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. 9 A census taken in 1520 produced a specific figure of 6,601. See Mary Dormer Harris, The Coventry Leet Book (Newyork: Oxford University Press, 1907), 674–75; Ingram, REED: Coventry, lxi. 10 More than forty-five Lollards admitted heresy when tried by Bishop Blythe in 1511–12, and seven were burned in 1519 “because they had the lordes praier, ye Creed, & ye tenn Commandementesin English.” See Imogen Luxton, “The Reformation and Popular Culture,” in Church and Society in England: Henry VIII to James I, ed. Felicity Heal and Rosemary O’Day (London: Macmillan, 1977) 67–68; the quote is taken from Lawrence M. Clopper, ed., REED: Chester (University of Toronto Press, 1979), 576. 11 Clifford Davidson, “‘The Devil’s Guts’: Allegations of Superstition and Fraud in Drama and Art during the Reformation,” in Iconoclasm Vs. Art and Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson and Ann Eljenholm Nichols (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1989), 92–144; Ingram, REED: Coventry, 112–13, 576. 70 Drama and religion in English provincial society well into the reign of his older sister. The mayor and council were sufficiently defiant of Catholicism under Mary that when the Bishop at Lichfield ordered them to apprehend religious suspects for questioning, they warned them to flee instead. Not surprisingly, the Privy Council 12 intervened to force a Catholic mayor into office in early 1556, yet by this point the city already had ‘great numbers zealous for evangelical truth,” 13 as one contemporary reported. Given the extent to which Protestantism was received within the civic leadership and among large segments of the citizenry, and given the control exercised by the city council over the town’s annual religious pageants, can one seriously doubt that those pageants were enthusiastically supported by Coventry Protestants? I believe this to have been the case. The most extraordinary indication of the alliance between Protestant- ism and theater in Coventry is provided by the story of John Careless. In his “Book of Martyrs,” John Foxe tells how this local weaver was jailed in his home town during Queen Mary’s reign but, remarkably, he was there in such credite with his keeper, yat vpon his worde he was let out to play in the Pageant about the city with othere his companions. And that done, keeping touch with his keeper, he returned agayne into prison at his houre appointed. And after that being broughte vp to London he was indued with such patience and constaunt fortitude, that he longed for nothing more earnestly, then to come to yat promotion to dye in the fyer for the profession of his faith: & yet it so pleased the Lorde to preuent him with death that he came not to it, but 14 dyed in prison, and after was buryed in the fieldes in a dounghill. According to an order of the Privy Council dated November 20, 1553, a weaver named John Careless was jailed in Coventry along with three other guildsmen on All Saints Day, November 1, 1553. They were charged with “lewd and seditious behavior,” which probably means they engaged in a public act, perhaps a play performance, against the recently restored 15 Roman Catholic religion. The dramatic records of Coventry leave no trace of Careless, although his guild, the Weavers, were among the most

12 See Acts of the Privy Council of England, 6 vols. (H. M. Stationory Office: London, 1892), V, 218. The other conflicts here are discussed in Reginald W. Ingram, “Fifteen Seventy-Nine and the Decline of Civic Religious Drama in Coventry,” in Elizabethan Theatre VIII, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Port Credit, ON: D. Neany, 1982) 117–18. 13 See Hastings Robinson, The Zurich Letters, ed. Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1842), 86–87. 14 John Foxe, The Seconde Volume of the Ecclesiastical Historie, conteining the Acts and Monuments of Martyrs (London; John Day, 1583), 1920–21. 15 See Acts of the Privy Council, 368. I discuss the Careless case at greater length in “Reforming Mysteries’ End,” 121–47. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 71 active participants in the town’s famous mystery play cycle; indeed, the Weaver’s nativity pageant is one of only two plays surviving from the Coventry cycle. Under Queen Elizabeth, John Careless became something of a Protestant folk hero. Foxe no doubt was partly responsible for this; but the weaver’s name appeared in the title of one of the period’s most popular and eloquently penned broadside ballads. Believed to be the martyr’s own words, “the godly Ballet of John Carelesse” recounts the experience of a sinner saved by grace and, according to Thomas Nashe, was popularly sung to the tune of Greensleeves. It was sufficiently well known for its opening lines (“Some men for sodayne joye do wepe, and some inn sorrowe synge”) to find their way into Shakespeare’s King Lear 16 and Thomas Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece. Stage-player and popular balladeer, Careless does not quite fit our stereotypical image of an early Protestant martyr. Here is a man who combined a deeply felt Protestant piety, indeed a martyr’s otherworldly sensibility, with an evident commitment to playing, and interestingly enough this theatrical bent is prominently featured in Careless’s extant writings: the animated account of his examination by the Marian authorities on April 25, 1556, and his twenty-odd prison letters with their extended self-dramatizations, vivid scenic descriptions, and repeated 17 allusions to song and dance. Careless’s represented experience in the examination and letters offers a unique glimpse of Protestant interiority, one that reveals a complex sense of the theatrical and accommodates 18 recreational playing to the lived experience of God’s elect. No less striking about Foxe’s account of Careless, of course, is its reference to the pageant performance at Coventry. We are told that when Careless was temporarily freed from the local prison, he performed in “the pageant about the city with othere his companions,” which, we may confidently assume along with Reginald Ingram, the editor of Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, refers to the town’s famous biblical play

16 The ballad was first printed by Miles Coverdale in Certain most godly, fruitful, and comfortable letters (London; John Day. 1564), 634–38. For Nashe, see R. B. McKerrow and F. Wilson, eds., The Works of Thomas Nashe, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), III, 104. I am indebted to Watt, Cheap Print, 95, for these references. For Careless as Protestant hero, see Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England, 102 and 111. 17 The examination and letters are most accessible in volume 8 of the reprinted edition of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of Martyrs, ed. George Townsend (1843–49; reprinted New York: AMS, 1965), VIII, 163–201. 18 For a more detailed account of Careless and Protestant interiority, see my “Reforming Mysteries’ End.” 72 Drama and religion in English provincial society 19 cycle staged during the week-long “Great Fair” of Corpus Christi. It is not clear whether anything other than personal charm led to Careless’s release (“he was there in such credite with his keeper,” Foxe tells us), but, as we shall see shortly, early Protestants were very active in the theater, and thus Careless’s release may have been due to his prominent part in the mystery play performances, perhaps in the pageant of his own guild, 20 the Weaver’s, the text of which survives. Particularly noteworthy is that Foxe relates the incident in such a matter-of-fact way that he does not appear to see any incongruity in a man he memorializes as a Protestant saint acting apparently in a play cycle which commentary, from the seventeenth century onward, has associated with medieval Catholicism. Foxe, himself, was a dramatist – one of his plays, Christus Triumphans, was staged at Cambridge in 1562 – and he once equated players with preachers in advancing the Protestant cause, so it is not as if he was 21 unfamiliar with the popular drama of his day. With respect to the Coventry biblical plays, themselves, although we cannot rule out Old Testaments subject matter entirely, the cycle of ten plays staged on pageant wagons in the streets of Coventry appears to have centered on the life of Christ; that such cycles existed we know from 22 Bale’s lost “mystery cycle” of nine plays. At what point religious changes within the cycle began to take place is a complicated question, since most of the pageants are lost. They may not have begun before 1539 when Mayor William Cotton, in a letter to Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, complained of the high expenditure the city must absorb for various civic activities, including the annual cycle: “at Corpus christi tide/ the poore Comeners be at suche charges with ther playes & pagyontes 23 that thei fare the worse all the yeire after.” Cotton’s condemnation of excessive drinking at feasts and the need for “reformacion” of such events

19 See Ingram, REED: Coventry, xix. 20 The other surviving play is the Shearmen and Taylors’ pageant. Both are printed in Hardin Craig, ed. Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, 2nd edn. EETS (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). I return to them later in the discussion. 21 See White, Theatre and Reformation, 2, 75, 106. 22 Margaret Rogerson has argued that the Coventry cycle is an English Creed play, such as the one that was staged intermittently at York. See her “The Coventry Corpus Christi Play, RORD 36 (1997): 143–77. 23 Ingram, REED: Coventry, 149. The economic woes of Tudor Coventry are discussed in Charles Pythian-Adams, Desolation of a City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); their relationship to pageantry is clarified further in “Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry, 1450–1550,” in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700, ed. Peter Clark and Paul Slack (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972): 57–86. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 73 may suggest his disapproval of civic pastimes, yet the letter is chiefly an appeal for Crown funding to help relieve Coventry’s notorious economic woes; its target is excess, not the various pastimes themselves. However, according to Pamela King, reformist elements are discernible at Coventry as early as 1534/35 when the pageants staged by the Shearmen and Taylors and by the Weavers (the same guild to which John Careless belonged) were “newly translate[d]” by the local playwright Robert Croo. King believes that the expository passages by the Prophets which Croo evidently wrote to link episodes in the two plays and to provide an interpretive frame for the action “suggest a preoccupation with Lutheran or Zwinglian ideas, far from the confident sacramentalism which pervades 24 the plays in the York Register.” Certainly the prophets’ concern with the nature of the Incarnation (especially the problem of Christ’s divinity versus his humanity) and the relationship between faith and reason reflect revived interest in, and controversy over, these theological issues in the 25 early years of the Reformation. Nevertheless, if Croo was an early advocate of religious reform, he left both extant Coventry plays remarkably free of controversy. The frequent references in the York, Towneley, and N-Town nativity scenes to Mary’s elevated status as “Godys spouse” and “queen of heaven” are conspicuously absent in these plays where, at least in Croo’s added commentary, the focus is centered on Christ’s atonement for the sins of humanity. Perhaps steering clear of highly controversial issues concerning doctrine and worship was intentional; striving after consensus among religious conservatives and advocates of reform may help to explain the Coventry cycle’s longevity well into Elizabeth’s reign. During the period of 1530 to 1575, Coventry’s play-producing guilds continuously revised and rewrote their pageants: the Cappers alone revised their play at least four times during this period, and this does not appear to be untypical. Reginald Ingram suggests that the turbulent religious scene in Reformation Coventry likely accounts for the revisions, and this almost certainly is the case in 1561 when in addition to two new characters named “wormes of Conscyence,” the Drapers paid 8d for “playing

24 Pamela King, “The York and Coventry Mystery Cycles,” REED Newsletter, 22 (1997): 25. See also her “Faith, Reason and the Prophets’ dialogue in the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors,” Drama and Philosophy, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press): 37–46. 25 Both these issues, for example, are given lengthy polemical discussion in Calvin’s Institutes (first edition 1535). See Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), II.ii.18–21 (on limitations of human reason); I.xiii.1–4; II.xiii.1–4 (on the Incarnation). 74 Drama and religion in English provincial society of the protestacyon,” which appears to have been a piece attacking popish 26 practices. It seems to me highly likely that the four pageants the Queen witnessed during her visit to Coventry in 1567 would have supported the Elizabethan Settlement of religion. Professor Gardiner finds that given the Protestantism of the Queen and her entourage, it is impossible that any of the traditional mystery plays would have been performed before Elizabeth and her predominantly Protestant court, but this is assuming 27 that such plays were Catholic. By the mid-1560s, the letter commonly ascribed to Robert Laneham seeking royal patronage for the Hock Tuesday Play indicates that certain Coventry preachers were hostile to the drama, and by this point no doubt the town experienced the same sorts of conflict over traditional recreations evident elsewhere in the realm, but it does not mean, as is routinely assumed, that such voices were representative of all serious reformed opinion about the propriety of stage-playing. It is noteworthy that while the Hock Tuesday Play drew the wrath of “certain godly preachers” and may have been cancelled as early as 1561 (though revived for the Queen’s visit in 1566 and again in the 1570s), the civic religious drama continued virtually uninterrupted through to 1579, and despite the city’s advanced 28 Protestantism, there is no surviving evidence of opposition to it. To an earlier generation of scholars the coexistence in mid-Tudor Coventry of a flourishing annual “Corpus Christi” cycle, on the one hand, and a developing reputation for zealous Protestant reform, on the 29 other, must have seemed baffling. What has not been hitherto observed, however, and may indicate positive clerical engagement with (and therefore not mere toleration of ) the pageant plays, is that Coventry’s leading religious authority and champion of puritan reform during the 1560s and early 1570s was himself an experienced actor and organizer of plays. I am referring here to the “town preacher” and Archdeacon of Coventry, Thomas Lever, who had served as preacher to Edward VI and

26 R.W. Ingram, “‘To Find the Players and All That Longeth Therto’: Notes on the Production of Medieval Drama in Coventry,” in Elizabethan Theatre V, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1975), 33; Ingram, REED: Coventry, 217. See also Thomas Sharpe, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries anciently performed at Coventry (Coventry, 1825; rpt. Totawa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), 72. 27 See Gardiner, Mysteries End, 84. 28 See Reginald. W. Ingram, “Fifteen Seventy-Nine and Decline of Civic Religious Drama in Conventry.” In Elizabethan Theatre VIII, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Port Credit, ON: D. Neany, 1982), 120–21. 29 See, for example, J. Tom Burgess, Historic Warwickshire. 2nd edn., ed. and rev. Josh Hill (Birmingham: Midland Educational, 1893), 79. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 75 Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, before going into exile during Queen Mary’s reign. On his return to England he apparently lost the opportunity to become a bishop because of his opposition to vestments and accepted the Archdeaconry of Coventry, along with the ministerial appointment at St. John’s, Bablake, at the request of Thomas Bentham, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, himself a zealous reformer. While a fellow at St. John’s in 1547/48, Lever was appointed the Lord of Christmas, a considerable undertaking that involved writing and performing “at least six dialogues, or festive or literary spectacles, on as many of the nights of the Twelve Days” of Christmas, for which he was funded 20s, and overseeing the “rest of the comedies and tragedies which are put on between Epiphany and Lent” within the college. During his time in office, Lever was in charge of the hundred-plus costumes and props stored in three great chests at St. John’s, a Christmas season that cost the college in excess of £4 for expenses. The costume inventory includes numerous church vestments and objects, lending further evidence of the staging of anti-Catholic plays at Cambridge. Given this knowledge, and the commitment to Protestant stage playing already established at Cambridge and boosted by the pro-drama views of Martin Bucer while Lever served there, it is entirely plausible that Lever contributed to the biblical plays 30 staged at Coventry in the 1560s and 1570s. Why the cycle plays were “laid down” for the last time in 1579, and large-scale civic drama revived again only in 1584 and possibly 1591, is not made clear in the surviving records, which are unfortunately silent on the issue. When four of the leading play-producing guilds, the Smiths, the Mercers, the Shearmen and Taylors, and the Weavers, sold their pageant wagons between 1586 and 1590, they were liquidating the material resources that had made pageant play entertainment possible for the past 200 years. Did this signify a new attitude within these guilds that the plays were no longer worth the enormous financial burden they carried in a city long plagued by economic problems? Were they responding to pressures from Protestant anti-theatricalists in a decade when such voices almost brought down the stage in London? Some light is cast on these questions by the records of 1591, when “the Comons of this Cittie” made a final request to revive the civic pageants. In May of that year the Council agreed “that

30 For Lever’s biography, see DNB for his drama-related activities at Cambridge, see Alan H. Nelson, ed., REED: Cambridge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), I 159–60,II1208. For the advocacy of a reformed religious drama for popular consumption in England by Martin Bucer, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1550, see White, Theatre and Reformation, 101–102. 76 Drama and religion in English provincial society the distrucion of Jerusalem the Conquest of the Danes or the historie of K[ing] E[dward] the 4 at the request of the Comons of this Cittie shalbe plaid on the pagens on Midsomer daye & St peters daye next in this 31 Cittie & non other playes.” The conspicuous exclusion of the biblical cycle as an option here is only one indication of changing attitudes within the city council, and perhaps within the guilds themselves who at this point were not so willing or able to finance plays on a grand scale. As Ingram remarks, “the guild payments recorded are only half to one-third of 32 what was usually spent in the olden days.” If a lack of willingness on the part of the guilds to finance the civic religious drama sealed their demise, it should be noted nevertheless that Coventry’s magistracy continued to host professional acting troupes right through to the English Civil War. In other words, it was not antipathy towards drama, per se, that brought an end to the religious stage in Coventry. On the opposite, northwestern side of the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield from Coventry was the Welsh border town of Shrewsbury, which offers another Midlands example of the Protestant adaptation of civic religious drama. Thomas Lever enters the picture again here, since he was instrumental in reviving Protestantism in the town during Elizabeth’s reign. Disturbed by the lack of preaching and persisting practice of popery in north Shropshire, Bishop Bentham asked the Coventry archdeacon to journey to Shrewsbury to preach in the town in August 1560; one month later Lever accompanied the bishop there, and he apparently delivered a second sermon, on the invitation of the bailiffs. It is no mere coincidence that within six months of Lever’s visits to Shrewsbury his old colleague at St. John’s College Cambridge, Thomas Ashton, had been appointed preacher and the local schoolmaster. The two men had been together at St. John’s. Ashton had served as fellow and bursar at the college for several years by the time Lever matriculated there in the later 1530s and became a fellow in the early 1540s. This was the “golden age” of St. John’s when the likes of John Cheke and Roger Ascham were at the forefront of developing a Protestant Humanist curriculum which included the staging of Greek and Latin plays. And indeed, St. John’s highly esteemed dramatic tradition may have influenced the town bailiff ’s choice of Ashton, given their own interests in maintaining the very popular civic 33 drama which, as at Coventry, extended back into the fifteenth century.

31 32 Ingram, REED: Coventry, 332. Ingram, “Fifteen seventy-nine,” 122. 33 For more on drama at Shrewsbury, see White, “Reforming Mysteries End,” 122–47. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 77

THE GROCERS’ PLAY AND THE NORWICH CYCLE REFORMED In Norwich, as in Coventry, both religious and trade guilds played a central role in civic affairs. Coventry’s mayor was always elected from the membership of the town’s powerful Corpus Christi Guild, whereas in Norwich, the St. George Guild, granted a unique charter by Henry VI, became indistinguishable from the town’s ruling elite from the mid fifteenth century onward. One major difference between the two urban communities was size: Norwich was second only to London in population with an estimated 8,500 inhabitants in the early sixteenth century and 34 11,000 by its end. Both, of course, were cathedral cities, but whereas Coventry’s magistracy exercised full authority over its Corpus Christi cycle, the church was a major, if not controlling sponsor, of Norwich’s great Whitsun entertainments through the early sixteenth century. This is because the Pentecost Fair, the occasion of the cycle plays, was founded and operated by the cathedral priory until 1524, the year the mayor and city council took it over. Up to that time, the priory had arranged for the St. Luke’s Guild to provide Norwich’s annual theatrical performances, the same conglomerate of painters, glaziers, and other craftsmen entrusted with completing the magnificent stone roof bosses adorning the vaulted 35 ceilings of Norwich Cathedral in the late fifteenth century. In 1527, however, shortly after the Pentecost Fair came under town leadership, the St. Luke’s Guild petitioned the city council on financial grounds to take over the pageants as well, arguing that since the city government and trades reaped the financial benefits of the large throngs of crowds who came to the fair to watch the festivities, the pageants and plays should be produced by all of the major trade guilds in the town. The request was granted and, in that year, the Whitsun festivities were completely reorganized under the full control of Norwich’s civic government. According to a list of pageants and their sponsored companies in Norwich’s “Old Free Book” (a volume of civic records) dated about 1530, the city authorized twelve pageants on subjects ranging from Creation to Pentecost to be staged by some sixty civic companies, several of them teaming up to save production costs. Whether the trades were simply taking over an existing biblical cycle or starting afresh is unclear, for all we

34 John Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich (Chichester, Sussex: Phillimore, 1977), 28–29. 35 I am indebted here to Joanna Dutka’s two fine articles on the Norwich cycle: “Mystery Plays at Norwich,” LSE, 10 (1978): 107–20; “The Lost Dramatic Cycle of Norwich and the Grocers’ Play of the Fall of Man,” RES, New Series, 35, No. 137 (Feb. 1984), 1–13. See also Norman Davis, ed. Non- Cycle Plays and Fragments, EETS, SS 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), xxii–xl. 78 Drama and religion in English provincial society know about the pre-1526 entertainments of the St. Luke’s Guild is that that they featured pageants and disguisings on the lives of the saints “and 36 many other light and feigned figures.” It is inconceivable to me that the companies simply took over the existing pageants without imposing their own stamp on them, and this seems confirmed by the only extant drama surviving from the Norwich cycle, the Grocers’ “play of paradise.” As Joanna Dutka points out, the list’s omitting both a Last Judgement play and a separate pageant featuring the crucifixion undermines “the principle of the ‘cycle’ from Creation to Doomsday” and indicates that this is a “Whitsun” rather than a “Corpus Christi” cycle of plays. Moreover, she points to a 1541 record that suggests that Norwich did not stage all twelve pageants together but rather selected as few as four plays for its 37 Whitsun festival. Despite the important work undertaken by Dutka two decades ago, there has been no recent analysis of the Norwich biblical cycle during 38 the critical years of its existence between 1530 and 1565. The best study of the town’s civic ceremonial during the Reformation era has been 39 done by Muriel McClendon. She has very recently demonstrated the important role which the festivities sponsored by the Guild of St. George and other civic ceremonial played in negotiating social, political and religious change in Norwich during the early Reformation years. Moreover, McClendon has firmly established the extent to which Protestantism infiltrated the city government from the 1530s and how it came to control civic and religious policy following the accession of Elizabeth I, observing, with respect to the magistracy, “it does seem that the religious composition of the aldermen had changed in the course of two years to become heavily Protestant, with but two identifiable Catholics and at least twenty 40 probable Protestants.” Puritanism began inroads as early as 1561 when

36 Larry Clopper has even suggested that the biblical cycle existed in Norwich only after the City took over the Pentecost Fair from the Priory in the 1520s(Drama, Play and Game, 157). Some sort of civic drama must have existed. The Paston letters refer to a “corpus Chrysti play” in 1478. Alan H. Nelson cites the latter as evidence that the Norwich cycle celebrated Corpus Christi and that it continued to take place in connection with this feast through the early sixteenth century, a view not widely embraced. See his illuminating discussion in Nelson, The Medieval English Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 119–37. 37 Dutka, “The Lost Dramatic Cycle,” 3–4. 38 REED: Norwich (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), edited by David Galloway, begins its coverage at 1540. It records accounts relevant to the Grocers’ pageant after that date, although relevant passages from the Kirkpatrick papers are included in Appendix 4. One awaits volume II of the REED collection on Norwich, which presumably will include an introduction to the pre-1540 records and the biblical cycle. 39 40 McClendon, Quiet Reformation, 88–110. McClendon, Quiet Reformation, 198–99. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 79 the city magistrates hired a future nonconformist to preach before the corporation, and by 1564 “prophesyings” like those earlier noted in Chelmsford were organized. The St. George Guild had not gone unaffected by reformed sentiment. More than a decade earlier when Edward VI’s regime had dissolved all religious fraternities as part of the Chantries Act, the “Fraternity and Guild of St. George” survived but would be from that time onward (save during the Marian restoration) known as the “company and citizens” of St. George. As happened to so many religious fraterni- ties at that time, the guild’s expensive ornaments were sold off and its festivities brought under scrutiny. By Elizabeth’s accession, the pageantry and feasting continued but had been rescheduled from the saint’s feast day of April 23 to some two months later on the first Sunday after Trinity. To further secularize and disassociate the procession, itself, from the Catholic veneration of the saint, “Ther shalbe neyther George nor Margett” featured in the parade, “But for pastime the dragon to come In and shew 41 hym self as in other yeares.” McClendon, however, has nothing to say about the Norwich biblical cycle which, as I mentioned, extended through to the mid-1560s and which provided a means by which the lay-controlled trade guilds could give expression to their religious views. A case in point is the Grocers’ Guild and its pageant of paradise featuring the fall of Adam and Eve, which has survived in both its Catholic and post-Reformation versions: the so-called Text A of 1533 and Text B of 1565. Although these pageants advanced the Grocers’ commercial interests, they also projected the guild’s religious sensibilities, showing how those sensibilities changed over the course of thirty or so years at a time of great religious transition in Norwich, as in other large communities across England. So who were the grocers and what do we know about their guild? A closer look at their activities may cast some light on other powerful urban guilds which sponsored drama in Norwich and elsewhere. Trading in mainly luxury goods imported from abroad, the grocers were among the wealthiest and most politically active of Norwich’s seventy-eight 42 trades. No decade in the sixteenth century passes without at least two or three leading grocers serving in the mayor’s office. Robert Greene, the Alderman of the Grocers in 1533 when their pageant is first recorded in the Whitsun cycle, was city mayor in 1529. Thomas Sotherton, the mayor who

41 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 47; McClendon, Quiet Reformation, 199–200. 42 Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, 56–57. My discussion of the grocers’ trade is much indebted to this study. 80 Drama and religion in English provincial society organized its final performance in 1565, was a grocer, and so were his two 43 immediate successors in office, Henry Bacon and Thomas Wall. The grocers were also prominent lay participants in the city’s religious affairs. Perhaps no one in early Tudor Norwich epitomized worldly success and traditional Catholic piety better than Robert Jannys, a wealthy grocer and two-time mayor whose will of 1530 stipulated a “penny to be given to each of eighty poor persons every Friday for twenty years – a bequest of some 44 £350.” By the 1540s the Protestantism that shaped the 1565 Grocers’ pageant had infiltrated the guild. Among the leading Protestant grocers were Andrew Quasshe, who got embroiled in a controversy over the Mass under Edward VI and objected to the festivities held by the guild of St. George on its feast day. The Grocers’ religious observances were overseen by John Kempe, the zealous chaplain of St. Andrews Hall, the former Blackfriar’s Hall, from the 1540s until Mary’s accession, at which 45 time he was defrocked for having married. The guild itself met several times a year to hear Mass, attend obits, and engage in other religious observances. It congregated for the Corpus Christi procession and it levied funds for its pageant play at its annual meeting on the Sunday after Corpus Christi, the same time it assigned two surveyors to take charge of the play and two deputies to organize the Corpus Christi festivities. All Saints Day and Michaelmas were other occasions when the guild met to feast and hold Mass. In this respect, the Grocers were no different than other guilds who engaged in a range of religious activities, many of them penitential rites and good works which helped to store up merits toward their own salvation and those of their deceased loved ones, according to the doctrine of purgatory. Participation in play productions, like walking in the processions of Corpus Christi, Whitsun, and the feast days,

43 Out of the seventy-eight occupations, the Grocers were ranked sixth between 1526 and 1550 and second between 1551 and 1575 in the number of freemen they admitted to the city (Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, 56). The Sotherton family shows up often in the records relating to festive ritual and drama in Tudor Norwich. Thomas’s father, Nicholas Sotherton, who was mayor in 1539, was elected alderman of the Grocers the following year when the guild spent 20s preparing their pageant wagon and the performance of their play (Galloway, Norwich, 3–4). In 1549/50, two members of the family contributed costumes to the St. George procession that year. It was in the gatehouse of John Sotherton that the pageant wagon was stored for several years following the final 1565 performance of the Grocers’ play; in 1570 the wagon was given to him in payment for the rent owing on the storage. 44 On Robert Jannys’ religious patronage, see Norman Tanner, “Religious Practice,” Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (New York: Hambledon and London, 2004), 150. 45 McClendon, Quiet Reformation, discusses Quasshe on 113–17 and Kempe on 82–83 and 200. For Kempe’s involvement with the guild, see Kirpatrick Papers, Norfolk Record Office, Manuscript 21,no.68. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 81 clearly was an extension of this religious life and would have been among those meritorious acts. After the guilds were suppressed by the Chantry Act of 1547, the Grocers’ Guild, like others, continued to meet for devo- tional reasons, hiring preachers and providing religious guidance for its 46 members. The surviving Grocers’ accounts indicate that their pageant was staged as part of the Norwich cycle intermittently from 1533 until 1565. The setting of the performances remains uncertain. However, there is no reason to seriously doubt that they shared the same general locale of the Pentecost Fair, that is to say, in Tombland, a open area between the walls of the Cathedral precinct and the city (see figure 5). Processional staging cannot be ruled out, however, since the pageants were mounted on horse-drawn pageant wagons. The list of expenses for the 1533 and 1565 performances, along with other evidence, suggest that the Grocers’ own pageant wagon was splendidly decorated to enhance the Grocers’ public image and to advertise its wares. The 1565 inventory describes the pageant wagon as “a Howsse of Waynskott paynted and buylded on a Carte witth 47 fowre whelys.” It is equipped with “A square toppe to sett over ye sayde Howse,” and on this square top was mounted a gilded griffon, the half- eagle, half-lion beast that served as the Grocers’ emblem. Streamers, banners, and weathercocks were other features that ornamented the cart. To create a sense of the natural beauty of the garden of paradise, the setting of the play, the Tree of Knowledge was featured on the pageant’s main floor, decorated with an array of exotic fruits. The Grocers’ accounts are particularly detailed here, listing “Orenges, fyges, allmondes dates 48 Reysens, preunis, & aples to garnyshe ye trie with.” I have not seen it mentioned in any commentary on the play, but these fruits were precisely those which the Norwich Grocers imported from abroad. As John F. Pound observes in his discussion of the Norwich trades, the Grocers imported through East Anglian ports figs, prunes, raisins, currants, oranges and lemons. He reports that “In 1581 a cargo of 20,000 oranges and 1,000 lemons reached Norwich in time for the St. Bartholomew’s 49 Fair.” The pageant wagon, then, was both a symbol of the Grocers’ identity but also a sort of advertisement of their monopoly of the high end part of the imports market. That the pageant wagon was two-storied

46 See “Grocers’ Accounts,” Kirpatrick Papers Ms 21, no. 68; see also Norman Davis, “Introduction: The Norwich Grocers’ Play.” In Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis. EETS, SS 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), xxxiii–xxxvi. 47 48 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 52. Galloway, REED: Norwich, 43. 49 Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, 57. 82

Figure 5. Map of Norwich by William Cuningham, in The Cosmographical Glasse (London, 1559). Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 83 with a “heaven” is indicated in the 1533 text where God announces that 50 “Into Paradyce I wyll nowe descende / With my mynysters angelicall.” A stage direction for Adam and Eve to retreat behind the pageant wagon may indicate that the ground before the pageant was also part of the playing area. Accommodation somewhere in the acting area was needed for an organ prescribed for the 1533 production and a choir of several singers indicated in both the A and B texts. The 1565 inventory curiously also includes stained “horse clothes” and decorative items (“4 headstallis 51 of brode Inkle with knopps & tassels”) for horses. It is not clear to me whether these horses accompanied or pulled the wagon during processions at Corpus Christi and possibly Whitsun as well. Together, Text A (1533) and Text B (1565) of the Grocers’ pageant provide an extraordinary example of how an English cycle play underwent revision along reformed lines. Unfortunately, neither extant text is in manuscript form; they are based on an eighteenth-century transcription 52 (itself no longer extant) printed in 1910. Text A is missing a section of dialogue after the Fall of Adam and Eve, though what is extant follows fairly faithfully the biblical account of the creation and fall related in Genesis chapters 2 and 3 of the Catholic Vulgate Bible. Text B, which draws on the Great Bible first printed in 1539, accompanies the Grocers’ dramatic accounts of the cycle revival in 1565 and shows an extensive 53 Protestant revision. This second, later version includes two prologues, both spoken by “the Prolocutor,” an expository character only elsewhere found in John Bale’s Protestant biblical plays and another 1560s interlude, 54 King Darius. According to the wording above them, Prologue 1 is to be used when no pageant play precedes it in the cycle performance (and

50 Davis, Non-Cycle Plays, 8 (Text A, ll. 9–10). All subsequent references to The Grocers’ Play are to this edition. 51 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 53. 52 For discussions comparing the two texts, see Davis, “Introduction” xxxvi–xl; and Dukta, “The Lost Dramatic Cycle,” 1–13. 53 Dutka, in “The Lost Dramatic Cycle,” 6–7, observes that the 1565 Text B shows no sign of using the Geneva Bible, which became very popular over the course of Elizabeth’s reign and the preferred version of committed Protestants. But it should be stated that Text B’s use of the Great Bible is not necessarily any indication of a conservative Christian outlook which Dutka sees in the play’s treatment of the Fall. The Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer used the Great Bible, as did the most staunchly Protestant of early Elizabethan interlude playwrights, William Wager. See R. Mark Benbow’s “Introduction” in Wager, ‘The Longer Thou Livest’, and ‘Enough is as Good as a Feast’ ed. R. Mark Benbow (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), x–xi. 54 See Michelle M. Butler, “Baleus Prolocutor and the Establishment of the Prologue in Sixteenth- Century Drama,” in Tudor Drama before Shakespeare, 1485–1590, ed. Lloyd Edward Kermode, et al. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 93–110. 84 Drama and religion in English provincial society 55 perhaps when the play was staged alone); Prologue 2 is spoken when the Grocers’ play follows others in sequence. Both prologues repeatedly appeal to the Bible as their narrative source – Prologue 1 incites biblical authority five times within the first seventeen lines; this may indicate some defensiveness on the part of the producers in response to puritanical opposition towards dramatic renditions of the Bible. The repeated foregrounding of Scripture in Text B is but one example of how the Protestant revision of the Norwich Grocers’ play differed from its predecessor. There are two others I would like to consider. The first of these has to do with the treatment of the matrimonial relationship of Adam and Eve. Both plays depict the relationship of Adam and Eve as 56 a divinely sanctioned marriage, but there are pronounced differences. Their first meeting after Eve’s creation is a case in point. Although Adam expresses joy over the Creation of Eve in both versions, Text A tends to define their prelapsarian marriage in terms of hierarchical authority: Adam is over Eve in the same way as God rules over Adam. Moreover, there is no reciprocal exchange of dialogue between them at this point in the narrative, and we are left with only a very sketchy sense of how they interact. In Text B, on the other hand, Adam and Eve engage in a warm and affectionate exchange, referring to one another as “Most lovynge 57 spowse,” “lovely lover,” “myn owne sweteharte,” and so on. Clearly, the author of Text A, like other pageant play authors dealing with his story, was restricted by the Church fathers’ insistence that of all the pleasures the first couple enjoyed in paradise, sex was not one of them. Like the Virgin Mary and the priesthood, they were celibate. Indeed, from St. Augustine onward, the church fathers debated how procreation could ever have taken 58 place without the ardous libidinis associated with the Fall happening. Protestant authorities, of course, seized on this issue to accentuate their difference with Catholics, extolling the virtues of married love (including sexual relations) by citing the first couple as the ideal marriage in all its aspects, and condemning the Catholic view of Adam and Eve’s marital

55 At Chester, one of the shepherd plays was staged alone in the town centre before the Earl of Derby and his son in 1578. See Clopper, REED: Chester, 179. 56 For these, see Dutka, “The Lost Dramatic Cycle,” 7–11, and Gordon Campbell and N. M. Davis, “Paradise Lost and the Norwich Grocers’ Play,” Milton Quarterly 14 (1980): 113–16. I am especially indebted to Campbell and Davis in the discussion of marriage which follows. 57 Grocers’ Play, Text B, ll. 28, 34, 61, 104. All subsequent references to the Grocers’ Play will be to this edition. 58 Patristic writers from Clement of Alexandria through Augustine to Hugh of St. Victor maintained that Adam and Eve were celibate before the Fall. For these sources, see Campbell and Davis, “Paradise Lost and the Norwich Grocers’ Play,” 114 and 116. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 85 59 relationship as against nature (read no sexual relations). Indeed Calvin and others charged that Rome’s interpretation of the Creation story was perverse right down to the Vulgate’s use of the term virago in translating the Greek word for woman. Calvin understood virago to mean “woman of a masculine nature,” which he thought deprived Eve of the feminine 60 charm so attractive to Adam. Following the Vulgate’s account of Eve’s creation closely, Text A, like its counterpart pageant at Chester, refers to 61 Eve as “virago.” Text B drops the term altogether in its revision of the Grocers’ earlier pageant. Text B, moreover, is completely free of the anti- feminist invective directed against Eve that one observes in many of the 62 other cycle plays of the Fall. In Texts A and B alike Satan enters immediately after Adam and Eve exit to go their separate ways in the Garden. Famously, in both versions, the serpent is depicted in disguise as “an angel of light.” In Text B he is described as “fair” and speaks in a falsetto voice (“beholde my voice so 63 small!”). The 1565 production expense accounts pay for a white wig, 64 coat, gloves, hose, and tail for “the Serpente.” The gloves and tale presumably hide his claws; the white hair accounts for his fair appearance, and the falsetto voice suggests he is female. The serpent’s “feminine” features recall the roof boss of the Fall in Norwich Cathedral (see figure 6). In Text A, he immediately launches into his temptation of Eve, whereas in Text B, the Serpent first delivers a revelatory soliloquy, which begins: “Nowe, nowe, of my purpos I dowght nott to atteyne;/ I can yt nott abyde 65 in theis joyes they shulde be.” Coming immediately after overhearing the words of affection between Adam and Eve, Satan’s remarks reveal that it is the joys of marital love, and not primarily Adam’s replacing him

59 See, for example, Calvin: “The artifice of Satan in attempting the defamation of marriage was twofold: first, that by means of the odium attached to it he might introduce the pestilential law of celibacy; and, secondly, that married persons might indulge themselves in whatever license they pleased.” John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, Called Genesis, trans. John King (1843; rpt. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1981), 134. 60 Calvin, Commentaries, 135–36. The point is made by Campbell and Davis, “Paradise Lost and the Norwich Grocers’ Play,” 114. 61 Grocers’ Play, Text A, l. 20. For Chester, see the Draper’s Adam and Eve,l.150,inThe Chester Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols. EETS SS 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 119. All subsequent references to the Chester Cycle will be to this edition. 62 As Rosemary Woolf asserts with respect to the extant major cycles, “In the plays of the Fall an attack upon women grows naturally out of Adam’s biblically based accusation of Eve, but becomes far more heavily accentuated than the narrative and psychological context could warrant.” See English Mystery Plays (Berkeley and Los Angelos: University of California Press, 1972), 123. 63 Grocers’ Play, Text B, l. 43. See also Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300–1660: vol. III, Plays and Their Markers to 1576 (London: Routledge & Kegan paul, 1981), 197. 64 65 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 53. Grocers’ Play, Text B, ll. 36–37. 86 Drama and religion in English provincial society

Figure 6. Roof boss of the Serpent tempting Adam and Eve (late 15th century), from Norwich Cathedral. in heaven (the chief motive in other cycle plays), that stokes the devil’s 66 jealousy. Again, this is quintessential Protestant teaching. The reformers accentuated the sanctity and nobility of marriage in opposition to the Catholic idealizing of virginity and celibacy, and indeed Calvin maintained that the Fall was very much about Satan’s attempt to defame the institu- tion of marriage, and “by means of the odium attached to it he might 67 introduce the pestilential law of celibacy.”

66 67 Woolf, English Mystery Plays, 116. Calvin, Commentaries, 134. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 87 Perhaps what most belies the early Elizabethan Protestantism of the Norwich Grocers’ Adam and Eve of 1565 is the extent to which the pageant resembles contemporary Protestant moral interludes, many of them designed for professional acting troupes like the many on record for 68 performance at town’s common hall of St. Andrew’s. Most immediately notable in this regard are the two allegorical figures of Dolor and Myserye 69 who “taketh Man by both armys.” Dolor and Myserye give both verbal and visual objectification to the psychological and spiritual despair Adam and Eve experience as a consequence of original sin. Their flanking Adam on stage just at the moment he experiences despair is reminiscent of very similar staging devices in such homiletic interludes as the early Elizabethan Enough is as Good as a Feast and The Tide Tarrieth No Man. These allegorical figures function within the Norwich reviser’s imposition of a Protestant conversion narrative onto the play’s structure, a strategy found nowhere else in the biblical cycle tradition. In keeping with standard Protestant teaching on spiritual regeneration, the characters’ experience of spiritual despair by means of Dolor and Myserye is seen as both a providentially ordained and necessary stage on the way to salvation. This is made clear by the Holy Ghost, the final character to enter the stage and a fitting choice given that the occasion of the cycle’s performance, Whitsuntide, celebrates the appearance of the Holy Ghost before the Christian church. As both a member of the Holy Trinity and as an agent of God’s prevenient, intervening grace, the Holy Ghost informs them that their sufferings are not permanent; rather they are a means “But to try the as gold is tryed in the fyer; / In the end premonyshed, shalt have 70 thy desyre.” The allusion here is to Isaiah 48:10 (“Behold, I haue [re]fined thee, but not as siluer; I haue chosen thee in the fornace of affliction”). As their spiritual “gyde,” the Holy Spirit exhorts Adam and Eve to put on the full armor of God: “the brest-plate of rightousnes,” “The shylde of faythe,” “The hellmett of salvacion,” “the sworde of the Spright, which 71 is the worde of God.” The scene is reminiscent of The Tide Tarrieth 72 No Man where a very similar stage imagery occurs. The pageant con- cludes triumphantly with a song after Adam rejoices in his foreordained

68 St. Andrews Hall was formerly the Blackfriars Church which the city purchased in 1540 from the Crown for £81. For accounts of payments to traveling acting troupes, see Galloway, REED: Norwich. 69 70 Grocers’ Play, Text B, ll. 110 s.d. Grocers’ Play, Text B, ll. 128–29. 71 Grocers’ Play, Text B, ll. 137–42. 72 See George Wapull, The Tide Tarrieth No Man, TFT (London: Jack, 1910), sig. F2v. I discuss the play in White, Theatre and Reformation, 93–94. 88 Drama and religion in English provincial society 73 election: “Deth is overcum by forepredestinacion,” he exclaims. Notwith- standing Adam’s final gesture of goodwill – asking the audience to join the cast in singing – his espousal of the Calvinist doctrine of “the elect few” and individualized religious conversion presume a markedly different sense of “community” than that characterizing medieval cycle perform- ances. For the play implies an elect community of the saved within the broad community of the Christian church. All the same, Text B turns the traditionally tragic story of the Fall into a marriage-affirming comedy of sin and redemption. Because of the incomplete state of the records, we do not know how many times the Whitsun cycle was staged during Elizabeth’s reign before 1565. The Grocers’ accounts which survive indicate that their pageant wagon was prepared for the Lord Mayor’s Show of 1563, in honor of the incoming mayor, Richard Davy. “Sourveyours” of the company were paid 6s, 4d, to furnish the pageant wagon “& prepare a devyce ageynst 74 yeday” This “device” may have been the Grocers’ play, but evidence is lacking for a complete cycle that year. The phrases, “as were wonte to go in the tyme of whitson holydayes,” and “in tymes paste haue bene vsyd,” included in the city council’s order to mount the plays in 1565, suggest 75 that perhaps the cycle had been dormant for a few years. If that is the case, why revive the pageant plays in 1565? What we do know is that 1565 was a momentous year in Norwich when Mayor Sotherton, a grocer by trade whose family was active in the guild, mounted a campaign to bring into the city Dutch and Walloon textile workers as a means of injecting new life into the ailing economy, which was suffering from a downturn in the cloth trade. With large numbers of Protestant refugees pouring in from the Spanish-controlled Netherlands – some forty-two Dutch and Walloon families were in residence that year – the mayor and aldermen, with the help of the Duke of Norfolk, sought official recognition for the alien population from the Privy Council, which came through with Letters Patent on November 5, 1565, officially authorizing the settlement 76 of thirty families in Norwich. Sotherton, therefore, may have seen in the revival of the Whitsuntide pageants an opportunity to showcase the city’s elite trades and its Protestantism both to the Privy Council, from which it sought support for its immigration policy, and to the Dutch and Walloon Protestant tradesmen in the Netherlands.

73 74 Grocers’ Play, Text B, l. 149. Galloway, REED: Norwich, 51. 75 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 51. 76 William Moens, The Walloons and Their Church at Norwich 1565–1832 (London: Lymington, 1888), i–ii, 4–6, 17–18. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 89

CHESTER: WAS ITS CYCLE REFORMED? I would now like to turn attention to the North where some of England’s most sophisticated and spectacular religious drama was developed but where, even well into Queen Elizabeth’s reign, popular religion remained conservative, so much so that the Earls of Northumberland and West- moreland in 1569, supported by the inhabitants of large communities such as York, mounted a rebellion, albeit a failed one, against the Protestant monarchy in an attempt to restore the nation to Roman Catholicism and evidently to replace Elizabeth on the throne with Mary Queen of Scots. The northern towns with the most famous annual biblical cycles were York and Chester. York did not undergo any serious revision along Protestant lines, and by the time cycle organizers began paying lip-service to the idea of doing so, it was too late: the Archbishop of York, Edmund Grindal, backed by the puritan Earl of Huntingdon’s Council of the North, made 77 sure it did not happen. On the other hand, the question of a “reformed cycle” has been raised about Chester, a chartered town with a population of about 5,000 in the mid sixteenth century where trade guilds mounted plays processional-style on pageant wagons under the direction of the lord mayor and his council. Like Norwich, Chester reorganized its civic drama in the early sixteenth century, and if there remains some doubt about whether Norwich had a Corpus Christi play before the cycle came under civic auspices, at Chester a switch from Corpus Christi to Whitsun certainly took place by 1531–32, when William Newhall’s proclamation refers to “Witsonweke” as the 78 occasion of the cycle. If in Chester the lord mayor had full jurisdiction over the Whitsun cycle, the church – in the form of the newly founded Cathedral of Chester after 1541 – continued to play a supporting role, and this partly explains why the Chester cycle survived as long as it did into the 1570s. Biblical drama at Chester, however, appears to have been a much larger enterprise than at Norwich, a “creation-to-doomsday” cycle consisting of some twenty-four plays performed over three days. Moreover, while Norwich’s cycle is mostly lost, the Chester cycle survives in the form of five manuscripts. These manuscripts – the earliest transcribed some twenty years following the last production in 1575, all seem to be based on 79 the same master text of the cycle. Another difference is that the Chester

77 See Johnston, “City as Patron: the Case of York,” 168–75. 78 Clopper, REED: Chester, 27–28. 79 For a detailed discussion of the extant manuscripts, see R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, The Chester Cycle Mystery (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 3–86. 90 Drama and religion in English provincial society Cycle was staged with greater frequency and for a longer stretch into Elizabeth’s reign. We have records for performances in 1561, 1567, 1568, 80 1572, and 1575. Assessing the extent to which Chester underwent “Protestantization” is 81 complicated. From documents surrounding the plays it appears that during Edward VI’s reign the Wives’ Assumption of the Virgin was dropped, as was the clergy’s Corpus Christi play (a casualty of the banning of the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1547); and the Baker’s Last Supper was also likely suppressed around this time, perhaps because, like the N-Town Passion,it 82 espoused transubstantiation. The Last Supper, however, was revived sometime later, probably under Mary; the surviving version of the pageant reflects a Protestant view of the Eucharist. The Late Banns – or “Post- Reformation Banns” as they are also called, announce the plays as a fully Protestantized cycle. Publicly presented on St. George’s Day in the year the Whitsun cycle was produced, the Late Banns advertised that the cycle was composed by a reform-minded monk of Medieval Chester who risked persecution in the age of superstition to bring the stories of the Bible to the general populace. The Late Banns insists that the cycle is faithful to the scriptures, and while conceding that extra-biblical personages and events are interwoven into several pageants, such material has been approved by the appropriate authorities. These stated claims, along with the concern over actors impersonating God the father, suggest that the Late Banns were written (or at the very least revised) during Elizabeth’s reign when advanced Protestants began attacking the theater, particular plays based on 83 scripture. At one point, the Banns make a rather stern directive to the Bakers to “see yat with the same wordes you vtter/As Criste himselfe spake them,” as if to warn the guild that any interpretation of the Last Supper as evidence of the real presence in the Eucharist, probably the type of language that got the pageant temporarily suppressed under Edward VI, would be to 84 court controversy. A perusal of the extant pageant texts themselves shows that the Late Banns do not fully deliver on their promise of reformed theater. To be sure, of all the large-scale cycles/collections of biblical drama that survive

80 Clopper, REED: Chester, 65–68, 75–87, 90–99, 110–18. 81 In the discussion that follows, I revise my own earlier assessment of the Chester cycle in “Reforming Mysteries’ End.” Based in part on new evidence (see below), I now think it was a much more conservative cycle than earlier surmised. 82 Mills and Lumiansky, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, 190. 83 Clopper, Drama, Play and Game, 290–91. 84 For the texts of the Late Banns, see Clopper, REED: Chester, 240–47; I quote ll. 17–18. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 91 in text form – the others are York, Towneley and N-Town – Chester is perhaps the closest to resembling a “Protestant” cycle. Individual pageants are repeatedly contextualized by references to the Bible – albeit the Latin Vulgate – and as if to guard against playgoers getting too caught up in the stories, characters, and visual spectacle, the “Expositor” makes frequent appearances throughout the cycle to explain the theological and spiritual 85 significance of the action. Moreover, there is a pronounced emphasis in such pageants as Christ on the Road to Emmaus (play 19), The Prophets of Antichrist (play 22), and The Last Judgement (play 24) on the power and majesty of God and the preeminent role of grace in spiritual regeneration which anticipates similar emphases in Protestant theology. However, it should be stressed that these features are drawn from the Church Fathers and not from the influence of Tyndale, Luther, or Calvin. Indeed, any theological sophistication observable in the surviving texts of the Chester Cycle owes little to Protestantism. No pageant, in my opinion, appears to have been substantially rewritten by a Protestant reviser, as is clearly the case with Text B of the Norwich Grocers’ Pageant. Reformed changes in the Chester cycle are, so far as I can tell, a result of pressures brought on by Protestant censorship and manifest themselves in the form of suppressed pageants, the deletion of some passages and the revision of others. One thinks of the Virgin Mary’s speech of lament at the cross in The Passion (play 16A) which is left out of two of the extant cycle manuscripts and therefore appears to have been a casualty of censorship, or the long, concluding segment of play 18, The Resurrection where Peter is shown to be “sovereign” among the disciples, similarly dropped from some manu- scripts, perhaps because it came too close to advocating the Catholic view of 86 Peter as the first pope. As we shall see shortly, other passages were revised to substitute a Protestant view of holy communion, or of repentance, in place of a Roman Catholic one. Protestant censorship may also explain the 87 amalgamation of one pageant into another late in the cycle’s history.

85 For the role of the Expositor and its relation to Protestantism, see Hill-Va´squez, Sacred Players, 17–50; for an earlier discussion, see David Mills, “Introduction,” The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Edition with Modernised Spelling, ed. David Mills (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992), xxii. 86 All play references are to The Chester Cycle, eds. Lumiansky and Mills. The Passion (Play 16a): ll. 257–72; and The Resurrection (Play 17): ll. 470–590. 87 Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, 191, cite The Purification of the Virgin as a very likely possibility, with the story finding its way into Christ and the Doctors around the time of Edward VI’s reign. This did not, however, stop Catholic observances and devotional experiences resurfaces in the new play. See Sally-Beth MacLean, “Marian Devotion in Post-Reformation Chester: Implications of the Smiths’ ‘Purification’ Play,” in The Middle Ages in the North West, ed. Tom Scott and Pat Starkey (Oxford: Leopard’s Head 1995), 237–55. 92 Drama and religion in English provincial society Both Laurence Clopper and David Mills discern a distinctly Protestant strain in play 4, Abraham, where King Melchisedech, who also is a priest, offers Abraham wine and bread following his victorious return from battle in what the Chester Expositor describes as a foreshadowing of the Lord’s 88 Supper. To be sure, the Expositor somewhat defensively emphasizes memory rather than sacrifice in the scene’s “signification” of the Eucharist, but the very paralleling of the bread and wine offered by Melchisedech with the Lord’s Supper was highly controversial in Protestant Europe and condemned as a “popish” misreading of the biblical account by the major reformers. Both Luther and Calvin in their biblical commentaries on Genesis see Melchisedech’s provision of wine and bread as simply illustrating hospitality toward Abraham, with Calvin adding that St. Paul in the Book of Hebrews “says not a word concerning bread and wine” in 89 his detailed comparison of Christ to the Old Testament priest-king. It is very unlikely, therefore, that the author (or rather reviser) of the sequence was a theologically trained Protestant. In most respects the Abraham 90 pageant is grounded on the teachings of the church fathers. Indeed, it is largely to medieval Catholic sources that the cycle turns for its extra-biblical material, most notably the apocryphal accounts of saints’ lives in The Golden Legend, some of them filtered through The Stanzaic Life of Christ, a devotional work written by a Chester author in the 91 fifteenth century. Although even some staunchly Protestant interludes such as The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene (published 1564)drew on saints’ legends, the more puritanically inclined of Chester’s citizens opposed such embellishments of scriptural personages and events. This is clear from the correspondence of the reformer Christopher Goodman discovered of late by David Mills. Goodman, who settled near Chester in the late 1560s, drew up a list of “absurdities” which he found in “the Old Original” (the master text of the cycle) when he perused it in 1572. Among his objections were that Noah’s Ark “is called a Shrine”; that in The Nativity (play 6), Mary is depicted with two midwives “Tibill & Salome”; that the shepherds are suspected to be sheep-stealers who make “vain offerings to move laughter & to maintain Superstition”; that in

88 Clopper, Drama, Play and Game, 185; David Mills, “Some Theological Issues in Chester’s Plays,” in Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, ed. David N. Klausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek (University of Toronto Press, 2007), 212–29. I had the good fortunate of reading Professor Mills’ essay (albeit briefly) just as this manuscript was going to press. 89 See Calvin, Commentaries, 390; Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol II, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Daniel E. Poellot (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 1960), 384–85. 90 See their valuable commentary in Chester Mystery Cycle, II, 43–59. 91 Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, 96–104. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 93 The Purification (play 11) Simeon finds that his writing “good woman” in place of “virgin” in his book miraculously vanishes; that The Harrowing of Hell (play 17) depicts “The deliverance of Adam &c out of hell & bringing these words to affirm his purpose [:] Attollite portas,” and that 92 Antichrist (play 23) is depicted “with turning of trees upwards.” No less disturbing for Goodman is the cycle’s continuing endorsement of “popery.” The Sheperds (play 7) depicts two of the shepherds joining religious orders, and play 13 and play 17 (The Blind Chelidonian and The Harrowing of Hell) endorse the Roman Mass; The Resurrection (play 18) “promiseth blyss for good works”; Peter is elevated above the other disciples by creating Matthew an apostle in The Ascension (play 20); the prophet Elijah is shown “blessing bread with the sign of the Cross” in Antichrist (play 23), and in The Last Judgement “Purgatory affirmed, preaching of merits of man. The divell speaking Latin & setteth forth 93 [the] invocation of Saints!” One might add that the Weavers’ Last Judgement is particularly extensive and explicit in its advocacy of Roman Catholicism, so much so that little or no Protestant revision is evident, and one finds it difficult to see how this pageant could have been officially sanctioned for performance during Elizabeth’s reign, notwithstanding its inclusion among the plays anno- unced and described in the Late Banns. What is especially interesting about The Last Judgement is its implicit recognition of the institution of the papacy. Following the Northern Rebellion any such acknowledge- ment in a public setting would have been politically dangerous, and one assumes that when the civic magistracy approved the 1575 performance of the plays, this one was among those left out due to its “superstition.” Nevertheless, the absence of any revision of the pageant may suggest the presence of religious conservatives within the Weavers’ Guild. We may never know when the Weavers’ Last Judgement ceased to be performed in the sixteenth century. The Weavers may have been sharing a pageant wagon with the Smiths as late as 1560–61, but evidence here 94 is circumstantial. The paucity of evidence surrounding much of the cycle’s history also makes it difficult to date the composition, revision, and performance of the other pageants, and this, in turn, obscures our understanding of when the Protestant changes took place in the 1560s

92 REED: Cheshire, eds. Elizabeth Baldwin, David Mills, and Lawrence M. Clopper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 147–48. I am grateful to REED for permitting me to read these materials from the collection prior to publication. 93 Baldwin et al., REED Cheshire, 147–148. 94 David Mills, Recycling the Cycle, (University of Toronto Press, 1998), 117;Clopper,REED Chester, 66. 94 Drama and religion in English provincial society and 1570s. Goodman’s letters confirm what we know from other sources – that the plays were constantly revised, but he adds that such revisions were 95 often ignored in performance by the guilds who staged them. Thanks to David Mills’s recent discovery of Goodman’s 10 June, 1572 letter to Archbishop Grindal, it can now be confidently asserted that at least two pageants were revised after the occasion the reformer read them in mid-1572. For example, in his list of objections to the “Old Original,” which he apparently sent to Mayor Hanky as well as to Grindal in June of 1572, he quotes three passages of dialogue promoting Catholic doctrine from the cycle, two of which are revised along Protestant lines in the extant cycle texts. The first of these is from The Resurrection. Speaking to the knights shortly after his resurrection, Jesus declares, according to Goodman, “And therto a full ryche messe, in bred myn one bodie, & that bred I you gyve, your wyked lyffe to amend, becomen is my fleshe, throgh wordes 96 5 betwyxt the prestes handes.” Christ is saying that during the Mass the bread becomes the body of Christ through the miracle of transubstanti- ation, which occurs when the priest consecrates the host by holding it up with both hands between his thumb and forefinger and pronounces the five words, “Hoc est enim Corpus Meum” (“For this is my body”). In all 97 the extant manuscripts of The Resurrection, this passage is changed. The phrasing about transubstantiation is dropped and replaced with language that conveys that holy communion is inefficacious without the communi- 98 cant’s exercise of faith (“becomes my fleseh through your beleeffe”). Goodman quotes another objectionable passage, this time in the dialogue of Simon the apostle in the pageant on Pentecost: “And I beleve with devo- tion, of syn to have remission, throgh penance & contrition, & heven whan I am dead.” The reviser of the extant version of Pentecost seemed to think that too much credit is given here to the sacrament of penance as the source of the remission of sins, so the passage is changed as follows to more truly reflect the language of the Apostle’s Creed (from which the language is taken): And I believe, with devotyon, of synne to have remission through Christes blood and Passion, 99 and Heaven when I am dead.

95 See Mill’s informative discussion of Goodman’s critique of and opposition to the Chester plays in Recycling the Cycle, 146–50 and 179–80; see also “Some Theological Issues in Chester’s Plays.” 96 97 Baldwin et al., REED Cheshire, 148. Resurrection (play 18), ll. 168–77. 98 During the consecration of the host during Mass the five words “Hoc est enim Corpus Meum” (“For this is my body”) initiate the miracle of transubstantiation. 99 Pentecost (play 21), ll. 347–350. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 95 These passages from the extant play texts of The Resurrection and Pentecost are clearly revisions of “The Old Original,” but when they specifically occurred after Goodman’s complaints is not known. They may have taken place as early as the June 1572 production of the cycle. For Goodman had sent the “Note” to the mayor possibly by May 10, which would have given the latter time to impose some last-minute changes to the scripts. Moreover, in a second letter from Goodman to Grindal sometime in late 1572, Goodman remarks (speaking of the cycle organizers) “they (to cloak their doings) shall alledge that many of the foresaid plays are corrected: yet we are sure that the most part remain as before, & the rest so corrected not much bettered, nor yet examined & allowed according to 100 order.” It is possible, however, that the final changes took place during preparations for the 1575 production, at which time Mayor Savage arranged for the cycle texts to be more fully revised in Protestant terms. Given that the revisions in the play texts observed here appear to be in response to Goodman’s specific criticisms of 1572, one wonders whether some of the defensive statements in the Late Banns about individual pageants are “answers” to Goodman’s criticisms as well. For example, three of the pageants that are most extensively criticized by Goodman for their extra-biblical material, The Nativity, The Shepherds, and The Harrowing of Hell, are vigorously defended in the Late Banns, despite their lack of biblical precedent. Thus, Goodman lists among his “absurdities” in The Nativity pageant the “Two midwives to Christ Tibill & Salome” and the “miracle” of Salome’s withering hands (when she attempts to prove Mary’s non-virginity). The Late Banns’ brief summary of The Nativity seems to respond to this by stating that “In the scriptures a warraunte. not of the midwiues reporte / The author tellethe 101 his author. then take hit in sporte” ; in other words, the midwives add a little harmless comedy to the story. In the Shepherds pageant, Goodman objects to “The foolish descanting of the Shephereds upon Gloria in excelsis” and to their comic portrayal in general as irreverent and unscriptural. The Late Banns acknowledge the mirthful treatment of the shepherds as extra-biblical but justify it as pleasant recreation and appropriate for characters of humble birth: The Shepherde poore of base and lowe degree you Paynters and Glaseers. decke out with all myrthef And see that Gloria. in excelsus. be songe merelye.

100 Cheshire, 146. 101 Chester, 243; “The Banes,” ll. 11–12; all subsequent references to the Late Banns are to this edition. 96 Drama and religion in English provincial society ffewe wordes in the Pagiante. make merthe trulye [i.e., based on truth], ffor all that the author had to stand vppon 102 Was glorye to god on highe & peace [t]on earthe to man. Goodman is especially critical of The Harrowing of Hell: The deliverance of Adam &c out of hell & bringing these words to affirm his purpose Attollite portas. Enoch & Elias living in paradise in the flesh & the abiding there for a time. Michael bringing the fathers out of hell with the cross hanging upon the theef ’s back.! The Late Banns description of The Harrowing of Hell is primarily taken up with defending it against just such criticisms. They report that “oure belefe” is that Christ descended into hell, but what he did in that place Though oure author sett forthe after his opynion yet creditt you the beste lerned. those he dothe not disgrase. There is no proof that the Late Banns are responding specifically to Goodman’s criticisms, but the correspondences are striking, and it is worth repeating that the preacher and his clerical colleagues did deliver a “Note” to Mayor Hanky in May of 1572 expressing their opposition, and they copied it to the Earl of Huntingdon on 10 May. The note, in terms of content, may be identical with the “notes of absurdities” which Goodman attached to his letter to Grindal a few weeks later in early June. If we accept this hypothesis, we can then date the Late Banns in their final, extant form no earlier than June 1572. Since this would have been too late for presentation that year (St. George’s Day when the Banns were traditionally presented was long past by then), perhaps they were prepared as part of the 1575 production. The Chester cycle, then, at least in terms of its text, was revised in response to reformist criticism during the 1560s and 1570s, but the plays nevertheless remained religiously conservative in their continued use of the Latin Vulgate, traditional liturgical music, and narrative materials from The Golden Legend, among other medieval Catholic sources. To whom, however, would such a hybrid cycle appeal? Richard Emmerson proposes that neither religious traditionalists nor rigorous Protestants in Elizabethan Chester would have responded favorably to the changes to the cycle described in the Late Banns, at least as they applied to the Dyers’ Antichrist which seems to have equated Catholicism with the Antichrist

102 “The Banes,” ll. 14–20. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 97 103 while still featuring many elements of the old religion. Thus Catholics and crypto-Catholics, who survived in large numbers in early Elizabethan 104 Cheshire, would have found such polemics deeply offensive, while the growing number of Protestants militants would have complained that the plays did not go far enough in removing the taint of “popish super- stition.” That the latter indeed felt this way we now know from the new evidence provided by Goodman’s “absurdities,” one of which applied specifically to Antichrist, as noted earlier. And Emmerson is surely right that the plays generated a hostile response from playgoers aligned with the opposite end of the religious spectrum as well, and this flew directly in the face of drama’s time-honored purpose of enhancing solidarity and sense of shared religious and civic pride among Cestrians. But what about those citizens who were neither crypto-Catholic nor puritanical? Was there room at this early stage in Chester’s Protestant history for a religious sensibility that would have continued to be genuinely moved and comforted – rather than alienated – by the cycle’s repre- sentations of Christian ceremony and devotion? I believe we should at least entertain the possibility of such a non-partisan religious sensibility. The diocese of Chester has been the focus of research on an emerging segment of Elizabethan Anglicanism known as “Prayer Book Protestants,” those members of the English church who were less concerned with preaching and the strict adherence to doctrinal truth than they were with 105 following the observances of the Book of Common Prayer. Judith Maltby has cited a Chester parish which vigorously defended its right to follow the Prayer Book’s liturgy against a puritan vicar, arguing that the tradition 106 was proudly observed for “forty years or more.” This took place in 1604, which meant that tradition extended back to the 1560s. It is not surprising that devotees of the Prayer Book thrived in the diocese, considering that only a fraction of its clergy in the 1560s and 1570s were graduates; as such, they were less likely to be preachers and doctrinal zealots and more prone to follow the pattern of Sunday worship prescribed in the Prayer Book. We should keep in mind that the Prayer Book’s liturgy was based on the Medieval Sarum (or Salisbury) rite (a popular medieval approach to church worship), and, as Christopher Marsh has argued recently, it

103 Richard K. Emmerson, “Contextualizing Performance,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (1999), 89–120; Mills, “Some Theological Issues in Chester’s Plays,” 217–18. 104 See K. R. Wark, Elizabethan Recusancy in Cheshire (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1971. 105 See Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 106 See Judith Maltby, “‘By this Book,” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: 1993): 118–28. 98 Drama and religion in English provincial society provided important points of continuity between the Catholic past and 107 the Protestant present. Such “moderate” Protestants surely would have found their devotional experience reaffirmed in the Chester cycle, which draws on many of the same scriptural and liturgical readings, especially on such feast days as Christmas, Candlemas, Easter, and Pentecost, found in the Book of Common Prayer. By the 1570s, however, the cycle’s days were numbered. It was now proving to be a divisive enterprise rather than an occasion of civic solida- rity, and powerful forces were lining up against it. If Chester Cathedral continued to support the cycle at Whitsun 1572 with stage materials and provisions, its ineffectual bishop, William Downham, bowed to pressure from Archbishop Grindall to sign an inhibition of May 15 against the 108 production going forward. Moreover, religious conservatives and moder- ates within the town council, notably the two mayors John Hanky and John Savage who sanctioned the 1572 and 1575 productions respectively, faced threats from the Privy Council itself. Mayor Hanky’s decision to authorize the 1572 production was backed by Cheshire’s most influential patron, the 3rd Earl of Derby, himself a suspected Catholic and protector of recusants, but Derby apparently did not intervene to revive the cycle after its last production at Midsummer (changed from Whitsun) in 1575, by which time some guildsmen and political leaders were expressing their 109 opposition. Without question, the driving force behind the campaign to end civic biblical drama in Chester was Christopher Goodman, whose extant letters, as we have seen, have crucially illuminated the events and attitudes surrounding the Chester cycle in its final years. One is tempted to dismiss Goodman as a mere puritan zealot, but this native Cestrian (born there about 1520) was an eminent Oxford scholar, Marian exile, political pamphleteer, Bible translator, and chaplain to the nobility, before returning to Chester around 1568, when he was nominated to the 110 Ecclesiastical Commission for the diocese. By 1570 he had obtained a

107 Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth Century England, 29–30. 108 Cheshire, 136–37. 109 For Derby’s support of the cycle, see Cheshire, 145. For the growing chorus of opposition, see Emmerson, “Contextualizing Performance,” 89–92. 110 See Wark, Elizabethan Recusancy, 9. Goodman attended Brasnose College at Oxford under Edward VI and was appointed Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in 1548. During Mary’s Catholic restoration, he journeyed with other Protestant exiles to Strassbourg and Frankfurt, before settling in Geneva as pastor of the English community; there he wrote a radical and influential political tract called How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed. On Elizabeth’s accession, he spent time in Scotland on John Knox’s invitation (c. 1559–65), in Ireland as chaplain to Sir Henry Sidney (1565–70). See biographical accounts, see DNB (2004) and Mills, Recycling the cycle, 146. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 99 living at Alforde, a parish about five miles south of Chester, and secured appointment as Archdeacon of Richmond, which at that time was within the Chester diocese, though located in North Yorkshire. He may have been appointed by Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of York, a fellow Marian exile in Strassbourg. As Archdeacon of Richmond, a prestigious appointment, Goodman oversaw one of only two consistory courts in the diocese of Chester; the other one was conducted by the Bishop of Chester. Goodman’s voice, therefore, carried considerable clout among his clerical colleagues, although this did not save him from being suspended from preaching in Chester in 1571 due to nonconformity. The suspension did not last for long, since he reports in his correspondence to Grindal that 111 he was preaching in the city against the plays. His letters, moreover, give the impression that a significant contingent of Cestrians shared his opposition to the Whitsun cycle. He cites two other clergymen who protested to the mayor about the plays: John Lane, a prebend of the Cathedral, and Robert Rogerson, who, according to David Mills, is one and the same as Robert Rogers who contributed to the famous Chester Breviary, and whose son was David Rogers, the antiquarian mainly responsible for the Breviary and for much of what we currently know 112 about the Chester cycle. In his 1572 letters to Grindal, Goodman refers to “my breathren & fellow ministers of this City, who now are present to joyn with me” in his campaign against the plays. Among the “breathren” are members of the city’s trade guilds participating in the production, since “many,” he observes, “for fear of [the mayor’s] displeasure are con- 113 strained to give their consent, others that make any resistance threatned.”

THE SURVIVAL OF THE CYCLES Goodman was part of the apparatus of state intervention which accelerated the pace with which the great civic biblical dramas of Chester and York came to an end in the 1570s. Others met their demise around the same time: Newcastle upon Tyne’s Corpus Christi cycle apparently ceased in 1568, while at Wakefield “a plaie commonlie called Corpus Christi plaie” “plaied this yere in Whitsonweke” was put down in 1576 by an order of 114 York Dean Matthew Hutton. And yet the Council of the North, under

111 112 113 Mills, Recycling, 146. Mills, Recycling, 147. Cheshire. 114 See J. J. Anderson, ed., Newcastle-upon-Tyne, REED (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 53–57, for what appear to be records for the last performance there in 1568, although the guilds continued to refer to a possible revival throughout much of Elizabeth’s reign. For the text of 100 Drama and religion in English provincial society the direction of the Earl of Huntingdon for much of Elizabeth’s reign, was unsuccessful in suppressing conservative religious drama across the vast terrain of “the North.” There, while the rest of the country became increasingly Protestantized, theater and Catholicism remained mutually supportive entities, with dramatic performances reaffirming a sense of solidarity and collective religious identity among those persisting in the old faith. As Christopher Haigh has demonstrated, the large deanships of the Chester diocese that stretch northward through Lancashire, like large conservative pockets of Yorkshire, Cumberland, and Westmorland, were 115 inefficiently monitored by Protestant ecclesiastical officials. And given that many civic and religious authorities in the region remained religiously conservative, it is hardly surprising that urban craft guilds and town councils continued to sponsor and organize “Corpus Christi plays” in such towns as Preston and Lancaster in Lancashire, and Kendall in 116 Westmorland, into the seventeenth century. At Kendall, a local record of 1575 refers to the “several pageants” of the annual, ongoing Corpus Christi play there, although it is unlikely that the drama was on the panoramic scale of York or Chester. More likely, as scholars now assume to have been the case at Wakefield, it constituted a cluster of small 117 pageants centering around the passion of Christ. This does not mean, of course, that the Towneley compilation, formally assumed to be the Wakefield mystery plays, was a “closet” version of the great creation-to-doomsday cycle. Barbara Palmer has suggested Doncaster, along with Wakefield and other smaller towns in the region, as possible producers of select Towneley pageants. Recently, she has pro-posed the possibility that the recusant Towneley family, itself, saved the cycle text from destruction after the dissolution of Whalley Abbey in Lancashire. This hypothesis coheres with Malcolm Parkes and Alexandra Johnston’s redating of the Towneley manuscript to Queen Mary’s reign in their new 118 paleographic and codicological study. I would like to take the argument one step further in suggesting that wealthy and well-placed recusant households not only preserved “Catholic” playbooks but were instru- mental in the continuing performance of individual “cycle” pageants well

Hutton’s order to Wakefield, see The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. A. C. Cawley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), 125. 115 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 116 Lancashire, ed. David George, REED (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), xliii and 29. 117 Douglas and Greenfield, REED; Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Gloucestershire, 168. 118 Palmer, “Recycling ‘The Wakefield Cycle’,” 86–128. Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 101 119 into the Jacobean period. When the counter-Reformation chose to reevangelize England during Elizabeth’s reign it did so via the social 120 elite rather than through popular auspices. The Stonyhurst pageants, a manuscript collection of some eighteen pageants dating from 1609,is indicative of continuing interest of northern households in reading and 121 performing biblical drama of a Catholic coloring. More than a decade later, in 1621, it was a recusant gentry family that sponsored an anti-puritan play with Catholic overtones in the grounds of Kendall Castle, and as we shall see in chapter 5 below, gentry and wealthy yeoman households in North Yorkshire during James I’s reign were prosecuted for hosting plays by the Simpsons, a recusant troupe of touring players which staged an 122 inflammatory interlude attacking the Church of England.

119 We should keep in mind that since the days of the third Earl of Northumberland under Henry VIII, playwrighting chaplains in noble households contributed plays to local civic productions; see above. 120 Haigh (see references in chapter 5). 121 See Phebe Jensen, “Recusancy, Festivity, and Community: the Simpsons at Gowthwaite Hall,” Region, Religion, and Patronage, eds. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 118n. 53;JohnBossy,The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 119. 122 Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, 135.