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!
