Richard Carew. The Ordinary, The Ordinalia, and the Ordinary Actor ...

Carew's Ordinary 46
44 E. K. Chambers took miraculum to be “a mere convenient shorthand for repraesentatio
miraculi, and ‘came, especially in England, to stand for ‘religious play’ in general.” He therefore
specifically includes all of the religious pageant sequences in this category (e.g. York, Chester,
Townley, Ludus Coventriae, Coventry, Newcastle, Norwich) as well as well as vernacular
biblical plays (e.g., the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Mary Magdalen, the Brome Abraham
and Isaac, The Conversion of St Paul) and the Cornish Plays. Chambers, Medieval Stage, II, 104,
407-436. This definition profoundly influenced such later scholars as Glynne Wickham, who
titles his chapter on vernacular religious plays, “Miracle Plays” and refers to the religious
pageant sequences as “Miracle Cycles.” Early English Stages 1300 to 1660. Volume One 1300 to
1576 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), pp. 112-76. The use of the term “Miracle
Play” in this inclusive way relies heavily upon the Wycliffite Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge and a
very few other mainly 15 th century texts. Clifford Davidson observes that “if there were a
‘precise’ meaning of the term ‘miraclis,’ however, it was not used in the Tretise in any exact way
but instead seems to have been intended as a broad category that would link the word “miraclis”
with a spectrum of dramatic activity ranging from the staging of religious scenes to
representations on feast days and seasons such as Christmas.” He points out, however, that “at no
point in the treatise are the great civic Corpus Christi cycles mentioned” even though “such
dramatic spectacles were already in existence by the late fourteenth century.” A Tretise of
Miraclis Pleyinge, edited by Clifford Davidson, Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series,
19 (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), p. 2. In addition, “clerk plays”
were called miracula. These were “written, directed, and probably performed by members of the
minor clergy, possibly in the churchyard, market-place, or outside the city walls rather than in
the church.” These are almost certainly one of the targets of the Tretise. Lawrence M. Clopper,
indeed, would limit the Tretise’s attack principally to such miracula, which he construes as
“clerical parodies and irrisiones” that largely consisted of “tricks intended to delight and amuse
people and that, in many case, led people to devalue the truth of God’s miracles.” Such miracula,
he thinks, died out in the 1530s about the time of the suppression of the monasteries. Clopper
provides a helpful appendix listing all the references he can find to “Miracula, Miracles, and
Steracles in Medieval and Early Modern England” Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and
Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 106, 295-98. The appendix makes clear Carew’s
glaringly singular use of the term, “Miracle Play.” Only in Manning’s Handlynge Synne (“swych
pleys . . . as myracles and bourdys,” c. 1300), the Tretis of Miracles Pleyinge, and the Wife of
Bath’s reference to “plays of myracles” (Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, D 555-58) do we find
terminology that even distantly approximates Carew. One might thus say that Crew unwittingly
invented the Miracle Play “genre.” This singularity is further illustrated in the OED, where Crew
is listed as the first use of the term “Miracle Play.” Thereafter, the next reference to “theatrical
pieces called ‘Miracles’” occurs in 1798 (Miracle Play and Miracle, sb. 2. b), and it then is
widely taken up by nineteenth-century historians.
45 Joyce and Newlyn point out that “An existing place name in Sancreed, ‘Plain Gwarry,’ further
attests the presence in early times of a plain-an-gwary at that location.” REED Dorset Cornwall,