The York Plays: A Critical Edition of the York Corpus Christi Play as Recorded in British Library Additional MS 35290, Volume II ed. by Richard Beadle (review)

This long-awaited companion volume to Professor Richard Beadle’s text and manuscript study of the York Corpus Christi Play (Volume I, 2009) completes the EETS editions of the four surviving English Biblical cycles. It is an outstanding achievement by a scholar who, as he writes, has ‘been concerned with the York Plays in one way or another for the best part of a lifetime’ (p. vi).

The Introduction to Volume II describes the Plays’ performance context, their documented history between 1399 and 1579, and their language, including the main scribe’s modernisation and his toning down of northern dialectal features. Headnotes elucidate the ‘bringing forth’ of each of the forty-seven pageants by its Craft or Crafts with reference to the Ordo Paginarum, a production list compiled in 1415 by the York civic authorities. The Headnotes also consider each pageant’s text as preserved and amended in London, British Library, MS Additional 35290, the Register compiled between 1463 and 1477 on the council’s behalf, to record and to vet the Corpus Christi Day productions. In the 1550s and 1560s the Common Clerk of York’s deputy, the eponymous John Clerke, annotated and amended the Register against the performances that he witnessed. Volume II’s explications of alterations and marginalia by Clerke and others thus bring Tudor productions of the Plays to imaginative life. Each Headnote also outlines its pageant’s sources and analogues, and discusses pertinent theatrical and literary issues, and versification. Extensive commentaries on lines and passages keyed to the Volume I edition deepen the reader’s understanding of subjects dealt with more broadly in the Introduction and Headnotes. This method has the advantage of thoroughness, and the disadvantage of retaining across subsections repetitions that probably should not have survived a final general editing. Volume II concludes with a Glossary that most readers will need to consult in order fully to comprehend the often-difficult Middle English of the texts edited in Volume I.

This monumental work resists detailed remembering after a single seriatim reading. However, even such a reading illuminates life in a late medieval and Tudor provincial city in all its multilayered complexity, and with an immediacy that even the most adept social history or literary or dramatic criticism will struggle to equal. Among the book’s revelations is the mesh of topological connections, many based in patristic symbology, that criss-cross the whole cycle of plays; that penetrate beyond its borders into liturgy and private devotional practices; and that mutually illuminate other arts, such as painting and sculpture. Also surprising for a dramatic tradition sometimes dismissed as mere entertainment and indoctrination for the masses is the sophisticated theological thinking that animates many of the pageants. Such thinking further deepens the ‘incarnational aesthetic’, recognised by Gail McMurray Gibson as fundamental to fifteenth-century religious culture (The Theater of Devotion (University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 8–10).

For example, York Plays Volume II shows that the clerical author or authors of the Shearmen’s pageant, The Road to Calvary, injected layers of patristic and Thomist meaning into Jesus’s seamless coat as a stage object, but centrally emphasised a eucharistic significance appropriate to the production context of Corpus Christi (p. 310). At the opposite end of its spectrum of interest, Volume II traces the continuing financial interactions between Craft representatives and the York civic authorities. It further demonstrates the ingenious ways in which the pageants promoted the everyday achievements of their producing Crafts. Discussions of staging and costuming differentiate clearly between facts and speculation. In these ways and many others, such as its mapping of the pageants’ performance stations around York, Volume II grounds the Plays’ intellectual and spiritual dimensions in...