Religion And The Vernacular: The York Mystery Plays
RELIGION AND THE VERNACULAR: THE YORK MYSTERY PLAYS
The growing importance of English in relation to matters of religion can be illustrated in many ways. Perhaps one of the most interesting developments was the establishment of mystery plays in great northern English cathedral cities, such as Chester and York. The York mystery plays are widely regarded as being the finest example of this genre, and deserve our attention.
By 1350, the ravages of the Black Death upon the northern English city of York had ended. The city entered into a new phase of prosperity, and was second only to London in terms of its financial and social importance. The city celebrated its new wealth and status by staging a series of plays on and around the feast of Corpus Christi. Like Easter, Corpus Christi was a movable feast, and could fall on any date between 23 May and 24 June. This ensured reasonably good weather for the cycle of plays. The plays in question depicted the creation, fall, and redemption of humanity, drawing extensively on biblical narratives.
The long sequence of events between creation and the last judgment was broken down into manageable segments, each of which was entrusted to one of the city's guilds. Trouble was taken to ensure that the guild had some natural relationship with the biblical scene being acted out. Thus the Marriage at Cana in Galilee (at which water was changed into wine) was entrusted to the Guild of Vintners, the Last Supper to the Guild of Bakers, and the Death of Christ to the Guild of Butchers.
The impact of these mystery plays was immense, and they came to play a major role in York's popular religious culture. The intermingling of images, actions, and words offered a powerful and attractive account of the central themes of the Christian faith, and offered both stimulation to the imagination and education for the mind. Most important of all, the plays were performed in English—or, more accurately, the Yorkshire dialect of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Where the Church offered a liturgy, Bible readings, and sermons only in Latin—which few outside the intellectual elite understood—the play cycle offered religious teaching in the vernacular. Its appeal was considerable. So the question naturally arose: why was the Bible not also available in this way?
The demand for a printed Bible in the English language became an issue of increasing importance in the late Middle Ages. There was clearly a growing market for such a work. It also had the potential to become a classic of English literature, allowing a definitive form of the English language to establish itself through the widespread usage, public and private, that such a work was guaranteed to enjoy. If any printed work could shape the contours of a living Western European language, that work was a vernacular Bible.