Medieval mystery plays and church dramas

A tradition still around today

Earlier this year, I was dipping into some medieval English "mystery plays," plays from the Middle Ages performed in various towns on an annual cycle, typically telling stories from the Bible.

One of the editions I was dipping into introduces these plays in the preface as the early ancestor of English drama, "crude" but "real and sincere". This makes sense to me. But even though I know very little of the history of English drama, these plays also felt familiar to me: I'd acted in, and even written, things that resemble them.

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The mystery plays follow the outline of Bible stories, sometimes simplistically. That was where the name comes from - they tell the "mysteries", or secrets, that were revealed by God in the Bible.

But, they also add extra characters and drama. The play about Noah and the Flood adds an argument between Noah and his wife about boarding the ark; the play about the birth of Jesus adds conversation between the shepherds (among others) and an inserted scene involving various prophets. But all these additions are brief. Unlike later retellings - such as, to pick on another dramatic-form retelling, Dorothy Sayers' The Man Born To Be King - the dramatists usually don't introduce new lengthy or developed plot threads.

They often read as skeletons walking from event to event of the story. Progress is quick from scene to scene, with motivations and character not developed. For example, in the scene between King Herod and the three Wise Men, they simply exchange factual statements with a short soliloquy from Herod explaining to the audience that he's been lying. A modern dramatist would try to hint at their characters, but we don't get that here. Or, when we do get insight into someone's character, it's usually in a soliloquy where Herod or a shepherd (or Noah or Melchizedek or someone else) simply says it.

They aren't good plays, by modern standards or the standards of Shakespeare's day or probably any time in-between. But, there are some gems - and, they get their story across well.

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This reminds me a lot of the skits I used to write for Sunday School classes. When I was young, my mom taught Sunday School at our church, and she was always looking for ideas. She knew I liked to write, so sometimes she'd ask me to write up a skit about the Bible story she was going to be covering in class. Over the years, I ended up writing a number of short plays: the story of Ruth, scenes from the life of Jesus, and others.

When I look back at the plays I wrote, I see some good parts - good interpretations of the Biblical story, and good brief character development. But overall, I get the same impression I get from the mystery plays: they're short plays with primitive construction. I can see the bones, much more vividly than in most stories. With almost each line, I can see how it quickly demonstrates things and moves them along. It doesn't just tell, but when it shows, it shows as briefly as possible.

(For example, take my post-Easter reflections where Peter is admitting that "All I'd done was make things worse." Or take my play of Nabal and David. The name "Nabal" means fool, so I had one of David's men ask in an aside "Why is he named 'fool' after all?" to which Abigail instantly responds "He is a fool." Unfortunately, I wasn't there when Mom's class staged it to see their response.)

In my case, the plays were primitive because - well, for one, they were short and needed to be quick; Mom's students needed to rehearse and perform them in about an hour and a half's Sunday School. But also, I was young, and a new writer. I didn't have as much writing skill then. When I look back on the first draft of the novel I tried writing around age 15, I cringe - and that was after I'd written a lot of these plays. My plays don't share the exact same flaws - I didn't have room for the lengthy digressions found in my novels, for example - but my lack of skill showed itself in other ways.

The authors of the medieval mystery plays presumably weren't as young as I was, and they definitely weren't as short on performance time, but I believe they were also new writers. They'd seen books (the priest's breviary, if nothing else), but I'd be surprised if most of them had written even part of one. Perhaps they'd acted in other mystery plays or told oral stories, but organized drama was a comparatively rare thing. People came from far and wide to see miracle-plays because they were the only organized drama around.

I'm not sure the playwrights would've wanted to invest much time improving; these plays were put on by guilds that had their normal daily work. But even if a playwright did invest time, I'm not sure what he could've done aside from viewing a few other similarly-amateur mystery plays and reading a couple works like Sir Gaiwain and the Green Knight. There wasn't much material around.

Story develops by building upon other story. Don Quixote had Orlando and other chivalrous romances; Shakespeare had Marlowe and other playwrights of the previous generation; Marlowe himself had these medieval mystery plays. I improved my writing by reading them and their successors. Even when excellent early works in a genre appear to come out of nowhere, they almost always have other antecedents. These medieval playwrights didn't have that chance.¹

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Another factor is that when I was writing my plays, I didn't want to go too far beyond the Biblical text. I think the medieval playwrights felt the same concerns.

This might seem surprising, since they introduce completely new conversations, as well as including incidents such as St. Veronica's handkerchief and the entire play around the Harrowing of Hell neither of which are found in the Biblical text². But, St. Veronica and the Harrowing of Hell were firmly found in medieval tradition; the playwrights (like their contemporaries) treated that as significant a source as the Bible. So what they were doing was taking the Bible and tradition and introducing new details and dialog.

Sometimes the dialog can be anachronistically weird, such as when Herod the Great is swearing by Mohammed, or the shepherds are invoking St. James. But, when you think about it, they were translating by sense for an audience that doesn't care about historical accuracy. Is that categorically worse than having someone say "five o'clock" when the twelve-hour clock measuring from noon wasn't invented till later? I wouldn't use it, but I can see why they would.

A fifteenth-century mystery play being staged in Flanders

I felt comfortable including new dialogue, too, because every important thread was coming straight from the Biblical text. I could expand on things summarized there, and draw out further themes that were in the text, but I didn't want to distract from representing the text. In part, this was because (as a Christian) I consider that text vitally important. But also, my plays were going to be presented in a context (in my case, usually Sunday School) where they would be meant to focus attention on the text, not the play itself. I see the medieval playwrights as being in the same boat here.

For another example, when I was in high school and my youth group was studying the Book of Esther in the Old Testament, one of my friends who was more into theater than me wrote a series of short skits presenting the incidents we were studying each week. There, he stuck strictly to the text and didn't add anything extraneous. But afterwards, he expanded them to a whole play of the Book of Esther, and there he did add extraneous subplots. He still didn't go too far from the Biblical events, but in that new context he went further than he had before.

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There're professionally-written plays in the same boat.

I still fondly remember a musical of the Book of Daniel that I sang in as a kid. It's much better done than my own plays, or the medieval mystery plays, but it's clearly in the same tradition. We see Daniel's rivals' character; we see them plotting against him in detail; we see them leading the naive King Darius to entrap Daniel - the Bible passes them both over in a couple sentences, and doesn't enlarge on anyone's character traits, but every incident in the musical is straight from the Bible.

(And it's beautifully done; I still sometimes sing Daniel's prayer from there.)

The publishers of that musical say their mission is "providing quality music publications and worship resources to the church." In other words, they're seeing the same niche: they want to focus attention not on their music but on the Bible and on God. And, they're responding to it in the same way as me and as the miracle-play playwrights.

Another church musical, which my sister sang in as a kid.

This's still a broad genre around churches today; I could name a number of other kids' musicals I've seen. I think it's limited to kids because kids usually have more time and interest in amateur theater these days. But also, churches and civil society are more distinct now than in the Middle Ages. Medieval mystery plays weren't organized by the church as such, but by craft guilds. In Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, he has tradesmen put on a play in honor of a king's wedding; that was extremely typical of the Middle Ages.

But today, groups like that (perhaps labor unions?) aren't generally doing public dramas. And if they were, they wouldn't be associated with the church. So, what this genre is left with is the church-related social groups that people still do join: Sunday School and youth group.

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None of these are great plays. But they're not trying to be great as plays. They're doing something else.

I stand by the Sunday School plays I wrote. Not every detail, absolutely - I still have regrets about leaving one scene out of my Ruth play³, and if I reread some of the older ones I'm sure I'd cringe at awkward lines. But I stand by what I was trying to do: retell the story with a message, and direct the attention through my words to that.

When I read the medieval plays, I feel a kinship with the playwrights. I know what they were trying to do, because I've done it myself.

1. They presumably had oral stories, but oral stories are very different from written stories.

2. Several points in the Bible can be taken to mention or assume the Harrowing of Hell, and the Roman Catholic Church among others does take them that way. But my point is, the Bible never describes it.

3. The scene with Ruth approaching Boaz when he's asleep on the threshing-floor. I had my reasons for cutting it, such as its being awkward to stage, but I wish I'd figured out a better way.