The N-Town Play: Drama and Liturgy in Medieval East Anglia (review)

The vexed question of the relationship between drama and liturgy has been fundamental to scholarly study of medieval theatre since E. K. Chambers's 1903 The Medieval Stage; the mystery cycles continue to be the focus of scholars' interest in medieval theatre and have been a recent focus of performers' interest, too, especially around the millennium; and since Gail McMurray Gibson's 1989 Theater of Devotion, East Anglia's preeminence as a center of medieval theatrical production has been widely recognized. Given all of these factors, it is perhaps surprising that Penny Granger's is the first book-length study of N-Town, the only surviving East Anglian "Cycle," and it is certain that Granger's book will prove valuable to those interested in medieval East Anglia, or theatre, or liturgy.

Granger offers a number of explanations for the fact that relatively little recent scholarly ink has been spilled over N-Town: it is regarded as dully didactic; its liturgical content makes it "difficult"; the Play suffers from an "absent narrative" in that nothing is known for certain about how or why it was compiled or copied, or where or whether it was read or performed. This absent narrative is the most important point here: performance records abound for the York Cycle, and the character of its manuscript history is clear, so York offers the student of medieval drama solid ground; furthermore, the York plays are regularly performed in the streets of the city and so are accessible to audience as well as reader, while Granger notes that she writes about N-Town with only the most limited experience of the play in performance—individual scenes only, and then sometimes recorded, not live—because N-Town is so rarely staged.

Coincidentally, growing interest in N-Town may be signaled by the fact that, since the publication of Granger's book, there have been in the UK at least two productions of substantial portions of the N-Town Play. I directed the N-Town Mary Plays and Passion Plays in Worcester College, Oxford; the production emphasized the liturgical aspect of N-Town through its staging in the College Chapel and deployment of the College Choir. Anthony Gash directed a production which selected from N-Town more widely and was performed in the Studio Theatre of the University of East Anglia: the production contextualized scenes from N-Town with specially written scenes introducing the late-medieval East Anglian women Margery Kempe, Margery Baxter, and Julian of Norwich as audiences of the Play. Both productions therefore related to themes of Granger's book, which addresses two principal questions: what is the effect of the liturgical content of the N-Town Play, and is the Play with its liturgical focus characteristically East Anglian, strongly related to other texts, dramatic and nondramatic, written around the same time and place?

Granger begins her book with a consideration of the relationships among ritual, liturgy, and drama. She draws on Catherine Bell's distinction between the "ritual" and the "ritual-like," and uses Richard Schechner's terms "entertainment" and "efficacy" as aspects of theatrical and liturgical activity respectively. Granger's position is that "drama and liturgy are both forms of ritual performance" (p. 7), and, by embracing the argument that any actualization of a text is in some sense a performance of it, she elides the experience of a reader with that of an audience member. Since the N-Town manuscript might have been copied for a devotional reader rather than for actors, and since no concrete evidence survives of the circumstances in which N-Town might ever have been performed, this may be a safe and sensible position, if a slightly frustrating one for any reader interested in the theatricality of medieval drama. Nonetheless, Granger comments interestingly on the difference between N-Town as "probably" a touring production and the wagon-staging of York, which allows an audience member the...