THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

(consisting of 48 plays), Chester (24 plays), Wakefield (32 plays), and for an unknown Midlands town (42 plays).
There are also surviving fragments from Coventry (plays once celebrated throughout England), Norwich,
Northampton, and Newcastle as well as cycles in the Cornish language of the mineral-rich far south-west of the
island. In some instances particular guilds would perform a play appropriate to their trade or mystery. At Chester, for
example, the scene of Noah’s flood was presented by the ‘Water-leaders and Drawers in Dee’ (that is, those who
supplied the city with water drawn from the river Dee); the Crucifixion was re-enacted by the Ironmongers (men who
sold nails) and, somewhat less appositely, the Harrowing of Hell was performed through the good offices of the Cooks
and Innkeepers (men certainly used to the virtues of a good fire). At York the Fishers and Mariners presented the
story of Noah, the Pinners and Painters the Crucifixion, and the Bakers the Last Supper. Although the majority of the
actors were amateurs it would seem that they were supported both by fine stage effects (the records of the Coventry
Drapers Company list a ‘Hell-mouth’, a barrel designed to produce the sound of an earthquake, and ‘a link to set the
world on fire’) and by seasoned performers (the clerk, Absolon, in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale delights to ‘shewe his
lightnesse and maistrye’ in playing Herod ‘upon a scaffold hye’).
The surviving cycles suggest that the major centres of performance were cities in the North and the Midlands of
England where the trade guilds could proudly demonstrate their independence from the jurisdiction of the Church.
Though no ‘original’ survives, there is evidence that certain plays directly parallel others in shape, language, and
style. Six plays from the so-called
[p. 75]
Towneley cycle (probably performed at Wakefield) closely resemble their York equivalents. The work of the
anonymous fifteenth-century writer known as ‘the Wakefield Master’, to whom are ascribed the two Shepherds’ plays
which accompany the representation of the Nativity, is particularly remarkable for its extensive use of a distinctive
Yorkshire dialect and local reference. The two Shepherds’ plays, written perhaps for performance in alternate years or
for different guilds, reveal a close understanding of the hardships endured by northern shepherds whose labour
sustained the local wool-trade. The two plays also suggest a greater awareness of the realities of rural life than does
the more emphatically urban York cycle. The shepherds complain frankly of the cold weather and of oppressive
landlords in what at first seems to be a harshly comic farce. With the appearance of the angel, however, their
coarseness is transformed into an instructive humility before the miracle of the birth that they have been privileged to
witness. It is as if the old covenant of wrath melts away with the establishment of the new covenant of love. The
Wakefield Master was no mere secular proto-realist; he had a mind carefully attuned by theology and symbolism (as
his use of a stolen sheep swaddled in a cradle as a witty parallel to the birth of the Lamb of God serves to suggest).
The comedy which relieves the agonies of human and divine history in the other cycles also suggests a devout
intermixture of game and earnest rooted in popular story-telling and performance. King Herod’s rampaging almost
topples over into the pantomimic (‘I wot not where I may sit for anger and for teen [rage]’) and the truculence of
Noah’s wife, when she refuses to go into the ark, threatens the future of the entire human race. In the Chester play she
is finally forced aboard by her sons, while in the Wakefield version she has to wait for the flood to touch her toes
(‘Yei, water nyghes so nere that I sit not dry’) before she grudgingly assents to be saved.
In none of the cycles is comedy or individual characterization allowed to detract from the central theme of the
unity of human history and its perceived pattern of salvation. Characters from the Old Testament are seen as
archetypes of the suffering, triumphant Christ while God’s hand is seen prompting patriarchs and prophets to help
realize the pre-ordained scheme of redemption. Far more so than the stained-glass windows of the great medieval
churches (many of which were barely decipherable to the myopic or the uninformed), these plays were genuinely the
‘books of the illiterate’. Like the graphic doom-paintings which featured so prominently in many parish churches
during the period, they also brought home to the faithful the mighty workings of God and the fearfulness of falling
unprepared into his hands. The urgency of the call to repentance, and the necessary response to divine mercy in the
face of the advances of death, are also evident in the ‘morality’ plays which have survived from the fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries. These moralities seem, for the most part, to have been tailored to suit the needs of groups of
travelling actors who were prepared to perform in the more intimate and contained spaces of inn-yards and halls.
Everyman (c. 1495), which derives
[p. 76]
from a Flemish original, shows a representative figure of the human race summoned unexpectedly by death (‘O Deth,
thou comest whan I had the leest in mynde’) and made acutely aware that his erstwhile friends, Fellowship, Kindred,
Cousin, and Goods, will not go with him. It is Good Deeds who finally supports him and who offers to justify him
before the throne of God. The East Anglian play Mankind (written c. 1465), which opens with a sermon delivered by
Mercy, shows its title character, an ostensibly upright countryman who is prepared to defend himself with his spade,