The York Mystery Plays, more properly called the York Corpus Christi Plays, are a Middle English cycle of forty-eight mystery plays, or pageants, which cover sacred history from the creation to the Last Judgement. These were traditionally presented on the feast day of Corpus Christi (a movable feast occurring the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, between May 23 and June 24). They were performed in the city of York, from the middle of the fourteenth century until 1569. It is one of only four virtually complete surviving English mystery play cycles, with the others known as the Chester Mystery Plays, the Towneley/Wakefield plays and N-Town plays. In addition to these, two long, composite, and late mystery pageants have survived from the Coventry cycle, and there are records and fragments from other similar productions which took place elsewhere. A manuscript of the York plays, probably dating from some time between 1463 and 1477, survives at the British Library.
Read more about York Mystery Plays: The Plays, The York Realist, Modern Revival, The York Millennium Mystery Plays, 2012 Production, The Waggon Plays, Adaptations and Related Plays
Famous quotes containing the words york, mystery and/or plays:
“New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world’s greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?”
—Paul Celan [Paul Antschel] (1920–1970)
“The form of act or thought mattered nothing. The hymns of David, the plays of Shakespeare, the metaphysics of Descartes, the crimes of Borgia, the virtues of Antonine, the atheism of yesterday and the materialism of to-day, were all emanation of divine thought, doing their appointed work. It was the duty of the church to deal with them all, not as though they existed through a power hostile to the deity, but as instruments of the deity to work out his unrevealed ends.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)