Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation

CHAPTER 3

Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation

In the present chapter I want to shift our attention from the parishes tothe larger towns, where religious drama was organized not by church-wardens and parochial guilds but by the ruling elite and the urban guildsthat operated under its authority. Although some drama-sponsoringtown guilds were religious – one thinks of the York Paternoster Guild, forexample – most were trade guilds. But trade guilds were not exclusively“secular” organizations; many had their own chaplains, worshipedtogether on major feast days, and indeed fostered a dynamic religiouslife for their members. The sacred drama they sponsored and performedwas an extension of that religious life, even if other interests were at stakeas well. Until fairly recently, these great civic spectacles were commonlyreferred to as “Corpus Christi Plays” and thought to be representative of“medieval drama” across England. It is now clear that while CorpusChristi was the favored feast day, some of the major cycles opted for(or switched to) Whitsun or other holy days in the summer season. Theyare of course “medieval” plays but the term is misleading as a general labelsince in towns such as Norwich and Chester the cycles developed, at leastin the form in which we know them today, in the sixteenth century whenthey remained popular, adapting in some cases (notably at Coventry andNorwich) to Protestant teachings. As to the “cycles” being normative ofprovincial drama, the current consensus of critical opinion is that theywere somewhat exceptional, especially cycles of the “creation-to-doomsday”variety, and that apart from the towns of Coventry and Norwich, theywere mainly a northern phenomenon, thriving for a time in Chester,York, Beverley, and Newcastle upon Tyne.1 Moreover, two of the fourcycles surviving more or less complete in manuscript form, namely the

1 Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 138–68; The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre,ed. Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Johnston, “Parish Playmakingbefore the Reformation.”

66

N-Town and the Towneley, are now assumed to be compilations ratherthan unified cycles produced by specific towns, and while the other twofeatured a “creation-to-doomsday” series of pageants, cycles in some majorurban centers concentrated chiefly on the New Testament.2

In this chapter I also want to focus at greater length on what all scholarsagree to have had a profound impact on provincial drama in general andthe cycle plays in particular: the Reformation. The role of Protestantismin the great urban cycles during a period when they continued to bepopular has generated considerable discussion of late. Notably, scholarsof diverse backgrounds’ such as Lawrence Clopper, Robert Tittler, andMuriel McClendon, have opened up new ways of seeing how traditionalreligious ceremonial and drama did not in many urban centers collapseunder Protestantism but found ways to adapt and reinvent themselves.3

Moreover, they, along with others, notably Tessa Watt and RonaldHutton, have compelled us to question the confrontational models ofviewing Protestant intervention in traditional religious culture, modelsdeployed by both early urban historians and more recently by revisionsof the English Reformation. As Watts has shown, the sources mostimmediately accessible to historians – city council minutes, church courtrecords, polemical treatises – tend to highlight points of confrontationbetween Protestantism and the existing religious culture, and yet areas ofcultural practice characterized by consensus, accommodation, resolutionof conflict, or simple contradiction (where, for example, traditionalCatholic and emerging Protestant patterns of belief and practice coexistuneasily side by side) are often ignored.4 In terms of the cycle plays,I would argue that the subject matter of the plays – the stories of the Bible –was one of those points of consensus.In discussing the various ways Protestantism engaged with the great

town cycles, particular attention will be given to Coventry, Norwich andChester. The Coventry weaver and player, John Careless, illustrates thata penchant for acting was not incompatible with a Protestant martyr’ssensibility, which in turn raises questions about other reformers’ attitudestowards the biblical civic drama and the extent it could be compatible withfervent Protestantism. However, only two plays survive from Coventry’s

2 See Palmer, “Recycling ‘The Wakefield Cycle,’” 88–130.3 Clopper, Drama, Play and Game, 286–93; Robert Tittler, “Reformation, Resources and Authorityin English Towns: An Overview,” in The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640, ed. PatrickCollinson and John Craig (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 305–34; and Muriel C. McClendon,The Quiet Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 88–110, 121–29.

4 See Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 325; Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England.

Civic biblical drama in the age of reformation 67

ten-pageant cycle (none at Shrewsbury), and they appear to be dated, intheir present form, very early in the Reformation, during the 1530s. Toobserve how a medieval “mystery” pageant was transformed into a fullyProtestantized civic drama, we must turn to Norwich. There, the NorwichGrocers’ “play of paradise” is the only extant cycle pageant for which wehave a pre-Reformation version and a completely revised post-Reformationversion; it therefore offers a concrete example of how pageant plays mighthave been revised at Coventry and other communities as well. Whetherit actually occurred to any significant extent at Chester is the questionthat will occupy the latter part of the chapter.

THE COVENTRY CYCLE REFORMED

The role Protestants played in the mystery play cycles in mid-sixteenth-century England continues to be debated. That role, as defined in highlyinfluential studies from Harold Gardiner’s mid-century book Mysteries’End to Eamon Duffy’s more recent The Stripping of the Altars andJames Simpsons’ Reform and Revolution, is one of distrust, hostility, andsuppression.5 In some respects, Gardiner was way ahead of his time. Heanticipated (along with a few other Catholic historians) the recent revisionistview of the English Reformation that Catholic religion remained vitaland popular well into Elizabeth’s reign and conversely that England’sProtestantization was slow and imposed mainly from above. Upon thesepremises, he argued that the mystery cycles were not part of a moribundprovincial culture victimized by Renaissance secularism and Protestantpopularism in sixteenth-century England (the critical consensus of his ownday) but continued to receive considerable support in many communitiesthrough the first half of Elizabeth’s reign. On this latter matter, Gardineris clearly correct, but his basic thesis about their history under the Refor-mation is no longer sustainable. That thesis is that since the great cycleswere irreducibly Catholic and therefore defiantly resistant to Protestantadaptation, the reformed governments of Edward VI and Elizabeth I hadno choice but to engage in a policy of suppression, and one that was bothsystematic and national in scale due to the cycle plays’ enduring popularityin many parts of the realm. Recently, however, early modern scholars haveshown just how capricious, sporadic, and selective Tudor authorities were

5 Harold Gardiner, Mysteries’ End (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946); Duffy, TheStripping of the Altars, 579–83.

68 Drama and religion in English provincial society

in regulating the stage, especially outside of London.6 No one is foolishenough to discount that state Protestantism at times acted to censor theplays, especially the cycle plays in the North in the wake of the NorthernRebellion and Queen Elizabeth’s Excommunication in 1569 and 1570respectively. Combine these troubling developments with the distaste forpopular, traditional revels shown by Archbishop Grindal and Dean Hutton,and one understands the repressive measures undertaken by Protestantauthorities against civic drama at York, Chester, and Wakefield, especiallyin 1569 and the tense period immediately following.7 But there simplywas no central policy to crush the religious drama. As Ronald Huttonasserts, “the leaders of Church and state did not themselves subscribe tothe campaign against” traditional plays and pastimes.8

In Coventry, a city of between 6,000 and 7,000 people in the earlysixteenth century, there are compelling indications that efforts were madeto revise the civic biblical cycle along Protestant lines very early, possiblyin the 1530s.9 Coventry had a long-established reputation for religiousfervor and dissent, and no doubt its early reception of Protestantism waspartly due to the strong Lollard following in the city dating back to themid fifteenth century.10 The Lollards here included some of the city’sruling oligarchies, and they evidently did not all share the sentimentsexpressed in A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge, for as Clifford Davidson pointsout, the only local person on record whose will includes a bequest to thecivic pageants is William Pysford, member of a leading Lollard familyand one-time mayor of Coventry (in 1501).11 Protestant control of the citycouncil can be dated at least from Edward VI’s reign, and it continued

6 Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991); AnnabelPatterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1984).

7 For the demise of the cycle plays at York, see Alexandra F. Johnston, “The City as Patron: York,”in Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Whitfield White andSuzanne R. Westfall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 150–75.

8 Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, 152. See also Bing D. Bills, “The ‘Suppression Theory’and the English Corpus Christi Play,” Theatre Journal 32.2 (May 1980): 157–67.

9 A census taken in 1520 produced a specific figure of 6,601. See Mary Dormer Harris, The CoventryLeet Book (Newyork: Oxford University Press, 1907), 674–75; Ingram, REED: Coventry, lxi.

10 More than forty-five Lollards admitted heresy when tried by Bishop Blythe in 1511–12, and sevenwere burned in 1519 “because they had the lordes praier, ye Creed, & ye tenn Commandementes inEnglish.” See Imogen Luxton, “The Reformation and Popular Culture,” in Church and Society inEngland: Henry VIII to James I, ed. Felicity Heal and Rosemary O’Day (London: Macmillan, 1977)67–68; the quote is taken from Lawrence M. Clopper, ed., REED: Chester (University of TorontoPress, 1979), 576.

11 Clifford Davidson, “‘The Devil’s Guts’: Allegations of Superstition and Fraud in Drama and Artduring the Reformation,” in Iconoclasm Vs. Art and Drama, ed. Clifford Davidson and AnnEljenholm Nichols (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University,1989), 92–144; Ingram, REED: Coventry, 112–13, 576.


well into the reign of his older sister. The mayor and council weresufficiently defiant of Catholicism under Mary that when the Bishop atLichfield ordered them to apprehend religious suspects for questioning,they warned them to flee instead. Not surprisingly, the Privy Councilintervened to force a Catholic mayor into office in early 1556,12 yet by thispoint the city already had ‘great numbers zealous for evangelical truth,”as one contemporary reported.13 Given the extent to which Protestantismwas received within the civic leadership and among large segments ofthe citizenry, and given the control exercised by the city council overthe town’s annual religious pageants, can one seriously doubt that thosepageants were enthusiastically supported by Coventry Protestants? I believethis to have been the case.The most extraordinary indication of the alliance between Protestant-

ism and theater in Coventry is provided by the story of John Careless. Inhis “Book of Martyrs,” John Foxe tells how this local weaver was jailed inhis home town during Queen Mary’s reign but, remarkably,

he was there in such credite with his keeper, yat vpon his worde he was let out toplay in the Pageant about the city with othere his companions. And that done,keeping touch with his keeper, he returned agayne into prison at his houreappointed. And after that being broughte vp to London he was indued with suchpatience and constaunt fortitude, that he longed for nothing more earnestly,then to come to yat promotion to dye in the fyer for the profession of his faith: &yet it so pleased the Lorde to preuent him with death that he came not to it, butdyed in prison, and after was buryed in the fieldes in a dounghill.14

According to an order of the Privy Council dated November 20, 1553,a weaver named John Careless was jailed in Coventry along with threeother guildsmen on All Saints Day, November 1, 1553. They were chargedwith “lewd and seditious behavior,” which probably means they engagedin a public act, perhaps a play performance, against the recently restoredRoman Catholic religion.15 The dramatic records of Coventry leave notrace of Careless, although his guild, the Weavers, were among the most

12 See Acts of the Privy Council of England, 6 vols. (H. M. Stationory Office: London, 1892), V, 218.The other conflicts here are discussed in Reginald W. Ingram, “Fifteen Seventy-Nine and theDecline of Civic Religious Drama in Coventry,” in Elizabethan Theatre VIII, ed. G. R. Hibbard(Port Credit, ON: D. Neany, 1982) 117–18.

13 See Hastings Robinson, The Zurich Letters, ed. Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1842), 86–87.

14 John Foxe, The Seconde Volume of the Ecclesiastical Historie, conteining the Acts and Monuments ofMartyrs (London; John Day, 1583), 1920–21.

15 See Acts of the Privy Council, 368. I discuss the Careless case at greater length in “ReformingMysteries’ End,” 121–47.


active participants in the town’s famous mystery play cycle; indeed, theWeaver’s nativity pageant is one of only two plays surviving from theCoventry cycle.Under Queen Elizabeth, John Careless became something of a

Protestant folk hero. Foxe no doubt was partly responsible for this; butthe weaver’s name appeared in the title of one of the period’s mostpopular and eloquently penned broadside ballads. Believed to be themartyr’s own words, “the godly Ballet of John Carelesse” recounts theexperience of a sinner saved by grace and, according to Thomas Nashe,was popularly sung to the tune of Greensleeves. It was sufficiently wellknown for its opening lines (“Some men for sodayne joye do wepe, andsome inn sorrowe synge”) to find their way into Shakespeare’s King Learand Thomas Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece.16

Stage-player and popular balladeer, Careless does not quite fit ourstereotypical image of an early Protestant martyr. Here is a man whocombined a deeply felt Protestant piety, indeed a martyr’s otherworldlysensibility, with an evident commitment to playing, and interestinglyenough this theatrical bent is prominently featured in Careless’s extantwritings: the animated account of his examination by the Marianauthorities on April 25, 1556, and his twenty-odd prison letters with theirextended self-dramatizations, vivid scenic descriptions, and repeatedallusions to song and dance.17 Careless’s represented experience in theexamination and letters offers a unique glimpse of Protestant interiority,one that reveals a complex sense of the theatrical and accommodatesrecreational playing to the lived experience of God’s elect.18

No less striking about Foxe’s account of Careless, of course, is itsreference to the pageant performance at Coventry. We are told that whenCareless was temporarily freed from the local prison, he performed in “thepageant about the city with othere his companions,” which, we mayconfidently assume along with Reginald Ingram, the editor of Records ofEarly English Drama: Coventry, refers to the town’s famous biblical play

16 The ballad was first printed by Miles Coverdale in Certain most godly, fruitful, and comfortableletters (London; John Day. 1564), 634–38. For Nashe, see R. B. McKerrow and F. Wilson, eds., TheWorks of Thomas Nashe, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), III, 104. I am indebtedto Watt, Cheap Print, 95, for these references. For Careless as Protestant hero, see Collinson, TheBirthpangs of Protestant England, 102 and 111.

17 The examination and letters are most accessible in volume 8 of the reprinted edition of Foxe’s Actsand Monuments of Martyrs, ed. George Townsend (1843–49; reprinted New York: AMS, 1965),VIII, 163–201.

18 For a more detailed account of Careless and Protestant interiority, see my “Reforming Mysteries’End.”


cycle staged during the week-long “Great Fair” of Corpus Christi.19 It isnot clear whether anything other than personal charm led to Careless’srelease (“he was there in such credite with his keeper,” Foxe tells us), but,as we shall see shortly, early Protestants were very active in the theater,and thus Careless’s release may have been due to his prominent part in themystery play performances, perhaps in the pageant of his own guild,the Weaver’s, the text of which survives.20 Particularly noteworthy is thatFoxe relates the incident in such a matter-of-fact way that he does notappear to see any incongruity in a man he memorializes as a Protestantsaint acting apparently in a play cycle which commentary, from theseventeenth century onward, has associated with medieval Catholicism.Foxe, himself, was a dramatist – one of his plays, Christus Triumphans,was staged at Cambridge in 1562 – and he once equated players withpreachers in advancing the Protestant cause, so it is not as if he wasunfamiliar with the popular drama of his day.21

With respect to the Coventry biblical plays, themselves, although wecannot rule out Old Testaments subject matter entirely, the cycle of tenplays staged on pageant wagons in the streets of Coventry appears tohave centered on the life of Christ; that such cycles existed we know fromBale’s lost “mystery cycle” of nine plays.22 At what point religious changeswithin the cycle began to take place is a complicated question, since mostof the pageants are lost. They may not have begun before 1539 whenMayor William Cotton, in a letter to Henry VIII’s chief minister ThomasCromwell, complained of the high expenditure the city must absorb forvarious civic activities, including the annual cycle: “at Corpus christi tide/the poore Comeners be at suche charges with ther playes & pagyontesthat thei fare the worse all the yeire after.”23 Cotton’s condemnation ofexcessive drinking at feasts and the need for “reformacion” of such events

19 See Ingram, REED: Coventry, xix.20 The other surviving play is the Shearmen and Taylors’ pageant. Both are printed in Hardin Craig,

ed. Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, 2nd edn. EETS (London: Oxford University Press, 1957).I return to them later in the discussion.

21 See White, Theatre and Reformation, 2, 75, 106.22 Margaret Rogerson has argued that the Coventry cycle is an English Creed play, such as the one

that was staged intermittently at York. See her “The Coventry Corpus Christi Play, RORD 36(1997): 143–77.

23 Ingram, REED: Coventry, 149. The economic woes of Tudor Coventry are discussed in CharlesPythian-Adams, Desolation of a City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); theirrelationship to pageantry is clarified further in “Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Yearat Coventry, 1450–1550,” in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700, ed. Peter Clark and PaulSlack (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972): 57–86.


may suggest his disapproval of civic pastimes, yet the letter is chiefly anappeal for Crown funding to help relieve Coventry’s notorious economicwoes; its target is excess, not the various pastimes themselves.However, according to Pamela King, reformist elements are discernible

at Coventry as early as 1534/35 when the pageants staged by the Shearmenand Taylors and by the Weavers (the same guild to which John Carelessbelonged) were “newly translate[d]” by the local playwright Robert Croo.King believes that the expository passages by the Prophets which Crooevidently wrote to link episodes in the two plays and to provide aninterpretive frame for the action “suggest a preoccupation with Lutheranor Zwinglian ideas, far from the confident sacramentalism which pervadesthe plays in the York Register.”24 Certainly the prophets’ concern with thenature of the Incarnation (especially the problem of Christ’s divinityversus his humanity) and the relationship between faith and reason reflectrevived interest in, and controversy over, these theological issues in theearly years of the Reformation.25 Nevertheless, if Croo was an earlyadvocate of religious reform, he left both extant Coventry plays remarkablyfree of controversy. The frequent references in the York, Towneley, andN-Town nativity scenes to Mary’s elevated status as “Godys spouse” and“queen of heaven” are conspicuously absent in these plays where, at leastin Croo’s added commentary, the focus is centered on Christ’s atonementfor the sins of humanity. Perhaps steering clear of highly controversialissues concerning doctrine and worship was intentional; striving afterconsensus among religious conservatives and advocates of reform mayhelp to explain the Coventry cycle’s longevity well into Elizabeth’s reign.During the period of 1530 to 1575, Coventry’s play-producing guilds

continuously revised and rewrote their pageants: the Cappers alonerevised their play at least four times during this period, and this does notappear to be untypical. Reginald Ingram suggests that the turbulentreligious scene in Reformation Coventry likely accounts for the revisions,and this almost certainly is the case in 1561 when in addition to two newcharacters named “wormes of Conscyence,” the Drapers paid 8d for “playing

24 Pamela King, “The York and Coventry Mystery Cycles,” REED Newsletter, 22 (1997): 25. See alsoher “Faith, Reason and the Prophets’ dialogue in the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen andTaylors,” Drama and Philosophy, ed. James Redmond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press):37–46.

25 Both these issues, for example, are given lengthy polemical discussion in Calvin’s Institutes (firstedition 1535). See Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill and trans. Ford LewisBattles (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), II.ii.18–21 (on limitations of human reason);I.xiii.1–4; II.xiii.1–4 (on the Incarnation).


of the protestacyon,” which appears to have been a piece attacking popishpractices.26 It seems to me highly likely that the four pageants the Queenwitnessed during her visit to Coventry in 1567 would have supported theElizabethan Settlement of religion. Professor Gardiner finds that giventhe Protestantism of the Queen and her entourage, it is impossible thatany of the traditional mystery plays would have been performed beforeElizabeth and her predominantly Protestant court, but this is assumingthat such plays were Catholic.27

By the mid-1560s, the letter commonly ascribed to Robert Lanehamseeking royal patronage for the Hock Tuesday Play indicates that certainCoventry preachers were hostile to the drama, and by this point no doubtthe town experienced the same sorts of conflict over traditional recreationsevident elsewhere in the realm, but it does not mean, as is routinelyassumed, that such voices were representative of all serious reformedopinion about the propriety of stage-playing. It is noteworthy that whilethe Hock Tuesday Play drew the wrath of “certain godly preachers” andmay have been cancelled as early as 1561 (though revived for the Queen’svisit in 1566 and again in the 1570s), the civic religious drama continuedvirtually uninterrupted through to 1579, and despite the city’s advancedProtestantism, there is no surviving evidence of opposition to it.28

To an earlier generation of scholars the coexistence in mid-TudorCoventry of a flourishing annual “Corpus Christi” cycle, on the onehand, and a developing reputation for zealous Protestant reform, on theother, must have seemed baffling.29 What has not been hitherto observed,however, and may indicate positive clerical engagement with (andtherefore not mere toleration of ) the pageant plays, is that Coventry’sleading religious authority and champion of puritan reform during the1560s and early 1570s was himself an experienced actor and organizerof plays. I am referring here to the “town preacher” and Archdeacon ofCoventry, Thomas Lever, who had served as preacher to Edward VI and

26 R.W. Ingram, “‘To Find the Players and All That Longeth Therto’: Notes on the Production ofMedieval Drama in Coventry,” in Elizabethan Theatre V, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Hamden, CT:Archon Books, 1975), 33; Ingram, REED: Coventry, 217. See also Thomas Sharpe, A Dissertation onthe Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries anciently performed at Coventry (Coventry, 1825; rpt. Totawa,NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1973), 72.

27 See Gardiner, Mysteries End, 84.28 See Reginald. W. Ingram, “Fifteen Seventy-Nine and Decline of Civic Religious Drama in

Conventry.” In Elizabethan Theatre VIII, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Port Credit, ON: D. Neany, 1982),120–21.

29 See, for example, J. Tom Burgess, Historic Warwickshire. 2nd edn., ed. and rev. Josh Hill(Birmingham: Midland Educational, 1893), 79.


Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, before going into exile duringQueen Mary’s reign. On his return to England he apparently lost theopportunity to become a bishop because of his opposition to vestmentsand accepted the Archdeaconry of Coventry, along with the ministerialappointment at St. John’s, Bablake, at the request of Thomas Bentham,Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, himself a zealous reformer. While afellow at St. John’s in 1547/48, Lever was appointed the Lord of Christmas,a considerable undertaking that involved writing and performing “at leastsix dialogues, or festive or literary spectacles, on as many of the nightsof the Twelve Days” of Christmas, for which he was funded 20s, andoverseeing the “rest of the comedies and tragedies which are put onbetween Epiphany and Lent” within the college. During his time in office,Lever was in charge of the hundred-plus costumes and props stored inthree great chests at St. John’s, a Christmas season that cost the college inexcess of £4 for expenses. The costume inventory includes numerouschurch vestments and objects, lending further evidence of the stagingof anti-Catholic plays at Cambridge. Given this knowledge, and thecommitment to Protestant stage playing already established at Cambridgeand boosted by the pro-drama views of Martin Bucer while Lever servedthere, it is entirely plausible that Lever contributed to the biblical playsstaged at Coventry in the 1560s and 1570s.30

Why the cycle plays were “laid down” for the last time in 1579, andlarge-scale civic drama revived again only in 1584 and possibly 1591, is notmade clear in the surviving records, which are unfortunately silent on theissue. When four of the leading play-producing guilds, the Smiths, theMercers, the Shearmen and Taylors, and the Weavers, sold their pageantwagons between 1586 and 1590, they were liquidating the material resourcesthat had made pageant play entertainment possible for the past 200 years.Did this signify a new attitude within these guilds that the plays were nolonger worth the enormous financial burden they carried in a city longplagued by economic problems? Were they responding to pressures fromProtestant anti-theatricalists in a decade when such voices almost broughtdown the stage in London? Some light is cast on these questions by therecords of 1591, when “the Comons of this Cittie” made a final request torevive the civic pageants. In May of that year the Council agreed “that

30 For Lever’s biography, see DNB for his drama-related activities at Cambridge, see Alan H. Nelson,ed., REED: Cambridge (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), I 159–60, II 1208. For theadvocacy of a reformed religious drama for popular consumption in England by Martin Bucer,Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge in 1550, see White, Theatre and Reformation, 101–102.


the distrucion of Jerusalem the Conquest of the Danes or the historie ofK[ing] E[dward] the 4 at the request of the Comons of this Cittie shalbeplaid on the pagens on Midsomer daye & St peters daye next in thisCittie & non other playes.”31 The conspicuous exclusion of the biblicalcycle as an option here is only one indication of changing attitudes withinthe city council, and perhaps within the guilds themselves who at thispoint were not so willing or able to finance plays on a grand scale. AsIngram remarks, “the guild payments recorded are only half to one-third ofwhat was usually spent in the olden days.”32 If a lack of willingness on thepart of the guilds to finance the civic religious drama sealed their demise, itshould be noted nevertheless that Coventry’s magistracy continued to hostprofessional acting troupes right through to the English Civil War. In otherwords, it was not antipathy towards drama, per se, that brought an end tothe religious stage in Coventry.On the opposite, northwestern side of the Diocese of Coventry and

Lichfield from Coventry was the Welsh border town of Shrewsbury,which offers another Midlands example of the Protestant adaptation ofcivic religious drama. Thomas Lever enters the picture again here, since hewas instrumental in reviving Protestantism in the town during Elizabeth’sreign. Disturbed by the lack of preaching and persisting practice of poperyin north Shropshire, Bishop Bentham asked the Coventry archdeaconto journey to Shrewsbury to preach in the town in August 1560; onemonth later Lever accompanied the bishop there, and he apparentlydelivered a second sermon, on the invitation of the bailiffs. It is no merecoincidence that within six months of Lever’s visits to Shrewsbury hisold colleague at St. John’s College Cambridge, Thomas Ashton, had beenappointed preacher and the local schoolmaster. The two men had beentogether at St. John’s. Ashton had served as fellow and bursar at thecollege for several years by the time Lever matriculated there in the later1530s and became a fellow in the early 1540s. This was the “golden age” ofSt. John’s when the likes of John Cheke and Roger Ascham were at theforefront of developing a Protestant Humanist curriculum which includedthe staging of Greek and Latin plays. And indeed, St. John’s highlyesteemed dramatic tradition may have influenced the town bailiff ’s choiceof Ashton, given their own interests in maintaining the very popular civicdrama which, as at Coventry, extended back into the fifteenth century.33

31 Ingram, REED: Coventry, 332. 32 Ingram, “Fifteen seventy-nine,” 122.33 For more on drama at Shrewsbury, see White, “Reforming Mysteries End,” 122–47.


THE GROCERS’ PLAY AND THE NORWICH CYCLE REFORMED

In Norwich, as in Coventry, both religious and trade guilds played acentral role in civic affairs. Coventry’s mayor was always elected fromthe membership of the town’s powerful Corpus Christi Guild, whereas inNorwich, the St. George Guild, granted a unique charter by Henry VI,became indistinguishable from the town’s ruling elite from the midfifteenth century onward. One major difference between the two urbancommunities was size: Norwich was second only to London in populationwith an estimated 8,500 inhabitants in the early sixteenth century and11,000 by its end.34 Both, of course, were cathedral cities, but whereasCoventry’s magistracy exercised full authority over its Corpus Christi cycle,the church was a major, if not controlling sponsor, of Norwich’s greatWhitsun entertainments through the early sixteenth century. This isbecause the Pentecost Fair, the occasion of the cycle plays, was foundedand operated by the cathedral priory until 1524, the year the mayor andcity council took it over. Up to that time, the priory had arranged for theSt. Luke’s Guild to provide Norwich’s annual theatrical performances, thesame conglomerate of painters, glaziers, and other craftsmen entrustedwith completing the magnificent stone roof bosses adorning the vaultedceilings of Norwich Cathedral in the late fifteenth century.35 In 1527,however, shortly after the Pentecost Fair came under town leadership, theSt. Luke’s Guild petitioned the city council on financial grounds to takeover the pageants as well, arguing that since the city government andtrades reaped the financial benefits of the large throngs of crowds whocame to the fair to watch the festivities, the pageants and plays shouldbe produced by all of the major trade guilds in the town. The requestwas granted and, in that year, the Whitsun festivities were completelyreorganized under the full control of Norwich’s civic government.According to a list of pageants and their sponsored companies in

Norwich’s “Old Free Book” (a volume of civic records) dated about 1530,the city authorized twelve pageants on subjects ranging from Creation toPentecost to be staged by some sixty civic companies, several of themteaming up to save production costs. Whether the trades were simplytaking over an existing biblical cycle or starting afresh is unclear, for all we

34 John Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich (Chichester, Sussex: Phillimore, 1977), 28–29.35 I am indebted here to Joanna Dutka’s two fine articles on the Norwich cycle: “Mystery Plays at

Norwich,” LSE, 10 (1978): 107–20; “The Lost Dramatic Cycle of Norwich and the Grocers’ Play ofthe Fall of Man,” RES, New Series, 35, No. 137 (Feb. 1984), 1–13. See also Norman Davis, ed. Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, EETS, SS 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), xxii–xl.


know about the pre-1526 entertainments of the St. Luke’s Guild is thatthat they featured pageants and disguisings on the lives of the saints “andmany other light and feigned figures.”36 It is inconceivable to me thatthe companies simply took over the existing pageants without imposingtheir own stamp on them, and this seems confirmed by the only extantdrama surviving from the Norwich cycle, the Grocers’ “play of paradise.”As Joanna Dutka points out, the list’s omitting both a Last Judgementplay and a separate pageant featuring the crucifixion undermines “theprinciple of the ‘cycle’ from Creation to Doomsday” and indicates thatthis is a “Whitsun” rather than a “Corpus Christi” cycle of plays. Moreover,she points to a 1541 record that suggests that Norwich did not stage alltwelve pageants together but rather selected as few as four plays for itsWhitsun festival.37

Despite the important work undertaken by Dutka two decades ago,there has been no recent analysis of the Norwich biblical cycle duringthe critical years of its existence between 1530 and 1565.38 The best studyof the town’s civic ceremonial during the Reformation era has beendone by Muriel McClendon.39 She has very recently demonstrated theimportant role which the festivities sponsored by the Guild of St. Georgeand other civic ceremonial played in negotiating social, political andreligious change in Norwich during the early Reformation years. Moreover,McClendon has firmly established the extent to which Protestantisminfiltrated the city government from the 1530s and how it came to controlcivic and religious policy following the accession of Elizabeth I, observing,with respect to the magistracy, “it does seem that the religious compositionof the aldermen had changed in the course of two years to becomeheavily Protestant, with but two identifiable Catholics and at least twentyprobable Protestants.”40 Puritanism began inroads as early as 1561 when

36 Larry Clopper has even suggested that the biblical cycle existed in Norwich only after the City tookover the Pentecost Fair from the Priory in the 1520s (Drama, Play and Game, 157). Some sort ofcivic drama must have existed. The Paston letters refer to a “corpus Chrysti play” in 1478. AlanH. Nelson cites the latter as evidence that the Norwich cycle celebrated Corpus Christi and that itcontinued to take place in connection with this feast through the early sixteenth century, a viewnot widely embraced. See his illuminating discussion in Nelson, The Medieval English Stage(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 119–37.

37 Dutka, “The Lost Dramatic Cycle,” 3–4.38 REED: Norwich (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), edited by David Galloway, begins

its coverage at 1540. It records accounts relevant to the Grocers’ pageant after that date, althoughrelevant passages from the Kirkpatrick papers are included in Appendix 4. One awaits volume II ofthe REED collection on Norwich, which presumably will include an introduction to the pre-1540records and the biblical cycle.

39 McClendon, Quiet Reformation, 88–110. 40 McClendon, Quiet Reformation, 198–99.


the city magistrates hired a future nonconformist to preach before thecorporation, and by 1564 “prophesyings” like those earlier noted inChelmsford were organized. The St. George Guild had not gone unaffectedby reformed sentiment. More than a decade earlier when Edward VI’sregime had dissolved all religious fraternities as part of the Chantries Act,the “Fraternity and Guild of St. George” survived but would be from thattime onward (save during the Marian restoration) known as the “companyand citizens” of St. George. As happened to so many religious fraterni-ties at that time, the guild’s expensive ornaments were sold off and itsfestivities brought under scrutiny. By Elizabeth’s accession, the pageantryand feasting continued but had been rescheduled from the saint’s feastday of April 23 to some two months later on the first Sunday after Trinity.To further secularize and disassociate the procession, itself, from theCatholic veneration of the saint, “Ther shalbe neyther George nor Margett”featured in the parade, “But for pastime the dragon to come In and shewhym self as in other yeares.”41

McClendon, however, has nothing to say about the Norwich biblicalcycle which, as I mentioned, extended through to the mid-1560s andwhich provided a means by which the lay-controlled trade guilds couldgive expression to their religious views. A case in point is the Grocers’Guild and its pageant of paradise featuring the fall of Adam and Eve,which has survived in both its Catholic and post-Reformation versions:the so-called Text A of 1533 and Text B of 1565. Although these pageantsadvanced the Grocers’ commercial interests, they also projected the guild’sreligious sensibilities, showing how those sensibilities changed over thecourse of thirty or so years at a time of great religious transition in Norwich,as in other large communities across England.So who were the grocers and what do we know about their guild?

A closer look at their activities may cast some light on other powerfulurban guilds which sponsored drama in Norwich and elsewhere. Tradingin mainly luxury goods imported from abroad, the grocers were amongthe wealthiest and most politically active of Norwich’s seventy-eighttrades.42 No decade in the sixteenth century passes without at least two orthree leading grocers serving in the mayor’s office. Robert Greene, theAlderman of the Grocers in 1533 when their pageant is first recorded in theWhitsun cycle, was city mayor in 1529. Thomas Sotherton, the mayor who

41 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 47; McClendon, Quiet Reformation, 199–200.42 Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, 56–57. My discussion of the grocers’ trade is much indebted to

this study.


organized its final performance in 1565, was a grocer, and so were his twoimmediate successors in office, Henry Bacon and Thomas Wall.43 Thegrocers were also prominent lay participants in the city’s religious affairs.Perhaps no one in early Tudor Norwich epitomized worldly success andtraditional Catholic piety better than Robert Jannys, a wealthy grocer andtwo-time mayor whose will of 1530 stipulated a “penny to be given to eachof eighty poor persons every Friday for twenty years – a bequest of some£350.”44 By the 1540s the Protestantism that shaped the 1565 Grocers’pageant had infiltrated the guild. Among the leading Protestant grocerswere Andrew Quasshe, who got embroiled in a controversy over theMass under Edward VI and objected to the festivities held by the guildof St. George on its feast day. The Grocers’ religious observances wereoverseen by John Kempe, the zealous chaplain of St. Andrews Hall, theformer Blackfriar’s Hall, from the 1540s until Mary’s accession, at whichtime he was defrocked for having married.45 The guild itself met severaltimes a year to hear Mass, attend obits, and engage in other religiousobservances. It congregated for the Corpus Christi procession and itlevied funds for its pageant play at its annual meeting on the Sunday afterCorpus Christi, the same time it assigned two surveyors to take charge ofthe play and two deputies to organize the Corpus Christi festivities. AllSaints Day and Michaelmas were other occasions when the guild met tofeast and hold Mass. In this respect, the Grocers were no different thanother guilds who engaged in a range of religious activities, many of thempenitential rites and good works which helped to store up merits towardtheir own salvation and those of their deceased loved ones, accordingto the doctrine of purgatory. Participation in play productions, likewalking in the processions of Corpus Christi, Whitsun, and the feast days,

43 Out of the seventy-eight occupations, the Grocers were ranked sixth between 1526 and 1550 andsecond between 1551 and 1575 in the number of freemen they admitted to the city (Pound, Tudorand Stuart Norwich, 56). The Sotherton family shows up often in the records relating to festiveritual and drama in Tudor Norwich. Thomas’s father, Nicholas Sotherton, who was mayor in 1539,was elected alderman of the Grocers the following year when the guild spent 20s preparing theirpageant wagon and the performance of their play (Galloway, Norwich, 3–4). In 1549/50, twomembers of the family contributed costumes to the St. George procession that year. It was in thegatehouse of John Sotherton that the pageant wagon was stored for several years following the final1565 performance of the Grocers’ play; in 1570 the wagon was given to him in payment for the rentowing on the storage.

44 On Robert Jannys’ religious patronage, see Norman Tanner, “Religious Practice,”Medieval Norwich,ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (New York: Hambledon and London, 2004), 150.

45 McClendon, Quiet Reformation, discusses Quasshe on 113–17 and Kempe on 82–83 and 200. ForKempe’s involvement with the guild, see Kirpatrick Papers, Norfolk Record Office, Manuscript21, no. 68.


clearly was an extension of this religious life and would have been amongthose meritorious acts. After the guilds were suppressed by the ChantryAct of 1547, the Grocers’ Guild, like others, continued to meet for devo-tional reasons, hiring preachers and providing religious guidance for itsmembers.46

The surviving Grocers’ accounts indicate that their pageant was stagedas part of the Norwich cycle intermittently from 1533 until 1565. Thesetting of the performances remains uncertain. However, there is noreason to seriously doubt that they shared the same general locale ofthe Pentecost Fair, that is to say, in Tombland, a open area between thewalls of the Cathedral precinct and the city (see figure 5). Processionalstaging cannot be ruled out, however, since the pageants were mountedon horse-drawn pageant wagons. The list of expenses for the 1533 and 1565performances, along with other evidence, suggest that the Grocers’ ownpageant wagon was splendidly decorated to enhance the Grocers’ publicimage and to advertise its wares. The 1565 inventory describes the pageantwagon as “a Howsse of Waynskott paynted and buylded on a Carte witthfowre whelys.”47 It is equipped with “A square toppe to sett over ye saydeHowse,” and on this square top was mounted a gilded griffon, the half-eagle, half-lion beast that served as the Grocers’ emblem. Streamers,banners, and weathercocks were other features that ornamented the cart.To create a sense of the natural beauty of the garden of paradise, thesetting of the play, the Tree of Knowledge was featured on the pageant’smain floor, decorated with an array of exotic fruits. The Grocers’ accountsare particularly detailed here, listing “Orenges, fyges, allmondes datesReysens, preunis, & aples to garnyshe ye trie with.”48 I have not seen itmentioned in any commentary on the play, but these fruits were preciselythose which the Norwich Grocers imported from abroad. As JohnF. Pound observes in his discussion of the Norwich trades, the Grocersimported through East Anglian ports figs, prunes, raisins, currants,oranges and lemons. He reports that “In 1581 a cargo of 20,000 orangesand 1,000 lemons reached Norwich in time for the St. Bartholomew’sFair.”49 The pageant wagon, then, was both a symbol of the Grocers’identity but also a sort of advertisement of their monopoly of the highend part of the imports market. That the pageant wagon was two-storied

46 See “Grocers’ Accounts,” Kirpatrick Papers Ms 21, no. 68; see also Norman Davis, “Introduction:The Norwich Grocers’ Play.” In Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davis. EETS, SS 1(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), xxxiii–xxxvi.

47 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 52. 48 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 43.49 Pound, Tudor and Stuart Norwich, 57.


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with a “heaven” is indicated in the 1533 text where God announces that“Into Paradyce I wyll nowe descende / With my mynysters angelicall.”50

A stage direction for Adam and Eve to retreat behind the pageant wagonmay indicate that the ground before the pageant was also part of theplaying area. Accommodation somewhere in the acting area was neededfor an organ prescribed for the 1533 production and a choir of severalsingers indicated in both the A and B texts. The 1565 inventory curiouslyalso includes stained “horse clothes” and decorative items (“4 headstallisof brode Inkle with knopps & tassels”) for horses.51 It is not clear to mewhether these horses accompanied or pulled the wagon during processionsat Corpus Christi and possibly Whitsun as well.Together, Text A (1533) and Text B (1565) of the Grocers’ pageant

provide an extraordinary example of how an English cycle play underwentrevision along reformed lines. Unfortunately, neither extant text is inmanuscript form; they are based on an eighteenth-century transcription(itself no longer extant) printed in 1910.52 Text A is missing a section ofdialogue after the Fall of Adam and Eve, though what is extant followsfairly faithfully the biblical account of the creation and fall related inGenesis chapters 2 and 3 of the Catholic Vulgate Bible. Text B, whichdraws on the Great Bible first printed in 1539, accompanies the Grocers’dramatic accounts of the cycle revival in 1565 and shows an extensiveProtestant revision.53 This second, later version includes two prologues,both spoken by “the Prolocutor,” an expository character only elsewherefound in John Bale’s Protestant biblical plays and another 1560s interlude,King Darius.54 According to the wording above them, Prologue 1 is to beused when no pageant play precedes it in the cycle performance (and

50 Davis, Non-Cycle Plays, 8 (Text A, ll. 9–10). All subsequent references to The Grocers’ Play are tothis edition.

51 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 53.52 For discussions comparing the two texts, see Davis, “Introduction” xxxvi–xl; and Dukta, “The Lost

Dramatic Cycle,” 1–13.53 Dutka, in “The Lost Dramatic Cycle,” 6–7, observes that the 1565 Text B shows no sign of using

the Geneva Bible, which became very popular over the course of Elizabeth’s reign and the preferredversion of committed Protestants. But it should be stated that Text B’s use of the Great Bible is notnecessarily any indication of a conservative Christian outlook which Dutka sees in the play’streatment of the Fall. The Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer used the Great Bible, as did themost staunchly Protestant of early Elizabethan interlude playwrights, William Wager. See R. MarkBenbow’s “Introduction” in Wager, ‘The Longer Thou Livest’, and ‘Enough is as Good as a Feast’ ed.R. Mark Benbow (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), x–xi.

54 See Michelle M. Butler, “Baleus Prolocutor and the Establishment of the Prologue in Sixteenth-Century Drama,” in Tudor Drama before Shakespeare, 1485–1590, ed. Lloyd Edward Kermode, et al.(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 93–110.


perhaps when the play was staged alone);55 Prologue 2 is spoken when theGrocers’ play follows others in sequence. Both prologues repeatedlyappeal to the Bible as their narrative source – Prologue 1 incites biblicalauthority five times within the first seventeen lines; this may indicate somedefensiveness on the part of the producers in response to puritanicalopposition towards dramatic renditions of the Bible.The repeated foregrounding of Scripture in Text B is but one example

of how the Protestant revision of the Norwich Grocers’ play differed fromits predecessor. There are two others I would like to consider. The first ofthese has to do with the treatment of the matrimonial relationship ofAdam and Eve. Both plays depict the relationship of Adam and Eve asa divinely sanctioned marriage, but there are pronounced differences.56

Their first meeting after Eve’s creation is a case in point. Although Adamexpresses joy over the Creation of Eve in both versions, Text A tends todefine their prelapsarian marriage in terms of hierarchical authority:Adam is over Eve in the same way as God rules over Adam. Moreover,there is no reciprocal exchange of dialogue between them at this point inthe narrative, and we are left with only a very sketchy sense of how theyinteract. In Text B, on the other hand, Adam and Eve engage in a warmand affectionate exchange, referring to one another as “Most lovyngespowse,” “lovely lover,” “myn owne sweteharte,” and so on.57 Clearly, theauthor of Text A, like other pageant play authors dealing with his story,was restricted by the Church fathers’ insistence that of all the pleasures thefirst couple enjoyed in paradise, sex was not one of them. Like the VirginMary and the priesthood, they were celibate. Indeed, from St. Augustineonward, the church fathers debated how procreation could ever have takenplace without the ardous libidinis associated with the Fall happening.58

Protestant authorities, of course, seized on this issue to accentuate theirdifference with Catholics, extolling the virtues of married love (includingsexual relations) by citing the first couple as the ideal marriage in all itsaspects, and condemning the Catholic view of Adam and Eve’s marital

55 At Chester, one of the shepherd plays was staged alone in the town centre before the Earl of Derbyand his son in 1578. See Clopper, REED: Chester, 179.

56 For these, see Dutka, “The Lost Dramatic Cycle,” 7–11, and Gordon Campbell and N. M. Davis,“Paradise Lost and the Norwich Grocers’ Play,” Milton Quarterly 14 (1980): 113–16. I am especiallyindebted to Campbell and Davis in the discussion of marriage which follows.

57 Grocers’ Play, Text B, ll. 28, 34, 61, 104. All subsequent references to the Grocers’ Play will be to thisedition.

58 Patristic writers from Clement of Alexandria through Augustine to Hugh of St. Victor maintainedthat Adam and Eve were celibate before the Fall. For these sources, see Campbell and Davis,“Paradise Lost and the Norwich Grocers’ Play,” 114 and 116.


relationship as against nature (read no sexual relations).59 Indeed Calvinand others charged that Rome’s interpretation of the Creation story wasperverse right down to the Vulgate’s use of the term virago in translatingthe Greek word for woman. Calvin understood virago to mean “womanof a masculine nature,” which he thought deprived Eve of the femininecharm so attractive to Adam.60 Following the Vulgate’s account of Eve’screation closely, Text A, like its counterpart pageant at Chester, refers toEve as “virago.”61 Text B drops the term altogether in its revision of theGrocers’ earlier pageant. Text B, moreover, is completely free of the anti-feminist invective directed against Eve that one observes in many of theother cycle plays of the Fall.62

In Texts A and B alike Satan enters immediately after Adam and Eveexit to go their separate ways in the Garden. Famously, in both versions,the serpent is depicted in disguise as “an angel of light.” In Text B he isdescribed as “fair” and speaks in a falsetto voice (“beholde my voice sosmall!”).63 The 1565 production expense accounts pay for a white wig,coat, gloves, hose, and tail for “the Serpente.”64 The gloves and talepresumably hide his claws; the white hair accounts for his fair appearance,and the falsetto voice suggests he is female. The serpent’s “feminine”features recall the roof boss of the Fall in Norwich Cathedral (see figure 6).In Text A, he immediately launches into his temptation of Eve, whereas

in Text B, the Serpent first delivers a revelatory soliloquy, which begins:“Nowe, nowe, of my purpos I dowght nott to atteyne;/ I can yt nott abydein theis joyes they shulde be.”65 Coming immediately after overhearingthe words of affection between Adam and Eve, Satan’s remarks revealthat it is the joys of marital love, and not primarily Adam’s replacing him

59 See, for example, Calvin: “The artifice of Satan in attempting the defamation of marriage wastwofold: first, that by means of the odium attached to it he might introduce the pestilential law ofcelibacy; and, secondly, that married persons might indulge themselves in whatever license theypleased.” John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, Called Genesis, trans. John King(1843; rpt. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1981), 134.

60 Calvin, Commentaries, 135–36. The point is made by Campbell and Davis, “Paradise Lost and theNorwich Grocers’ Play,” 114.

61 Grocers’ Play, Text A, l. 20. For Chester, see the Draper’s Adam and Eve, l. 150, in The ChesterCycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, 2 vols. EETS SS 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1974), 119. All subsequent references to the Chester Cycle will be to this edition.

62 As Rosemary Woolf asserts with respect to the extant major cycles, “In the plays of the Fall anattack upon women grows naturally out of Adam’s biblically based accusation of Eve, but becomesfar more heavily accentuated than the narrative and psychological context could warrant.” SeeEnglish Mystery Plays (Berkeley and Los Angelos: University of California Press, 1972), 123.

63 Grocers’ Play, Text B, l. 43. See also Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300–1660: vol. III, Playsand Their Markers to 1576 (London: Routledge & Kegan paul, 1981), 197.

64 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 53. 65 Grocers’ Play, Text B, ll. 36–37.


in heaven (the chief motive in other cycle plays), that stokes the devil’sjealousy.66 Again, this is quintessential Protestant teaching. The reformersaccentuated the sanctity and nobility of marriage in opposition to theCatholic idealizing of virginity and celibacy, and indeed Calvin maintainedthat the Fall was very much about Satan’s attempt to defame the institu-tion of marriage, and “by means of the odium attached to it he mightintroduce the pestilential law of celibacy.”67

Figure 6. Roof boss of the Serpent tempting Adam and Eve (late 15th century),from Norwich Cathedral.

66 Woolf, English Mystery Plays, 116. 67 Calvin, Commentaries, 134.


Perhaps what most belies the early Elizabethan Protestantism of theNorwich Grocers’ Adam and Eve of 1565 is the extent to which the pageantresembles contemporary Protestant moral interludes, many of themdesigned for professional acting troupes like the many on record forperformance at town’s common hall of St. Andrew’s.68 Most immediatelynotable in this regard are the two allegorical figures of Dolor and Myseryewho “taketh Man by both armys.”69 Dolor and Myserye give both verbaland visual objectification to the psychological and spiritual despairAdam and Eve experience as a consequence of original sin. Their flankingAdam on stage just at the moment he experiences despair is reminiscentof very similar staging devices in such homiletic interludes as the earlyElizabethan Enough is as Good as a Feast and The Tide Tarrieth No Man.These allegorical figures function within the Norwich reviser’s impositionof a Protestant conversion narrative onto the play’s structure, a strategyfound nowhere else in the biblical cycle tradition. In keeping with standardProtestant teaching on spiritual regeneration, the characters’ experienceof spiritual despair by means of Dolor and Myserye is seen as both aprovidentially ordained and necessary stage on the way to salvation. Thisis made clear by the Holy Ghost, the final character to enter the stageand a fitting choice given that the occasion of the cycle’s performance,Whitsuntide, celebrates the appearance of the Holy Ghost before theChristian church. As both a member of the Holy Trinity and as an agentof God’s prevenient, intervening grace, the Holy Ghost informs themthat their sufferings are not permanent; rather they are a means “But totry the as gold is tryed in the fyer; / In the end premonyshed, shalt havethy desyre.”70 The allusion here is to Isaiah 48:10 (“Behold, I haue [re]finedthee, but not as siluer; I haue chosen thee in the fornace of affliction”).As their spiritual “gyde,” the Holy Spirit exhorts Adam and Eve to put onthe full armor of God: “the brest-plate of rightousnes,” “The shylde offaythe,” “The hellmett of salvacion,” “the sworde of the Spright, whichis the worde of God.”71 The scene is reminiscent of The Tide TarriethNo Man where a very similar stage imagery occurs.72 The pageant con-cludes triumphantly with a song after Adam rejoices in his foreordained

68 St. Andrews Hall was formerly the Blackfriars Church which the city purchased in 1540 from theCrown for £81. For accounts of payments to traveling acting troupes, see Galloway, REED:Norwich.

69 Grocers’ Play, Text B, ll. 110 s.d. 70 Grocers’ Play, Text B, ll. 128–29.71 Grocers’ Play, Text B, ll. 137–42.72 See George Wapull, The Tide Tarrieth No Man, TFT (London: Jack, 1910), sig. F2v. I discuss the

play in White, Theatre and Reformation, 93–94.


paulwhite

Cross-Out

paulwhite

Replacement Text

reveals

election: “Deth is overcum by forepredestinacion,” he exclaims.73 Notwith-standing Adam’s final gesture of goodwill – asking the audience to jointhe cast in singing – his espousal of the Calvinist doctrine of “the electfew” and individualized religious conversion presume a markedly differentsense of “community” than that characterizing medieval cycle perform-ances. For the play implies an elect community of the saved within thebroad community of the Christian church. All the same, Text B turnsthe traditionally tragic story of the Fall into a marriage-affirming comedyof sin and redemption.Because of the incomplete state of the records, we do not know how

many times the Whitsun cycle was staged during Elizabeth’s reign before1565. The Grocers’ accounts which survive indicate that their pageantwagon was prepared for the Lord Mayor’s Show of 1563, in honor of theincoming mayor, Richard Davy. “Sourveyours” of the company werepaid 6s, 4d, to furnish the pageant wagon “& prepare a devyce ageynstyeday”74 This “device” may have been the Grocers’ play, but evidence islacking for a complete cycle that year. The phrases, “as were wonte to goin the tyme of whitson holydayes,” and “in tymes paste haue bene vsyd,”included in the city council’s order to mount the plays in 1565, suggestthat perhaps the cycle had been dormant for a few years.75 If that is thecase, why revive the pageant plays in 1565? What we do know is that 1565was a momentous year in Norwich when Mayor Sotherton, a grocer bytrade whose family was active in the guild, mounted a campaign to bringinto the city Dutch and Walloon textile workers as a means of injectingnew life into the ailing economy, which was suffering from a downturnin the cloth trade. With large numbers of Protestant refugees pouring infrom the Spanish-controlled Netherlands – some forty-two Dutch andWalloon families were in residence that year – the mayor and aldermen,with the help of the Duke of Norfolk, sought official recognition for thealien population from the Privy Council, which came through withLetters Patent on November 5, 1565, officially authorizing the settlementof thirty families in Norwich.76 Sotherton, therefore, may have seen in therevival of the Whitsuntide pageants an opportunity to showcase the city’selite trades and its Protestantism both to the Privy Council, from which itsought support for its immigration policy, and to the Dutch and WalloonProtestant tradesmen in the Netherlands.

73 Grocers’ Play, Text B, l. 149. 74 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 51.75 Galloway, REED: Norwich, 51.76 William Moens, The Walloons and Their Church at Norwich 1565–1832 (London: Lymington, 1888),

i–ii, 4–6, 17–18.


CHESTER: WAS ITS CYCLE REFORMED?

I would now like to turn attention to the North where some of England’smost sophisticated and spectacular religious drama was developed butwhere, even well into Queen Elizabeth’s reign, popular religion remainedconservative, so much so that the Earls of Northumberland and West-moreland in 1569, supported by the inhabitants of large communities suchas York, mounted a rebellion, albeit a failed one, against the Protestantmonarchy in an attempt to restore the nation to Roman Catholicism andevidently to replace Elizabeth on the throne with Mary Queen of Scots.The northern towns with the most famous annual biblical cycles were Yorkand Chester. York did not undergo any serious revision along Protestantlines, and by the time cycle organizers began paying lip-service to the ideaof doing so, it was too late: the Archbishop of York, Edmund Grindal,backed by the puritan Earl of Huntingdon’s Council of the North, madesure it did not happen.77 On the other hand, the question of a “reformedcycle” has been raised about Chester, a chartered town with a populationof about 5,000 in the mid sixteenth century where trade guilds mountedplays processional-style on pageant wagons under the direction of the lordmayor and his council.Like Norwich, Chester reorganized its civic drama in the early sixteenth

century, and if there remains some doubt about whether Norwich had aCorpus Christi play before the cycle came under civic auspices, at Chestera switch from Corpus Christi to Whitsun certainly took place by 1531–32,when William Newhall’s proclamation refers to “Witsonweke” as theoccasion of the cycle.78 If in Chester the lord mayor had full jurisdictionover the Whitsun cycle, the church – in the form of the newly foundedCathedral of Chester after 1541 – continued to play a supporting role,and this partly explains why the Chester cycle survived as long as it did intothe 1570s. Biblical drama at Chester, however, appears to have been amuch larger enterprise than at Norwich, a “creation-to-doomsday” cycleconsisting of some twenty-four plays performed over three days. Moreover,while Norwich’s cycle is mostly lost, the Chester cycle survives in the formof five manuscripts. These manuscripts – the earliest transcribed sometwenty years following the last production in 1575, all seem to be based onthe same master text of the cycle.79 Another difference is that the Chester

77 See Johnston, “City as Patron: the Case of York,” 168–75.78 Clopper, REED: Chester, 27–28.79 For a detailed discussion of the extant manuscripts, see R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills,

The Chester Cycle Mystery (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 3–86.


Cycle was staged with greater frequency and for a longer stretch intoElizabeth’s reign. We have records for performances in 1561, 1567, 1568,1572, and 1575.80

Assessing the extent to which Chester underwent “Protestantization” iscomplicated.81 From documents surrounding the plays it appears thatduring Edward VI’s reign the Wives’ Assumption of the Virgin was dropped,as was the clergy’s Corpus Christi play (a casualty of the banning of theFeast of Corpus Christi in 1547); and the Baker’s Last Supper was also likelysuppressed around this time, perhaps because, like the N-Town Passion, itespoused transubstantiation.82 The Last Supper, however, was revivedsometime later, probably under Mary; the surviving version of the pageantreflects a Protestant view of the Eucharist. The Late Banns – or “Post-Reformation Banns” as they are also called, announce the plays as a fullyProtestantized cycle. Publicly presented on St. George’s Day in the year theWhitsun cycle was produced, the Late Banns advertised that the cycle wascomposed by a reform-minded monk of Medieval Chester who riskedpersecution in the age of superstition to bring the stories of the Bible tothe general populace. The Late Banns insists that the cycle is faithful to thescriptures, and while conceding that extra-biblical personages and eventsare interwoven into several pageants, such material has been approved bythe appropriate authorities. These stated claims, along with the concernover actors impersonating God the father, suggest that the Late Bannswere written (or at the very least revised) during Elizabeth’s reign whenadvanced Protestants began attacking the theater, particular plays based onscripture.83 At one point, the Banns make a rather stern directive to theBakers to “see yat with the same wordes you vtter/As Criste himselfe spakethem,” as if to warn the guild that any interpretation of the Last Supper asevidence of the real presence in the Eucharist, probably the type of languagethat got the pageant temporarily suppressed under Edward VI, would be tocourt controversy.84

A perusal of the extant pageant texts themselves shows that the LateBanns do not fully deliver on their promise of reformed theater. To besure, of all the large-scale cycles/collections of biblical drama that survive

80 Clopper, REED: Chester, 65–68, 75–87, 90–99, 110–18.81 In the discussion that follows, I revise my own earlier assessment of the Chester cycle in

“Reforming Mysteries’ End.” Based in part on new evidence (see below), I now think it was amuch more conservative cycle than earlier surmised.

82 Mills and Lumiansky, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, 190.83 Clopper, Drama, Play and Game, 290–91.84 For the texts of the Late Banns, see Clopper, REED: Chester, 240–47; I quote ll. 17–18.


in text form – the others are York, Towneley and N-Town – Chester isperhaps the closest to resembling a “Protestant” cycle. Individual pageantsare repeatedly contextualized by references to the Bible – albeit the LatinVulgate – and as if to guard against playgoers getting too caught up in thestories, characters, and visual spectacle, the “Expositor” makes frequentappearances throughout the cycle to explain the theological and spiritualsignificance of the action.85 Moreover, there is a pronounced emphasis insuch pageants as Christ on the Road to Emmaus (play 19), The Prophets ofAntichrist (play 22), and The Last Judgement (play 24) on the power andmajesty of God and the preeminent role of grace in spiritual regenerationwhich anticipates similar emphases in Protestant theology. However, itshould be stressed that these features are drawn from the Church Fathersand not from the influence of Tyndale, Luther, or Calvin. Indeed, anytheological sophistication observable in the surviving texts of the ChesterCycle owes little to Protestantism. No pageant, in my opinion, appears tohave been substantially rewritten by a Protestant reviser, as is clearly thecase with Text B of the Norwich Grocers’ Pageant. Reformed changes inthe Chester cycle are, so far as I can tell, a result of pressures brought on byProtestant censorship and manifest themselves in the form of suppressedpageants, the deletion of some passages and the revision of others. Onethinks of the Virgin Mary’s speech of lament at the cross in The Passion(play 16A) which is left out of two of the extant cycle manuscripts andtherefore appears to have been a casualty of censorship, or the long,concluding segment of play 18, The Resurrection where Peter is shown tobe “sovereign” among the disciples, similarly dropped from some manu-scripts, perhaps because it came too close to advocating the Catholic view ofPeter as the first pope.86 As we shall see shortly, other passages were revisedto substitute a Protestant view of holy communion, or of repentance, inplace of a Roman Catholic one. Protestant censorship may also explain theamalgamation of one pageant into another late in the cycle’s history.87

85 For the role of the Expositor and its relation to Protestantism, see Hill-Vasquez, Sacred Players, 17–50;for an earlier discussion, see David Mills, “Introduction,” The Chester Mystery Cycle: A New Editionwith Modernised Spelling, ed. David Mills (East Lansing, MI: Colleagues Press, 1992), xxii.

86 All play references are to The Chester Cycle, eds. Lumiansky and Mills. The Passion (Play 16a):ll. 257–72; and The Resurrection (Play 17): ll. 470–590.

87 Lumiansky and Mills, The Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, 191, cite The Purification ofthe Virgin as a very likely possibility, with the story finding its way into Christ and the Doctorsaround the time of Edward VI’s reign. This did not, however, stop Catholic observances anddevotional experiences resurfaces in the new play. See Sally-Beth MacLean, “Marian Devotion inPost-Reformation Chester: Implications of the Smiths’ ‘Purification’ Play,” in The Middle Ages inthe North West, ed. Tom Scott and Pat Starkey (Oxford: Leopard’s Head 1995), 237–55.


Both Laurence Clopper and David Mills discern a distinctly Protestantstrain in play 4, Abraham, where King Melchisedech, who also is a priest,offers Abraham wine and bread following his victorious return from battlein what the Chester Expositor describes as a foreshadowing of the Lord’sSupper.88 To be sure, the Expositor somewhat defensively emphasizesmemory rather than sacrifice in the scene’s “signification” of the Eucharist,but the very paralleling of the bread and wine offered by Melchisedechwith the Lord’s Supper was highly controversial in Protestant Europe andcondemned as a “popish” misreading of the biblical account by the majorreformers. Both Luther and Calvin in their biblical commentaries onGenesis see Melchisedech’s provision of wine and bread as simplyillustrating hospitality toward Abraham, with Calvin adding that St. Paulin the Book of Hebrews “says not a word concerning bread and wine” inhis detailed comparison of Christ to the Old Testament priest-king.89 It isvery unlikely, therefore, that the author (or rather reviser) of the sequencewas a theologically trained Protestant. In most respects the Abrahampageant is grounded on the teachings of the church fathers.90

Indeed, it is largely to medieval Catholic sources that the cycle turns forits extra-biblical material, most notably the apocryphal accounts of saints’lives in The Golden Legend, some of them filtered through The StanzaicLife of Christ, a devotional work written by a Chester author in thefifteenth century.91 Although even some staunchly Protestant interludessuch as The Life and Repentaunce of Mary Magdalene (published 1564) drewon saints’ legends, the more puritanically inclined of Chester’s citizensopposed such embellishments of scriptural personages and events. This isclear from the correspondence of the reformer Christopher Goodmandiscovered of late by David Mills. Goodman, who settled near Chesterin the late 1560s, drew up a list of “absurdities” which he found in “theOld Original” (the master text of the cycle) when he perused it in 1572.Among his objections were that Noah’s Ark “is called a Shrine”; that inThe Nativity (play 6), Mary is depicted with two midwives “Tibill &Salome”; that the shepherds are suspected to be sheep-stealers who make“vain offerings to move laughter & to maintain Superstition”; that in

88 Clopper, Drama, Play and Game, 185; David Mills, “Some Theological Issues in Chester’s Plays,”in Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston, ed. David N. Klausner andKaren Sawyer Marsalek (University of Toronto Press, 2007), 212–29. I had the good fortunate ofreading Professor Mills’ essay (albeit briefly) just as this manuscript was going to press.

89 See Calvin, Commentaries, 390; Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol II, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan andDaniel E. Poellot (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 1960), 384–85.

90 See their valuable commentary in Chester Mystery Cycle, II, 43–59.91 Chester Mystery Cycle: Essays and Documents, 96–104.


The Purification (play 11) Simeon finds that his writing “good woman” inplace of “virgin” in his book miraculously vanishes; that The Harrowingof Hell (play 17) depicts “The deliverance of Adam &c out of hell &bringing these words to affirm his purpose [:] Attollite portas,” and thatAntichrist (play 23) is depicted “with turning of trees upwards.”92

No less disturbing for Goodman is the cycle’s continuing endorsementof “popery.” The Sheperds (play 7) depicts two of the shepherds joiningreligious orders, and play 13 and play 17 (The Blind Chelidonian and TheHarrowing of Hell) endorse the Roman Mass; The Resurrection (play 18)“promiseth blyss for good works”; Peter is elevated above the otherdisciples by creating Matthew an apostle in The Ascension (play 20);the prophet Elijah is shown “blessing bread with the sign of the Cross” inAntichrist (play 23), and in The Last Judgement “Purgatory affirmed,preaching of merits of man. The divell speaking Latin & setteth forth[the] invocation of Saints!”93

One might add that the Weavers’ Last Judgement is particularly extensiveand explicit in its advocacy of Roman Catholicism, so much so that littleor no Protestant revision is evident, and one finds it difficult to see howthis pageant could have been officially sanctioned for performance duringElizabeth’s reign, notwithstanding its inclusion among the plays anno-unced and described in the Late Banns. What is especially interestingabout The Last Judgement is its implicit recognition of the institution ofthe papacy. Following the Northern Rebellion any such acknowledge-ment in a public setting would have been politically dangerous, and oneassumes that when the civic magistracy approved the 1575 performance ofthe plays, this one was among those left out due to its “superstition.”Nevertheless, the absence of any revision of the pageant may suggest thepresence of religious conservatives within the Weavers’ Guild.We may never know when the Weavers’ Last Judgement ceased to be

performed in the sixteenth century. The Weavers may have been sharinga pageant wagon with the Smiths as late as 1560–61, but evidence hereis circumstantial.94 The paucity of evidence surrounding much of thecycle’s history also makes it difficult to date the composition, revision,and performance of the other pageants, and this, in turn, obscures ourunderstanding of when the Protestant changes took place in the 1560s

92 REED: Cheshire, eds. Elizabeth Baldwin, David Mills, and Lawrence M. Clopper (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 2007), 147–48. I am grateful to REED for permitting me to readthese materials from the collection prior to publication.

93 Baldwin et al., REED Cheshire, 147–148.94 David Mills, Recycling the Cycle, (University of Toronto Press, 1998), 117; Clopper, REED Chester, 66.


and 1570s. Goodman’s letters confirm what we know from other sources –that the plays were constantly revised, but he adds that such revisions wereoften ignored in performance by the guilds who staged them.95

Thanks to David Mills’s recent discovery of Goodman’s 10 June, 1572letter to Archbishop Grindal, it can now be confidently asserted that atleast two pageants were revised after the occasion the reformer read themin mid-1572. For example, in his list of objections to the “Old Original,”which he apparently sent to Mayor Hanky as well as to Grindal in Juneof 1572, he quotes three passages of dialogue promoting Catholic doctrinefrom the cycle, two of which are revised along Protestant lines in the extantcycle texts. The first of these is from The Resurrection. Speaking to theknights shortly after his resurrection, Jesus declares, according to Goodman,“And therto a full ryche messe, in bred myn one bodie, & that bred I yougyve, your wyked lyffe to amend, becomen is my fleshe, throgh wordes5 betwyxt the prestes handes.”96 Christ is saying that during the Mass thebread becomes the body of Christ through the miracle of transubstanti-ation, which occurs when the priest consecrates the host by holding it upwith both hands between his thumb and forefinger and pronounces thefive words, “Hoc est enim Corpus Meum” (“For this is my body”). In allthe extant manuscripts of The Resurrection, this passage is changed.97 Thephrasing about transubstantiation is dropped and replaced with languagethat conveys that holy communion is inefficacious without the communi-cant’s exercise of faith (“becomes my fleseh through your beleeffe”).98

Goodman quotes another objectionable passage, this time in the dialogueof Simon the apostle in the pageant on Pentecost: “And I beleve with devo-tion, of syn to have remission, throgh penance & contrition, & heven whanI am dead.” The reviser of the extant version of Pentecost seemed to thinkthat toomuch credit is given here to the sacrament of penance as the source ofthe remission of sins, so the passage is changed as follows to more truly reflectthe language of the Apostle’s Creed (from which the language is taken):

And I believe, with devotyon,of synne to have remissionthrough Christes blood and Passion,and Heaven when I am dead. 99

95 See Mill’s informative discussion of Goodman’s critique of and opposition to the Chester plays inRecycling the Cycle, 146–50 and 179–80; see also “Some Theological Issues in Chester’s Plays.”

96 Baldwin et al., REED Cheshire, 148. 97 Resurrection (play 18), ll. 168–77.98 During the consecration of the host during Mass the five words “Hoc est enim Corpus Meum”

(“For this is my body”) initiate the miracle of transubstantiation.99 Pentecost (play 21), ll. 347–350.


These passages from the extant play texts of The Resurrection and Pentecostare clearly revisions of “The Old Original,” but when they specificallyoccurred after Goodman’s complaints is not known. They may have takenplace as early as the June 1572 production of the cycle. For Goodmanhad sent the “Note” to the mayor possibly by May 10, which would havegiven the latter time to impose some last-minute changes to the scripts.Moreover, in a second letter from Goodman to Grindal sometime inlate 1572, Goodman remarks (speaking of the cycle organizers) “they (tocloak their doings) shall alledge that many of the foresaid plays arecorrected: yet we are sure that the most part remain as before, & the restso corrected not much bettered, nor yet examined & allowed according toorder.”100 It is possible, however, that the final changes took place duringpreparations for the 1575 production, at which time Mayor Savagearranged for the cycle texts to be more fully revised in Protestant terms.Given that the revisions in the play texts observed here appear to be in

response to Goodman’s specific criticisms of 1572, one wonders whethersome of the defensive statements in the Late Banns about individualpageants are “answers” to Goodman’s criticisms as well. For example,three of the pageants that are most extensively criticized by Goodmanfor their extra-biblical material, The Nativity, The Shepherds, andThe Harrowing of Hell, are vigorously defended in the Late Banns, despitetheir lack of biblical precedent. Thus, Goodman lists among his“absurdities” in The Nativity pageant the “Two midwives to ChristTibill & Salome” and the “miracle” of Salome’s withering hands (whenshe attempts to prove Mary’s non-virginity). The Late Banns’ briefsummary of The Nativity seems to respond to this by stating that “In thescriptures a warraunte. not of the midwiues reporte / The author tellethehis author. then take hit in sporte”101; in other words, the midwives add alittle harmless comedy to the story. In the Shepherds pageant, Goodmanobjects to “The foolish descanting of the Shephereds upon Gloria in excelsis”and to their comic portrayal in general as irreverent and unscriptural.The Late Banns acknowledge the mirthful treatment of the shepherdsas extra-biblical but justify it as pleasant recreation and appropriate forcharacters of humble birth:

The Shepherde poore of base and lowe degreeyou Paynters and Glaseers. decke out with all myrthefAnd see that Gloria. in excelsus. be songe merelye.

100 Cheshire, 146.101 Chester, 243; “The Banes,” ll. 11–12; all subsequent references to the Late Banns are to this edition.


ffewe wordes in the Pagiante. make merthe trulye [i.e., based on truth],ffor all that the author had to stand vpponWas glorye to god on highe & peace [t]on earthe to man. 102

Goodman is especially critical of The Harrowing of Hell:

The deliverance of Adam &c out of hell & bringing these words to affirm hispurpose Attollite portas. Enoch & Elias living in paradise in the flesh & theabiding there for a time. Michael bringing the fathers out of hell with the crosshanging upon the theef ’s back.!

The Late Banns description of The Harrowing of Hell is primarily takenup with defending it against just such criticisms. They report that “ourebelefe” is that Christ descended into hell,

but what he did in that placeThough oure author sett forthe after his opynionyet creditt you the beste lerned. those he dothe not disgrase.

There is no proof that the Late Banns are responding specifically toGoodman’s criticisms, but the correspondences are striking, and it isworth repeating that the preacher and his clerical colleagues did deliver a“Note” to Mayor Hanky in May of 1572 expressing their opposition, andthey copied it to the Earl of Huntingdon on 10 May. The note, in termsof content, may be identical with the “notes of absurdities” whichGoodman attached to his letter to Grindal a few weeks later in early June.If we accept this hypothesis, we can then date the Late Banns in theirfinal, extant form no earlier than June 1572. Since this would have beentoo late for presentation that year (St. George’s Day when the Banns weretraditionally presented was long past by then), perhaps they were preparedas part of the 1575 production.The Chester cycle, then, at least in terms of its text, was revised in

response to reformist criticism during the 1560s and 1570s, but the playsnevertheless remained religiously conservative in their continued use ofthe Latin Vulgate, traditional liturgical music, and narrative materialsfrom The Golden Legend, among other medieval Catholic sources. Towhom, however, would such a hybrid cycle appeal? Richard Emmersonproposes that neither religious traditionalists nor rigorous Protestants inElizabethan Chester would have responded favorably to the changes to thecycle described in the Late Banns, at least as they applied to the Dyers’Antichrist which seems to have equated Catholicism with the Antichrist

102 “The Banes,” ll. 14–20.


while still featuring many elements of the old religion.103 Thus Catholicsand crypto-Catholics, who survived in large numbers in early ElizabethanCheshire,104 would have found such polemics deeply offensive, while thegrowing number of Protestants militants would have complained thatthe plays did not go far enough in removing the taint of “popish super-stition.” That the latter indeed felt this way we now know from the newevidence provided by Goodman’s “absurdities,” one of which appliedspecifically to Antichrist, as noted earlier. And Emmerson is surely rightthat the plays generated a hostile response from playgoers aligned withthe opposite end of the religious spectrum as well, and this flew directly inthe face of drama’s time-honored purpose of enhancing solidarity andsense of shared religious and civic pride among Cestrians.But what about those citizens who were neither crypto-Catholic nor

puritanical? Was there room at this early stage in Chester’s Protestanthistory for a religious sensibility that would have continued to be genuinelymoved and comforted – rather than alienated – by the cycle’s repre-sentations of Christian ceremony and devotion? I believe we should atleast entertain the possibility of such a non-partisan religious sensibility.The diocese of Chester has been the focus of research on an emergingsegment of Elizabethan Anglicanism known as “Prayer Book Protestants,”those members of the English church who were less concerned withpreaching and the strict adherence to doctrinal truth than they were withfollowing the observances of the Book of Common Prayer.105 Judith Maltbyhas cited a Chester parish which vigorously defended its right to followthe Prayer Book’s liturgy against a puritan vicar, arguing that the traditionwas proudly observed for “forty years or more.”106 This took place in 1604,which meant that tradition extended back to the 1560s. It is not surprisingthat devotees of the Prayer Book thrived in the diocese, consideringthat only a fraction of its clergy in the 1560s and 1570s were graduates; assuch, they were less likely to be preachers and doctrinal zealots and moreprone to follow the pattern of Sunday worship prescribed in the PrayerBook. We should keep in mind that the Prayer Book’s liturgy was basedon the Medieval Sarum (or Salisbury) rite (a popular medieval approachto church worship), and, as Christopher Marsh has argued recently, it

103 Richard K. Emmerson, “Contextualizing Performance,” Journal of Medieval and Early ModernStudies 29 (1999), 89–120; Mills, “Some Theological Issues in Chester’s Plays,” 217–18.

104 See K. R. Wark, Elizabethan Recusancy in Cheshire (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1971.105 See Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998).106 See JudithMaltby, “‘By this Book,” inThe Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: 1993): 118–28.


provided important points of continuity between the Catholic past andthe Protestant present.107 Such “moderate” Protestants surely would havefound their devotional experience reaffirmed in the Chester cycle, whichdraws on many of the same scriptural and liturgical readings, especially onsuch feast days as Christmas, Candlemas, Easter, and Pentecost, found inthe Book of Common Prayer.By the 1570s, however, the cycle’s days were numbered. It was now

proving to be a divisive enterprise rather than an occasion of civic solida-rity, and powerful forces were lining up against it. If Chester Cathedralcontinued to support the cycle at Whitsun 1572 with stage materials andprovisions, its ineffectual bishop, William Downham, bowed to pressurefrom Archbishop Grindall to sign an inhibition of May 15 against theproduction going forward.108 Moreover, religious conservatives and moder-ates within the town council, notably the two mayors John Hanky andJohn Savage who sanctioned the 1572 and 1575 productions respectively,faced threats from the Privy Council itself. Mayor Hanky’s decision toauthorize the 1572 production was backed by Cheshire’s most influentialpatron, the 3rd Earl of Derby, himself a suspected Catholic and protectorof recusants, but Derby apparently did not intervene to revive the cycleafter its last production at Midsummer (changed from Whitsun) in 1575,by which time some guildsmen and political leaders were expressing theiropposition.109 Without question, the driving force behind the campaignto end civic biblical drama in Chester was Christopher Goodman, whoseextant letters, as we have seen, have crucially illuminated the events andattitudes surrounding the Chester cycle in its final years. One is temptedto dismiss Goodman as a mere puritan zealot, but this native Cestrian(born there about 1520) was an eminent Oxford scholar, Marian exile,political pamphleteer, Bible translator, and chaplain to the nobility, beforereturning to Chester around 1568, when he was nominated to theEcclesiastical Commission for the diocese.110 By 1570 he had obtained a

107 Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth Century England, 29–30.108 Cheshire, 136–37.109 For Derby’s support of the cycle, see Cheshire, 145. For the growing chorus of opposition, see

Emmerson, “Contextualizing Performance,” 89–92.110 See Wark, Elizabethan Recusancy, 9. Goodman attended Brasnose College at Oxford under

Edward VI and was appointed Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in 1548. During Mary’sCatholic restoration, he journeyed with other Protestant exiles to Strassbourg and Frankfurt,before settling in Geneva as pastor of the English community; there he wrote a radical andinfluential political tract called How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed. On Elizabeth’s accession,he spent time in Scotland on John Knox’s invitation (c. 1559–65), in Ireland as chaplain toSir Henry Sidney (1565–70). See biographical accounts, see DNB (2004) and Mills, Recycling thecycle, 146.


living at Alforde, a parish about five miles south of Chester, and securedappointment as Archdeacon of Richmond, which at that time was withinthe Chester diocese, though located in North Yorkshire. He may havebeen appointed by Edmund Grindal, Archbishop of York, a fellowMarian exile in Strassbourg. As Archdeacon of Richmond, a prestigiousappointment, Goodman oversaw one of only two consistory courts in thediocese of Chester; the other one was conducted by the Bishop of Chester.Goodman’s voice, therefore, carried considerable clout among his clericalcolleagues, although this did not save him from being suspended frompreaching in Chester in 1571 due to nonconformity. The suspension didnot last for long, since he reports in his correspondence to Grindal thathe was preaching in the city against the plays.111 His letters, moreover,give the impression that a significant contingent of Cestrians shared hisopposition to the Whitsun cycle. He cites two other clergymen whoprotested to the mayor about the plays: John Lane, a prebend of theCathedral, and Robert Rogerson, who, according to David Mills, is oneand the same as Robert Rogers who contributed to the famous ChesterBreviary, and whose son was David Rogers, the antiquarian mainlyresponsible for the Breviary and for much of what we currently knowabout the Chester cycle.112 In his 1572 letters to Grindal, Goodman refersto “my breathren & fellow ministers of this City, who now are present tojoyn with me” in his campaign against the plays. Among the “breathren”are members of the city’s trade guilds participating in the production,since “many,” he observes, “for fear of [the mayor’s] displeasure are con-strained to give their consent, others that make any resistance threatned.”113

THE SURVIVAL OF THE CYCLES

Goodman was part of the apparatus of state intervention which acceleratedthe pace with which the great civic biblical dramas of Chester and Yorkcame to an end in the 1570s. Others met their demise around the sametime: Newcastle upon Tyne’s Corpus Christi cycle apparently ceased in1568, while at Wakefield “a plaie commonlie called Corpus Christi plaie”“plaied this yere in Whitsonweke” was put down in 1576 by an order ofYork Dean Matthew Hutton.114 And yet the Council of the North, under

111 Mills, Recycling, 146. 112 Mills, Recycling, 147. 113 Cheshire.114 See J. J. Anderson, ed., Newcastle-upon-Tyne, REED (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983),

53–57, for what appear to be records for the last performance there in 1568, although the guildscontinued to refer to a possible revival throughout much of Elizabeth’s reign. For the text of


the direction of the Earl of Huntingdon for much of Elizabeth’s reign,was unsuccessful in suppressing conservative religious drama across thevast terrain of “the North.” There, while the rest of the country becameincreasingly Protestantized, theater and Catholicism remained mutuallysupportive entities, with dramatic performances reaffirming a sense ofsolidarity and collective religious identity among those persisting in theold faith. As Christopher Haigh has demonstrated, the large deanships ofthe Chester diocese that stretch northward through Lancashire, like largeconservative pockets of Yorkshire, Cumberland, and Westmorland, wereinefficiently monitored by Protestant ecclesiastical officials.115 And giventhat many civic and religious authorities in the region remained religiouslyconservative, it is hardly surprising that urban craft guilds and towncouncils continued to sponsor and organize “Corpus Christi plays” insuch towns as Preston and Lancaster in Lancashire, and Kendall inWestmorland, into the seventeenth century.116 At Kendall, a local recordof 1575 refers to the “several pageants” of the annual, ongoing CorpusChristi play there, although it is unlikely that the drama was on thepanoramic scale of York or Chester. More likely, as scholars now assumeto have been the case at Wakefield, it constituted a cluster of smallpageants centering around the passion of Christ.117

This does not mean, of course, that the Towneley compilation, formallyassumed to be the Wakefield mystery plays, was a “closet” version of thegreat creation-to-doomsday cycle. Barbara Palmer has suggested Doncaster,along with Wakefield and other smaller towns in the region, as possibleproducers of select Towneley pageants. Recently, she has pro-posed thepossibility that the recusant Towneley family, itself, saved the cycle textfrom destruction after the dissolution of Whalley Abbey in Lancashire.This hypothesis coheres with Malcolm Parkes and Alexandra Johnston’sredating of the Towneley manuscript to Queen Mary’s reign in their newpaleographic and codicological study.118 I would like to take the argumentone step further in suggesting that wealthy and well-placed recusanthouseholds not only preserved “Catholic” playbooks but were instru-mental in the continuing performance of individual “cycle” pageants well

Hutton’s order to Wakefield, see The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. A. C. Cawley(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958), 125.

115 Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1975).

116 Lancashire, ed. David George, REED (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), xliii and 29.117 Douglas and Greenfield, REED; Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Gloucestershire, 168.118 Palmer, “Recycling ‘The Wakefield Cycle’,” 86–128.


into the Jacobean period.119 When the counter-Reformation chose toreevangelize England during Elizabeth’s reign it did so via the socialelite rather than through popular auspices.120 The Stonyhurst pageants, amanuscript collection of some eighteen pageants dating from 1609, isindicative of continuing interest of northern households in reading andperforming biblical drama of a Catholic coloring.121 More than a decadelater, in 1621, it was a recusant gentry family that sponsored an anti-puritanplay with Catholic overtones in the grounds of Kendall Castle, and as weshall see in chapter 5 below, gentry and wealthy yeoman households inNorth Yorkshire during James I’s reign were prosecuted for hosting playsby the Simpsons, a recusant troupe of touring players which staged aninflammatory interlude attacking the Church of England.122

119 We should keep in mind that since the days of the third Earl of Northumberland under HenryVIII, playwrighting chaplains in noble households contributed plays to local civic productions;see above.

120 Haigh (see references in chapter 5).121 See Phebe Jensen, “Recusancy, Festivity, and Community: the Simpsons at Gowthwaite Hall,”

Region, Religion, and Patronage, eds. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, Richard Wilson (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2003), 118n. 53; John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 119.

122 Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion, 135.
