Hey there, I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and today we’re going to
circle up our pageant wagons and talk about the theater of the late Middle Ages: mainly
mystery plays and morality plays.
Judged by contemporary standards, these plays are… awkward.
They’re episodic, kind of basic, and pretty chaotic in their mix of comedy, drama, and
scripture.
But some of the jokes are good.
Like the ones about baby-eating [PAUSE] That’s more Yorick’s speed than mine - you love
a morose groaner, dontcha, Bonehead?
Mystery plays and morality plays were the first European plays to unite religious life
and secular life in more than a thousand years.
Whole towns pitched in to create them; whole towns arrived to see them.
Those wagon wheels paved the way for the Renaissance’s theatrical explosion.
Today, we’re going to look today at The Second Shepherd’s Play, written by the Wakefield
Master.
It may seem a little hum-drum, but no Wakefield Master, no Shakespeare.
And no Shakespeare: NO YORICK!
Actually maybe that’s ok ... INTRO
A couple of episodes ago, we looked at liturgical drama: those moments, first in the Easter
mass and then all year, when priests and monks acted out some of the liturgy.
This form took off, and spread all throughout Europe.
And by the 11th and 12th centuries, got pretty elaborate.
It expanded out from the altar and spread all over the church, occupying small spaces
usually known as mansions, which were decorated to suggest different scenes.
One personal favorite: The Hell Mouth.
Intense!
For a while, liturgical drama works.
You have the liturgy, you have the drama, you have the mansions—religious fun for
the whole family.
But eventually it’s just not enough.
Because here’s the thing: Medieval Gothic churches are big.
They’re really big.
They are trying to stretch all the way up to heaven and capture something of God’s
majesty in glass and stone.
If you’ve ever stood in Notre Dame, or York Minster, you’re like, yup, that there’s
some world class majesty.
And yet, even these colossal churches become too small to contain the awesomeness that
is THEE-AH-TAH!.
So liturgical drama moves to the only other place with enough square footage to accommodate
all that dang majesty: outside.
Now you’re thinking, yay, fun, liturgical drama al fresco!
Not so fast.
In 1210, Pope Innocent III issues an edict saying that the clergy can’t perform plays
in public.
The clergy are like, “Oh well.”
But the people are like, “No!
You can’t walk it back.
We want hellmouths!
Bigger!
Better!
More!”
So in the early 13th century a radical thing happens: Drama moves from being a clerical
phenomenon to being a secular one.
We back, baby!
Since Roman times—for more than a thousand years!—Christians have haaaated theater.
But Christians also loved theater, or the liturgical drama wouldn’t have caught on
the way it did.
Performing plays inside the church, basing them exclusively on the Christian liturgy,
and having members of the clergy act in them were the strategies Christians used to make
it less sinful… but that’s all gone now.
Drama has left the building and by building I mean basilica; priests are no longer the
actors.
Bring on the incest plots and the dancing girls!
Ok, it doesn’t escalate THAT quickly, It’s going to take theater a few decades to get
truly decadent.
Theater sticks pretty closely to the Bible and associated religious texts as the liturgical
dramas transform into the cycle plays.
Cycle plays are an ambitious genre of medieval drama that depicts the whole history of the
Christian universe, starting with the creation of the world, and ending with the death and
resurrection of Christ, and skimming most of the Old and New Testaments in between.
Some of them go all the way up to the Last Judgment.
In England, the performing of cycles began sometime in the late 1300s and continued until
into the late 1500s, when they were banned because of the English Reformation.
The Protestants weren’t so keen on graven images, even fun theatrical ones, and cycle
plays were seen as too Catholic.
The same thing happened throughout Europe.
In the age of religious disputes and wars, religious drama was seen as too controversial
(even if it was very popular).
In some cities cycle plays were organized by religious guilds, but in many places, especially
England, they were produced by trade and craft guilds.
This is why they are sometimes known as mystery plays, because a “mystery” was another
word for a trade.
So carpentry, that’s a mystery.
As are ship-building, blacksmithing, and baking.
Listen, have you ever tried to make croissants?
Or a schooner?
Very Mysterious!
The plays themselves are not mysteries like Murder She Wrote or Serial.
They’re more about mystery in the religious sense.
Whodunnit?
God, pretty much always.
Or sometimes Judas.
Cycle plays are also known as passion plays if the particular cycle focuses on the passion
of the Christ.
In most cases, each guild would be responsible for staging a biblical story, usually one
overlapping with their work.
So the shipwrights might take on Noah and the Ark, and the bakers the Last Supper.
Each guild would supply the costumes, actors, and set – and pile it all into a big cart,
known as a pageant wagon—basically, a theatremobile.
The carts were trundled through the town, stopping often at fixed points to perform.
Or maybe they stayed put and audiences moved?
Scholars aren’t sure.
And by the way, the move from cart to cart mirrors the way dramatic action would move
from mansion to mansion in liturgical dramas.
Each play lasted half an hour, and there were upwards of forty plays!
If you thought Les Miz was long, get ready.
The cycle dramas were often performed over several days, though—you weren’t expected
to sit for twenty hours straight.
You could relieve yourself, grab a beer or a lard-based pie.
Most actors weren’t professionals, either: they were men and boys, drawn from the working
class.
In some towns, women participated.
Amateur actors were expected to take their work very seriously, though: you got fined
if you didn’t know your lines.
The cycle plays were a big draw for tourists and a chance for towns to show off their civic
pride, and their skills as craftspeople.
OOOooooOOOOoooo - mysteriiioooouuussss!
Most plays restated the basic action of a Bible story, though guilds would dress stories
up with anachronistic jokes and the occasional bit of troubling anti-Semitism.
Plays were typically a mix of highly stylized action and contemporary realism.
And authors were mostly anonymous, although a couple of Frenchmen signed their plays about
the lives of saints, also known as miracle plays.
Medieval stagecraft wasn’t the most sophisticated–when your stage is a wagon, there are limits–but
guilds wanted to put on a good show, so there were plenty of special effects, like trap
doors, fake corpses, fake blood and some fire effects.
I know, right?
Don’t tell the fire marshall guild!
One of the best preserved and best loved of the cycle plays is “The Second Shepherd’s
Play.”
This English work is part of the Wakefield Cycle.
It was composed by an anonymous writer sometime in the 15th century, known only as the Wakefield
Master.
It’s called “The Second Shepherd’s Play,” because there’s an earlier shepherd’s
play in the same manuscript trove.
Let’s take it to the, Thoughtbubble: It’s freezing cold in a meadow somewhere
in the Middle East (that looks a lot like the north of England).
Coll, the first shepherd, enters … and complains about the weather.
Then a second shepherd, Gib, arrives.
He complains about the weather, too, and also about his wife, who he says is fat.
A third shepherd, Daw, shows up, saying, “Christ’s cross me speed,” which is odd because Christ
hasn’t been born yet.
Oh!
And he also complains about the weather.
HASHTAG RELATABLE Northern England content right here, huh?
Then Mak enters.
Mak is a sheep stealer.
Conflict!
He tries to trick the shepherds, but they’re onto him.
eventually they bond about how terrible Mak’s drunk, baby-having wife is, and everyone goes
to sleep.
Except Mak!
He puts a spell on the rest, and runs off with a sheep, bringing it home to his wife
Gill, who’s like, “Way to go.
Now you’re going to be hanged.”
But Mak is like, “Come on!
It’s meat!”
So Gill comes up with a plan to put the sheep in the cradle and say it’s a baby.
Good thinking, Gill.
Back in the meadow, Mak pretends to wake up alongside the shepherds, but they realize
a sheep is missing, and go to search his house.
Gill fends them off, joking about eating the baby, which is maybe about the Eucharist?
but also about cannibalism?
The shepherds take off, but then they’re like, “Oh wait, we forgot to bring gifts
for the baby.”
So they come back and find the sheep!
Instead of hanging Mak, they decide to roll him up in a cloth and beat him black and blue.
Hooray!
Another one of those famous happy Christian endings!
Thanks, Thoughtbubble.
Wait… wasn’t that supposed to be a Bible story?
Well, after the shepherd’s leave, an angel comes down and tells them to go to Bethlehem
and see the Christ child.
Bethlehem is conveniently very nearby.
They go visit Mary and the little baby Jesus, bringing him cherries, a bird, and a tennis
ball.
Not a joke.
An actual tennis ball.
In this play, we can see the Bible story, mostly borrowed from the gospel of Luke, intersect
pretty comfortably with the English vernacular: entertaining an audience while also celebrating
Jesus.
It’s comic and dramatic, serious and silly, high and low, religious and folkloric.
It reminds the audience that Christ was born to save northern English shepherds, as well
as biblical types.
And there’s just a little cannibalism—for fun.
Cycle plays weren’t the only fun in town, though.
Pretty soon another form of medieval drama made its debut: the secular play!
Which first appeared in France in the late 13th century.
These plays were often based on folklore, hence “The Play of the Greenwood,” includes
both fairies and townspeople, and “The Play of Robin and Marion,” which is the first
dramatization of the Robin Hood stories.
We’re still dramatizing this one seven hundred years later, though now with Kevin Costner
and the soothing pipes of Bryan Adams.
The other important medieval genre is the morality play, which Hildegarde of Bingen
started.
The most famous morality play is “Everyman,” which is still performed annually and often
updated.
Morality plays have one simple message: YOU GONNA DIE.
So you’d better get your act together, because all that love and wealth and fun aren’t
gonna follow you six feet under.
Right, Yorick?
But you know what will follow you?
Good deeds.
So go help some old ladies cross a cattle path.
Morality plays have a huge influence on the plays of the English Renaissance.
Mystery, folk, and morality plays had a good run.
They remained the dominant forms of theater for more than 300 years.
And as I mentioned, “Everyman” is still being performed today.
Take that, “Cats!”
But things get tricky at the beginning of the Renaissance when Protestant reformers
look around and decide that drama and religion shouldn’t mix, and they ban cycle dramas.
Happy trails, pageant wagons.
Until next time… curtain!