ABOUT THE MEDIEVAL YORK PLAYS

Dozens of record books and archives from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, in the city of York, England, bear witness to a tradition that began there at some point before the year 1376 and continued to 1569: the annual Corpus Christi Play. Nearly every year, on Corpus Christi Day, that “play” (more like what we would call a “play festival”!) could include as many as fifty-seven different “pageants” (more like what we would call a “play” in a “play festival”). According to the records, each pageant-play was produced and performed by a different community group — usually a guild. Guilds were independent and sometimes very influential groups organized around a particular craft, trade, merchant group, or religious idea (in practice, the guilds combined what we now call a “trade union” with what we now call a “fraternity,” though membership in many guilds was open to both men and women).

The guilds and other groups performed these pageant-plays on mobile wagon stages (which, often confusingly, the records also refer to as “pageants” — the pageants were what pageants were performed on). Pageant-wagons allowed the performers to repeat their pageant-plays over and over, at various performance stations in main streets throughout the city of York, so that large numbers of locals and tourists could see them. The number and location of the performance stations varied from year to year, but there were usually about twelve of them (sometimes a bit fewer, sometimes a bit more). Pageant 1 would start at Station 1 at dawn, then repeat at Station 2 (while Pageant 2 started at Station 1), then repeat at Station 3 (while Pageant 2 ran at Station 2 and Pageant 3 at Station 1), and so on across all the stations — until Pageant 1 made it all the way to Station 12, finishing up as Pageant 13 started its first run back at Station 1 — they kept it going like that, switching in a new play at Station 1 every round, until Pageant 57 finished its final run at Station 12, well into the night. Imagine: up to fifty-seven plays, each repeating twelve times across the city, all on one day, every year! There has been some scholarly debate about whether, how, and why such a “maximal” performance schedule really could have worked within a single day, most recently in 2019, when Arlynda Boyer proposed a “staggered” model; in 2025 we’ll be using a “maximal but clustered” model, described and defended by GM Matt Sergi in his 2025 response.

The number of plays also changed from year to year. By the late 1400s the number seems to have settled at about fifty: it was sometime between 1463 and 1477 when a scribe in medieval York (probably the city’s Common Clerk) copied down the York Register — the only surviving copy of the play scripts that the Corpus Christi performers used. Since each of the guilds usually handled the copying their own relatively disposable scripts (which had to be done by hand — no printing press yet!), all but one of which were lost forever (the Scriveners’ Guild did save one of theirs, of the Doubting Thomas pageant) it is very lucky that the handwritten York Register copy made it all the way to the present day. That handwritten copy was damaged considerably in the intervening years, so that many of the surviving plays have chunks missing, whose lost contents we can only guess at; the copyist also missed three of the fifty plays then being performed (Marriage in Cana, Feast at Simon’s House, and Funeral of Mary), so we can only guess at those too. But even without those lost parts, the forty-seven plays in the York Register add up to more than 13,000 lines of medieval dramatic poetry.

By “medieval,” we mean the middle ages — that is, the period between the fifth-century withdrawal of ancient Roman troops from Britain and the sixteenth-century rise to dominance of “Renaissance” or “modern” cultural ideals (which happened in York decades later than it did in London). During this period, most people in York were Christian — what we’d now call Catholic — but outside of an educated elite, most laypeople (that is, people who weren’t in the clergy) in England had only a relatively limited understanding of the religion that they practiced (especially since Church services, prayers, scripture, and rituals were exclusively in Latin, which few English people understood beyond a few words). That’s no value judgment on medieval English religion one way or the other: it is simply a way of engaging with religion that is concerned more with its social, cultural, festival, and broadly moral aspects than with matters of theology, philosophy, or doctrine.

It is usually the educated elite (think Chaucer) whose perspectives get studied in school. But medieval laypeople’s flexible engagement with religion made religious drama very important — and very entertaining. For those who did not understand much Latin, plays were one of the primary ways to learn about, and think and play through, the sacred stories of the Bible. So, on Corpus Christi Day — the yearly celebration of the Catholic belief that the real Body of Jesus Christ (corpus christi) was present in the sacramental bread and wine at weekly Mass — the people of York developed plays centred on the Bible’s sacred stories about Jesus. The most highly educated folks, with their deep knowledge of Catholic theology, certainly had a hand in the initial composition of the play scripts, and probably weighed in at other times as well… but as those lines developed from generation to generation, with each play-script in the hands of a different guild, the interests and influences of countless hands and voices shaped the York plays into a massive entertainment for, of, and by the community of York. Most notable is the plays’ focus on the experience of Jesus’ virgin mother, Mary, about whom the Bible says relatively little; drawing on various popular sources and adding much material of their own, the playmakers of York add stories about Mary’s pregnancy, young motherhood, and her life after Jesus’ death, into her own death, funeral, ascension into Heaven, and crowning as Heaven’s Queen. But the full sweep of the fifty York Corpus Christi plays, which extend across the whole of biblical history from God’s Creation of the universe through to the final days of the Last Judgment, include many, many other embellishments on subjects only briefly mentioned, or never mentioned at all, in the actual Bible. The result is a kind of medieval dramatic fanfic, compiling countless voices and perspectives into an all-day, radically participatory way of doing plays, and playing with the most sacred of subjects, that present-day models of theatre cannot really comprehend. As much as the plays’ biblical subject matter might baffle some present-day audiences, what these massive plays ask of the community that puts them on, and offers them out of each other’s efforts, is unparalleled in the modern theatre, and can now challenge us to rethink what public performance has been and can be.

The only way to really understand medieval drama is to do it, or witness it, live.

But if you’d like to learn more about the history of, and read some of, the York Plays, we recommend the updated-spelling edition that we’re using as the base for our shows: Christina M. Fitzgerald’s The York Corpus Christi Play: Selected Pageants, which offers informative introductions to the plays overall and to each included play individually.

If you’re curious to see the York Plays in their original spelling — and to read an in-depth introduction to the York Plays that is available for free online — we also recommend Clifford Davidson’s The York Corpus Christi Plays.