Medieval Religious Drama

Long before the emergence of a fully secular theater in the age of Shakespeare, there developed in England a rich tradition of religious drama. This originated in the form of Latin plays developed by the clergy and primarily for their spiritual edification, but soon developed into a series of plays written and performed for lay audiences. These plays were generally of two broad kinds: Morality plays and Mystery plays. Our survey includes one of each.

The creators of these plays may have been familiar with the principles of classical rhetoric, according to which literature has three primary purposes: docere, to instruct delectare, to delight or entertain movere, to inspire virtuous action/behavior

Unlike Mystery plays, which are based on biblical events and stories, Morality plays are fictional allegories. Characters typically represent the abstract concepts for which they are named—e.g. Death or Time, or any one of the Seven Deadly Sins such as Gluttony or Sloth or Pride—or a representative Christian, as is the case with the title character of Everyman. These plays captivate and delight their audiences (delectare), but their chief purpose is to teach (docere)—more particularly, to chasten sinners and prepare them for the ultimate realities of death and judgment.

Morality plays were a later development of the earlier Mystery-play tradition. Whereas Moralities are stand-alone plays, individual Mystery plays belong to elaborate “cycles”—series of plays that covered all of biblical history, from Creation and the Fall of Man, to Noah’s flood, the coming of Jesus, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Crucifixion, and on through to the final Judgment and Doomsday. These cycles were known for the towns in which they were performed—e.g. the York cycle or the Chester cycle. The Second Shepherd’s Pageant belongs to the Townely cycle.

The Mysteries were performed as part of the festivities surrounding Whitsuntide and especially Corpus Christi: spring and Easter festivals celebrating central ideas in Christianity, namely the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection of Jesus. The plays were staged by guilds (i.e. trade unions and civic organizations), each guild being responsible usually for one particular play. They were performed on open carts or wagons that moved from station to station about the city, so spectators could remain in one location and watch a succession of plays in order, each cart followed by the next in an unfolding enactment of the Bible’s major events.

Cycle performances typically began at dawn and lasted, in some cases, until well after midnight. A typical spectator might have witnessed in a single day all of biblical history, beginning appropriately with Creation in the morning, and concluding with Doomsday in the deep dark of night.

The chief purpose of these seasonal performances was to edify the faithful through an entertaining spectacle (delectare, “to delight”) that would inspire awe (movere, “to move”), and to proclaim the “good news” of the Gospel (docere, “to instruct”).

Corpus Christi and the Medieval Episteme

The Second Shepherd’s Pageant or Secunda Pastorum exemplifies the Mystery play’s combining of spiritual edification with entertaining diversion. It portrays a single incident in the Gospel stories, namely the Adoration wherein the Shepherds or Magi visit the Nativity scene, bearing gifts for the infant Jesus. But this is only one part of a two-part structure. Indeed, the biblical material receives scant treatment compared to the comical intrigue involving the shepherds Coll, Gib, and Daw, Mak the sheep stealer, and Mak’s wife Gill. What are we to make of this incredible combination of biblical story and farce?

One possibility, if we examine the play primarily through a religious lens, is to see the entertaining spectacle as mere bait (delectare) with which to captivate the audience in order that they might be taught (docere). But given the predominance of the comical plot involving the sheep-stealing couple and their dupes, perhaps the reverse is true: the Adoration scene justifies or sanctifies/sanctions the entertainment—makes it acceptable by infusing it with a religious topic.

A more complex (and more likely) reading, an extension primarily of the religious view, recognizes that the combining of folk elements with lofty spiritual notions gets at something essential to Medieval Christian experience: namely, the idea that all of creation is an expression of the divine—that the most elemental features of material reality are charged with the numinous. This idea derives from the Incarnation, the central Christian doctrine according to which the “Word [i.e. God] was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Corpus Christi, which means “body of Christ,” is the name of the spring festival celebrating the Incarnation. It is also the context in which SSP was first performed.

The philosophical basis for this incarnational or sacramental view of the world had been developed by the thirteenth-century Dominican friar and philosopher Thomas Aquinas. The Thomistic principle of analogy, derived from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, held that the universe consists of a vast web of correspondences and likenesses, everything connected with everything else through some sort of resemblance. The stars are to the firmament, for example, what flowers are to the surface of the earth. Or consider the man-as-microcosm analogy, wherein the seven orifices of the head correspond to the seven planets. Similarly, in an expansion of ancient Galenic physiology, the “humours” or bodily fluids governing health and mental states correspond to planets and earthly metals: Mercury=quicksilver=the sanguine humour (red bile or blood), hence a quick-witted or “mercurial” temperament Saturn=lead=the melancholy humour (black bile), hence a gloomy or “saturnine” disposition Mars=sulfur=the choleric humor (yellow bile), hence a propensity for fighting or a “martial” mode of being Not merely fanciful conceits or metaphors, these correspondences describe the Medieval world-view, knowledge of how the world actually is, its constituent parts meaningfully connected by an intricate web of analogy.

This idea was extended to include the idea expressed by the Latin phrase sub species aeternitatis: that the material world is a reflection or manifestation of the eternal world of the spirit and the divine. It is in this context that the Incarnation was thought to redeem an otherwise fallen universe by infusing it with the sacred. Spirit and matter in this view are not opposites, but rather elements of an essential unity. Their separation, a feature of later philosophical developments, had not yet occurred for the English and European imagination. And the supreme religious expression of this cultural episteme (mode of knowing) was the sacrament of the Eucharist, the ritual wherein bread was magically transformed into the divine body of God.

This idea at the center of the Corpus Christi festival found its way into numerous forms of cultural expression. To quote historian Miri Rubin, “rituals within which [the Eucharist] unfolded offered ideas of further and analogous uses in other spheres of life.” One of the more conspicuous of these spheres was that of the Medieval theater.