N-Town Plays - The Manuscript

The Manuscript

The manuscript is now housed in the British Library, London (BL MS Cotton Vespasian D.8). As its name might suggest, though, it was once the property of the 17th-century antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton and was housed in his large library. Cotton's librarian, Richard James, quickly examined the manuscript and erroneously assumed that it contained the Biblical plays performed in Coventry during the 15th and 16th centuries, thus naming them the Ludus Coventriae or "the Play Called Corpus Christi". He was mistaken in both cases, but that mistake has proven very difficult to correct; the name Ludus Coventriae persists in the secondary and critical literature well into the 20th century. A further complication of the N-Town plays was made by Hardin Craig who, in his Medieval Drama (1955), called the collection the Hegge Plays after their former owner, Robert Hegge. The name Hegge Plays only briefly caught on, and the most common way to refer to these plays now is The N-Town Plays, after the reference in the last stanza of the opening proclamation that the play was to be played at "N-Town"; when the plays toured from town to town, N. (meaning nomen, the Latin for name) would be replaced by the name of the town the cycle was playing in at any given time.

The plays of the N-Town cycle vary from simple, almost liturgical, recitations of Biblical texts (as in the Moses play of the Ten Commandments, the Jesse play with its kings and prophets, and the Penetecost play) to highly complex and fast moving short dramas on Biblical themes that have a naturalism and liveliness (as in the Death of Herod and the Woman Taken in Adultery) almost unique in early drama. These plays can all be played from a wagon or a single booth stage. On the other hand, the two Mary Plays and the Passion Play were written for what is often called "place and scaffold" production in the round using "scaffolds" or raised stages and also the "platea" or the "place" between the stages.

The true nature of the manuscript has been hidden by the fact that the scribe arranged all the episodes in "chronological order" starting with Creation and ending with Judgment, simulating an episodic play presenting salvation history as in the two northern civic cycles from York and Chester. As he did this he buried the Mary Play inside the Nativity sequence and copied the Passion Play into place between the Raising of Lazarus and the Resurrection appearances. It has taken painstaking paleographic and codicologic examinations of the manuscript to determine what the scribe actually did. To further complicate the matter, at some point in the history of copying out these plays, the proclamation was attached to them. Although the proclamation does not match the plays that follow, someone, possibly the scribe of this manuscript, placed numbers in the margin of the text against incidents that correspond to the description of the "pageants" in the proclamation. This does not affect the single episode pageants but it breaks up the flow of the Passion Play and has obscured the very existence of the Mary Play for centuries.

A final scribal feature of this manuscript is the stage directions which reflect a curious mixture of intent. They seem to be recording performance detail while, at the same time, facilitating the reading of the manuscript as a meditation text rather than using it as a text to be enacted. The stage directions are in Latin in the pageants, in the Mary Play they are a mix of English and Latin and in the Passion Play they are almost entirely in English. They seem to function as much as an aid to help a reader visualize the action as actual practical instructions to a director. The details of costume and action in the stage directions in the Passion Play suggest a description of an actual performance. The liturgical music is specified in the Mary Play and Assumption Play by including the opening words of each piece or the "incipit" in the stage directions. On the other hand the stage directions in many of the pageants are quite laconic.