Calendar and text: Christ's ministry in the York plays and the liturgy.

The modern reader tends to accept that mystery plays are based on the Bible, thereby reading them into an intellectual milieu, the world of the professional Church. Yet we know nothing of the individual authors, and increasingly more, thanks to the efforts of the Records of Early English Drama project, about the milieu of the civic and guild authorities who commissioned and interpreted the texts in performance and the audience who watched them. Few fifteenth-century men and women had access to the Bible as a book. Indeed, following the seventh of Arundel's 1407 Constitutions, it is unclear whether even the translation of the text of the day by preachers could be freely practised.(1) Most, therefore, received the word of God primarily through their ears, and in Latin, through the readings in the liturgy, which only those with some education might recognize. The ecclesiastical climate of the early to mid-fifteenth century was one in which the transmission to the laity of biblical material through any medium was subject to scrutiny. In this context, it is entirely to be expected that the York dramatists' rhetorical construction of the matter of sacred text should be broadly devotional, leaning heavily and conservatively on the forms and patterns of the liturgy. Yet wholesale rejection of the `evolutionary' theory which assumed that medieval vernacular drama was the direct heir of the Latin drama of the medieval Church has caused many modern scholars to ignore all possibilities of liturgical influence: an entire, and once fruitful, line of inquiry has, for the last thirty years or so, more or less been abandoned.(2)

Unlike private Bible study, liturgical reading is not sequential, not narrative or historical in focus, but thematic, meditative, and above all recurrent. The reading aloud from the Gospel book at mass, transforming the written to the spoken word as part of the office, was a kind of transubstantiation. The speaking of God's word invoked his presence, as the reading unlocked the mystery of the day. The correlation between mystery cycles and Corpus Christi is no longer accepted uncritically as a given(3) and it is also the case that the York Cycle pre-dates the formation of the Corpus Christi Guild in York. Yet York's, the earliest cycle, is the one which is consistently associated with the feast, and the influential city fathers and members of the trade and craft guilds associated with it in its heyday were amongst the founder members of the Corpus Christi Guild.(4) It can also be argued that there are points in many of the individual pageants at which the arrival of Christ on earth is perceived as analogous to the process of transubstantiation.(5) The recognition of a special relationship between the feast and the pageants goes some way towards explaining the treatment and selection of biblical narrative history present in the plays as well as their apparently equivocal treatment of historical chronology. The present is, for the whole period after Christ, a period of waiting and witnessing, and witness is borne by repetitious acts of worship. Worship explains particularly the manner in which the plays demonstrate not only the relationship between one past event and another, or the relationship between all past events and the eternal, but the coming together of all past events, through the eternal, with time now.(6) Christianity may be a religion of a linear nature, arranged around a unique and pivotal event, but this is held in tension by the essentially cyclic nature of patterns of worship. The recurrent pattern of anniversaries, of divine service, offers a model for measuring time: the numbering of the years, the annual calendar of festivities, and the hours of each day. The matter of biblical text was arranged in a recurrent interwoven pattern of significances which vicariously measured the passage of time.

The York Cycle(7) is the earliest surviving near-complete cycle of pageants from England. It survives in a single version, and is securely associated with the feast of Corpus Christi. It is already recognized that music in the cycle owes a debt to liturgical practice:(8) this article suggests that there is a comparable and pervasive debt in the spoken text, both for selection and organization and for verbal echo. Placing the cycle alongside liturgical readings in the missal(9) for the period between Epiphany and Easter demonstrates a sustained pattern of analogies. This is not to suggest that the cycle is duplicating the liturgy in another mode; rather it reveals that liturgical associations and echoes are as much a part of the fabric of the cycle as are the vernacular homiletic works with which it is more prominently linked in recent scholarship. Most of the material in the cycle is associated with the two major festal periods in the Church year, around Christmas and Easter. The elaborate mimetic heritage of the Christmas and Easter liturgy explains this apparent concentration. Accordingly, all other material in the cycle simply offers minimal temporal and symbolic contextualization. The other material, however, also represents an elaboration of biblical texts which are read during the intervening period in the Church year. The intervening period of Christ's life is lived out liturgically in the weeks between Epiphany and Palm Sunday, and, in Septuagesima, the sequence is complemented in the breviary by a sequence of Old Testament readings from Genesis at matins.

One third of the York Cycle, in the fullest form in which it can be reconstructed, concerns pageants which treat the subjects of texts read between Epiphany and Holy Week: I The Fall of the Angels (Barkers); II The Creation (Plasterers); III The Creation of Adam and Eve (Cardmakers); IV Adam and Eve in Eden (Fullers); V The Fall of Man (Coopers); VI The Expulsion (Armourers); VII Cain and Abel (Glovers); VIII The Building of the Ark (Shipwrights); IX The Flood (Fishers and Mariners); X Abraham and Isaac (Parchmentmakers and Bookbinders); XI Moses and Pharaoh (Hosiers); XX Christ and the Doctors (Spurriers and Lorimers); XXI The Baptism (Barbers); XXII The Temptation (Smiths); XXIIA The Marriage at Cana (Vintners); XXIII The Transfiguration (Curriers); XXIIIA Jesus in the House of Simon the Leper (Iron-mongers); XXIV The Woman Taken in Adultery/The Raising of Lazarus (Cappers); and XLVII The Last Judgement (Mercers). XXIIA and XXIIIA were never registered, although the main scribe knew of their existence.(10) Richard Beadle further adds that

Both the Ordo and the second list of pageants which accompanies it in the A/

Y Memorandum Book agree in listing the Marriage between the Baptism (no.

XXI) and the Temptation (no. XXII), whereas the Register has the events in

their scriptural order.

This discrepancy is just one of the things explained when the pageants are placed alongside the equivalent readings in the service books. The Ordo and the second Memorandum Book list in fact place this play in its liturgical order, whereas the Register corrects to a natural narrative historical order, such as would be found in a life of Christ. The liturgical order of Christ's meeting with the doctors in the temple and the Baptism are reversed in the same way.

1. Epiphany to Septuagesima

The liturgical texts and the pageants in question fall into three distinct groups. The first group in the calendar relates to the period between Epiphany and Septuagesima for which the pattern of readings in the missal is set out in Table 1. The first three Sundays after Epiphany are marked by Gospel texts at mass relating the Baptism, Christ before the doctors in the temple, and the marriage at Cana. This is the subject matter of York Cycle pageants XXI, XX, and XXIIA respectively. The accompanying readings from the Epistles are based upon an examination of the nature of human society and, specifically, of man's relationship with the deity as it was established through Christ's life. The first of these, from Romans iii.19-26, concerns the difference between divine and human law, the second and third deal with examples of the symbiosis of human society, invoking the imagery of the members of the body to describe universal co-operation as an ideal. The following Gospel readings for the full season between Epiphany and Septuagesima continue this investigation of the human nature of Christ: exploring, for example, his genealogy (Luke iv. 31-7), and narrating the choosing of apostles (Mark iii.6-15 and Luke ix.57-62), as well as subsequent accounts of miracles (reputation for healing, Matthew iv.23-25; healing the leper, Luke v.12-15; stilling the tempest, Matthew viii.23-7). The last of these is accompanied by the text from Romans xiii.8-10 on obeying the Ten Commandments. When Easter is early, however, this season immediately after Epiphany need contain only one Sunday before it coincides with Septuagesima. The sequence above presupposes the maximum possible interval of six weeks. The weeks which do not occur between Epiphany and Septuagesima in the calendar of any one year are transferred to the season between Trinity and Advent, the offices being inserted at the beginning of the season, the masses at the end.(11) Consequently, in every year only the Sunday masses containing the reading of the Baptism (the Sunday within the Octave of Epiphany) and the visit to the doctors (first Sunday after the Octave of Epiphany) will occur, although in a majority of years the marriage at Cana (second Sunday after the Octave of Epiphany) will also occur, the others occurring during this season with diminishing frequency. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that when the selection of episodes in a cycle of pageants is set against the experience of scripture based on a skeletal model of the calendar, no episodes relate to this variable season. The inclusion of the missing pageant of the marriage at Cana in the York Cycle might be connected with its clear eucharistic associations for a festival which was itself a celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi. Its apparently aberrant historical placing is in any case explained. The evidence of rubricated Sarum missals also provides evidence that, where the season was extremely short, the masses of the first three weeks were compressed into the available period,(12) in which case all three masses might occur annually.

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The York Cycle play-texts which deal with the episodes featured in readings from this section of the calendar show emphases which are characteristic of the liturgical season. The York pageant of Christ and the Doctors follows the text from Luke xi.42-52 quite closely in framework, with some dramatic embellishment. In the Gospel account Mary and Joseph are not given distinct actions and reactions to the loss of their son; in the pageant they are contrasted with each other in a manner reminiscent of their roles in The Flight into Egypt.(13) Joseph appears as comforter:

Marie, mende thy chere,

For certis whan all is done

He comes with folke in feere,

And will ouertake vs sone, (20-4)

and purveyor of practical advice:

Agaynewarde rede I pat we gang

The right way to pat same citee,

To spire and spie all men emang,

For hardely homward gone is he. (39-43)

Mary, by contrast, falls immediately to self-accusation and accusation of her spouse, and to lamenting their loss. Many of her lines are the stock material of the planctus, which is her dominant mode of discourse throughout the cycle and here also echoes the mothers of the children slaughtered in the preceding pageant:

Allas, in bale pus am I boone ... (17)

My is lost, allas pe whille ... (32)

Of sorowes sere schal be my sang ... (43)

The end of the pageant, particularly the reproaches of the parents, follows verses 48 to 52 in almost exact detail.

The central section of Christ and the Doctors has, however, no direct Gospel source, as Luke gives no account of the subject of the disputation. The York playwright turns it into a demonstration of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments, along with the Fourteen Articles of Belief, Seven Sacraments, Seven Works of Mercy, and Seven Sins, were part of the the staple extra-liturgical material which was supposed to be familiar to every lay Christian in the period of the pageants, the material in which every parish priest had a duty to instruct and examine his parishioners. A. C. Cawley has traced the relationship between didactic vernacular texts on the Decalogue and drama in some detail.(14) The didactic tradition derives from the Ignorantia sacerdotum, after the incipit of canon 9 of a decree of the Council of Lambeth of 1281 by Bishop John Pecham. Amongst the many manuals derived from this canon was the so-called Lay Folk's Catechism, written in 1357 by Archbishop John Thoresby of York.(15) Versions of the book, particularly that translated into English verse by John Gaytryge, a monk of St Mary's Abbey in York, were in common currency at the period of the cycles, their material part of the apparatus of the faith familiar in urban society. Cawley goes on to observe that there are two versions of the Decalogue which occur in the cycles: a version based directly on Exodus, which is used in Old Testament prophets' plays, and a New Testament variant, substituting Christ's precepts for the first commandment, which is used when Christ discusses the Commandments with the Doctors.(16) Cawley ascribes the topic of Christ's disputation with the Doctors to a fusion of this episode with his enunciation of his two great precepts to `a doctor of the law' in Matthew xxii.35, as well as the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas xix.2,(17) and it does seem altogether likely that the dramatists were basing their material on a didactic tradition of this kind; equally it is highly appropriate to the liturgical season to which the episode belongs. Lent was traditionally the period in the Church year for the reception of new catechumens, so there is a certain appropriateness in anticipating this by placing basic materials of the faith at a point early in the historical account of Christ's life, prior to the Baptism, and early in the textual sequence relating to the whole period between Epiphany and Holy Week.

In the pageant, the first Doctor recites the two Commandments from Matthew xxii and is told by Jesus that in them, `Hyngis all pe lawe pat we shall lere' (161). He who fulfils them, fulfils all. The author of The Lay Folks' Catechism(18) enumerates and glosses all Ten Commandments then pauses to make the same point:

This ten Commandement?? that I haue nowe rekend

Er umbilouked in twa of the godspell,

Luce Xo. Capo.

The tane is we love god ouer al thinges,

The tothir that we love our euen-cristen als we do oure selven.

For god augh us to love halye with hert,

With al our might, with al our thought, with word and with deid:

Our euen-cristen alswa augh us to loue

Un-to that ilk gode that we loue us selven,

That is, that thai welefare in bodi and in saule,

And cum to that ilk blisses that we think to.

Who-so dos this twa fulfilles the othir. (258-68)

Jesus then rises to the Doctor's challenge in the pageant, and recites the others. The audience is thus presented with a scene reminiscent of the examination of an adolescent of artisan parents in the basic tenets of the faith, by a venerable body of churchmen such as would be present at a visitation or in a school, but one where this boy can turn the tables on his examiners. The focus on the first two Commandments is, of course, standard New Testament teaching. St Paul urges, Romans xiii.8-10:

Nemini quidquam debeatis, nisi ut invicem diligatis: qui enim diligit

proximum, legem implevit. Nam: Non adulterabis: Non occides: Non furaberis:

Non falsum testimonium dices: Non concupisces: et si quod est aliud

mandatum, in hoc verbo instauratur: Diliges proximum tuum sicut teipsum.

Dilectio proximi malum non operatur. Plenitudo ergo legis est dilectio.

This text is the Epistle reading for mass on the fourth Sunday after Epiphany, further supporting a distinctively seasonal thematic reading of the pageant.

The next pageant narrates the Baptism. There are two readings on the Baptism: Matthew iii.13-17 is read on the Sunday within the Octave of Epiphany, while John i.29-34 is read on the Sunday after the Octave. The pageant synthesizes these accounts, as do Gospel harmonies. The process of preparation for adult baptism took place in Lent, culminating on the Wednesday following the fourth Sunday in Lent, the Day of Great Scrutiny.(19) The practice of examining new catechumens throughout Lent died out after the tenth century, as infant baptism had become the norm,(20) but the extra readings in Lent on Wednesdays and Saturdays associated with it remained in the liturgy,(21) as the period of the year remained associated with instruction in the faith, for both new catechumens and Lenten penitents. Since the Lateran Council of 1215 annual confession followed by Easter communion was obligatory for all. The pageant of The Baptism not only offers an account of Jesus's baptism by John the Baptist, but interpolates instruction on the meaning of the sacrament. Such explanation is seasonably appropriate to Epiphany as an initiation for the weeks of preparation which follow.

The text in Matthew's Gospel deals with John's protestation that Jesus should rather baptize him, with the moment of the baptism itself, and the descent of the Holy Ghost. John's text provides the chronologically earlier sequence in which John identifies Jesus as the Redeemer, `agnus Dei ... qui tollit peccatum mundi', and as the Deity, existing outside time: `Post me venit vir qui ante me factus est.' But the pageant opens with the Baptist complaining about the difficulty of converting the populace. His first three stanzas, closely following John, explore the interrelationship between conversion, witness, and prophecy. The speech is one of many in the cycle with ambiguous deixis, ostensibly addressed to God, but as the Baptist is reporting on how he preaches that people should prepare themselves for baptism, he is also indirectly instructing the audience:

Loke pou make pe redy -- ay saide I --

Vnto oure lord God most of myght,

pat is pat pou be clene haly

In worde, in worke ay redy dight 

Agayns oure lord,

With partite liffe pat ilke a wight

Be well restored.

For if we be clene in levyng,

Oure bodis are Goddis tempyll pan.

In the whilke he will make his dwellyng.

Therfore be clene, bothe wiffe and man,

pis is my reed;

God will make in yowe haly pan

His wonnyng-steed. (29-42)

The ensuing dialogue, between John and the angel then with Christ, is corrupt because of a lacuna in the manuscript. In what remains, desire to instruct about the sacrament finally vanquishes historical verisimilitude, as John says,

Bot wele I wote, baptyme is tane

To wasshe and clense man of synne,

And wele I wotte pat synne is none

In hym, withoute ne withinne. (77-80)

The Lay Folks' Catechism defines baptism in similar terms:

The firste sacrement of seuen is our baptisme,

That we take the first tyme that we becum cristen,

In whilk bathe the first syn that we er born with,

And alkyn othir syn, is wasshen oway,

That we er filed with ar we take it;

And the trouthe of halikirk is taken thare-in

Withouten whilk na synfulman saule may be saued. (T 275-81)

The Catechism gives great importance to the correctness of the words which must be said in the sacrament too: `I baptize the in the name / Of the Fadir & the Son, & the Hali Gast' (T 286-7). Inevitably in the pageant too, the exact words are repeated by the Baptist (149-50), heedless of the anomaly that Jesus is being baptized in his own name. Again, the Catechism emphasizes the role of holy water:

Another is, that it be done anely in water,

For nanothir licour is leuefull tharfore, (T 288-9)

Jesus in the pageant accordingly pronounces,

pe vertue of my baptyme dwelle

In baptyme-watir euere and ay ... (101-2)

Both clearly derive their instructions for the procedure of the sacrament from the liturgical Manuale,(22) where the instructions for the blessing of the baptismal font begin, `Quando fons fuerit mundandus, et de pura aqua renovandus, quod saepe debet fieri propter aquae corruptionem, tunc dicitur sequens Litania et benedicitur fons modo sequenti cum cerco acenso. Et nota quod aqua baptismatis non debet mutari propter honorem alicujus potentis, nisi fuerit corrupta.' Later instructions indicate that the holy oil is omitted from the sacrament during Easter and Pentecost, and when emergency baptism is taken to infants in extremis, but that the presence and condition of the water are essential.

The pageant also twice asserts the connection between baptism and judgement, both personal and general, first when John prophesies that Jesus `schall giffe batyme more entire / In fire and gaste' (12-13), referring specifically to Pentecost, and secondly when Jesus' own voice, at the end of the pageant, promises,

What man pat trowis and baptised bes

Schall saued be and come to blisse.

Whoso trowes no??t, to payne endles

He schal be dampned sone, trowe wele pis. (162-5)

This overt connection of baptism and judgement contributes to the cycle's overarching historical and sacramental nexus of meaning, supporting the interpolation at the end of The Flood and its Waning where Noah assures Ham that although there will never be a second flood, the world will not endure eternally but will be wasted by fire in the end (299-302). In the order of the sacrament, the newly baptized is presented with a lit candle and promised eternal life after Christ's second coming with the words, `Accipe lampadem ardentem: irreprehensibilem custodi baptismum tuum; serva mandata; ut cum venerit Dominum ad nuptias possis occurrere ei una cum sanctis suis in aula caelesti, ut habeas vitam aeternam et vivas in saecula saeculorum.'(23) The Baptism, like The Last Supper, is an ingenious narrative compromise, inheriting and decorously mediating both the mythic narrative of the Gospel account, and the Church's ritual drama of re-enactment. Both pageants have mixed liturgical parentage, drawing their narrative raison d'etre from the readings in the missal, but their obligatory formulaic dialogue from elsewhere. The Last Supper clearly draws on the ordinary of the mass itself, whereas The Baptism is influenced by the special service for celebration of baptism, generally available in the separate Manuale, but sometimes integrated into the missal for Holy Week, the original date of reception of new catechumens. Both pageants are unfortunately incomplete in the manuscript at crucial points in their action. In The Baptism no pages are missing, but the scribe has indicated, at the point when Jesus' cue for entry is required, that `here wants a pece', and has written, next to the subsequent speech by Jesus, `de novo facto', indicating a reworking of this crucial moment in the action. In The Last Supper the problem is more straightforward as a page has been torn out: the enactment of a sacrament by a player may have proved offensive to post-Reformation sensibilities.(24)

2. Septuagesima to Quadragesima

With Septuagesima, the pre-Lenten period in the calendar, the long preparation for the Passion commences. The pattern of readings in the missal between Septuagesima and Quadragesima, the first Sunday of Lent, are set out in Table 2. Readings of Gospel accounts of Christ's miracles continue, commencing with the parable of the labourers in the vineyard on the first Sunday (Matthew xx.1-16). The thematic focus of the readings changes, however, and begins to look forward to the Passion, with parables and other Gospel texts in which the Passion and the Second Coming are overtly prophesied. The readings from the Epistles become more penitential in focus, in keeping with other changes to the character of the ritual of the mass such as the replacement of alleluias by tracts.(25) The early pattern doses on Quinquagesima Sunday, immediately before Ash Wednesday, with the reading from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians xiii, on faith, hope, and charity. The Gospel reading for that day is taken from Luke xviii.31-43, which describes Christ's prophecy of his own death and the performance of the first miracle on the road to Jerusalem. It appears that none of the cycles included any of this material. This period from Septuagesima Sunday is, however, the time when readings in the breviary for matins follow sequentially the episodes from the Old Testament which are the customary opening to a cycle of pageants.(26) The breviary sequence begins with the Creation and Fall on Septuagesima Sunday, followed by the story of Noah on Sexagesima Sunday, and Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac on Quinquagesima. Then on Quadragesima Sunday, the original first day of Lent, the Old Testament matins sequence harmonizes with, before giving way to, the New Testament readings from the missal once more. Hence on that Sunday, the matins reading tells of Moses and the Exodus, the period of Judaic exile, while the reading at mass concerns Christ's temptation in the wilderness. Thereafter, although the Old Testament sequence continues in the breviary, it does not in the cycle, but readings in the missal again coincide with the subject matter of the final group of pageants which lead up to the treatment of the Passion itself.

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It is perhaps worth noting here that the inclusion of materials in the cycle echoing weekday masses and material from the breviary argues strongly for clerical authorship. What familiarity the audience of the plays would have had with material from the breviary is less clear, although texts for matins were available to the lay elite in books of hours. Two reasons why the York Cycle should omit the material from the missal at this point in the calendar, but include material from the breviary, suggest themselves. First, a special interpretation was put upon Septuagesima by the Church fathers following Jerome, as a period within which the entire history of the world was ordered and recapitulated.(27) The episodes from the Old Testament featured in the matins readings were of fundamental historical and symbolic importance to the faith. Secondly, the omission of the missal texts from the cycle at this point may be connected with the fact that they deal predominantly with Christ's preaching and include two parables. The rationale of the cycle depends on a historical narrative in which certain events are elevated to symbolic significance because they derive their meaning from the centre, the Redemption. The sequence proceeds, therefore, according to both metonymic and metaphoric narrative principles. Christ's preaching, as reported in the Gospels, consists predominantly of parables, and is consequently also richly metaphoric. Although the parables were adapted for dramatic performance during the period of the mystery plays, none of the cycles includes the mimetic realization of one: a parable has its own metaphoric self-sufficiency which would run counter to the narrative coherence of the cycle as a whole.

The subjects of liturgical readings in the period beginning at Septuagesima, therefore, coincide with two distinct groups of pageants, the Old Testament story and the account of Christ's ministry, which have been split according to the chronological demands of the cycle's narrative so that they bracket the pageants which tell the story of the Christmas period from Advent to Epiphany. Quadragesima Sunday is the pivotal point. These two distinct groups of pageants work differently in the construction of the cycle's overall meaning, particularly if it is accepted as a celebration of Corpus Christi, the confirmation of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the sign of the perpetuity of Redemption. In the cycle of pageants, which was designed to occupy one single day, the Septuagesima texts are divided into those drawn from matins in the breviary -- the Fall of angels, the Creation and Fall of Man, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Abraham and Isaac, Moses and Pharaoh -- representing alienation and reconciliation through a succession of Old Testament figures; and those drawn from the missal -- Christ and the doctors, Baptism, marriage at Cana, Temptation, Transfiguration, Simon the leper, woman taken in adultery, raising of Lazarus -- all of which focus upon transformations. Historically they anticipate the Resurrection of Christ as well as the general resurrection, but they also explore the potential presence of the divine in the postlapsarian world. These two groups are separated from each other by the pageants' narrative sequence concerning the Nativity, the central historical moment of transformation at which God became man.

3. Quadragesima to Holy Week

The few ensuing episodes which the York Cycle does include to complete the bridging of the gap between Christmas and Easter all occur in Lent itself, with an increasing concentration towards the end. Table 3 sets out the arrangement of readings for Lent. The Temptation marks the beginning of Lent in the liturgy of the missal, in the company of St Paul's exhortation to man, II Corinthians vi.1-10, to demonstrate steadfastness in adversity. On the following day, the Gospel text is Matthew xxv.31-46, the Last Judgement. The dramatists always rectify historical order in the placing of this episode at the end of the cycles, but the proximity of the two texts in the calendar supports the thematic linkage of both which interpretative criticism has regularly found within the plays.(28) The Saturday ending that first week culminates in the Gospel reading of Matthew xvii.1-9, the Transfiguration. The Saturday of the fourth week in Lent has John viii.1-11 as its Gospel reading, the woman taken in adultery, and on the Friday of the final week of Lent the reading is John xi.1-45, the raising of Lazarus. This section of the cycle maintains the thematic focus of the season in the calendar upon the dual nature of Christ. After Epiphany there is a concentration on confirmations of his humanity and divinity which build retrospectively on the evidence of the Nativity; now, in the latter part of the season, the chosen episodes anticipate and interpret his death and Resurrection.

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What emerges is that the treatment of any one pageant in the cycle shows a dependence both on the heritage of its subject matter in patristic writing and on its customary positional significance within the liturgical calendar. Each pageant can, in other words, be contextualized diachronically in intellectual history and synchronically within the practice of worship. For the interpretative critic the distinction is probably unimportant, as these generating and receiving milieux, having developed in parallel through the early centuries of Christianity, accord. The distinction becomes important only in the consideration of the reception of mystery plays in their community. These two spheres of reference make contact, most importantly, in preaching, itself an important part of the synchronic context of the pageants, but also an accessible filter of the intellectual-historical legacy of a given text. Preaching, however, derived its full meaning by being a relatively integrated part of the round of worship; the relationship of the mystery plays to the same patterns is allusive, the cycle of one day indicating the annual cycle contained in the calendar. What follows will show how the dramatized Gospel text can be read not only in the customary way as a synthesis of the dramatist's intellectual heritage but also as a synthesis of the audience's accustomed reception of it as the focus for worship at mass on significant days within a specific season of the year.

The opening of the York pageant of The Temptation also reminds us of the elements of established dramaturgical convention which the drama of psychomachia as an autonomous form had established for itself. It begins with one of those raging, space-clearing, and attention-seeking monologues which any audience of mystery plays is accustomed to receiving from the mouths of the cycles' tyrants, as the Devil reminds the audience of how, ever since he fell, he has been moving about among mankind wreaking havoc. Jesus' solitude, which is referred to by the Devil as he issues the ensuing temptation -- `Ther sall no man witte what I mene / But I and pou' (65-6) -- is heavily ironic, as the entire scene is conducted before the eyes of an all-seeing audience. Mystery plays adhere to no self-conscious convention of either ignoring or acknowledging their audiences, but exploit the local advantages of either. The Lenten message, `A man lyvis noght in mayne and mode / With brede allone' (74-5), is the clear rebuke to the absent/present observer. Another is delivered from the pinnacle of the temple, `Be subgette to pi sovereyne / Arely and late' (123-4). A third admonition for the faithful is then presented, paraphrasing the biblical source, as a reproach to the Devil:

Non othyr myght schal be thy mede,

For wretyn it is, who right can rede,

Thy lord God pe aught to drede

And honoure ay,

And serue hym in worde and dede

Both ny??t and day.

The departing Devil, whose eyes are apparently blinded by brightness emanating from Jesus, crosses paths with one of two angels who have come belatedly to assist their master. The angel enquires whether Jesus has been hard pressed by the Devil. The reply takes the form of a straight instruction on how to deal with temptation:

For whan pe fende schall folke see

And salus pam in sere degre,

pare myrroure may pei make of me

For to stande still,

For ouercome schall pei no??t be

Bot yf pay will. (193-8)

The pageant closes with a confirmation of the beneficial effects of withstanding temptation in general:

My blissing haue pei with my hande

pat with swilke greffe is no??t grucchand,

And also pat will stiffely stande

Agaynste pe fende.

I knawe my tyme is faste comand,

Now will I wende. (205-10)

The play is a relatively unembellished version of the story, which no doubt relied on some rather startling visual effects as Jesus was transported to the pinnacle of the temple. Textually it presents the epitome of the idea of psychomachia as dialogue. In this battle of words, both parties take time out to address their case to the audience. The liturgical reading, Matthew iv.1-11, marks the opening of Lent, to which it bears a clear figural relationship which can readily be turned to moral instruction on relevant behaviour. Patristic commentary may give prominence to the wider theme of the devil's test of Christ's nature, but the late medieval preacher or Gospel harmonist was far more likely to expand on the episode's liturgical meaning. In Mirk's Festial,(29) for example, the model sermon for the first Sunday in Lent draws on the Temptation as an exemplum for the fast period to come:

And was per fourty dayes and so mony nyghtys fastyng for our loue, shouyng

to vs and all cristen men and pepull pe vertu and pe mede pat comyth of

fastyng, pe wheche vertu and mede ben expressed yn pe preface yn pe masse

pat ys sayde in holy chyrche pes fourty dayes.

Advice follows not only on bodily fasting, but on fasting of thought by concentrating on what a miserable creature a man is, particularly when he becomes the inevitable stinking corpse.

A specifically Lenten interpretation of the text can be found in many popular devotional texts from the Blickling Homilies(30) to the pseudo-Bonaventure Meditations on the Life of Christ, closer to the cycle in time and space by virtue of its having been adapted by Nicholas Love at the Carthusian house of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, c.1400.(31) Similarly, the author of the Stanzaic Life of Christ, a fourteenth-century text from Chester, takes considerable pains to connect biblical events with the liturgy, and opens the section on Quadragesima(32) by relating Lent's thirty-six days, discounting Sundays, to one-tenth of man's time,

But bycause that God al-might

fast fourte dayes fullilye,

therfore four be-iiij oright

we fasten to make ful fourty, (4437-40)

which takes Lent back to Ash Wednesday. There follows an ingenious and compendious explanation for the forty-day fast, drawing on all examples of forty available in scripture. The writer then discusses Christ's fast, showing an interesting consciousness of the double time-scheme presented by biblical history on one hand and the calendar on the other:

Now is to knowe a nedefull thing

to which I rede ??ow take gode hede,

whi we hold not oure fastyng

that tyme that Crist did, as was nede.

For Crist, as I haue told by-fore,

was folowet opon the twolft daie,

when he of elde was bout more

bygynning thritte ??er in fai,

Then his fasting began he

of faurty daies, as I fynd,

faur skilles whi so don not we

schowe I wil whil I haue mynde. (4617-28)

The reasons why we should fast annually and not only in our thirtieth year are explained, once more by reference to the requirements of the General Resurrection. Whereas the Resurrection occurred only once as a historical event in Christ's life, here it is conceived as an annual spiritual occurrence in the Christian's life, at Easter. The Lenten fast is then compared to the period the Jews spent in the wilderness, that fast to be emulated by Gentiles who want to be delivered out of bondage at Easter. The author seems to be working with a typological model in his interpretation. But the story of the Exodus is also the matins text for the same Sunday, the first in Lent, when the Temptation is the Gospel text at mass, so the primary source of inspiration may still be simply the calendar and the liturgy. The episode, therefore, plays a pivotal role in an account of Christ's life, whether the organizing principle be figural or festive. Figurally it links the Fall with the Resurrection and beyond, importantly foregrounding the mystery of Christ's dual nature. In its liturgical context, however, its significance on the first Sunday of Lent is as a moral exemplum of how to use a fast, particularly the universal fast of Lent, as a remedy against the temptations of the devil and a preparation for the feast of Easter.

A single thematic preoccupation unites The Transfiguration of Christ and all the following ministry episodes selected by the playwrights: they all explore the dichotomy of Christ's human and divine natures in ways which prepare the meaning of the Resurrection. This episode is the Gospel text for the mass on Ember Saturday in Lent, the day before the second Sunday. Ember days are the three times in the Church year, apart from the great fast of Lent, which are set aside for fasting. Known earlier as quatuor tempora or the `quarter tense', they fall on the Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday in the third week in Advent, the first week in Lent, in the week after Pentecost, and the week following 14 September.(33) The Ember Saturday of Lent was a very important day as it was the primary day in the calendar for ordinations,(34) a day of fasting and keeping vigils with an embellished liturgy, including the Great Vigil of Twelve Lessons, which took place during the night. It is not altogether surprising, therefore, that the Gospel text for mass on this day, of special and memorable significance in its own right and coming right at the beginning of Lent, the period counting down to Easter, should have been selected for dramatization. The York pageant elaborates on its Gospel source by drawing an important distinction between Elias and Moses, the two figures who are miraculously conjured to testify to the divinity of Christ. This distinction aids the integration of later material in the Passion sequence which draws on the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. Elias says that he comes from the Earthly Paradise, Moses that he comes from hell. Moses, therefore, speaks from limbo where he awaits the Harrowing of Hell:

Frendis, if pat ??e frayne my name,

Moyses pan may ??e rede by rawe.

Two thousand ??ere aftir Adam

pan gaffe God vnto me his lawe,

And sythen in helle had bene oure hame,

Allas, Adams kynne, pis schall ??e knawe.

Vnto Crist come, pis is pe same

pat vs schall fro pat dongeoun drawe.

He schall brynge pam to blys

pat nowe in bale are bonne.

This myrthe we may not mys,

For this same is Goddis sonne. (121-32)

Moses also acknowledges that he was the recipient of God's old law on Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments which represent the first contract between God and man, one based on divine justice alone. This is the old law which is imminently to be fulfilled and modified by Christ's new law of justice tempered with mercy, defining the new contract between man and his God drawn up on Calvary. Elias promises to fight on Christ's side against the Antichrist, when the tenets of divine justice will be reasserted once and for all time. The pageant capitalizes verbally and visually on the transformational nature of the event and its meaning. It concerns Christ's divinity and his humanity, anticipates his Resurrection as well as the General Resurrection of the dead, and confess concrete narrative dramatic form upon central theological abstractions, the related sacred paradoxes of justice and mercy, doubt and belief. These properties of the biblical account in all probability contributed to the adoption of a new feast dedicated to the Transfiguration into the calendar in the 1480s or 1490s, around the same time as that of the Holy Name.(35) These are also the available thematic foci of the remaining episodes from the Lenten liturgy on which the cycle draws to cover the historical period of Christ's ministry.

The missing pageant of Jesus in the House of Simon the Leper is an intrusion at this point of the York Cycle, as the text from Luke vii does not occur in the missal for the Lenten season. J. Clerke the scribe wrote, `This matter lacks, videlicet.' Jesus, et Simon leprosus rogans eum vt manducaret cum eo, duo discipuli, Maria Magdalena lauans pedes Jesu lacrimis et capillis suis tergens.'(36) This note does help to explain such a pageant's sometime inclusion at this point. In the biblical text, the protagonist is `a woman in the city who was a sinner'. Elsewhere, in John xii.12-19, Christ's feet are anointed by another nameless woman and also wiped with her hair. The latter event reportedly took place at Bethany, and the woman was Mary, sister of Lazarus whom Jesus was to raise from the dead. Traditionally, Mary of Bethany was conflated with Mary Magdalene. The confusion clearly arose because, in the words of Nicholas of Lyra, `erat quam multe mulieres vocabantur nomine Marie'.(37) Indeed the seven Marys of the New Testament, as well as the woman taken in adultery, the woman of Samaria, and the woman in the city who was a sinner, all combine at some point in the later Middle Ages with the legendary St Mary the Egyptian, under the name Magdalen.(38) In the missal, the story of the woman taken in adultery is anticipated by two other thematically related stories featuring women. The story of Christ's encounter with the woman of Samaria at the well from John iv.4-42 is the Gospel text for the preceding day, the third Friday in Quadragesima, and the apocryphal history of Susanna is then read before the Gospel text on the Saturday itself. The entire week is given over to the appropriate penitential issues of purgation by water and fire, and of forgiveness. In the York Cycle, however, it is the link between the woman taken in adultery and the raising of Lazarus that is asserted, and so much so that the story of the man born blind, a miracle on the road to Jerusalem, is annexed from its liturgical position between these two episodes and inserted instead into the cycle's Palm Sunday material, the pageant of The Entry into Jerusalem. Described thus, the reordering seems complicated, but in fact all these readings belong to the end of Lent and the beginning of Passiontide. The cycle dramatist seems to be self-consciously maintaining the thematic continuity of that period in the calendar while reordering locally once again in order to attend to the narrative integrity of the Gospel harmony sequence.

The episode of The Woman Taken in Adultery makes case-history of the transformation of the sinner in a pageant which illustrates the gravity of contravening one of the Commandments, but also objectifies the balance between justice and mercy as they coexist under the tenets of the new law. Within the narrative of the cycle, the episode anticipates the trial scenes in the Passion sequence, which systematically expose the inadequacies inherent in earthly justice, signalled variously by Jewish and Roman authority probably overlaid with fifteenth-century English juridical procedures. Within its calendar context, the account presents an optimistic object lesson for Lent, both on the necessity of repentance and its efficacy for the murkiest of individual souls. The liturgical background to a dramatic treatment of this episode was examined by Peter Meredith in an article on the N-town plays which explains why in that instance the episode should open with the line, `Nolo mortem peccatoris', part of the weekday antiphon for the psalms at Prime during the first four weeks of Lent, and of the Epistle for the mass on Friday in the first week of Lent.(39) He reconstructs that playwright's knowledge of commentaries on the episode and the structuring of the pageant in terms of text and exemplum, pointing out that not only is the Gospel text presented in full as the reading for the Saturday of the fourth week in Lent, but that quotations and key phrases from it are repeated elsewhere in this part of the season as antiphons. In the case of the York episode, a different argument for a self-conscious homiletic Lenten composition can be made. The manuscript is missing the leaf containing the crucial action of the arrival of Christ, his initial exchange with the scribes and Pharisees, and his writing in the earth. All this central action is missing, moreover, because it was contained on one leaf, indicating the comparative economy with which the episode is treated in York. What embellishment there is of the Gospel text is confined to the initial debate amongst the Jews and the closing exchange between Christ and his apostles. The latter, as the chosen closure of the episode and a transition into The Raising of Lagarus, seems to offer a reading which is different in emphasis from the traditional patristic interpretation. St Augustine emphasizes the separability of sin and sinner signalled by `Vade, deinceps jam noli peccare',(40) his Tractatus XXXIII on John's Gospel focusing on the relationship between the individual soul and Christ. The York pageants, on the other hand, focus self-consistently on Christ's ministry as an opportunity for general pardon, such as was institutionalized in the season of Lent. Hence the departing woman's final speech contains four lines which are apparently addressed not to Christ but to the audience, as indicated in the pronominal shift from second to third person, opening out the lesson once more into the realm of communal public experience:

A, lord, ay loued mott pou bee.

All erthely folke in feere

Loves hym and his high name,

pat me on pis manere

Hath saued fro synne and schame. (70-4)

The ensuing dialogue between Jesus and the first and second disciples begins by celebrating the former's role as saviour of sinners, but moves on to emphasize man's role as agent as well as recipient of mercy:

A, maistir, here may men se also

How mekenes may full mekill amende,

To forgeue gladly where we goo

All folke pat hath vs oght offende. (87-90)

Once again the directly delivered lesson has communal, social force.

The pageant offers a contrast between a group of characters at its beginning, the scribes and Pharisees representing the old law, who offer outright condemnation for the sin, and Christ and the disciples at the end. The opening scene abstains from characterizing the victim of the Jews' vilification, promoting a reading of the episode in which the woman is not foregrounded primarily as an individual sinner, as she is in other dramatic versions of the episode. The closing scene of the pageant demonstrates the new law as a code of social behaviour, in which man can be both agent and patient. As such, the focus lies not so much upon the private relationship between the individual soul and the deity, but upon the institutional legacy of Christ's mercy as represented by the Church, and formalized and celebrated in its public acts of worship and, by extension, the pageants. This view of Christ's ministry as signalling the transformation from old to new law was broached in the reading of the Commandments offered at the centre of the pageant of Christ before the Doctors. The obligation of the individual Christian to emulate Christ in the exercise of mercy was further institutionalized by his Church as the corporate body of all Christians in, for example, its reading of Matthew xxv, the Last Judgement, and the Works of Corporal Mercy, which provides the cycle with its definitive final moment.

The broad principles of selection and treatment in the York Cycle of the episodes drawn from Christ's ministry are simply confirmed by the treatment of the last of them, The Raising of Lazarus. The final Friday and Saturday at the very end of Lent are marked by two texts drawn from John's Gospel. The first, John xi, the narrative of the raising of Lazarus, is the immediate dramatic forerunner of Christ's own Resurrection, a demonstration of his power over death and the devil. The second, the text for the eve of Palm Sunday, John viii.12-20, confirms Christ's role as true `light of the world', saviour, and ultimate judge, as he bears witness for the final time in his ministry, as it is narrated in the calendar, to his power and divinity. The raising of Lazarus is paired with an Old Testament account of another resurrection by divine intervention, taken from III Kings xvii.17-24, where Elijah calls upon God to resurrect a baby in order to demonstrate to the child's mother that his preaching has divine sanction. And the final emphatic statement of Christ's divine nature is in turn supported by Isaiah's vision of God the comforter in xlix.8-15:

Haec dicit Dominus: in tempore placito exaudivi te, et in die salutis

auxiliatus sum tui; et servavi te, et dedi te in foedus populi, ut

suscitares terram, et possideres haereditates dissipatas; ut diceres his

qui vincti sunt: exite; et his qui in tenebris; revelamini. Super vias

pascentur, et in omnibus planis pascua eorum.

Non esurient neque sitient, et non percutiet eos aestus et sol, quia

miserator eorum reget eos, et ad fontes aquarum portabit eos. Et ponam

omnes montes meos in viam, et semitae meae exaltabuntur. Ecce isti de

longe venient, et ecce illi ab aquilone et mari, et isti de terra

australi. Laudate, caeli, et exsulta, terra;

iubilate, montes, laudem, quia consolatus est Dominus populum suum, et

pauperum suorum miserebitur. Et dixit Sion: dereliquit me Dominus, et

Dominus oblitus est mei. Numquid oblivisci potest mulier infantem suum, ut

non misereatur filio uteri sui? Et si ilia oblita fuerit, ego tamen non

obliviscar tui.

The moment is the climax of Lent, the drawing together of the whole examination of the nature of belief, of man's role as doubter and penitent, of catechumen coming to God, and Christ's reciprocal role as comforter, redeemer, and judge. The devil was denied proof of Christ's nature in the wilderness, but the return from the wilderness is marked by proofs of Christ's divinity available in his miracles, as well as the direct manifestation of the Transfiguration. The ultimate test, which will be the ultimate defining event, is about to be celebrated in the narrative of Holy Week itself. In the York Cycle, this watershed of the faith is represented by the regrettably fragmentary pageant of The Raising of Lazarus. The episode is, notwithstanding, crucial to the tropological narrative of the cycle.

For the York dramatist, John xi carried a weight of Latin commentary relating to the definition and nature of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, and the wider implications of the resurrection of the body. For the audience too, Christ's last miracle offered a dramatic mirror for the fast-approaching climax of Holy Week. The fragment in the York Cycle strays very little from John's narrative. Conversely, in the N-town pageant, the biblical narrative is embedded within an overtly didactic sequence on moderation in mourning, and the Towneley pageant compresses the Gospel account, devoting the second half of the pageant to a vivid and imaginative monologue from Lazarus on the horrors of the tomb, undoubtedly inspired by precursors of the Visio Lazari which later appears in the popular compendium known as the Kalender of Shepherdes.(41) Both of these latter embellishments draw on mainstream, nondramatic vernacular literary writing within the broad ars moriendi context.

The three participants in the episode are identified as Lazarus and his sisters Martha and Mary. The pageant does not call Mary `Magdalen' in the text, but the surviving description of Jesus at the House of Simon the Leper suggests such an identification, linking the two episodes. Other dramatists dealing with the episode seem to have accepted the conflation, as Mary of Bethany is called `Mawdelyn' and `Mawdlayn' in N-town and Towneley respectively. The play of The Life of St Mary Magdalen from the Digby collection(42) includes the episode of Lazarus's resurrection, and in the Latin tradition too, in both the Benediktbeuern Ludus de Passione and the Fleury Playbook, the characters are conflated. Commentators in general devote more attention to the figural significance of the three participants in the episode than to their literal identifies. The cue is evidently taken from the Glossa which states, `Lazarus figura est Judaeorum qui infirmi erant in fide Christi: Martha et Maria significant doctrinam bonorum Judaeorum.'(43) The distinct roles of the two sisters in particular received detailed inspection. Why Martha and Mary should send a messenger to Christ instead of going personally was used by Latin commentators to construct the reading of Martha and Mary respectively as types of the active and contemplative lives.(44) Traditionally it is Martha who sends for Christ's help while Mary indulges in excessive mourning. In the York Cycle alone, there is no distinction to be drawn between the two sisters: both have sent the Nuncius, and both are equally vehement in their mourning. They have a stanza each:

Maria:

Allas, owtane Goddis will allone,

pat I schulld sitte to see pis sight,

For I may morne and make my mone,

So wo in worlde was neuere wight.

pat I loued most is fro me gone,

My dere brothir pat Lazar hight,

And I durst saye I wolde be slone

For nowe me fayles both mynde and myght.

My welthe is wente for euere,

No medycyne mende me may.

A, dede, pou do thy deuer

And haue me hense away.

Martha:

Allas, for ruthe now may I raue

And febilly fare by frith and felde,

Wolde God pat I were grathed in graue,

pat dede hadde tane me vndir telde.

For hele in harte mon I neuere haue

But if he helpe pat all may welde.

Of Crist I will som comforte craue

For he may be my bote and belde.

To seke I schal no??t cesse

Tille I may souereyne see.

Hayle, pereles prince of pesse,

Jesu my maister so free. (147-70)

These are not voices designed to be read according to patristic allegorical gloss; they are two more female voices raised in yet another anticipatory echo of the planctus which will follow in the liturgy of Good Friday, precisely one week after this episode in the liturgy. The desire to die with their brother which both sisters express anticipates the same desire in the Virgin at the base of the Cross.(45)

The York dramatist of this pageant is not entirely ignorant of its entire burden of patristic commentary, as can be seen from the way that the pageant gives prominence both to Christ's mysterious foreknowledge of his friend's death and to the period spent by Lazarus in the tomb.(46) The dramatist uses this material to link the episode with other proofs of Christ's divinity:

I saie to ??ou, Lazare is dede,

And for ??ou all grete joie I haue

??e wote I was noght in pat stede

What tyme pat he was graued in graue. (137-40)

The nature of the miracle, and Christ's foreknowledge of the death of Lazarus, are part of a broader concern with exploring Christ's own dual nature, and his relationship with the Father. In the Gospel account, Christ says to the messenger, `Infirmitas non est ad mortem, sed pro gloria Dei, ut glorificetur Filius Dei per eam.' In the York pageant, Father and Son are quite distinct:

I saie ??ou pat sekeness

Is no??t onto pe dede,

But joie of Goddis gudnesse

Schal be schewed in pat stede.

And Goddis sone schall be glorified ... (107-11)

Accordingly the prayer for intercession is addressed to the Father in heaven. Unfortunately that part of the pageant which would have interpreted Christ's affirmation of his own divinity, `ego sum resurrectio et vita ...', is missing.(47)

The most theologically problematic verse in the narrative is Verse 35, `Et lacrymatus est Iesus'. This, coupled with John's account of Christ's perturbation immediately before the accomplishment of the miracle, offered more evidence about Christ's dual nature at a historical moment immediately prior to the events of the Passion in which such matters predominate. The relevant passage, which bears a substantial burden of commentary, is unfortunately missing from the York pageant altogether. It clearly caused problems for the dramatists of other cycles.(48) The central issue, in common with both the Temptation and the Passion, concerns how Christ responds to taunts to exercise his divine power to save himself and to place his divine credentials beyond public doubt. Christ's divinity is a secret known only to his disciples, demonstrated at his Transfiguration, and crucially concealed from the devil. It is, however, an open secret, as its concealment within the dramatic narrative is functional to its repeated revelation to the audiences of the cycles. These other pageants are here simply following the major range of orthodox readings of the event.(49) For dramatic representation is not in a position easily to present metaphysical interpretations of biblical text, but where there are conventionally morally didactic readings available, these can effectively be exploited. English lives of Christ, possibly following Ludolphus of Saxony, saw Lazarus himself as chiefly a figura poenitentium.(50) This reading, supported by the Lenten occurrence of the episode in the Church calendar, opened possibilities to the dramatists for drawing on the larger body of contemporary vernacular writing on the subject of death and penance for embellishment, as the extensive digressions incorporated into N-town and Towneley testify.

The York playwright, so far as can be established, chose, however, to focus on a less embellished version of the story, possibly relying on the simple liturgical strength of the episode in its significant historical position. The Lazarus miracle offered the playwright a Lenten theme of bodily death and spiritual salvation, as well as an episode which economically anticipated the Passion, the Harrowing of Hell, and the Resurrection of Christ himself. The period of the pageants is one which, broadly speaking, saw a proliferation of visual images associating bodily decay with either, literally, spiritual salvation, or, figurally, man's state of sin: this episode also offered opportunities for incorporating such popular imagery, and all the pageants would have shown the moving of the stone and the unbinding of the risen corpse, a sequence of profound and eerie visual impact. Dwelling on the visual aspects of bodily death and the resurrection of a body dead for four days is not simply a by-product of the more macabre manifestations of late medieval visual art; it too belongs to the core of patristic accretions to the biblical text.(51) The visual realization of resurrectio et vita, and the image of light implicit in the interpretation, accords with the devotional impact of the drama, and closely allied to the stock imagery of light in the treatment of the risen corpse is the contemplative image conveyed in Jesus' own comparison of himself to the day, and the apostles to the twelve hours of daylight, in John xi.9-10. The York dramatist devotes an entire stanza to the image:

Jesus:

??e wote by cours wele for to kast,

pe daie is now of xij oures lange,

And whilis light of pe day may last

It is gode pat we grathely gange.

For whan daylight is pleynly past

Full sone pan may ??e wende all wrang.

Therfore takes hede and trauayle fast

Whills light of liffe is ??ou emang.

And to ??ou saie I more,

How pat Lazar oure frende

Slepes nowe, and I therfore

With ??ou to hym will wende. (123-34)

The related imagery of day and night, life and death, salvation and sin is already present in the text from John's Gospel, in its placing towards the end of Lent, and in the related texts in its liturgical context: the drama exploits this context to convey an accepted correspondence between death and resurrection and the reclamation of lost souls to the faith such as is entirely appropriate as the climax of Lent and a prelude to the events of Holy Week.

5. Conclusion

The pageants in the York Cycle which present scenes from the adult life of Christ between the flight into Egypt and the entry into Jerusalem have attracted less critical attention than any other section of the cycle. They have rarely been discussed as a group. They are few in number, given the available amount of material in the Gospel accounts of Christ's life, and the few there are have inconvenient lacunae. They are not anthologized: the editors of anthologies of mystery plays, whose object is to present representative examples of the more dramatically appealing pageants from the surviving cycles, appear to consider that the focus on Christmas and Easter in the cycles is so pervasive that the material between can be omitted unmissed.

The York Cycle of pageants was devised as a celebration of the liturgical feast of Corpus Christi, the celebration of the mystic union between God and man contained in the eucharist. The cycle tells the story of that relationship as a historical drama with a corporate, and by extension, civic, focus.(52) Naturally the focus of the narrative is the period in which God was actually transformed into a man who lived out a span of man's time on earth, with particular dual climaxes directed at events surrounding his arrival and departure. Those climaxes were part of the fabric of the audience's own lifecycle in the recurrent annual liturgical celebrations of Christmas and Easter. Christ spent his time on earth teaching men about the nature of their relationship with the deity, by preaching and by signs, creating a pedagogic heritage which was passed on to the evangelists who recorded his words and actions and, thereby, to the Church and the clergy within whose traditions the mystery plays were produced. Teaching by preaching, by example, and by sign is fundamental to the procedures of the medieval Church. The season of the Church year which was traditionally given over to induction into, and renewing of individual bonds within, the Church was the period between Christmas and Easter, when the liturgy draws on texts from both Old and New Testaments which teach and remind the human race about the historical nature of its contract with the deity. The relationship is then confirmed sacramentally in the pattern of timeless rituals of baptism, penance and, particularly, eucharist. The cycle of plays, using the Septuagesima matins readings from the Old Testament and the major signifying episodes from the Gospel readings at mass in the period immediately after Epiphany and in Lent itself, is a reprise of this pattern for enactment on the day of its celebration.

NOTES

(1) Margaret Deanesly, The Lollard Bible (Cambridge, 1920), p. 295; Anne Hudson, Lollards and their Books (London, 1985), pp. 148-55. The circumstances of the licensing and reception of Nicholas Love's Mirrour of the Blessed Lift of Jesus Christ, ed. Michael G. Sargent (New York and London, 1992) (see especially pp. xxiv-xxv) are also relevant in this context.

(2) Raymond St-Jacques, in `Middle English literature and the liturgy: recent research and future possibilities', Mosaic, 12/2 (1979), 1-10, refers back (3-4) to Mary Marshall's pioneering study of influence of Latin liturgical plays on the cycles, `The dramatic tradition established by the liturgical plays', PMLA, 56 (1941), 962-91; to Marjorie Coogen Downing's unpublished doctoral dissertation, `The influence of the liturgy on the English cycle plays', Yale, DA, 27 (1967), which looked for the influences of the liturgy which did not pass through Latin dramatic intermediaries; and to a further unpublished doctoral dissertation, E. M. Clark, `The liturgical influence in the Towneley plays' (unpub. diss., University of Oklahoma, 1941), which investigated how liturgy helped transmit biblical matter into dramatic form. All were general in focus. The most recent and thorough study of the subject is Theo Stemmler, Liturgische Feiern und geistliche Spiele (Tubingen, 1970). Also writing at a time at which a straightforwardly evolutionary argument for the development of Corpus Christi cycles was largely unchallenged, Stemmler uses Chambers and Craig as starting points for his argument and begins by examining Latin liturgical drama, before moving on to the English vernacular cycles. Like the other studies, his treatment of detail focuses on the seasons of Christmas and Easter, because their dramatization is common to both traditions. For the modern reader, his most valuable observations concern the association of the whole story of the Fall and Redemption as it relates to the new feast of Corpus Christi (pp. 174-7):

Aus diesen Worten Urbans IV geht hervor, da[Beta] die Einsetzung des neuen

Festes im umfassenden Rahmen des Erlosungswerkes gesehen wird. Es wird

ausfuhrlich dargestellt, wie die eucharistische Speise die todlichen Folgen

aufhebt, die der Genu[Beta] jener verbotenen Speise im Paradies ausgelost

hat. In immer wieder neuen Formulierungen werden Sundenfall und Genu[Beta]

der verbotenen Frucht der Erlosungstat Christi und dem Genu[Beta] der

heilbringenden Speise gegenubergestellt. Das gro[Beta]e Thema von Fall und

Erlosung des Menschen ist also bereits in der papstlichen Einsetzungsbulle

deutlich erkennbar.

Confirming broad patterns, he points out that in the York Barkers' play of the Creation and Fall of Lucifer, the newly created angels sing the Te Deum laudamus, establishing a fundamental relationship of worship between Creator and creature (p. 182). He sees this as defining the nature of the relationship through several other examples from other cycles, and relating not only to the Fall of angels, but also of man. He also, countering Glynne Wickham, attributes the processional impulse of the cycles to liturgical precedents, particularly the Palm Sunday procession, at which crosses and the host in a feretrum or monstrance were conventionally carried, rather than to folklore ritual (p. 193).

(3) For example, most recently, Alexandra Johnson, `What if no texts survived? External evidence for early English drama', in Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey (eds.), Contexts for Early English Drama (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind., 1989), p. II.

(4) Alexandra Johnson correctly asserts that `the Guild of Corpus Christi never at any time had anything to do with the Corpus Christi Play' (`The Guild of Corpus Christi and the procession of Corpus Christi in York', Medieval Studies, 38 (1976), 372-84 (p. 373)), and, indeed, until the procession and the plays were moved to separate days, it would not have been possible to march in one and actually to perform in the other. However, although the Guild of Corpus Christi as a whole had no hand in the plays, the same cannot be said of its individual members. The membership lists (Robert H. Skaife (ed.), The Register of the Guild of Corpus Christi in the City of York, Surtees Society LVII (1871)) include the names of twelve mayors in the first twenty years of the confraternity's existence, as well as all those named in the Mercers' 1433 indenture by which that guild transferred its stage properties.

(5) It is not appropriate to develop this point in the present context. Suffice to say that in pageants attributable to a number of different hands, Christ is formulaically greeted in speeches repeating the greeting, `Hail ...'. These speeches, which include the Virgin's words to her newborn son, echo the conventional form of elevation lyrics, cf. R. H. Robbins, `Levation prayers in Middle English verse', Modern Philology, 40 (1942-3), 131-46.

(6) C. A. Patrides, The Grand Design of God: The Literary Form of the Christian View of History (London, 1972), p. 7.

(7) Richard Beadle (ed.), The York Plays (London, 1982). All quotations from the York Cycle are taken from this edition. References to the other major collections of mystery plays will be by play title and line number, drawing on the standard editions as follows: Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley (eds.), The Towneley Plays, Early English Text Society, SS 13 (1994); R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills (eds.), The Chester Cycle, Early English Text Society, SS 3 (1974); Stephen Spector (ed.), The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, Early English Text Society, SS 11 (1991).

(8) Most recently in Richard Rastall, The Heaven Singing: Music in Early English Religious Drama, Vol. I (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), passim, but especially pp. 121-37 and 290-99.

(9) Revd Dr Henderson (ed.), Missale ad usum insignis ecclesiae Eboracensis, I and II, Suttees Society, LIX (1874) and LX (1875). The Use prevalent in the archdiocese of York in the fifteenth century has been used as the primary source, although there is in fact little variation in the readings cited between the uses of York and of Sarum. Different Gospel readings were, however, employed on the fifth Sunday after Epiphany, York: Luke iv.14-22, Jesus returns to Galilee to preach; Sarum: Matthew xiii.24-30, the parable of the wheat and the tares.

(10) Beadle, York Plays, pp. 440, 441.

(11) Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office; A Guide to their Organisation and Terminology (Toronto, 1982), p. 4.

(12) Ibid., p. 136.

(13) Beadle, York Plays, pp. 161-6.

(14) `Middle English metrical versions of the Decalogue with reference to the English Corpus Christi cycles', Leeds Studies in English, NS 8 (1975), 129-45.

(15) T. F. Simmons and H. E. Nolloth (eds.), The Lay Folks' Catechism, Early English Text Society, OS 118 (1901). See Anne Hudson, `A new look at the Lay Folks' Catechism', Viator, 16 (1985), 243-58, for the precedence of variant texts and manuscripts. This English verse version of Pecham's `Ignorancia sacerdotis ...' is integrated into Archbishop Thoresby of York's Register for 25 November 1357 (fols [297.sup.v]-[298.sup.v]). The English text is, in many manuscripts, attributed to John Gaytryk, a monk of St Mary's Abbey in York. See also R. N. Swanson, `The origins of the Lay Folks' Catechism', MAE, 60 (1991), 92-7.

(16) `Middle English versions of the Decalogue', pp. 133-4.

(17) Ibid., p. 136.

(18) Simmons and Nolloth (eds.), Catechism, p. 60.

(19) Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts, p. 95.

(20) O. B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, Md., 1965), p. 100.

(21) Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts, p. 909.

(22) Manuale et processionale ad usum insignis ecclesiae Eboracensis, Surtees Society (Durham, 1875), pp. 5-22.

(23) Ibid., p. 17.

(24) In the Catalan Misteri d'Elx, the pageant of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary which has been in continuous annual production in its city of origin since the fifteenth century, the part of St Peter, the celebrant of the funeral mass of the Virgin, still must be played by a priest, cf. Pamela King and Asuncion Salvador-Rabaza Ramos, `La Festa d'Elx', Medieval English Theatre, 8/2 (1986), 21-50 (p. 33).

(25) Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts, p. 137.

(26) The relationship between the liturgy and Old Testament episodes in mystery cycles was discussed in Adelina M. Jenney, `A further word as to the origin of the Old Testament plays', MP, 13 (1915), 59-64.

(27) Hardison, Christian Rite, p. 87.

(28) e.g. Alan H. Nelson, `The temptation of Christ; or the English temptation of Satan', in Jerome Taylor and Alan Nelson (eds.), Medieval English Drama.' Essays Critical and Contextual (Chicago, Il., 1972), pp. 218-29.

(29) Theodore Erbe (ed.), Mirk's Festial, I, Early English Text Society, ES 96 (1905), pp. 82-4.

(30) R. Morris (ed.), The Blickling Homilies, Early English Text Society, OS 58, 63, 73 (1874), cf. p. 26.

(31) M. G. Sargent (ed.), Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (New York, 1992).

(32) Francis A. Foster (ed.), A Stanzaic Life of Christ, Early English Text Society, OS 166 (1926), p. 150.

(33) Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts, p. 110.

(34) Cyrille Vogel, Medieval Liturgy: An Introduction to the Sources (Washington, DC, 1986) p. 312.

(35) Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (London and New Haven, Conn., 1992), p. 45.

(36) Beadle, York Plays, p. 441.

(37) Nicholas de Lyra, Lyra in Biblia, Part II (Nuremberg, 1481), unpaginated.

(38) Helen M. Garth, Saint Mary Magdalen in Medieval Literature (Baltimore, Md., 1950), p. 18.

(39) Peter Meredith, "`Nolo mortem" and the Ludus Coventriae play of the woman taken in adultery', MAE, 38 (1969), 38-54.

(40) St Augustine, Tract 49 in Joan., PL, XXXV, col. 1650.

(41) H. O. Sommer (ed.), The Kalender of Shepherdes, Vol. I (London, 1892), pp. 67-92. The Kalender was first printed in French in 1493, then translated into English in 1506, but it is recognized to be a compendium of earlier material. Max Voigt, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Visionenliteratur in Mittelalter, Palaestra 146 (1924), 1-133 (p. 4), quotes an account dating from 1353 of one Sir George's visit to St Patrick's Purgatory that contains the following: `Item vidit ibi sicut eciam beatus Lazarus in suo libro quem fecit de penis purgatorii et qui communiter et publice legitur in ecclesia Marsiliensi in qua quondam episcopus erat; vidit quidem ...'

(42) F. J. Furnivall (ed.), The Digby Plays, Early English Text Society, ES 70 (1896), pp. 165ff.

(43) Glossa ordinaria: Evangelium secundum Joannem, PL, CXIV, col. 399.

(44) Ludolphus de Saxonia, Vita Jesu Christi (Paris and Rome, 1865), p. 457, for example, offers a clear synthesis of this tradition, equating Martha with the active life, Mary with the contemplative, whereas he sees in Lazarus a figure of penance.

(45) The speeches, taken as a piece, contribute more than detailed verbal analogues. It is by repeating broad rhetorical patterns such as this that the York Cycle supports its cyclic transformational movement, from Fall to Redemption, alienation to reunion. The most arresting of all these rhetorical patterns are those of greeting and lamenting, both associated with the Virgin Mary, as the `Hail' incipit of the angel of the Annunciation who brings God to mankind is repeatedly juxtaposed, in the greetings of shepherds and magi at the Nativity for example, with the `Alas' which opens the planctus at moments of separation as when the mothers of the Innocents mourn their dead babies. These patterns are not evidence of common authorship for the pageants in which they occur, so much as of conventional modes of discourse, comprehended in broad patterns and drawing their meaning from acts of worship.

(46) Nicholas of Lyra equates this foreknowledge with the ars magica, whereas Chrysostom, in his commentary on John, suggests that Christ's display of his privileged knowledge to his disciples was a piece of reluctant boastfulness made necessary by their imperfection, and that the four days in the tomb were necessary to establish that Lazarus was not in a coma. Augustine (Tract. 49 in Joan.) placed actual figural significance on each of the four days. Both glosses are acknowledged in Ludolphus of Saxony's popular Vita Jesu Christi.

(47) St Augustine (Tract. 49 in Joan, PL, XXXV, cols 1749-54) sidesteps the issue somewhat by stating that the object was not to glorify Christ himself, but for our benefit, and that, consequently, Lazarus' death was not for death's sake, but to make possible a miracle which would enable man to believe in God and survive true death. Bodily resurrection by the time of the mystery plays was, of course, associated with spiritual salvation in a way which became a truism in western thought, notably in legends of the miraculous preservation of the bodies of saints.

(48) In Chester, the incident is included by report (426-33). The dramatist here demonstrates a sense of wider implications, citing the miracle of the man born blind, which is so closely linked with this one both in the liturgy and the cycles themselves. The N-town dramatist offers both the tears and his own explanation for them. Christ cannot stand by and watch others weep without himself being moved: the deity is not immune to infectious emotion (377-80). This dramatist thus foregrounds the paradox of Christ's dual nature. In the Towneley pageant Christ weeps. Dramatically here a display of mourning is in keeping with the tenor of the pageant and later reminders of the horrors of bodily death and its inevitability.

(49) Augustine related the episode to his discussion of the nature of Christ: he was troubled because he wished to be, in the same way as he felt hunger because he wished to, for he undertook the voice, body, and spirit of man in one natural person. The tears were shed for the lost sinner; that is Christ knew he was lost, not where he was, in the same way that God called out, `Adam, ubi es?' in Eden. The most comprehensive account of these verses is found in St Hilary's definition of the Trinity (Pictavorum episcopi opera: liber decimus de Trinitate, editor unknown (Paris, 1693), col. 1052). To summarize, in general he asserts that Jesus was strongly affected by human emotions as part of his human nature, like the streams of living waters which are promised to the faithful. Specifically he wept for Lazarus, not because he was sorry that Lazarus was dead, for he himself instructed the disciples to rejoice at the death which would glorify God, nor did he weep because he was absent when Lazarus died, because that absence would reinforce the faith of the apostles. His only remaining reason for weeping was his own human nature. Lazarus had to be reunited body with soul, Jesus too had a body and a soul: he would not be alive himself if he did not weep and grieve.

(50) Ludolphus de Saxonia, Vita Jesu Christi, p. 457.

(51) St Ambrose, in his funeral oration on his brother Satyrus II, goes, characteristically, to the emotive heart of the text (Funeral Orations, trans L. P. McCaulay, J. J. Sullivan, M. R. P. McGuire, and R. J. Deferrari, Fathers of the Church 22 (New York, 1953)).

(52) Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 92, expresses this relationship aptly:

The Mass is the sign of unity, the bond of love: whoever desires to live

must be `incorporated' by this food and drink. Thus the unity and fellowship

of the Corpus Christi guild is just one aspect of the `mystical body of

Christ', a unity rooted in charity and expressed in the works of mercy.

Only in that unity can anyone be a member of Christ, and all the natural

bonds of human fellowship, such as the loyalty and affection of one gild

member for another, or the care of the rich for the poor, or of the whole

for the sick, is an expression of this fundamental community in Christ

through the Sacrament.