any of the lost plays, if indeed they did exist, hew more closely to the character as we first meet him?

Without that information, it’s hard to say whether we can consider the idea that “Pathelin: the Series!” actually existed in the sense that we’d know it, as opposed to being closer to an internet fan page where enthusiastic writers with no technical connection to the material nonetheless feel comfortable riffing on the the source material. But the fact that we have three surviving plays that make use of the character Pierre Pathelin does show us how beloved the first play, and its scheming lead character, were by medieval French audiences. Perhaps that is an immutable human characteristic, unchanged across the centuries: we love certain characters too much to leave them alone, even if perhaps we’d be better off simply being satisfied with what their original creator offered us, and not trying to make their lightnight strike twice. 

An Art History of “The War in Heaven”

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, History, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

This will make the most sense if you can take a look at our Pinterest board by the same title while you read this! https://www.pinterest.com/hiddentheatre/the-war-in-heaven-ymp-2026/an-art-history-of-the-war-in-heaven/

Let me preface this all by saying, I am not an art historian. I’m just someone who enjoys art, galleries and museums, and I find art useful as a window into how people look at their world and their stories. There’s a theatrical, narrative quality to a lot of historic art, and it says so much about the society which created it. As we head into the design phase of working on “The War in Heaven”, I like to take some inspiration from the art surrounding it- not to recreate imagery (ours will not be a medieval Sunday in the Park with George), but to consider: what symbolism follows a biblical tale? How did medieval people imagine it, versus Renaissance citizens, versus people today? What visual cues are inescapable, and what’s changed, and why?

The “Fall of the Rebel Angels”, as it’s almost universally titled in art, has been fairly popular inspiration for painters for the better part of a millennium. That alone is interesting, because the story in the Bible is relatively thin, scattered across several books; the art, like our play, is reflecting the traditions that have accrued around it, far more than what the text itself says.

The earliest images that I was able to find are from illuminated manuscripts, and date to the 13th century. There is a consistent vocabulary in displaying the Fall of the Angels, with God central, in some sort of sphere, surrounded by many angel faces, and below him, an enormous, open hellmouth into which the fallen drop. One mid-14th century painter, known only as the Master of the Rebel Angels (and known only from two pieces) departs from this to show one side of heaven as empty choir stalls at the very top of the work, while the dominant image is a mixture of robed angels and black daemons falling towards an orb that looks rather like a rotten piece of fruit, sucking them into holes. It’s legitimately one of the creepier iterations of the story. 

These early renditions have a fairly consistent colour palette: golds, blues, reds, browns. A century later the colors expand vastly, and the symmetry that largely frames the majority of the earlier paintings disappears, while the art itself moves from manuscript to displayable painting. Nicholas Frances’ “The Fall of the Angels” is almost Easter-egg pretty with pastels and a soft, velvet quality to the paint. In truth, his fallen angels look more like they’ve fallen asleep, and the way the good angels appear to be pushing them down a river to the daemons below reminds me a bit of nineteenth century log-drivers in America’s upper midwest. Similarly colourful, Neri diBicci’s two iterations of “Fallen Angels” strike me as somehow science-fictional, as if St Michael is fighting dragons on Mars. It’s worth noting, though, that while colourful and somewhat fantastic, there is what I can only describe as a calmness to these paintings. They aren’t overly crowded, the motions portrayed aren’t frantic, and you can stop and look at the details without feeling overwhelmed. They’re also, quite honestly, about as peaceful as a fall into Hell could be.

Skip ahead again and that all changes. The 16th century Falls are, for the most part, crowded, messy, busy, chaotic, detailed. Hieronymus Bosch, whose “Garden of Earthly Delights” triptych may not depict the Fall but is one of the most gloriously creative interpretations of Heaven, Earth, and Hell ever painted, created a “Fall of the Angels” that, while both metaphorically and literally pale by comparison, includes some of his signature features: weird human-animal hybrids, flying monsters, and the odd suggestion that musical instruments may be terrifying. He in turn inspired Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose “Fall of the Rebel Angels” is something you can stare at for hours and keep finding something new. What I find most fascinating about it is that his St Michael, although the “hero” of the narrative, dressed in golden armour with a blue cape flying behind him- gold and blue being two of the colours traditionally associated with all things heavenly- has long, skinny limbs, joints accentuated by armour, and an oddly small head, all of which together makes me think of a stick insect or a praying mantis. It’s an interesting waypoint, far more complex and distressing than the era preceding it, but still decidedly unrealistic and removed from humanity.

Whatever flesh Bruegel’s angel Michael may lack, the Renaissance artists, who really seem to have found the Fall of Angels inspirational, will make up for it, for their versions are seas of flesh. Their St Michaels are, almost to a one, clad in blue armour and red capes, armed with swords and shields, and they’ve been putting in a lot of hours at the gym. So have the fallen angels, who are now stripped of wings, and grotesquery… and clothing. (This is one aspect which, I promise, will not be featured in our Mystery Play!) This was a period when art became fascinated with the details of human anatomy, with the angles of twisted limbs and the colours and contours of flesh, muscle, and sinew, and for whom the ideal body, whether earthly or angelic, allowed for the maximum study of these aspects.

Other iterations moved beyond framed paintings for the wall in this period: a version of the Fall was designed (though not completed) for the ceiling of the chapel at Versailles, while the story also moves into the realm of sculpture. The detail on these carved works is astonishing, and while they keep some of the style of paintings in their era- a pleated tunic for St Michael, angels and daemons naked and buff- they also offer an item which returns them to their medieval roots in the forms of hellmouths, with the round ears and upturned snouts of a Chinese dragon, or a small lapdog. They are every bit as extravagant as the paintings, giving a sense of the chaos and density of bodies that was envisioned for this episode in the mid-1700s.

Prints abound during the later Georgian and Victorian period, modelled on the paintings of the previous century, now presented in black-and-white, suitable for mass distribution. Unto themselves, they seem less of a creative leap in style, more a carrying-on of Early Modern artistic tradition. My favourite discovery from this century, however, uses the Fall as a parody. It’s a cartoon of Queen Victoria and many of the politicians of her day. The good angels are now respectably clad in long robes and have feathered wings, while the fallen have leathery wings and wear loincloths (presumably a Victorian equation with barbarism)… but almost all of them have the beards and muttonchops that were fashionable in the period and seem, to modern eyes, most decidedly un-angelic! I love it because it shows the familiarity that Victorian audiences had with the story of the Fallen Angels, and also with the previous centuries’ artwork depicting it, since parody only works if you understand the reference points it’s using.

Narrative art (rather than abstract) may be slightly less fashionable these days that in centuries past, and biblical stories no longer dominate the vocabulary from which artists can draw. Nevertheless, a quick perusal of sites like Pinterest or Etsy will show that “The War in Heaven” is still inspiring artists, most of whose work contain references to the earlier depictions. They’re us: carrying on a centuries-old tradition, mining its cues and iconography for inspiration, and then building something new for the 21st century. And that’s why I keep going back to the artwork when trying to brainstorm how our play should look.

A Different Trinity: History, Law & Drama

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Drama, Farces, History

#FridayFarces is back, this time with a consideration of how history, drama, and legal proceedings can interact to instruct as well as entertain us.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a person who doesn’t enjoy drama in some form or another. For most people these days, it’s television and cinema; whether you love television or going to the opera, the point is that the very idea of drama is something that virtually everyone finds appealing. (Tell anyone that you work in theatre or television and watch their reaction.) Law seems to come in for a similar, probably equally misplaced, aura of glamour: scroll through your television menu and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find any hour of the day when some legally-based show isn’t airing- in some places there are entire channels dedicated to airing legal cases. Law is drama, in most people’s eyes. 

History sadly comes in for a different response. Only yesterday, a young family friend still in university was saying how much she “can’t get into” history. I understand where she’s coming from: in school, we teach historically abominably, a list of tedious facts purged entirely of humanity and intrigue. But history is all about drama, people, and law; and the drama of law can be a gateway drug when it comes to learning to love history.

I was fortunate to discover this young, entirely unintentionally. A favourite book from my high school years (still on my shelf!), Mary S. Hartman’s Victorian Murderesses, uses famous, well-documented trials to shine light on the often hidden realities of women’s lives, and public responses to them. My brilliant freshman year university course “The Historian as Detective”, gave me books like Natalie Zemon Davis’s enjoyable (and short!) The Return of Martin Guerre* and Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome, by Thoms V. and Elizabeth S. Cohen, both of which rely heavily on trial records to illuminate rural French and urban Italian society, respectively. What I learned then is that the law leaves a detailed record, in a way that very few other historical records can, showing ordinary people caught unexpectedly, made suddenly visible, their everyday lives in captured in metaphorical amber, and set down on paper. Moreover, while trials may be representative more of the “outliers” than their more “ordinary” contemporaries, by showing what was unusual, or not permissible, or in debate, we can understand what was normal, permitted, and accepted by society.

This is one reason why the history-drama-law triad is so important to both the casually curious and serious scholarship. Our farces aren’t quite in this category- there is of course much very erudite research about them!- but primarily they are, to an audience, merely fun. But they reveal other ways that this trio present themselves and talk between themselves.

Both Master Pierre Pathelin and Le Cuvier (to give The Washtub its French title) may have been written and performed by lawyers: The Society of the Basoche, the company of law clerks in medieval Paris. The Basoche are a fascinating group, and I hope to dedicate a day to talking about this most unusual medieval guild at a later date, but for now it’s enough to say that their evolution was an entirely logical phenomenon. The law is full of emotional highs and lows, triumphs and tragedies, justice and injustice- literally the things that define drama, even if there is no stage in sight. Moreover, the Basoche had its own internal jurisdiction, which allowed its students to practice some form of “real” law, the way a mock trial team at a university may do today. If there weren’t any cases on the go, they wrote their own, including causes grasses, mocking lawsuits for Carnival, which allowed them to create “cases” that were particularly absurd or scandalous. Writing true farce, then, without the necessity of a legal framework, may have been an entirely foreseeable next step. By the mid-fifteenth century, the time at which both of our plays were likely composed, the Basoche were working with the company that staged fully religious plays, to contribute to a full day of every sort of drama: morality, mystery, sottie and farce all going on a shared playbill for the public’s day of entertainment. Indeed, the Basoche is today remembered more vividly as a comedy-dramatic enterprise than its actual purpose within the legal-education system. (Thus, to further our theme of interconnectivity between our three themes: the law gave us drama, and today the drama has preserved for us something of the history of law.)

In addition to this very real tie to actual attorneys and clerks, both Pathelin and The Washtub contain aspects of law within the narrative of the drama. The Washtub deals with a contract between a man and his wife, one they draw up in full view of the audience, who functionally serve as “witnesses”, creating what would, in effect, have thus been considered a legally binding document. (One could imagine a sequel in which both husband and wife seek out attorneys to argue about the validity, or amendment, to the contract they have somewhat carelessly drawn up!) In Pathelin the connection to law is still greater: Pierre Pathelin claims to be a lawyer, and the final scene of the play is a trial in a courtroom before a judge. It’s unclear if Pathelin is any sort of attorney at all: Howard Graham Harvey, whose book Theatre of the Basoche is enormously helpful in making sense of the legal aspects of Pathelin, says that “Pathelin’s lack of education raises the strongest presumption that he is nothing more than an unlicensed village practitioner.” In cities, legal training and licensing was becoming more rigorous, as the very existence of the Basoche shows, but in rural areas, the bar to setting oneself up at the bar of law was low; as with Pathelin, cleverness could substitute for a real education. If the play was indeed created by members of the Basoche, perhaps they were making a crack at untrained people who claimed the same mantle of “lawyer” that they so painstakingly studied to achieve. That said, the play also leaves us rather liking and admiring Pathelin, his trickery and audacity, so perhaps it’s less a critical dig and more a nudge and wink- lawyers appreciating that their profession often rewards finding ways to be clever that are just barely, but technically, within the bounds of the law. The play thus gives us a window, however distorted through comedic exaggeration, into village legal practice of the times, while also using it as a source for commentary and comedy. 

One need not, of course, be a student of all three disciplines. But the lawyer needs to understand precedent, or what happened in the past. The historian benefits from understanding the legal framework that shaped and was shaped by the society he or she studies. And those who appreciate the drama of both have a unique opportunity towards making material that might otherwise seem dull as fascinating, alive, and vibrant. We get to take the idea of drama and make it literal drama. Ours must surely be the best of all three worlds.

*Martin Guerre has been dramatised for the stage in multiple versions. The musical version, written by the same people who created Les Misérables, is an extremely interesting study in creating drama by marrying up different aspects of history, effectively destroying much strict historical veracity in pursuit of revealing a completely different aspect of history. I belive some of the women from Victorian Murderesses have also been turned into at least television drama, although I haven’t seen them and cannot say how closely they hewed to the historical record. Still, the fact that these stories were intriguing enough to become drama in the literal sense proves the point that legal history is ripe pickings for history-via-performance!

Meet Lucy Toulmin Smith, the Woman Who Brought Us the York Mystery Plays

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays 2026

In honour of International Women’s Day, for this #MysteryPlayMonday, our director reflects on the woman who first brought the York Mystery Plays to modern eyes.

Ever since I first started studying the York Mystery Plays, I was intrigued by the fact that the first modern edition of the plays was edited by a Victorian woman. There were plenty of male antiquarians, discovering medieval documents and bringing them to publication and public notice throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but similar work by women was relatively thin on the ground. Modern medieval drama scholarship has many brilliant, amazing women bringing out new information and insights on a regular basis, and I’m proud to call many of them friends. But I wanted to take some time to get to know the woman on whose shoulders we all stand. 

I must confess I have not hurried into this: Lucy Toulmin Smith has been a name on the spine on the bookshelf for twenty years, and it was only recently that I really got curious about who she was. What was her journey to these plays that tie us together? 

I had always somehow assumed that Smith’s interest in the York plays came from a personal connection to the area. Nope! Lucy Toulmin Smith wasn’t, technically, even British- she was born in Boston in 1838. The family was English, however; her father, Joshua, hailed from Birmingham, and it was during a five-year sojourn to America that Lucy Toulmin Smith was born. Professionally, Joshua was a lawyer, but he’s usually considered a political theorist, and the germane thing, as far as his daughter is concerned, is that he was a prolific writer whose study interests ranged beyond legal matters, to geology and history. (As the daughter of a geologist whose personal interests are history and politics, this made me smile- Lucy and I share something beyond an interest in mystery plays!) The Toulmin Smiths returned to England in 1842 and settled in London.

Other than that she was educated at home, there isn’t much information available about Toulmin Smith’s childhood- we may presume it was standard for any middle class Victorian girl- until the death of her younger brother William in 1851. The family had been educating him to be a helper in Joshua’s research and writing, but that role was then given to Lucy. The need for someone to do that work must have been great, since there were other boys in the family; but they were considerably younger, and waiting for them to grow into it was apparently impractical. I’d love to know what Lucy thought- was this a welcome development, a chance to exercise what would prove to be a brilliant  mind? Was it a disappointment to find that her parents effectively expected her to remain single and at home? We can’t know her thoughts on the situation when, at age thirteen, her path was set. We only know that she rose to the occasion, and beyond.

Joshua Tolmin Smith died in 1869, while he was in the middle of a significant research/writing project about the craft organisations of medieval England. English Gilds was completed by Lucy, and her work on the medieval documents for her father’s study was the seed for her most important project (so far as we’re concerned, at least!). It clearly set off an interest in bringing medieval and early modern documents into modern editions for scholarship, because two years later she published The Maire of Bristoweis Kalendar (The Mayor of Bristol’s Calendar), about that city in the fifteenth century, followed seven years later by an edition of Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse, a mostly seventeenth-century compilation. It’s unclear if her projects were self-chosen or suggested by some of the antiquarian societies who published them, but it seems reasonable to assume that theatre history must also have interested Smith, because in 1883 she added to her early modern theatre catalogue with an edition of the 1561 play Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex.

But it was the project that followed which was her most significant, and the one for which Lucy Toulmin Smith is probably the best known: the York Mystery Plays. How long she had been working on it, since the English Gilds project first suggested it, isn’t known- it may have been percolating in her mind for many years, or it may have simply taken that long to secure permission to access the manuscript. But in 1882, the Newcastle Weekly Courant carried the news item that “Lord Ashburnham… has at last consented to the publication of his unique fifteenth century MS. of the York Mysteries, which has never been printed, though its existence has long been known. With much liberality, he has placed it in the hands of Miss Toulmin Smith, who is preparing to edit the whole….”, which hints at least at a start date for the actual work. There seems to have been a fair amount of excitement about the upcoming edition; news items from papers as far away as New Zealand note its incipient publication towards the end of 1884! (No information is readily available about what induced Lord Ashburnham to permit publication of a manuscript that that had remained in private hands, out of sight but apparently not out of mind, for a remarkably long time.)

Although she would go on to publish several more (largely medieval) editions, it was the Mystery Plays that would cement Lucy Toulmin Smith’s reputation in scholarship. One anecdote I found most delightful was that during the 1880s she spent so much time researching at the British Museum that she sometimes used it as a return address when writing letters. That dedication proved worthwhile: her back catalogue of well-received, high-quality editorial work earned Toulmin Smith a second, significant distinction. In 1894, she became the first woman in England to become head of a public library when she took the position at Manchester College in Oxford. It was a job she would keep almost until her death: she died in 1911, only a month after her retirement. 

Finding that one of the photographs that survives (and is kicking around the internet) of Toulmin Smith was taken at the 1899 International Congress of Women, a suffrage group, felt like the perfect ending to my search about Lucy’s life, for it was hard to imagine that a woman of her gifts would not have been part of the movement to give her peers a voice in political life. Her life is a testament to the intelligence and independence women could display even in the most repressive of centuries. And in pursuing her own academic interest through her work, Lucy Toulmin Smith gave to England, and the world, access to one of its great cultural treasures. Her work made mine possible. I hope she got half as much joy from revealing the Mystery Plays to the rest of the world, that those of us who have had the chance to study and stage them so much later have been granted.

A Taxonomy of Farces (Maybe)

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Farces, French Farces

Think you know what a farce is? Maybe nobody really knows! This week’s #FarcesFriday looks at scholarly debate about what medieval farces are, aren’t, and how to tell them from other styles- or not!

As humans, we like to label, define, and classify. It’s part of how we make sense of our world. This can be problematic, like when we assume people fall into stereotypes rather than seeing them as nuanced individuals, but it can also be extremely useful in making sure that, when we’re communicating, we have the same understanding of what we’re talking about. It’s all towards making sense and being understood.

For several weeks we’ve been talking about “medieval French farces”, and the fact that we didn’t lead with this particular essay tells you that we- like you, mostly likely!- didn’t feel like the word “farce” required a definition or explanation. After all, it’s not a rare word; in fact, when I was doing some initial reading with an eye towards proposing this project, I felt like I was seeing the word farce in the news almost daily. (Interestingly, when I checked Newspapers.com for use of the term “farce”, I expected the political section to be where it was found. But, while not infrequent there, it wasn’t where farce shows up most often. It’s most frequently used in the sports section!) If we can use it so readily, if the news can bandy that word about, then… surely we all know what a farce is, whether theatrical or otherwise. Right?

Well… not exactly. We’re probably okay on the “otherwise”, news-usage category, but scholarship debating the question “what is a farce”, particularly a medieval farce, has a lengthy history, and it does not seem to have ever become a settled answer. Moreover, there is not a linear direction of travel (“we used to think this but now we believe that”). You can’t pinpoint a specific understanding to a particular time; the ideas come and go and multiple arguments exist simultaneously to debate amongst one another. Any of these people can or could probably claim far more knowledge of this specific genre than I, so my goal here isn’t to take sides. Rather, it’s to illustrate for you just how messy this question is, so that when you next see a medieval farce (hopefully ours! this summer!) you can make up your own mind about how you’d define it.

On the surface it seems easy to posit that if drama is split between tragedy and comedy*, then farce is clearly a subgenre of the latter. However, some scholars have posited that farce is actually a third type that sits between them, particularly because so much of farce humour comes at the expense and discomfort of someone else. If one person’s laughter is directly at the result of another’s degradement, how can it be assigned either category? It’s tragedy for one character, comedy for another. At least one scholar suggests that comedy is probable while farce is so exaggerated as to be impossible in real life. This is just one example of how different opinions align farces within the dramatic tradition.

If we assume that farce is indeed a subfield of comedy, then defining farce often means separating it from other forms of comedy, particularly types unique to medieval France, such as the sottie and the morality. Some models suggest that they exist on a spectrum: farce is pure comedy, a sottie is meant to be funny but probably has a more moralistic subtext, and a morality uses humour solely to teach a moral lesson, often using what is funny to say “this is what you shouldn’tdo”. Other scholarship spins morality off completely, seeing it as something totally removed from farce and humour. As morality is the genre most distant to farce in any model (though still within sighting distance!), I won’t dwell on its definition overmuch; I just want to point out that if you’ve seen any of our Mankind iterations, or are otherwise familiar with the play, it will be readily apparent that much of what is often taken to define a farce is present in a play that, in the English classification, is usually called a morality play. (It’s worth noting that defining any medieval drama can be slippery- are they mystery plays? cycle drama? biblical drama?; you can find all of these terms used for the same plays!)

So, sotties and farces. They’re the two types most closely linked and fought over, in terms of taxonomy. It seems to be a minority position, and perhaps an earlier one rather than current, but some scholars have felt that the title determined this, since there are plays clearly titled with one term or the other. Particularly in early scholarship, it was posited that where a play sat on the afternoon’s playbill could be considered in trying to name the type. (“Farce” originally meant “stuffing”, as in “stuffed into a programme of other entertainment”.) More commonly, the argument is that some internal component is what separates them. Some believe it’s the characters: named characters are more indicative of farce, while allegorical or “type” names might suggest a sottie. One school of thinking is that the determining factor is who is performing them; a “company of sots (or fools)” would perform the eponymous sotties, while other similar fare performed by an acting troop out of fool costumes would perform farces. 

Content is one of the most complex aspects that many farce scholars believe make the difference. I won’t go as further in depth as this issue really deserves, but suffice to say that the contradictions in theory are plentiful! “Farce is more like a slice of real life, sotties are more stylised, exaggerated, or absurd” might be the summation of one argument, while another writer will tell you that what defines a farce is how “stylised, exaggerated, and absurd” it is. Indeed, the “ordinariness” of characters and story is frequently mentioned in defining farce, but the “clowning” and slapstick or improbability is mentioned equally often- can it encompass these together? Do sotties contain more or less slapstick than farces? If sotties are indeed played by “fool” characters, does that make a difference on the slapstick question? And does verbal humour versus visual humour place them in one category or the other? 

The intention of a play is no less debated, and may or may not factor into defining farce from sottie from morality. Is a farce’s sole purpose to invoke laughter? Some argue that the answer is yes, and that is one of the defining features of a farce. Others, however, that none of these forms- or perhaps any drama!- is intended solely for amusement, without any potential subtextual lessons or food for thought. Is a sottie inherently more satirical than a farce- or is satire something entirely different altogether? Where is the place of allegory, particularly between moralities and sotties? It is probably also fair to question whether intent can actually be divorced from content, or whether the two aspects are inherently in service to one another.

And there’s the vexing caveat inherent in all of this. Almost everyone agrees that, however one chooses to define farce, sottie, morality, or comedy, there are always going to be outliers, plays in the medieval French repertoire that just don’t fit any model particularly well, or fit very well… except that one little detail… That detail may be so unique that it doesn’t argue for throwing out one’s entire framework, but it will always be a weak point, a place for someone else to begin developing a different argument that will fit most plays very well… except that one little detail….

So much of the previous paragraphs have been laid out as questions rather than answers, because these are the heart of academic disagreement and complexity of thinking, which means they’re also some of the most interesting places to ponder if one is seeking to create a Taxonomy of Farce. I would love to tell you that I had the answers, but if scholars far more versed in this niche specialism haven’t managed it over the past four centuries, I cannot pretend to be their better. With regard to our own pair of plays, The Washtub seems to fit fairly neatly into various taxonomical models, maybe not always under the same headings, but it doesn’t itself seem to be a freak. Pathelin, on the other hand- and this may be why it’s held in such high esteem- almost never seems to fit easily into any model; it seems so much an outlier, though it’s historically been labelled as the pinnacle of medieval French farce, that I almost wonder if it isn’t the dramatic equivalent of a missing link, fitting neatly into no easy category because it represents the bridge between them.

In the end, I am left with the famous words of the late US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, who, charged with coming up with a legal definition for smut, replied, “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” I daresay most of us would feel exactly the same way about farce. Whether or not we’d be correct remains for debate in the halls of academia.

*In the modern usage, which I intend throughout this article, “comedy” and “tragedy” are usually understood to be defined by a generally happy or unhappy outcome at drama’s end. Ancient Greek drama used these terms to mean the characters were high status or low status; the emotional output didn’t matter.

Wondering where all this comes from? Closer to the performance we’ll be sharing the bibliography of the sources that inform our work on farces, so stay tuned!

York Mystery Plays: The Documentary Evidence

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Mystery Plays

How do we know about the medieval plays? For this week’s #MysteryPlayMonday, you can learn a little bit about the original documents that have preserved this precious history… and how we’re preserving knowledge of the modern revivals.

An enormous amount has been written about the York Mystery Plays, particularly in the last century. Its clear ties to a city which has retained so much of its medieval character is one of the reasons. Another is the fact that its documentation comes from several different types of source, giving a richer picture of not only how the plays may have been performed, but of the civic life that surrounded them.

York’s plays were not a large, monolithic, single script; they were discrete plays, owned by their guilds, and the original, guild-owned scripts have not (except in truly fragmentary bits) survived. The documents that have come to our time are generally civic in nature, the property of city government, or in some cases remarkable survivors of guilds which have themselves continued through the centuries into today.

Few of these documents are available to see in person; being several hundred years old, they are fragile, require very specific, special care, and knowledge of how to handle them. But it’s still interesting to know just where our information about the plays came from, as well as the kinds of documents that were created- and have survived since!- the Middle Ages. Here, then, is a look at how we know what we know about the York plays.

– “The Ordo Paginarum”. Contained in a book known as the ‘A/Y Memorandum Book’, which was concerned with city government regarding the regulation of the trade guilds, this was an official document that listing the guilds, with a brief summary of each play for which they were responsible, and also included the proclamation which announced to all in the city that the plays were to be performed. It dates to 1415, at which point the plays had already been around for some time, although their inception date is unknown.

– “The Register”. Housed at the British Library as MS Additional 35290, this is a particularly unique document dating between 1463 and 1477. It dates from the middle of the plays’ original lifespan. This isn’t a playing text in the sense that the community-theatre actors would have known; it was created by a city clerk as a compilation from the original scripts, against which he could “quality check” the plays as they were performed. The clerk left some notes in it that help flesh out details about performance, and it is from this record that we know the lines that make up our plays.

            *A facsimile copy of these documents has been printed, if you want to see what the originals look like.

– other York City records. Bureaucracy was alive and well in the Middle Ages! Among the preserved documents are some which show space rented for storing waggons that were used in the plays (called “pageants” at the time), payments made to musicians who were part of the accompanying parade, and other expenses for festivities that were held at the same time.

– Guild documents. Some of the surviving guild records list payments for play-related expenses, which offer up more details about how the plays may have looked, and where they were staged. The Merchant Adventurers’ guild, for example, has a particularly rich 15th century documentary history connected with the plays (in comparison to other guilds which also survive). These documents are scattered among libraries and archives. Their dates range from the 14th to the 17th centuries.

            * The best way to find the content of these documents is via the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volume on York. REED is an extraordinary project, aimed at compiling all records of medieval drama across the UK, and while it is not the kind of thing you sit down to read with a nice cup of coffee, it’s a window into both details of medieval drama and also medieval documentation that’s well worth a perusal. (There are also volumes on nearly all parts of the country, if you’re curious to see how York compares to other places.)

            And what of modern revivals? What are we leaving for the future? It might viscerally seem as though, with modern knowledge about  how much has been lost that could have given us knowledge of the medieval mystery plays, we would intentionally leave extensive documentation. There is a mystery play archive, at the National Centre for Early Music in York, but since, not unlike the situation with the guilds, productions have been somewhat decentralised, the bulk of things like scripts and notes are either housed with individual people or organisations (if they are retained at all!), and their long-term survival is not assured.

Of course, we also have a digital footprint, which at present seems reasonably extensive. How well digital data will survive as technology evolves can’t be guessed. But for the time being, there are several places where you can look through information about our twentieth and twenty-first century renditions of the Mystery Plays. These are the main sites you might find interesting:

York Mystery Plays (yorkmysteryplays.co.uk) – the digital home for the waggon plays as we are performing them.

York Mystery Plays: Illumination- From Shadow Into Light (yorkmysteryplays.org) – a fairly comprehensive website dedicated to various aspects of the twentieth and twenty-first century revivals, both fixed-place productions and on waggons.

York Mystery Plays Archive (ncem.co.uk) – the digital arm of the physical archive located at the NCEM in York.

York Mystery Plays Supporters Trust (ympst.co.uk) – an organisation created to support all mystery play productions, from individual seasonal production to waggon plays to the large-scale productions that have occurred since the millennium

The Soundscapes of the York Mystery Plays (soundscapesyorkmysteryplays.com) – a study looking at what the medieval plays might have sounded like.

All of these online spaces offer slightly different perspectives on what the modern mystery plays have been, and how they have evolved. Our modern history is less tied to the city in a legal sense than was the case in the Middle Ages, but the complexity and richness of the shows is certainly no less than theirs. Perhaps the most remarkable continuation is the association with the guilds, a unique phenomenon that has only revived with the move onto the waggons, but one which directly embeds the waggon plays in the wider York civic life. Hopefully, they’re still preserving their records and passing them down for future centuries of Mystery Play enthusiasts to pore over!

Another get together for York’s Theatre People – Saturday 12th November 1.00pm

Posted on by under Academic Curiosity, Casting Call, Drama, Musings, News, Production

Following the success of our impromptu get together for members of York’s Theatre community last month, we are running the event again – this time with a little more notice!

This is a chance for anyone involved or interested in theatre to chat and network with like-minded people and we are considering making it a regular occurrence.

Check out the event on Facebook – we hope to see you there!