When the production and performance of these plays were taken over by the professional guilds, each guild took the responsibility for a particular episode or set of episodes from scriptural history. One guild, for example, might present the Fall of Lucifer, another the Killing of Abel, and yet another the Crucifixion and so on. To maintain the interest of the performers as well as the audience, which was chiefly the trade guilds as well, there was a growing tendency to incorporate topical and social themes into the plays, even though the emphasis remained on God’s relationship with man and on the promise of salvation through Christ.
“The Feast of Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ), established in 1311 to celebrate the miracle of the Eucharist, created a framework for integrating these plays. The English mystery plays were probably first performed in Chester, sometime around the middle of the thirteenth century. By the sixteenth century, several English towns had established the performance on Corpus Christi of long cycles of mystery plays, covering sacred history from Creation to Judgment Day. “ 1
Once the religious dramas had been removed from the church and were under the control of the clergy and performed by the trade guilds, their progressive secularization led even upto incorporating elements from popular farce. They became boisterous and realistic in tone and style, often moving from serious religious subjects to topical farce and back, as in the well known “The Second Shepherd’s Play” from the Wakefield cycle.
Often critics deem this play blasphemous due to the comic treatment given to religious subject matter.
"The play is hardly blasphemous in the juxtaposition of the two worlds, a juxtaposition so often found on the restricted stage of the pageant wagon." (Kahrl p. 71). 2
However, A.C. Baugh as quoted in Tailor's Medieval English Drama has this to say on the subject:
"The length of the Mak episode is hopelessly out of proportion to the proper matter of the play. The Second Shepherd's Play, as a shepherd's play, is an artistic absurdity; as a farce of Mak the sheepstealer, it is the masterpiece of English religious drama." 3
It does seem strange that the main portion of the play has nothing to do with the nativity.
It has been suggested by some scholars that The Second Shepherd's Play is in a sense an exploration of the Christian significance of the number three. For example, it focuses on three shepherds that begin the play with three soliloquies.
"It treats three motifs appropriate to the nativity story- law, charity, and wonder- and associates these motifs with the parts of the Holy Trinity." (Gardner, p. 85). 4
The play also contains three distinct movements, and closes with three adorations of the Christ child to whom they give three gifts.
The most grotesque figure of all is certainly Cain in the play ‘The Killing of Abel’, who appears as the very type of a coarse and unmannerly person. According to medieval tradition, the reason why the Lord did not look graciously upon Cain’s offering was that Cain offered it reluctantly; and therefore, grew the suggestion of common church literature, that Cain was the prototype of stingy peasants who tried to avoid the obligation of paying tithes to the priests.
“Though moral teaching does not play a great part in mysteries, clerical authors repeatedly made use of the occasion to impress the payment of tithe upon peasants as an important moral duty; and nowhere is this done with so palpable a directness as here.” 5
After this long-drawn-out scene, the murder of the brother is treated quite shortly, which again distorts the Biblical Sources.
In the Chester Cycle, however, contents of several scenes are truly instructive or didactic, such as the offering of bread and wine by Melchizedek, or the prophecies of Ezekiel, Zechariah, Daniel and St. John concerning the end of the world. The common humorous figures of Noah’s wife, and of the shepherds on Christmas Eve, are still present; but, overall, the original purpose of this cycle, namely, a representation of the biblical history of the world, appears more plainly here than in the York Plays etc, which, for the sake of what was theatrically effective, almost entirely neglected the original instructive element.
“It was this increasing secularization and farcical elaboration that led the Church to withdraw official approval and support from the mystery and miracle plays, and finally to suppress them altogether in England following the Reformation in the sixteenth century.”
The actors in the mysteries performed under the direction of the guilds were amateurs. Most of the mystery plays were written in the simple and widely familiar stanza form of the popular romance. The writing and characterization were, for the most part, crude, as more effort was expended on the elaborate staging of the plays than on their literary quality.
Thus, in conclusion many scholars believe that these mystery plays made the stage for the preaching of social morals rather than religious and hence, to achieve that, did in fact distort their biblical sources quite a bit.
The mystery and miracle plays, like morality plays, became less popular in England during the sixteenth century, probably because of growing pressure by religious authorities regarding their blasphemous content, however, their influence on later English drama cannot be over looked.
End Notes
- Bertrin, G. & Remy, A.F.J. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume X. Copyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton Company
- Kahrl, Stanley J. (1974). Traditions of Medieval English Drama. London: Hutchinson University Library.
- Taylor, Jerome, and Nelson, Alan H. (Ed.). (1972). Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
- Gardner, John. (1974). The Construction of the Wakefield Cycle. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
- Dwyer, D.W. The Second Shepherd's Play in The Wakefield Cycle. Copyright 1998.
Bibliography
Happe, P. English Mystery Plays. London: Penguin Books,1975.
Ward & Trent, et al. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–21
Kahrl, Stanley J. (1974). Traditions of Medieval English Drama. London: Hutchinson University Library.
Taylor, Jerome, and Nelson, Alan H. (Ed.). (1972). Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Blue,T. Mystery and miracle plays in English drama. Pagewise, Inc. 2001.
Bertrin, G. & Remy, A.F.J. The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume X. Copyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton Company
Gardner, John. (1974). The Construction of the Wakefield Cycle. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.