EN360: Medieval English Drama

Spring 2006

SECOND ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

The second essay is due at the beginning of class on Wednesday, April 5. The essay should be approximately 5-6 pages long, and in it you should address themes in any of the mystery plays on New Testament subjects. Below are the suggested topics. (You may write on another topic if you wish, but see me to discuss it first.)

1. Assess the role of women in mystery plays by carefully comparing and contrasting two plays. Some plays that might be particularly revealing on this issue are: “Joseph’s Trouble about Mary” (York); “The Salutation of Elizabeth” (Wakefield); “The Woman Taken in Adultery” (N-town); “Christ Before Pilate (I): The Dream of Pilate’s Wife” (York); “The Death of Christ” (York).
2. Compare and contrast the “First Shepherds’ Play” and the “Second Shepherds’ Play” from Wakefield. What themes do they have in common, and how do they differ in themes and in dramatization? You might consider focusing on the complaints that the shepherds voice at the beginning of each play, and how the plays address these concerns, if at all.
3. Focusing on the most famous of the mystery plays, the Wakefield “Second Shepherds’ Play,” explain the relationship between the story of Mak the sheep-stealer that makes up most of the play and the Nativity sequence that concludes it. Is this play appropriate to its Nativity setting, and if so, how? Or, focus specifically on the figure of Mak and explain what he represents and what his significance is in the play.
4. Analyze the characterization of Christ in at least two mystery plays. Your could focus on two plays in the York Passion sequence, or you could contrast Christ’s role in one Wakefield drama to his role in one York drama. How do different characters conceive of Christ and respond to him? How is Christ different from the other characters, and how do the playwrights dramatize the difference?
5. In the intentionally anachronistic method of the medieval dramatists, the priestly figures in the mystery plays are always represented as contemporary clerics—priests and bishops of the medieval Catholic Church. Focusing on two plays, show how the Church is depicted in these plays, and consider what the medieval drama is suggesting about religions and the people who make up the Church.
6. Many of these plays contain very complex uses of language, and many build different uses of language into their dramatic schemes. Show how language is a theme in one or two of the plays, such as the “Second Shepherds’ Play” or “Herod the Great” from Wakefield, or “The Crucifixion” or the “Death of Christ” from York.
7. These plays were produced and performed by members of craft guilds, and many of the plays show a particular interest in labor, whether it be that of the Wakefield shepherds, or of the Wakefield torturers, or of the York soldiers who perform the Crucifixion. Focusing on two plays, analyze the depiction of work and labor in the plays, with consideration of how it relates to the Christian drama being presented or to the community being defined by the performances.
8. As large-scale dramatic cycles performed on holidays in medieval towns, the mystery plays are informed by a spirit of festive play and revelry. Often, however, the figures most associated with the spirit of play are villains, devils, or vice figures, from Mak in the “Second Shepherds’ Play” to the torturers in the “Buffeting” to Tutivillus in the Wakefield “Judgment.” Is the spirit of play ever integrated into the Christian moral scheme presumably being celebrated by these dramas? Or is festive spirit—and therefore the spirit of drama itself, which is inseparable from “play”—simply at odds with the moral content of the drama?
9. It is often asserted that these large-scale civic dramas served to define the communities that performed them. But if so, how do they do this, and what sort of community is being defined? Focusing on several plays from the York or Wakefield cycles, show how the plays serve as ways for us to tell ourselves who and what we are. Keep in mind that one ways communities define themselves is in terms of who they are not—setting up an opposition between us and them, or identifying the “other” that “we” can all reject as alien.