Clifford Davidson

The Medieval Institute

Western Michigan University

Kalamazoo, Michigan 49008, USA

In a recent article, Lawrence Clopper has provided a skeptical survey of the texts and records of the saint play in England which argues that the genre was relatively insignificant in the history of medieval drama.¹ In his list of texts and references compiled from various sources, he allows only five playtexts and fragments and three lost plays out of a total of fifty-five to be verifiably plays on the lives of saints. Except for records which Clopper accepts as indicative of saint play performance at Lydd, London, and York,² the others are identified by him as "either doubtful, for lack of evidence, or erroneous, when the extant evidence argues against their being saint plays."³ Skepticism here is healthy, since it forces scholars to re-examine the evidence, much of which of necessity is ambiguous. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of looking at all the records of lost entertainments that may be saint plays is ultimately convincing.⁴ Such plays would have had a natural attractiveness in a time when devotion to saints on a communal as well as individual basis was strong. The evidence for this appears in the iconography of churches and in the relics which they contained. Not surprisingly, therefore, a major element in pageantry was hagiographic display. Possibly more characters of saints appeared in processions than any other single type of character.⁵ In France, across the channel, more than a hundred playtexts of saint plays survive,⁶ and I think we may be certain that if the Reformation had not suppressed playtexts as well as performances, we would have a great many more English examples available for our study.

Part of the difficulty with Clopper's approach is that he defines the saint play narrowly as "scripted drama," a designation that is hard to prove with regard to lost plays and entertainments, and would exclude any example of unscripted traditional drama such as we probably have in many instances of records reporting St. George. Oddly, Clopper would apparently also exclude liturgical plays such as the apparent Peregrinus recorded at Lincoln in 1323­24 or the Assumption of the Virgin, presented over a period more than a century and a half (1393­1561) at the same site.⁷ It is true that the one is a biblical play dramatizing the Emmaus story, and that the other involved the use of a mechanical device, perhaps utilizing a statue of the Virgin which was raised to the roof of the cathedral nave as in the present-day Elche play of the Assumption of the Virgin. But the grounds for exclusion seem to me to be far too rigid in these cases.

Further, since on the whole the terminology used to denote staged drama was remarkably flexible,⁸ it is misleading to insist on the identification of one category, miracula, as designating a single genre of plays that were felt to be deserving of approbation. A key text here involves the well-known description of an event at Dunstable in which one Geoffrey had made a "quemdam ludum de Sancta Katerina,--quem 'Miracula' vulgariter appellamus," and borrowed choir copes from the abbey at St. Albans for his pupils to wear in it (c.1100­19).⁹ Clopper refers to an earlier article in which he has argued that the purpose of this ludus was simply play, a game in which, he speculates, the little clergeons in Geoffrey's school might likely "let off steam" and "detonate their Catherine's wheel."¹⁰ The presence of fireworks would have provided an explanation for the fire that destroyed the copes, but all of this is quite impossible since gunpowder was not introduced in Europe until the fourteenth century and the St. Catherine's wheel as a fireworks display apparently did not appear until the eighteenth century. Further, risking choir copes in juvenile horse-play seems not likely in the light of the high cost of linen at that time, and this in addition to the appropriateness of vestments for the medieval music-drama, which not implausibly could have blended Latin and vernacular verses. The use of the term miracula would have been to limit ludus, a common rhetorical practice¹¹ and one which here rules out the other possible meaning of 'game.'¹²

Another instance in which the term ludus is combined in the dramatic records with miracula occurred at or near Gloucester in 1283. In an account of alms given at the visit of Edward I to Gloucester, 26s. 8d. was given to the clerics responsible for a play (ludus), designated as "miracula sancti Nicholai," and the boy bishop.¹³ Of course there is plenty of uncertainty here, since it is unclear where the performance occurred (Peter Greenfield suggests Llanthony Abbey, outside Gloucester¹⁴), but we do know that it took place on the eve of the feast of St. Nicholas, a time normally associated with revelry. Might we not have a play like Hilarius's Iconia, described as a ludus, or the similar Fleury play, which begins with the words "Aliud miraculum de Sancto Nicholao et de quodam Iudeo"?¹⁵

It would seem, according to Clopper's list, that references that appear to be saint plays in such sources as mayors' lists and chronicles are unreliable sources of information, and of course well they might be. The London Chronicle's reference to St. Catherine in 1393 ("In this yere was the pley of seynt Katerine"¹⁶) perhaps would need further corroboration to ascertain its precise status, but I would suggest that it probably does belong in the same category as two plays cited in Coventry annals. Both were presented in the Little Park outside the city walls, in 1491 "A Play of St Katherine in the Little Parke"¹⁷--a choice of subject matter that would be consistent with local devotion to this saint, who was one of the patrons of one of two major guilds of city--and in 1505 a "Play" at Whitsun, the date also chosen for the cycle plays at Chester. The subject of the latter was an unlikely enough one, the Irish Cistercian monk St. Christian, but the annals listing is corroborated by an independent document, the Proof of Majority of Walter Smythe, which identifies the production as a "Magnus ludus vocatus seynt christeans play . . ." and specifies that it was presented at Pentecost.¹⁸

Very likely the Shrewsbury SS. Feliciana and Sabina, in 1515­16, and St. Catherine, in 1526, bore some resemblance to the London and Coventry plays cited above. The Shrewsbury plays were both presented under official auspices, one of them verifiably at Whitsun, and were shown at the dry quarry outside the city. The reference in the bailiff's accounts to SS. Feliciana and Sabina describes a "play," "show," and "martyrdom," and specifically notes that it was presented "for the honour of the said town."¹⁹ The "players of the same martyrdom" received ten shillings.²⁰ The bailiff's accounts for the "Saynt Katheryn is play" suggest an elaborate production with expenditures for wigs, false beards, fool's mask, gold and silver leaf, bells (six dozen!), and gunpowder for pyrotechnic effects.²¹ These would be quite appropriate to a St. Catherine play based on her vita, though of course other costumes and equipment, some of which was perhaps provided by the players themselves, would have been needed. The payments for the latter play were made two days after Corpus Christi, which occurred on 31 May 1526, so it may have been mounted at that time rather than at Whitsun.

While it is not known known precisely what was presented in the three-day performance such as the Christina play that occurred at Bethersden in 1519­21, the presence of playwardens, rehearsals, banns, a deviser and his equipment (in other words, a "property player"), a dressing chamber, and a stage would argue strongly for a large production of a type related instead to the gargantuan theatrical events that were mounted on the Continent.²² Unlikely as St. Christina of Markyate (c.1097­c.1161) might seem for such a production, the play may well have adapted episodes from the lives of other saints, perhaps even episodes in the standard repertory of the deviser who had come in to direct the play. In spite of the ambiguity, and the isolated provincial town in Kent in which the play was mounted, the record can hardly be arbitrarily set aside as doubtful. It should be remembered that sparsely populated Cornwall could still produce the elaborate St. Meriasek--in Cornish, no less, and hence not accessible except as pure spectacle to Anglophones from nearby counties.²³

A very different kind of show seems to have been involved in the Thomas Becket pageant at Canterbury between 1504 and its suppression as well as its revival during the reign of Queen Mary. While mainly the pageant has been thought to be little more than a tableau vivant showing the martyrdom of the saint (only in the records for 1542­43, after the suppression of Thomas's cult by the crown, is the pageant specifically called a "play," a designation which here is particularly problematic),²⁴ the earlier records suggest some interesting properties and details. The scene was presented on a wagon, which was moved about by men and, in 1514­15, with the help of a horse; it required repairs and painting, and was stored when not in use. The wagon was fitted with a painted cloth. The saint seems to have been a puppet or image, whose head frequently needed painting and repairs from the constant battering in representations of his martyrdom. A bag of blood was used for the effect displayed when the knights, played by children, struck him. There was a "vyce" or mechanical device, perhaps to fly the (puppet) angel who, according to the saint's vita, appeared at his requiem Mass.²⁵ The action seems to have been confined to a single scene, but it was the crucial one in the life of the saint, whose cult flourished in England after his murder in 1170. Though ambiguous on many points, the pageant nevertheless is consistent with the principal Becket scene depicted in iconography, and hence we are able to know something of its possible appearance even though the evidence of the records is scanty.

A more complex narrative of the life of Becket seems to have been exhibited in a pageant in the Midsummer Show in London in London in 1519 since the characters included not only Becket, who was shown at his martyrdom, but also his father Gilbert and his mother, identified here as the Jewess though in the legendary life of the saint she is a Saracen princess.²⁶ A jail, with a jailer, was provided for Gilbert, and one of the knights was called Tracy at the martyrdom. The crosarius, Edward Grim, was also present at Becket's death. The iconography of the early life of Becket can be studied at York in painted glass panels,²⁷ and hence we may have some idea of the possible appearance of the scene, but the bare lists which comprise the dramatic records can only tease us with their incompleteness.

A separate classification of saint plays and pageants devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary remains problematic. Two fragments, Dux Moraud and the Durham Prologue, seem to be portions of miracles of Our Lady plays,²⁸ but one of the plays stitched into the N-town manuscript is verifiably a Mary play that dramatizes her early legendary life.²⁹ The immense popularity of Mary and the dimensions of devotion directed to her would suggest her early life and her death, assumption, and coronation as ideal for dramatic presentation.³⁰ According to antiquarian annals, the play chosen for presentation before Prince Arthur at Chester on 3 or 4 August 1499 was the "Storie of the Assumption of oure Ladye . . . played at the abbey gates."³¹ If these annals are correct, the play was also intended for local audiences, for it is reported to have been repeated at the high cross. The Assumption of the Virgin was also played, along with the Shepherds' play, in St. John's churchyard in 1515­16.³² If the Assumption play involved the pageant and play from Chester cycle, another significant detail may be noted: the play, at least within the context of the cycle, was under the sponsorship of "þe Wyfus of þe town."³³ Unfortunately, quite certainly due to the influence of Protestant iconoclasm, the Assumption play was removed from the text of the Chester Whitsun cycle and does not appear in any of the manuscripts.

Assumption of the Virgin plays had the advantage of requiring spectacular effects utilizing stage machinery which would lift the actress or a substituted image into "heaven" for her coronation, as noted above in connection with the Lincoln play. But other saints' lives commonly demanded moving effects, particularly when they depicted suffering and martyrdom. If the Ashmole Fragment was part of a saint play of St. Lawrence,³⁴ it would have concluded with the death of the saint on a fiery grill, presumably followed by the ascent of his soul into heaven. Even more graphic would have been the play or pageant of St. Erasmus at Perth which included a cord-drawer who, along with other tormentors, would have appeared to pull out the saint's intestines, probably on a winch as was conventional in iconography.³⁵ Whether the martyrdom plays were fully scripted plays, pageants with some action, or improvised drama, they would seem to have served, along with the presentation of violence in the plays of the Passion, to establish a taste for seeing stage suffering with realistic effects such as stage blood and with the death of the character with whom one empathizes.

The above defense of the saint play as a popular genre does not deny the uncertainties and the ambiguities involved, and Clopper's work in forcefully emphasizing these ambiguities should be seen as a useful scholarly service. Each example needs to be examined carefully and judged tentatively rather than with certainty in instances in which certitude is not allowed under the rules of evidence. The reference to a play (ludus) of St. James "in sex paginis compilatum" in the will of William Revetour at York would seem to be an actual play about this apostle since it is listed along with another play title, "le Crede Play."³⁶ A play about St. James would indeed have been appropriately given to the St. Christopher Guild, which held a feast annually on the feast day of St. James, 25 July--a day that was also a feast of St. Christopher. To suggest, as Clopper does, that the book might have been an ordo for a riding of St. James³⁷ seems very much less likely. Similar logic may be applied to Robert Lasingby's will of 1456 in which he gives a book of a play of St. Denys ("ludum Oreginale Sancti Dionisij") to his parish church of St. Denys.³⁸ Here one would not expect Lasingby to give to the church in his will what already is the church's play. But above all in these cases and in all the other instances in which we may be seeing records of actual saint plays, we need to avoid imagining that the form and shape of any missing plays would necessarily be similar to the extant plays of Mary Magdalene or The Conversion of St. Paul in Digby MS. 133 which are two East Anglian dramas that might not be typical in the least.³⁹

The ambiguities of the historical records, then, will continue to serve as a source of frustration to scholars unless the evidence, incomplete as it is, can be placed within the larger social and religious context. The plays and pageants existed in between the people's piety and anxiety over their spiritual condition on the one hand, and on the other their desire for entertainment and release from the concerns of everyday life. A third factor, especially important in the case of some of the saint plays, was economic, as at Braintree, Essex, where fund raising for the church building fund was the motive for playing.⁴⁰ Scholarly methodology which attempts to separate out the lost plays definitively and interrogates the records for information that cannot be obtained will not in the end achieve particularly illuminating results. I would therefore call for a interdisciplinary approach in which the plays and pageants are recognized to be integral to the community, to its people, and to all dimensions of their lives.

Further, the plays were spectacles, designed to be seen as well as heard, and their visual effects were often shared with such media as painted glass, wall paintings, alabaster carvings, and even manuscript illuminations. Their iconography, even if the texts are lost, is therefore, at least as if through a glass darkly, available to us. If we must live with shadows of English saint plays and pageants, at least we can see art that is contemporary with them and that hence represented the visual imagination of artists who worked in the same cities or regions as the playwrights, producers, and actors. It is still valid to speak of the "reciprocal illumination"⁴¹ that took place between the visual arts and the theater that we still call "medieval" or, by analogy with music of the period, "early."

¹ Lawrence M. Clopper, "Communitas: The Play of Saints in Late Medieval and Tudor England," Mediaevalia 18 (1995 [for 1992]): 81­109.

² These are St. George at Lydd, Kent; Thomas Becket at London in 1170­82; and St. George at York in 1554. Allowing Thomas Becket, martyred in 1170, is odd here since there is no evidence in William Fitzstephen's Desciptio Londoniae for any specific saint plays except to divide them into two groups: confessors and martyrs.

³ Clopper, "Communitas," 105.

⁴ See the listing of English saint plays and pageants at:

⁵See the index to Ian Lancashire, Dramatic Texts and Records of Britain: A Chronological Topography to 1558 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), esp. 602­05.

⁶Lynette R. Muir, "The Saint Play in Medieval France," in The Saint Play in Medieval Europe, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986), 124.

⁷Clopper, "Communitas," 87.

⁸See John Coldewey, "Plays and 'Play' in Early English Drama," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 28 (1985): 181­88; Abigail Ann Young, "Plays and Players: The Latin Terms for Performance," REED Newsletter 9 (1984): 56­62, 10 (1985):9­16; and Glending Olson, "Plays as Play: A Medieval Ethical Theory of Performance and the Intellectual Context of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge," Viator 26 (1995): 195­221.

⁹Thomas of Walsingham, Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, ed. H. T. Riley, 3 vols., Rolls Ser. 28 (1867­69), 1:73.

¹⁰Lawrence M. Clopper, "Miracula and The Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge," Speculum 65 (1990): 885.

¹¹Young, "Plays and Players," pt. 1, 57.

¹²To be sure, there is still considerable ambiguity with regard to the term 'miracle' as it is used in the account of the Dunstable example. When we consider the categories of ludus which Olson has noted in pseudo-Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum morale, the Dunstable St. Catherine may have fit the category of ludus devotionis or even ludus innocentiae, but in my view would hardly have fallen among examples of ludus derisionis or ludus insolentiae ("Plays as Play," 220).

¹³Records of Early English Drama: Cumberland, Westmorland, and Gloucester, ed. Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenfield (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 290, 388.

¹⁴Ibid., 422.

¹⁵Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 2:338, 344.

¹⁶A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483, ed. Edward Tyrell and Nicholas H. Nicolas (London: Longman, 1827), 80.

¹⁷Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, ed. R. W. Ingram (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 74.

¹⁸Ibid., 100, 128.

¹⁹I quote from the translation in Records of Early English Drama: Shropshire, ed. J. Alan B. Somerset, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 2:591; the Latin terms are ludus, demonstracio, and martirium (ibid., 1:172).

²⁰"Et in Regardo dato lusoribus eiusdem Martirij tunc temporis hoc anno x s." (ibid., 172). Clopper suggests ("Communitas," 88) that lusores "could mean either musicians or gamesmen." Abigail Young notes that the most common meaning was 'player,' but also could refer to a player "in a mixed musical and dramatic performance" ("Plays and Players," pt. 1, 61).

²¹REED: Shropshire, 1:183­84.

²²Churchwardens' Accounts at Betrysden, 1515­1573, ed. Francis R. Mercer, Kent Record Soc. 5 (Ashford, Kent, 1928), 3­5, 9­12, 78­80.

²³See Beunans Meriasek: The Life of Saint Meriasek, Bishop and Confessor, ed. and trans. Whitley Stokes (London: Trübner, 1872); for commentary on the sparse population of Cornwall and the geography of the Cornish language, see Gloria Betcher, "A Reassessment of the Date and Provenance of the Cornish Ordinalia," Comparative Drama 29 (1995­96): 438­39, 448­49.

²⁴The Records of Plays and Players in Kent, ed. Giles E. Dawson, Malone Soc. Collections 7 (1965), 198. One possibility is a Protestantization of the Becket play to please the authorities.

²⁵Ibid., 192-98.

²⁶A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485­1640, ed. Jean Robertson and D. J. Gordon, Malone Soc. Collections 3 (1954), 3­4.

²⁷Formerly at the Church of St. Wilfrid, and now divided between the York Minster Chapter House and St. Michael-le-Belfrey; see Clifford Davidson, "The Middle English Saint Play," in The Saint Play in Medieval Europe, ed. Clifford Davidson, Early Drama, Art, and Music, Monograph Series 8 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1986), 57­59.

²⁸See Constance B. Hieatt, "A Case for Duk Moraud as a Play of the Miracles of the Virgin," Mediaeval Studies 32 (1970): 345­51; and Stephen K. Wright, "The Durham Play of Mary and the Poor Knight: Sources and Analogues of a Lost English Miracle Play," Comparative Drama 17 (1983): 254­65.

²⁹See Peter Meredith, ed., The Mary Play From the N.town Manuscript (London: Longman, 1987).

³⁰See Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 137­76.

³¹Records of Early English Drama: Chester, ed. Lawrence M. Clopper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 21.

³²Ibid., 23­24.

³³Ibid., 23.

³⁴For the identification of this fragment as a saint play of St. Lawrence, see Stephen K. Wright, "Is the Ashmole Fragment a Remnant of a Middle English Saint Play?" Neophilologus 75 (1991): 139­49.

³⁵Anna J. Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland (1927; reprint New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 271­73.

³⁶REED: York, ed. Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 1:68.

³⁷Clopper, "Communitas," 96.

³⁸REED: York, 1:88.

³⁹Another source of ambiguity in the study of the saint play is suggested by a case to which Olson ("Plays as Play," 201) calls attention in Henry of Rimini's Tractatus de quatuor virtutuibus cardinalibus (Strassburg, 1472), 4.4.7: a Venetian play about the Virgin Mary was created originally in her honor, and was acceptable when it maintained a proper devotional purpose. Now, however, the play has been subject to abuse and deserves to be suppressed or reformed.

⁴⁰W. A. Mepham, "Mediaeval Plays in the 16th Century at Heybridge and Braintree," Essex Review 55 (1946): 14­16.

⁴¹The term is F. P. Pickering's; see his Literature and Art in the Middle Ages (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1970). The methodology described here is that followed in my "Middle English Saint Play."