Tag Archives: york mystery plays

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.

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.

Meet York’s Tanners’ Guild

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

Look around the place where you’re sitting. How much of what you can see is made of plastic? Although you obviously have many items that medieval people wouldn’t need- couldn’t have dreamed of- such as whatever device on which you’re reading this!- consider this: they didn’t have plastic. Their ubiquitous material of seemingly infinite shaping capabilities was leather. And to have leather, you needed people who could make it from animal hide. Enter the Tanners, the end product of whose work could be seen everywhere medieval people looked. Or walked: shoe were almost universally leather, and everyone would have needed them.

The Tanners were the guild in York who “brought forth the pageant” of “The Fall of the Rebel Angels” or, as it’s named this year, The War in Heaven. Theirs is a play of goodness competing with fire and brimstone, and in that, it is an apt choice for a guild that was necessary, successful, and prosperous, but achieved all of that through work which was (and still is) smelly, polluting, and downright unpleasant.

To get to know the tanners a little better, let’s talk about what they were doing, at least in a very general overview. To make leather, you start with a carcass- they worked specifically with cattle and oxen- removing their hide in large pieces, doing as little damage as possible. Hides would be salted, to help dry them out so that the bacteria that would normally cause them to rot wasn’t able to survive. Once a sort of hide-jerky had been achieved, they had to be soaked to remove all the salt itself. All the fats and clinging meaty bits had to be scraped off, then it had to be soaked in unpleasant things like alkaline lime or urine, to loosen up the hair, so it too could be scraped off. As if urine wasn’t enough, dung would be rubbed into the leather to help soften it up in a process called “bating”. 

The tanning itself gets its name from tannins, which you find in tea or red wine, but in this case came from tree bark, especially oak. From this came “barker” was another word for tanner; our play is alternatively credited to the “Tanners’ Guild” and the “Barkers Guild”, but it was the same craft. The tanners would make vats of a sort of bark tea, and the hides would put into each one, progressively, from weakest to strongest. Along the way, the brown colour we tend to associate with leather was achieved. (There were slightly different processes for other types of hide and leather, which would result in different colours like white or yellow.) All of this, by the way, took several months- a tanned hide was the result of the better part of a year’s labour, though of course more than one was being processed at a time. Once it came out of the final tanning vat, it would get stretched, rubbed with oils, and worked to keep it soft and smooth. And then it was ready to pass on to the next craft guild, the Curriers, for further work.

If all of this sounds fairly miserable, it probably was, and it required enormous amounts of water to achieve, so tanneries tended to be built along rivers, preferably downstream from town, so all of the unpleasant byproducts weren’t directly stinking up the town. Some cities had ordinances that kept the tanning process far away from the city centre. But in York, at least some parts of the process were surprisingly proximate to the city, albeit across the river: Barker Tower is right by Lendal Bridge, the curious little round building on the southwestern side, is named for them, and Tanner Row, the next street southeast parallel to Station Road, certainly indicates their neighbourhood. At the end of the fourteenth century, records suggest that almost all of York’s tanners were resident in the parish of All Saints North Street, which is just around the corner from Tanner Row. All of this is just opposite the Guildhall on the northeast riverbank, and well within the city walls. 

If they were geographically isolated, the Tanners occupied a curious place in York hierarchically. I’m sure you know that medieval craft guilds were- to oversimplify somewhat- a trade union-cum-fraternal organisation. The membership supported one another and passed trade knowledge through their own closed channels, but the guilds and the city government were also tied intimately together in mutually reinforcing ways. For the city, guilds were a way to help organise the city and maintain order by outsourcing some aspects of trade law and enforcement to the guilds; for the guilds, having their regulations recorded and enforced by the city council gave them the heft of law; and fines were split between the city and the guilds, to the benefit of both. Still, guilds weren’t all on the same footing, politically, socially, or financially. The Tanners were reasonably well off on the last count- leather was necessary, everywhere, and lucrative. But because their actual craft, the work and process, were so unpleasant, tanning was held in surprisingly low esteem for such important work. Tanners weren’t brought into the political elite of the city government; none of their members was ever elevated to city mayor.

What did this mean for the plays? After all, mystery plays weren’t just a fun extra for the craft guilds: they were mandated by the city, with hefty fines if a guild failed to do its part. Some monies that the city or guilds took in were apportioned specifically for use in making the plays happen. Scholars debate over whether the plays could be seen as a form of craft advertisement- the leather for devils’ and angels’ costumes and masks was certainly on display in The War in Heaven– or a more pure act of general civic pride and/or religious devotion. (I suspect these things aren’t mutually exclusive.) The plays may have been owned by the guilds, but that was by arrangement with and approval of the city council, who kept a close eye on whether they stuck to their scripts and performed appropriately. The Tanners got to lead the parade with the first play, arguably a visible and prominent position (albeit one that meant they may have had to be ready to perform as early as half four in the morning!). Their production set the tone for the day, and got to be seen before audiences’ attention spans were overly taxed. And their play is a bit of a departure from strict biblical chronology, so it could be said that they were given a bigger play than was absolutely necessary. That, of course, is entirely speculative, since we know nothing about the plays’ authorship or inception. But the point is that, even being passed over for involvement at the highest levels of government, the Tanners didn’t suffer in their prominence when it came to the mystery plays. The stink of their craft may have helped them create a more memorable and off-putting Hell… but as proof that good things came out of those vats of stench, they were able to show the city God, the angels, and a little bit of heaven as well.

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.

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!