The York Mystery Plays Performance in the City

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The York Mystery Plays Performance in the City Edited by Margaret Rogerson THE UNIVERSITY YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS CONTENTS List of Illustrations vii Contributors ix Acknowledgements xiii Abbreviations xiv Introduction: Performance in the City Margaret Rogerson 1 Foreword: The Mystery Plays and the Community Keith Jones 25 1. Nicholas Lancaster, Richard of Gloucester and the York Corpus 31 Christi Play Richard Beadle 2. Bridging the Jurisdictional Divide: The Masons and the York 53 Corpus Christi Play Sheila K. Christie 3. Group Dynamics: The Noah Family in the York Pageant of 75 The Flood Mike Tyler 4. Embodied Enchantments: Cognitive Theory and the York Mystery 91 Plays Jill Stevenson 5. Performing Mystery Plays in 21st-century York 113 Practicalities of Modern Production: Setting the Groundwork 113 Elenid Davies and Ben Pugh The Pageant Master's Overview 116 Mike Tyler 6. The York Wagons: Construction, Dressing and Performance 125 Designing for the Fall of the Angels (Young York Civic Trust) 125 Peter Brown A Custom-built Wagon for the Crucifixion Play (Company 127 of Butchers) Tony Wright Creation of the World to the Fifth Day - the Wagon (York Guild of 132 Building) Steve Bielby 7. Interpreting the York Text: Words and Music 135 The Potters' Pageant of Pentecost (Pocklington School) 135 Emma Cunningham and Alan Heaven The Pageant of The Resurrection - Christ's Appearance to Mary 138 Magdalene (Heslington Church) Linda AH Music and the York Mystery Plays 140 Paul Toy 8. Producing The Creation and Fall of Man in 21st-century York: 145 'Thys werke is wroght now' Giveno Williams, with John Merrylees and David Richmond 9. The Communities of the York Plays 157 Alexandra F. Johnston 10. Raising the Cross: Pre-textual Theatricality and the York 165 Crucifixion Play Sharon Aronson-Lehavi 11. Confraternities and Civic Ceremonial: the Siena Palio 181 Pamela M. King 12. Devotional Acting: Sydney 2008 and Medieval York 205 Margaret Rogerson Glossary of Middle English Words 227 Bibilography 229 Index 243.

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Wickedly Devotional Comedy in the York Temptation of Christ1 Christopher Crane United States Naval Academy Make rome belyve, and late me gang! [let me pass!] Who makes here al þis þrang? High you hense, high myght ou hang Right with a roppe. I drede me þat I dwelle to lang [I’m delayed too long] To do a jape. [mischief, joke] (York Plays 22.1-6) Satan opens the York Temptation of Christ2 pageant with these words, employing a complex and subtle rhetorical comedy aimed at moving ﬁ fteenth-century spectators toward lives of greater devotion. With “late me gang!” Satan (“Diabolus” in the text) achieves more in these lines than just making a scene; he draws his audience members into the action. Medieval staging in York likely had Satan approach the pageant wagon stage through the audience, addressing them as he enters. As spectators respond, perhaps stepping aside, smiling, or even egging him on, they both submit to and celebrate him. However, the central action of this pageant is Christ’s successful resistance to the devil’s efforts to entice him to sin.3 Theologically and thematically, this victory parallels the pageant of Adam and Eve’s temptation earlier in the cycle4 and establishes Christ’s qualiﬁ cation to redeem the fall of mankind with his death, which follows in the series of passion pageants that follow this scene. If the purpose of this pageant is to illustrate Christ’s victory, why does it open with this entertaining portrayal of Satan? Why not portray Jesus in prayer or meditating on the Scriptures he will use to resist Satan’s tactics? Can the pageant provide an orthodox message about the devil after endowing him with such charisma? The exemplary and biblical nature of the mystery plays in general (whether humorous or not) gives them a homiletic quality that frequently invites the audience to 29 30 Christopher Crane participate vicariously in the enacted stories and to appropriate the lessons of Scripture.
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152 Issues in Review careful thought and tighter direction could have made this production work that I was even for some of their more serious parents . mind, wai Certainly the Catholic University of Americas `Slaughter of the Innocents' dramatic li proved that contemporary stylization could work, theatrically, without com- medievalis promising either religious values or the integrity of the original text . This had gathe Herod was a mad Edwardian villain in a modern suit, a gold cape, and a hat this perfor that no one of any era would have been caught dead in, while the messenger the spect was a bicycle courier. For the slaughter itself, which involved bundles of red design and rags rather than the usual dolls, the soldiers four - instead of the original two - clear sense donned black capes with massive shoulder pads, along with dark glasses and creased. By nylon masks, and strapped large plastic buckets to their feet as stilts, before seemed to making their measured advance toward the audience ; they were thus far more compelled e visible than the women they confronted in the crowd, whose screams were as possible, nonetheless distinctly audible above the percussive effects provided by the other cases, this Y actors onstage, visibly watching the carnage below. The effect was far more which indi chilling than comic, in an episode that too often seems unintentionally funny . two genera Without the comfort of identifiably medieval (or merely silly) garb on the Before 1 soldiers to distance them from us, we are forced to confront them more York Cycle, directly. This is not a new concept: evidence suggests that medieval audiences bara Palmer would similarly have been confronted with a Herodian court that appeared sional' mod vaguely Saracen - both distantly Other and, unlike the actual historical cordless drills Herod, sufficiently contemporary and familiar to suggest a real threat .
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