"This game wel pleyd in good a-ray": The N-Town Playbooks and East Anglian Games

"This game wel pleyd in good a-ray": The N-Town Playbooks and East Anglian Games Douglas Sugano When scholars discuss an integral play text, they usually envision a performance much like that text. When we read a dramatic anthology, however, we suspend our notions of textual dramaturgical integrity. In the latter case we think instead of staging only the discrete dramatic units (whatever selections are there), not about how the entire collection would play together. We face an analogous problem when we approach the N-Town manuscript, one of the four major English cycle texts. It is a cycle that includes most of the expected plays from Creation to Doomsday, and yet it is a manuscript that the compiler transformed through his various interpolations. What began as a modest cycle ended up as an agglomerative manuscript that exhibits the rich variety of East Anglian drama and its theatrical organizations . I do not argue with Timothy Fry, Rosemary Woolf, and Martin Stevens, who say that the manuscript has its own type of integrity.1 I do expect, however, that the manuscript's eclecticism should inform not only a "New Criticism" reading of the text but also eclectic dramatic interpretations as well. The recent editions by Peter Meredith and Stephen Spector will certainly invite re-examinations of the text and East Anglian records . When we begin with paléographie analyses and the manuscript 's own claims about the drama, we find the N-Town codex more an elegant compilation of different East Anglian games than a single organization's dramatic cycle. Even though its editors have declared the codex to be a compilation, contemporary scholarship still has not fully reckoned with its disparate component parts and the East Anglian records.2 Most scholars have wisely restricted themselves to 221 222Comparative Drama discussing the manuscript's discrete sections such as the Mary Play or the two Passion plays. A critical problem arises when scholars discuss the whole manuscript or when they address dramaturgical or organization issues related to the text. The N-Town manuscript complicates matters with its many other anomalies: it apparently was not staged on pageant wagons; it has no guild references; it cannot be traced to a real town; and no external records corroborate its plays or performances. It is clear that the N-Town manuscript is unlike the three other English cycle manuscripts. If the N-Town codex is different in kind from the others, then it should not be treated with the same critical assumptions. Much of the criticism that addresses the whole manuscript has taken one of two directions, sometimes both: discerning the compiler's guiding principle of inclusion, or locating the compiler's home. In light of the manuscript's eclectic nature, the task before us becomes manifold, not singular. We should be searching for the provenance of the manuscript and the compiler, but at the same time we should also be attempting to find the respective locations of the playbooks, where they were performed, and records of those performances. In that way, we will arrive at a fuller and more accurate depiction of the N-Town playbooks' various performances. We may even find, as we comb the East Anglian records, that one of the N-Town plays was played in several towns on separate occasions. As we read, interpret , and perform the plays, we also need to reappraise what the plays mean as separate works written by different playwrights and produced by different organizations. We should not read the manuscript as parts of a larger whole unless our goal is to declare it closet drama. Just as it would be bizarre to interpret and stage the Digby Plays as a cycle, it would be strange to treat the N-Town plays as an integral dramatic cycle. This latter manuscript, in many regards, is more to be seen as a commonplace book or a neatly organized eclectic playbook than as a dramatic cycle. Spector has identified three strata to the manuscript: (1) a basic set of plays associated with the proclamation; (2) a point when most of the manuscript was transcribed, evinced by the Mary Play (c.1468); and (3) the later inclusion of the...