Not for Adults Only: The English Corpus Christi Plays

Most readers of The Quarterly will recall C. S. Lewis's dictum, "I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story." Lewis was both a writer of children's literature and a medievalist of considerable repute; I hope he would be pleased to appear in the introduction to an essay which discusses as children's literature a major segment of medieval literature clearly enjoyed by medieval adults. The Corpus Christi plays of medieval England have often (but nowadays, increasingly often) been discussed as adult literature; but they were also children's literature—and simply very good plays. (Might I set it up as a canon that a play which is enjoyed only by adults is a bad play?)

There can be no doubt that children attended the cycle plays of Corpus Christi; indeed, there would have been no keeping them away. Scholars like Meradith and Robert McMunn and Bennett Brockman have long since noted that all medieval English literature was accessible to both children and adults; the most accessible literature was the Corpus Christi drama. These plays were performed in almost every English town of any size, almost every year from 1335 (a date suggested by Siegfried Wenzel) to about 1600. But the plays were not merely "accessible"; the children must have thronged to see them. Aside from the obvious attraction of the spectacle (large, decorated carts or stages, crowds, a festive atmosphere), the cycles attracted children by portraying children on-stage, by presenting villains of highly entertaining frightfulness, and even by incorporating children's games into the plays.

Children appear as actors, even as protagonists, in all the surviving cycles. Isaac has lengthy speeches in the three plays which portray him as a boy, the ones in the Chester and Taunley cycles' and Ludus Coventriae. The four "boys" of Chester's "Shepherds" also have major speeches (p. 151-54). The best roles came in Ludus Coventriae, where the infant Mary and the twelve-year-old Christ are the protagonists of their respective plays ("Mary in the Temple" and "Christ and the Doctors").

Perhaps even more attractive to a youthful audience than their counterparts on stage were the plays' villains, most of them distinguished as much for funniness as frightfulness. Herod, Cain, King Balaack, Pharaoh, Caiaphas, Pilate, and various tortores all rage gratifyingly on-stage, fittingly seconded by Satan and various demons who appear in order to underline their villainy or reward it fittingly (as in Ludus Coventriae , where "Diabolus" carries off to hell King Herod and his murderous knights immediately following the slaughter of the innocents.

Chester's Herod is a good example of these villains: he roars from side to side of the stage, brandishing serially a staff, a sword, a bill, his sword again (which he throws down, then breaks), his staff once more, and a second sword—all in ten minutes or less. He repeatedly promises to chop off the head of the new king the magi tell him of; his sanguinary disposition reminds one of Carroll's Queen of Hearts. He is considerably less funny as he calls up his knights and orders them to murder all new-born males: "Go slay that rascal . . .; Kill the dirtyarses . . . Slay all boy-children tonight!"

The game element of the Corpus Christi plays, which V. F. KoIve has described, must have interested the youthful spectators as much as did the plays' children or villains. The most notable of the games—the one the children would have found most familiar and, surely, the most compelling in its dramatic context—was "Hot Cockles," a game children played by having one of their number kneel, cover his or her eyes, lay his or head in another child's lap, and, as the other children singly laid on light blows, try to guess who struck each blow. In the Passion plays of the Corpus Christi drama Christ is always "it," and "Hot Cockles" becomes the buffeting of the biblical accounts of Christ's arraignment before Caiaphas (Matthew 26:67...