Civic Biblical Drama in the Age of Reformation

CHAPTER 3 Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation In the present chapter I want to shift our attention from the parishes to the larger towns, where religious drama was organized not by church- wardens and parochial guilds but by the ruling elite and the urban guilds that operated under its authority. Although some drama-sponsoring town guilds were religious – one thinks of the York Paternoster Guild, for example – most were trade guilds. But trade guilds were not exclusively “secular” organizations; many had their own chaplains, worshiped together on major feast days, and indeed fostered a dynamic religious life for their members. The sacred drama they sponsored and performed was an extension of that religious life, even if other interests were at stake as well. Until fairly recently, these great civic spectacles were commonly referred to as “Corpus Christi Plays” and thought to be representative of “medieval drama” across England. It is now clear that while Corpus Christi was the favored feast day, some of the major cycles opted for (or switched to) Whitsun or other holy days in the summer season. They are of course “medieval” plays but the term is misleading as a general label since in towns such as Norwich and Chester the cycles developed, at least in the form in which we know them today, in the sixteenth century when they remained popular, adapting in some cases (notably at Coventry and Norwich) to Protestant teachings. As to the “cycles” being normative of provincial drama, the current consensus of critical opinion is that they were somewhat exceptional, especially cycles of the “creation-to-doomsday” variety, and that apart from the towns of Coventry and Norwich, they were mainly a northern phenomenon, thriving for a time in Chester, 1 York, Beverley, and Newcastle upon Tyne. Moreover, two of the four cycles surviving more or less complete in manuscript form, namely the 1 Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 138–68; The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Johnston, “Parish Playmaking before the Reformation.” 66 Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 67 N-Town and the Towneley, are now assumed to be compilations rather than unified cycles produced by specific towns, and while the other two featured a “creation-to-doomsday” series of pageants, cycles in some major 2 urban centers concentrated chiefly on the New Testament. In this chapter I also want to focus at greater length on what all scholars agree to have had a profound impact on provincial drama in general and the cycle plays in particular: the Reformation. The role of Protestantism in the great urban cycles during a period when they continued to be popular has generated considerable discussion of late. Notably, scholars of diverse backgrounds’ such as Lawrence Clopper, Robert Tittler, and Muriel McClendon, have opened up new ways of seeing how traditional religious ceremonial and drama did not in many urban centers collapse 3 under Protestantism but found ways to adapt and reinvent themselves. Moreover, they, along with others, notably Tessa Watt and Ronald Hutton, have compelled us to question the confrontational models of viewing Protestant intervention in traditional religious culture, models deployed by both early urban historians and more recently by revisions of the English Reformation. As Watts has shown, the sources most immediately accessible to historians – city council minutes, church court records, polemical treatises – tend to highlight points of confrontation between Protestantism and the existing religious culture, and yet areas of cultural practice characterized by consensus, accommodation, resolution of conflict, or simple contradiction (where, for example, traditional Catholic and emerging Protestant patterns of belief and practice coexist 4 uneasily side by side) are often ignored. In terms of the cycle plays, I would argue that the subject matter of the plays – the stories of the Bible – was one of those points of consensus. In discussing the various ways Protestantism engaged with the great town cycles, particular attention will be given to Coventry, Norwich and Chester. The Coventry weaver and player, John Careless, illustrates that a penchant for acting was not incompatible with a Protestant martyr’s sensibility, which in turn raises questions about other reformers’ attitudes towards the biblical civic drama and the extent it could be compatible with fervent Protestantism. However, only two plays survive from Coventry’s 2 See Palmer, “Recycling ‘The Wakefield Cycle,’” 88–130. 3 Clopper, Drama, Play and Game, 286–93; Robert Tittler, “Reformation, Resources and Authority in English Towns: An Overview,” in The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640, ed. Patrick Collinson and John Craig (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 305–34; and Muriel C. McClendon, The Quiet Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 88–110, 121–29. 4 See Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 325; Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England. 68 Drama and religion in English provincial society ten-pageant cycle (none at Shrewsbury), and they appear to be dated, in their present form, very early in the Reformation, during the 1530s. To observe how a medieval “mystery” pageant was transformed into a fully Protestantized civic drama, we must turn to Norwich. There, the Norwich Grocers’ “play of paradise” is the only extant cycle pageant for which we have a pre-Reformation version and a completely revised post-Reformation version; it therefore offers a concrete example of how pageant plays might have been revised at Coventry and other communities as well. Whether it actually occurred to any significant extent at Chester is the question that will occupy the latter part of the chapter. THE COVENTRY CYCLE REFORMED The role Protestants played in the mystery play cycles in mid-sixteenth- century England continues to be debated. That role, as defined in highly influential studies from Harold Gardiner’s mid-century book Mysteries’ End to Eamon Duffy’s more recent The Stripping of the Altars and James Simpsons’ Reform and Revolution, is one of distrust, hostility, and 5 suppression. In some respects, Gardiner was way ahead of his time. He anticipated (along with a few other Catholic historians) the recent revisionist view of the English Reformation that Catholic religion remained vital and popular well into Elizabeth’s reign and conversely that England’s Protestantization was slow and imposed mainly from above. Upon these premises, he argued that the mystery cycles were not part of a moribund provincial culture victimized by Renaissance secularism and Protestant popularism in sixteenth-century England (the critical consensus of his own day) but continued to receive considerable support in many communities through the first half of Elizabeth’s reign. On this latter matter, Gardiner is clearly correct, but his basic thesis about their history under the Refor- mation is no longer sustainable. That thesis is that since the great cycles were irreducibly Catholic and therefore defiantly resistant to Protestant adaptation, the reformed governments of Edward VI and Elizabeth I had no choice but to engage in a policy of suppression, and one that was both systematic and national in scale due to the cycle plays’ enduring popularity in many parts of the realm. Recently, however, early modern scholars have shown just how capricious, sporadic, and selective Tudor authorities were 5 Harold Gardiner, Mysteries’ End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946); Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 579–83. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 69 6 in regulating the stage, especially outside of London. No one is foolish enough to discount that state Protestantism at times acted to censor the plays, especially the cycle plays in the North in the wake of the Northern Rebellion and Queen Elizabeth’s Excommunication in 1569 and 1570 respectively. Combine these troubling developments with the distaste for popular, traditional revels shown by Archbishop Grindal and Dean Hutton, and one understands the repressive measures undertaken by Protestant authorities against civic drama at York, Chester, and Wakefield, especially 7 in 1569 and the tense period immediately following. But there simply was no central policy to crush the religious drama. As Ronald Hutton asserts, “the leaders of Church and state did not themselves subscribe to 8 the campaign against” traditional plays and pastimes. In Coventry, a city of between 6,000 and 7,000 people in the early sixteenth century, there are compelling indications that efforts were made to revise the civic biblical cycle along Protestant lines very early, possibly 9 in the 1530s. Coventry had a long-established reputation for religious fervor and dissent, and no doubt its early reception of Protestantism was partly due to the strong Lollard following in the city dating back to the 10 mid fifteenth century. The Lollards here included some of the city’s ruling oligarchies, and they evidently did not all share the sentiments expressed in A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, for as Clifford Davidson points out, the only local person on record whose will includes a bequest to the civic pageants is William Pysford, member of a leading Lollard family 11 and one-time mayor of Coventry (in 1501). Protestant control of the city council can be dated at least from Edward VI’s reign, and it continued 6 Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991); Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1984). 7 For the demise of the cycle plays at York, see Alexandra F. Johnston, “The City as Patron: York,” in Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Whitfield White and Suzanne R. Westfall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 150–75. 8 Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, 152. See also Bing D. Bills, “The ‘Suppression Theory’ and the English Corpus Christi Play,” Theatre Journal 32.2 (May 1980): 157–67.

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