What are mystery plays? :)
Mystery plays are short Medieval plays depicting or dramatising scenes from the bible and one of the older traditions of formal drama in Europe. There’s some debate over the word ‘mystery’, which might mean ‘miracle’ as in the miraculous events of the bible or ‘ministerium’, the Latin term for ‘craft‘.
In the earliest days (dating back to 9th century) these plays seem to have been acted in churches by the clergy, but following the 1210 Papal edict forbidding the clergy from acting in public, they became lay dramas and came to be performed in vernacular. In England, it became a tradition for the guilds in prosperous towns like London or York to put on these productions (hence the debate about whether ‘mystery’ refers to craft) on Corpus Cristi day. Each guild would perform one tale from the bible, often one that related to their trade (the carpenters for the building of Noah’s ark, the goldsmiths for the nativity, the nail-makers for the crucifixion(!)…). The laity also began to incorporate comic scenes, and the acting and characterisation became more sophisticated.
In York, it’s known that the plays were played on large wagons with a platform at head height which served as a stage. These wagons processed around the city, stopping at each waypoint and performing their part before moving to the next point. Each play is quite short, but the events covered stretch from the fall of man to Christ’s redemption of mankind on the cross, so taken as a whole it can take an entire day to perform.
Mystery plays were eventually banned in England, mostly as a result of the Reformation, because of the Protestant disapproval of the depiction of Godhead, and because the mystery plays were a firmly Catholic tradition that the Church of England had an interest in suppressing. It probably didn’t help that religious drama was also banned on the Catholic side at the Council of Trent (1545–63) in response to Protestant criticisms. In England, there were clear attempts to continue the much-loved tradition for a while after, evidenced by the fact that the Wakefield plays show some signs of Protestant censorship, but it did eventually die out (the last records are 1579).
The other type of medieval drama to look out for is the ‘morality play’ (plays include Mankind, and Everyman: both worth a read). These aren’t biblical and aren’t associated with particular feast days. They often depict a single person (who represents all mankind) as they struggle to be virtuous amongst the earthly temptations faced in their life. The characters are often allegorical, with names like ‘World’, 'Good Deeds’, 'Greed’ (the seven deadly sins frequently make an appearance). The texts of many of these plays (but not all) have been preserved and are occasionally produced in professional theatres as well as by towns like York. If you have any interest in Middle English, they’re also quite entertaining to read.
From an early modern perspective medieval drama is important because it’s quite likely that a lot of the sixteenth-century dramatists we study today would have seen some of these plays (Shakespeare maybe in Coventry). The consequent influence of the mystery plays on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in England can’t be underestimated: the mixing of tragedy and comedy, the struggle between virtue and vice, the free treatment of time, and the metaphor of the stage as the world come from the English tradition rather than Greek drama, the other major influence. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus is probably the most obvious instance: allegorical characters, the fate of the sinner, the good and bad angel, the seven deadly sins, the time-frame covering 24 years in a single play: it’s a sophisticated morality play that self-reflexivly comments on its own genre and tradition by making it about the struggle of a single man rather than the representative of humankind in general. Characterisation had some influence too: for instance, stock characters like the ‘Vice’ character (Lucifer or Herod are biblical examples) traditionally had monologues detailing their evil plans spoken directly to the audience, and informs characters like Richard III, Edmund and Iago in Shakespeare’s plays. In fact, Shakespeare alludes to the Herod character, famous for drama-queen shouting, directly in Hamlet’s advice to the Players: ‘I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod’ (3.2.12-14).
