The Laity, the Church and the Mystery Plays:A Drama of Belonging (review)

Tony Corbett's book is divided into two sections: "Contexts" and "Drama of Belonging." The first part begins by asking some fundamental questions: Whom do the plays speak for? To whom are they speaking? And what meaning do they convey? Corbett points out that some have thought of the plays as a kind of catechism for the laity that represents in dramatic form the essentials of the faith that were to be taught to the laity as articulated in the syllabi developed at Lateran Council IV and by the English archbishop John Pecham and the bishop John Thoresby. At the parish level, clerics were to instruct their flock in the elements of the faith: the Pater Noster, the Creed, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Acts of Mercy, and so forth. Corbett points out, quite correctly, that the syllabus does not exist in its entirety in any of the cycles or collections of biblical plays. This observation provides an opening to differentiate the spirituality of the clerical hierarchy from that of the laity. Corbett stresses that the distinction he is making does not argue that the piety of the laity was counter to that of the clergy; he describes it as traditional and conservative. Then he begins to assess how this lay audience might receive the plays. He explores how the texts are meaningful to the performers, who are most acquainted with the texts; the audience close enough to hear the texts spoken; and the audience, who can only interpret the actions from what they see because of the poor acoustics arising from production in the outdoors. He notes with regard to the latter that they can understand what they see only if they are knowledgeable about the events they are seeing—that is, that they have some kind of "devotional literacy." This part of the argument is a variant of the discussion of whether images, stained-glass windows, and other artistic representations within churches function as books for the illiterate. They cannot, Corbett argues, unless the viewer had some pre-knowledge of what the images represent. This point provides the base for the argument that the experience of Christian religion is different for laity and clergy or, more important, for the laity and an institutionalized hierarchy of clerisy. Readers of this part of the book may think that Corbett draws too firm a line between clergy and laity, even though most would agree that experiences and ritual participation do differ. Corbett suggests that the laity's relation to belief and practice is closer to that of laymen in the early Church and implies at times that there is some residue of that practice in the late-medieval and early-modern periods. Although he does not state this outright, readers can have the sense of what he was describing as lay piety was a kind of proto-Protestantism.

The second part of the book comments on the presence of the Decalogue in the plays and the absence of the Pater Noster and the Creed from them before proceeding to a discussion of the representations of Mary and Christ. The appropriate place for the Decalogue would be in a Moses play, but the cycles usually present it in the scenes of Christ and the doctors. Corbett argues that this scenario reflects the relationship of the laity to the clergy as well as the particular form of lay piety that exists in the plays. Christ, he says, is represented as an unlettered youth who confounds his learned elders with his innate (actually divinely inspired) knowledge; thus, Christ's position in the play is similar to that of the lay audience before their clerical superiors.

Following through on the point that most of the clerical syllabus does not exist in the cycle, Corbett observes that the Pater Noster does not appear in any...