N-Town Plays
Encyclopedia
The N-Town Plays are a cycle of 42 medieval Mystery play
s from between 1450 and 1500.
. The name Hegge Plays only briefly caught on, and the most common way to refer to these plays now is The N-Town Plays, after the reference in the last stanza of the opening proclamation that the play was to be played at "N-Town"; when the plays toured from town to town, N. (meaning nomen, the Latin for name) would be replaced by the name of the town the cycle was playing in at any given time.
The plays of the N-Town cycle vary from simple, almost liturgical, recitations of Biblical texts (as in the Moses play of the Ten Commandments, the Jesse play with its kings and prophets, and the Penetecost play) to highly complex and fast moving short dramas on Biblical themes that have a naturalism and liveliness (as in the Death of Herod and the Woman Taken in Adultery) almost unique in early drama. These plays can all be played from a wagon or a single booth stage. On the other hand, the two Mary Plays and the Passion Play were written for what is often called "place and scaffold" production in the round using "scaffolds" or raised stages and also the "platea" or the "place" between the stages.
The true nature of the manuscript has been hidden by the fact that the scribe arranged all the episodes in "chronological order" starting with Creation and ending with Judgment, simulating an episodic play presenting salvation history as in the two northern civic cycles from York and Chester. As he did this he buried the Mary Play inside the Nativity sequence and copied the Passion Play into place between the Raising of Lazarus and the Resurrection appearances. It has taken painstaking paleographical and codicological examinations of the ms to determine what the scribe actually did. To further complicate the matter, at some point in the history of copying out these plays, the proclamation was attached to them. Although the proclamation does not match the plays that follow, someone, possibly the scribe of this ms, placed numbers in the margin of the text against incidents that correspond to the description of the "pageants" in the proclamation. This does not affect the single episode pageants but it breaks up the flow of the Passion Play and has obscured the very existence of the Mary Play for centuries.
A final scribal feature of this manuscript is the stage directions which reflect a curious mixture of intent. They seem to be recording performance detail while, at the same time, facilitating the reading of the manuscript as a meditation text rather than using it as a text to be enacted. The stage directions are in Latin in the pageants, in the Mary Play they are a mix of English and Latin and in the Passion Play they are almost entirely in English. They seem to function as much as an aid to help a reader visualize the action as actual practical instructions to a director. The details of costume and action in the stage directions in the Passion Play suggest a description of an actual performance. The liturgical music is specified in the Mary Play and Assumption Play by including the opening words of each piece or the "incipit" in the stage directions. On the other hand the stage directions in many of the pageants are quite laconic.
. Stephen Spector cautiously writes "The linguistic evidence indicates that the codex was recorded principally or exclusively by scribes trained in East Anglia" (Spector, xxix) Meredith more positively asserts that The Mary Play comes from Norfolk (Meredith, 6). However, since the eclectic nature of the MS. has been recognized, scholars have been hesitant to insist that all the plays copied into this anthology were played in the same place.
after the turn of the 16th century and all the versions of the Chester plays after 1596.
, while the others are taken from either Roman Catholic or folk tradition.
A facsimile of the manuscript from the British Library was also published: The N-Town Plays: a facsimile of British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII. Ed. Peter Meredith and Stanley J. Kahrl. Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1977.
Mystery play
Mystery plays and miracle plays are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song...
s from between 1450 and 1500.
The manuscript
The manuscript is now housed in the British Library, London (BL MS Cotton Vespasian D.8). As its name might suggest, though, it was once the property of the 17th-century antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton and was housed in his large library. Cotton's librarian, Richard James, quickly examined the manuscript and erroneously assumed that it contained the Biblical plays performed in Coventry during the 15th and 16th centuries, thus naming them the Ludus Coventriae or "the Play Called Corpus Christi". He was mistaken in both cases, but that mistake has proven very difficult to correct; the name Ludus Coventriae persists in the secondary and critical literature well into the 20th century. A further complication of the N-Town plays was made by Hardin Craig who, in his Medieval Drama (1955), called the collection the Hegge Plays after their former owner, Robert HeggeRobert Hegge
-Life:Born at Durham in 1599, he was the son of Stephen Hegge, notary public there, by Anne, daughter of Robert Swyft, LL.D., prebendary of Durham. On 7 November 1614 he was admitted scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and graduated B.A. on 13 February 1617 and M.A. on 17 March 1620...
. The name Hegge Plays only briefly caught on, and the most common way to refer to these plays now is The N-Town Plays, after the reference in the last stanza of the opening proclamation that the play was to be played at "N-Town"; when the plays toured from town to town, N. (meaning nomen, the Latin for name) would be replaced by the name of the town the cycle was playing in at any given time.
The true nature of the manuscript has been hidden by the fact that the scribe arranged all the episodes in "chronological order" starting with Creation and ending with Judgment, simulating an episodic play presenting salvation history as in the two northern civic cycles from York and Chester. As he did this he buried the Mary Play inside the Nativity sequence and copied the Passion Play into place between the Raising of Lazarus and the Resurrection appearances. It has taken painstaking paleographical and codicological examinations of the ms to determine what the scribe actually did. To further complicate the matter, at some point in the history of copying out these plays, the proclamation was attached to them. Although the proclamation does not match the plays that follow, someone, possibly the scribe of this ms, placed numbers in the margin of the text against incidents that correspond to the description of the "pageants" in the proclamation. This does not affect the single episode pageants but it breaks up the flow of the Passion Play and has obscured the very existence of the Mary Play for centuries.
A final scribal feature of this manuscript is the stage directions which reflect a curious mixture of intent. They seem to be recording performance detail while, at the same time, facilitating the reading of the manuscript as a meditation text rather than using it as a text to be enacted. The stage directions are in Latin in the pageants, in the Mary Play they are a mix of English and Latin and in the Passion Play they are almost entirely in English. They seem to function as much as an aid to help a reader visualize the action as actual practical instructions to a director. The details of costume and action in the stage directions in the Passion Play suggest a description of an actual performance. The liturgical music is specified in the Mary Play and Assumption Play by including the opening words of each piece or the "incipit" in the stage directions. On the other hand the stage directions in many of the pageants are quite laconic.
Location
All scholars who have worked with this manuscript agree that it belongs in the east Midlands. Some attempt has been made to place it as far north as Lincoln (it was even called the Lincoln cycle by some scholars for a period), but the general consensus places the manuscript in East AngliaEast Anglia
East Anglia is a traditional name for a region of eastern England, named after an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Kingdom of the East Angles. The Angles took their name from their homeland Angeln, in northern Germany. East Anglia initially consisted of Norfolk and Suffolk, but upon the marriage of...
. Stephen Spector cautiously writes "The linguistic evidence indicates that the codex was recorded principally or exclusively by scribes trained in East Anglia" (Spector, xxix) Meredith more positively asserts that The Mary Play comes from Norfolk (Meredith, 6). However, since the eclectic nature of the MS. has been recognized, scholars have been hesitant to insist that all the plays copied into this anthology were played in the same place.
Date
The date "1468" appears in the hand of the major scribe at the end of the Purification play (f 100v). This, then, is the earliest possible date for the copying of the text. Spector has concluded on the basis of dialectal evidence that the plays cannot predate 1425 and on the basis of the watermarks on the paper that the paper used by the main scribe comes from the period 1460-77. It is possible, again on the basis of the paper, that the Assumption play, written separately by a different scribe and bound into the main MS., was copied slightly earlier. We are safe to assume that the MS. dates from the second half of the third quarter (ca. 1463-75) of the 15th century. This makes it the oldest MS. to contain a large number of Biblical plays. Although we know there were plays performed elsewhere from the late 14th century, the York manuscript was written down in the 1470s, the Towneley MS.Wakefield Mystery Plays
The Wakefield or Towneley Mystery Plays are a series of thirty-two mystery plays based on the Bible most likely performed around the Feast of Corpus Christi probably in the town of Wakefield, England during the late Middle Ages until 1576...
after the turn of the 16th century and all the versions of the Chester plays after 1596.
Sources of the plays
The majority of the plays that make up the N-Town Cycle are based (some rather tenuously) on the BibleBible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
, while the others are taken from either Roman Catholic or folk tradition.
- The Proclamation of the Banns
- Play 1: Creation of Heaven & Fall of the Rebel Angels
- Play 2: Creation of World & Fall of Adam and EveAdam and EveAdam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
- Play 3: Cain and AbelCain and AbelIn the Hebrew Bible, Cain and Abel are two sons of Adam and Eve. The Qur'an mentions the story, calling them the two sons of Adam only....
- Play 4: NoahNoahNoah was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the tenth and last of the antediluvian Patriarchs. The biblical story of Noah is contained in chapters 6–9 of the book of Genesis, where he saves his family and representatives of all animals from the flood by constructing an ark...
's Flood - Play 5: AbrahamAbrahamAbraham , whose birth name was Abram, is the eponym of the Abrahamic religions, among which are Judaism, Christianity and Islam...
's Sacrifice of Isaac - Play 6: MosesMosesMoses was, according to the Hebrew Bible and Qur'an, a religious leader, lawgiver and prophet, to whom the authorship of the Torah is traditionally attributed...
and the Ten Commandments - Play 7: The Root of JesseTree of JesseThe Tree of Jesse is a depiction in art of the Ancestors of Christ, shown in a tree which rises from Jesse of Bethlehem, the father of King David; the original use of the family tree as a schematic representation of a genealogy...
: Prophecies of the Savior - Play 8: JoachimJoachimSaint Joachim was the husband of Saint Anne and the father of Mary, the mother of Jesus in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican traditions. The story of Joachim and Anne appears first in the apocryphal Gospel of James...
and Anna & the Conception of Mary - Play 9: Joachim and Anne's Presentation of Mary at the Temple
- Play 10: The Marriage of MaryMary (mother of Jesus)Mary , commonly referred to as "Saint Mary", "Mother Mary", the "Virgin Mary", the "Blessed Virgin Mary", or "Mary, Mother of God", was a Jewish woman of Nazareth in Galilee...
and JosephSaint JosephSaint Joseph is a figure in the Gospels, the husband of the Virgin Mary and the earthly father of Jesus Christ .... - Play 11: The Parliament in Heaven and the AnnunciationAnnunciationThe Annunciation, also referred to as the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary or Annunciation of the Lord, is the Christian celebration of the announcement by the angel Gabriel to Virgin Mary, that she would conceive and become the mother of Jesus the Son of God. Gabriel told Mary to name her...
- Play 12: Joseph's Doubt About Mary
- Play 13: Mary's Visit to ElizabethElizabeth (Biblical person)Elizabeth is also spelled Elisabeth or Elisheva...
- Play 14: The Trial of Mary and Joseph
- Play 15: The NativityNativity of JesusThe Nativity of Jesus, or simply The Nativity, refers to the accounts of the birth of Jesus in two of the Canonical gospels and in various apocryphal texts....
- Play 16: The Annunciation to and Visitation of the ShepherdsBeit SahourBeit Sahour is a Palestinian town east of Bethlehem under the administration of the Palestinian National Authority...
- Play 17: (No play)
- Play 18: The Adoration of the Magi
- Play 19: The PurificationPurificationPurification is the process of rendering something pure, i.e. clean of foreign elements and/or pollution, and may refer to:* List of purification methods in chemistry* Water purification** Organisms used in water purification...
- Play 20: Slaughter of the Innocents
- Play 21: Christ and the Doctors in the Temple
- Play 22: The Baptism of Christ
- Play 23: The Parliament in Hell and the Temptation in the DesertTemptation of ChristThe temptation of Christ is detailed in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. According to these texts, after being baptized, Jesus fasted for forty days and nights in the Judean desert. During this time, the devil appeared to Jesus and tempted him...
- Play 24: The Woman taken in adultery
- Play 25: The Raising of LazarusLazarus of BethanyLazarus of Bethany, also known as Saint Lazarus or Lazarus of the Four Days, is the subject of a prominent miracle attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus restores him to life four days after his death...
- Play 26: The First Passion PlayPassion playA Passion play is a dramatic presentation depicting the Passion of Jesus Christ: his trial, suffering and death. It is a traditional part of Lent in several Christian denominations, particularly in Catholic tradition....
: Lucifer and John the Baptist; Conspiracy Against Christ; Entry into Jerusalem - Play 27: The Last SupperLast SupperThe Last Supper is the final meal that, according to Christian belief, Jesus shared with his Twelve Apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. The Last Supper provides the scriptural basis for the Eucharist, also known as "communion" or "the Lord's Supper".The First Epistle to the Corinthians is...
- Play 28: Agony in the GardenAgony in the GardenThe Agony in the Garden refers to the events in the life of Jesus between the Last Supper and Jesus' arrest. Jesus' struggle praying and discussing with God, before accepting his sacrifice, before his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane also denotes a state of mind - agony.-Scriptural...
& the Arrest of Christ - Play 29: Christ's Passion: Herod's Boasting; Trial Before AnnasAnnasAnnas [also Ananus or Ananias], son of Seth , was appointed by the Roman legate Quirinius as the first High Priest of the newly formed Roman province of Iudaea in 6 AD; just after the Romans had deposed Archelaus, Ethnarch of Judaea, thereby putting Judaea directly under Roman rule.Annas officially...
& Caiphas - Play 30: Death of Judas & Trials Before Pilate and Herod
- Play 31: Pilate's Wife, and the Second Trial Before Pilate
- Play 32: Procession to CalvaryCalvaryCalvary or Golgotha was the site, outside of ancient Jerusalem’s early first century walls, at which the crucifixion of Jesus is said to have occurred. Calvary and Golgotha are the English names for the site used in Western Christianity...
& Crucifixion of Christ - Play 33: The Harrowing of HellHarrowing of HellThe Harrowing of Hell is a doctrine in Christian theology referenced in the Apostles' Creed and the Athanasian Creed that states that Jesus Christ "descended into Hell"...
- Play 34: Burial of Christ & Guarding of the SepulchreSepulchreThe rock-cut tombs in ancient Israel are a group of hundreds of rock-cut tombs constructed in Israel in ancient times. They were cut into the rock, sometimes with elaborate facades and multiple burial chambers. Some are free-standing, but most are caves. Each tomb typically belonged to a...
- Play 35: The Harrowing of Hell B: Christ's Appearance to Mary; Pilate Berates the Soldiers
- Play 36: The Three Marys at the Tomb of Christ
- Play 37: Christ's Appearance to Mary MagdaleneMary MagdaleneMary Magdalene was one of Jesus' most celebrated disciples, and the most important woman disciple in the movement of Jesus. Jesus cleansed her of "seven demons", conventionally interpreted as referring to complex illnesses...
- Play 38: Christ's Appearance to Cleophas, Luke, and Thomas
- Play 39: The Ascension of Christ & the Selection of Matthias
- Play 40: PentecostPentecostPentecost is a prominent feast in the calendar of Ancient Israel celebrating the giving of the Law on Sinai, and also later in the Christian liturgical year commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples of Christ after the Resurrection of Jesus...
- Play 41: Assumption of MaryAssumption of MaryAccording to the belief of Christians of the Roman Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and parts of the Anglican Communion and Continuing Anglicanism, the Assumption of Mary was the bodily taking up of the Virgin Mary into Heaven at the end of her life...
Into Heaven - Play 42: Last JudgmentLast JudgmentThe Last Judgment, Final Judgment, Day of Judgment, Judgment Day, or The Day of the Lord in Christian theology, is the final and eternal judgment by God of every nation. The concept is found in all the Canonical gospels, particularly the Gospel of Matthew. It will purportedly take place after the...
Editions of the plays
Some recent published editions of the N-town plays include:- The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D. 8. 2 vols. Ed. Stephen Spector. Oxford: Published for the Early English Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1991.
- The Passion Play from the N-Town Manuscript, ed. Peter Meredith. Harlow: Longman, 1990
- The Mary Play from the N-Town Manuscript, ed, Peter Meredith. Harlow: Longamn, 1987.
A facsimile of the manuscript from the British Library was also published: The N-Town Plays: a facsimile of British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII. Ed. Peter Meredith and Stanley J. Kahrl. Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1977.
External links
- http://www.chass.toronto.edu/~ajohnsto/intront.html
- The texts of the plays in the N-Town Cycle are available at the website From Stage to Page - Medieval and Renaissance Drama: http://www.umm.maine.edu/faculty/necastro/drama/ntown/index.html