the york plays only survive in a single fifteenth-century manuscript.

one damaged copy, written out by hand.

We’ll be performing every word of what survives — but since the original text is a difficult-to-understand Northern dialect of fifteenth-century English, we’ll be starting with Christina M. Fitzgerald’s updated-spelling edition, plus additional updated-spelling versions Fitzgerald is developing just for our production (!) — and then each participating group will translate from the Fitzgerald version as much as is necessary to make the original text most meaningful, understandable, and accessible to them (but without skipping any words or lines in the process).

Many of the plays are missing a line, or a whole page, or a few pages, and three of the fifty plays have been lost forever. So rather than just skipping over the lost parts, each participating group will also fill in any gaps in their plays by generating their own content, based on any information that survives about the loss — and on their own creativity. That way, we can most fully re-create the experience of the medieval plays by doing as York’s medieval guild players did: preserving prior years’ traditions by weaving them in with the present.

The result will be a massive play production that is at once new and old (and thoroughly true to the surviving text), playful and sacred, unified under a common project and wildly multivocal — all contradictions which were equally applicable to the many-handed medieval productions in the first place.

we will update some of the wording, taking care that we stick closely to the meaning of each original word, line, & sentence that survives.

We might opt to speak certain lines at the same time, or overlap them, or make other creative choices in performance. We might opt to combine two or more characters into one. But we won't skip or cut a single word. We will use updates or translations to make those words and lines understandable to present-day audiences — and meaningful to our performers — without changing the meaning of the original text or replacing early voices with our own.

The original manuscript text is in an early Northern English dialect that few spectators at the 2025 staging will be able to understand — Hayll man vnmyghty þi menȝe to mende, and so forth.  

So each participating group will start with the Fitzgerald editions, which get us closer to present-day English, but still retain some lines whose language is often unfamiliar – Hail, man unmighty thy meinie to mende. These lines, spoken by actors who understand what they’re saying (thanks to Fitzgerald’s glosses and notes), will get much more meaning across.

And from there, it’s up to each group on its own to decide how/whether they want to update or translate Fitzgerald’s editions further still. The goal is to ensure that each group understands and connects emotionally with every word they speak, so different groups will make different choices here. Some groups might opt to leave the Fitzgerald version as is; some might further translate or update a few selected words, lines, or passages; some might update or modernize the language of whole passages, scenes, plays (again, always staying true to the word-by-word meaning of the original text when they do so), resulting in a hybrid production.

Overall, for the original surviving text, we will be using different intensities of translation, but never adaptation — never turning the original into something else.

but where the original word, line, sentence, or scene doesn’t survive, we’ll get more creative.

The original fifteenth-century manuscript is damaged. Sometimes a line is missing here or there. Sometimes a page is missing. Or multiple pages. Or whole plays. Sometimes, too, there is a cue that refers to information once taken for granted, but now lost (often a music cue will not specify the specific song).

So, whenever there is a gap or missing cue reference in the text, each group will fill it in with new material of their own devising, material that is meaningful, engaging, or interesting to that group — impressionistic or anachronistic as it may be.

Each group got its play-cluster assignments in autumn 2023; our goal is for each group to have generated its new additions by december 2024, and certainly before rehearsals begin — except when the group wants to generate new material by using devising techniques during the rehearsal process (in those cases, though, the devising process should start early!).

We’ll aim for each addition to be approximately the same size as what was lost (if one line is missing, we’ll only add one line back in). And above all, we’ll choose additions that will fill out, but not exceed, our assigned run times.

all 17 participating groups will follow the same ground rules about handling the text, but those rules leave much room for variation.

The ground rules below are primarily for use by our participants, but if you’re a spectator and curious about the details of how we’re handling texts, feel free to click on any item to expand it.

  • Every group will follow the cardinal rule of our production: do the whole thing, no cuts, no skips. Any new wording a group chooses must correspond directly and reasonably to Fitzgerald’s text, word for word, sentence for sentence.

    The words can be reordered within a sentence. Sometimes two words might be best translated as one, or one as two. But further afield than that is too far, and winds up losing the spirit of the exercise.

    So, by way of example, a group might take Fitzgerald’s "For this skill made I you this day, / My name to worship ay where" and either leave it as is or update/translate it to:

    - "I made you for this reason: to worship my name everywhere"

    - "Just today, I created y’all. Here's why: you glorify what I stand for, across the world"

    - "This day I created you. Because you can bear witness, the world over, to what 'Creator' means."

    In each case above, every word in the sentence is derived from a word (or two) in the medieval English, in some reasonable way (our go-to resource for word meanings should be the Middle English Dictionary). Even in that last case, every word still corresponds reasonably to one or two words in the original (“to what ‘Creator’ means” = “My name,” as spoken by God). But in that case, the rationale for correspondence should be consistent within that particular group’s approach to their full play (perhaps this group’s take on Adam and Eve positions God’s role as Creator as the primary source of his authority). We’re not going to randomly stretch lines just to stretch them.

    What we won’t do is adapt the lines too far away from the Fitzgerald text, by leaving out or adding too many words, or by ignoring obvious meanings of the original – say, "Yeah, I just made you, duh, so what?" – just ends up defeating the purpose of what we’re doing here and ends up a self-centered exercise.

  • The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century playmakers of York adapted stories from the Bible into dialogue that made sense to them. And some of that dialogue is antisemitic. And we’re definitely not gonna leave that dialogue as is. We’re not trying to wipe historical antisemitism from the record here — we’ll make resources available during the performance, including the Fitzgerald text itself, that will make the history fully clear — but live performance, especially a public performance that multiple passers-by might come to see without any context, is obviously the wrong medium for an initial confrontation with historical hate.

    The York plays were composed by multiple hands, with multiple viewpoints. In some cases, “Jew(s)” appears in the dialogue simply to refer, without any negative judgment (and sometimes with a sense of kindness and inclusion), to the ethnic, cultural, and religious group — Jesus and Mary certainly included — among whom most of the biblical events happened. We’ll leave those in.

    In other cases, “Jew(s)” is used, pejoratively and ahistorically, to refer only to the bad guys in the story, as though the good guys (Jesus, Mary, etc.) weren’t also Jews themselves. In those cases, our groups will choose either a more specific term that refers to a now-defunct subsect of the biblical-era Jewish community (perhaps “Pharisees” or “Sanhedrin”) or a more general term that gets more effectively at what is happening in the story (perhaps “persecutors,” “enemies,” or even “bad guys”).

    And in other cases in the original surviving texts, “Jew(s)” is simply used full-on ignorantly, as a vague signifier of “anyone who doesn’t believe what Christians believe.” In those cases, the most accurate present-day translation is usually “non-believer(s)” — so we’ll use that, or some equivalent.

    The York Plays' ignorantly characterized Jews and Romans often swear by or pray to a made-up pantheon of gods, as though biblical-era Judaism was pantheistic (!). The most frequently mentioned god is “Mahound,” derived etymologically — in an even more absurd turn — from the name of the holy prophet of Islam, though none of these cases can possibly refer to the prophet (because of the sense of the lines, the stated religion of the speaker, and the historical timeline of the scene's setting).

    It is doubtful that most of York’s playmakers even knew that “Mahound” had ever had any historical reference specifically to Islam (compare to “punk”, used widely today without any knowledge of its homophobic etymology). Still, we’re not gonna use that term in our 2025 productions. Groups might opt to translate/update “Mahound” to a different “god” name that does not refer, even obscurely, to any religious beliefs present-day audiences might likely hold, preferably a fitting biblical-era or Roman one (perhaps “Moloch,” which Allen Ginsburg repurposed as the god of modernity’s dehumanization, would work; perhaps “Mammon” is a good choice too). Or, where the person swearing or praying was clearly a monotheist historically, groups might choose to translate/update “Mahound” simply to “God.”

  • Because so many plays are happening at the same time, our groups will be rehearsing with timers. So as we prepare our texts ahead of rehearsal, as we rehearse, and especially as we develop new additions to fill in the holes in the text, we’ll keep these assigned run-times in mind:

    Clusters 1-7, and 9 should run 20 minutes each.

    Cluster 8 should run 18 minutes. (Clusters 8 and 32, being shorter than the surrounding plays, will be leaving a few minutes unused, so PLS can organize welcome speeches, blessings, and acknowledgements during those minutes).

    Clusters 31, 33, and 34 should each run 25 minutes.

    All other Clusters should run 24 minutes.

    We haev to build timing concerns into our process from the beginning. If any group misses their target time, it will throw everyone else off pretty hard — so we’re going to do our best. Even if everybody keeps within their assigned run time, we already have a massively long production. When we add the assigned times above to a 5-7 minute transition after every play, with each play repeating three or four times, we get an 18 1/2 hour production — that is, from 6am to 12:30am. So we are going to keep things TIGHT!

    That doesn’t mean we’re going to try and get everything exactly the same at every run – that never makes for good live performance! Instead, we’ll pay attention to run times in preparing our scripts and scores. Plays that keep running short in rehearsal should add flexible or expandable content (maybe a song or dance?) toward the end of their play, so that they can extend their action to fit into the available time. Plays that keep running long in rehearsal should set some of their opening dialogue in the transition period that follows the play prior to theirs. Their action can begin while the various plays are switching from station to station, even before their full cast and stage has been set up. In rehearsal, we’ll have to practice again and again with timing, so that each group is ready to handle the unpredictable timing issues that will always arise in performance.

    Above all, we will not use any set pieces, design elements, or effects that require any but the shortest, simplest set-up times, doable in a few seconds during pre-play transitions.

    As we develop and rehearse, we’ll keep in contact with the PLS organizers regarding timing. If our assigned run time isn’t working, we’ll work with PLS to figure out a solution ahead of time.