We have only a fragment of York’s Cain and Abel play; the guild duly submitted its script for the registry, but several pages in the middle were lost, so we have only the beginning and the end. It probably followed the same pattern as another “Cain and Abel” play, that of Wakefield, also in Yorkshire. The Wakefield text I have has been modernized by John Glassner and appears in his Medieval and Tudor Drama book.
The story of Abel’s murder at Cain’s hands would have been another popular medieval one. In a culture that saw dogfighting and bull-baiting as wholesome sports, that allowed little boys to stone sparrows to death on St. Stephen’s Day, depicting torture or murder was just fine, as long as a moral lesson came out of it. The stage production notes in one medieval “Cain and Abel” suggested that Abel’s tunic should conceal a thin-walled pottery flask that Cain could shatter in striking him, which sounds to me like the use of fake stage blood.
And while it wasn’t acceptable to have fun at the expense of noble or saintly people, sinners or common folk were fair game. We start to see in Wakefield’s “Cain” the use of a “clown” as it’s often called when Shakespeare has one: a peasant farmer or city laborer with rough language and a bad attitude, always looking to dodge work or sass his boss. Cain has a hired-help farm boy, just to increase the comic potential. In Wakefield’s “Cain,” the hired-help gets the opening lines, “Here come I, a merry lad,” while exhorting the audience to be quiet when his master comes. In fact, whoever keeps talking, he says, may “blow my black hole both behind and before till his teeth bleed!” And so Cain’s lad rings in the first butt joke of the scene.
Abel convinces Cain to tithe his grain with much earnest arguing, while Cain slaps his hired lad, cracks more butt jokes, and swears by the devil. He greets Abel with “kiss my arse” and “kiss the devil’s bum,” and announces that God has always been his foe, pointing to his poor harvests. But when they arrive at the place of sacrifice, the slapstick really begins.
Abel’s sacrifice is soon burnt, and I really think the wagon stage must have had an iron pan with a real fire struck up in it, for the talk on stage is about the fire burning bright and clean—whereas when Cain gets around to setting fire to his sacrifice, it smokes and goes out. But before Cain lights his fire, he spends a long time counting out how many sheaves of grain he will put on the altar. He mutters to the side, swearing he’ll keep the best for himself, and he counts very grudgingly, taking up most of scene getting from two to twenty. He puts them down, pulls them back; he counts with his eyes closed (no fault to him if he misses some, right?), he sifts through his sheaf to find the skinniest stalks. Farm humor, to be sure, and probably played in a very comic way. And the whole time, he’s swearing by the devil, cursing his brother, and finally saying “in the devil’s name” when he lights it.
Nobody in the audience should be surprised when he’s such a mean cur that he knocks Abel out with an old jawbone lying on the stage ground. We’ve had ample warning that he’s very, very bad. Cain then turns to address the audience; medieval theater didn’t hesitate to break the fourth wall, and productions often used the audience and its spaces as part of the set. “And if any of you think I did amiss, I shall amend it worse!” he cries, threatening them. God comes to condemn Cain, and then his tone changes to be a little less defiant.
But before the play has a chance to become moralizing or dull, Cain calls back his hired lad. “Hide the body!” he commands. The boy is horrified, and then begins a line of patter straight out of Vaudeville. Cain is making a speech about how the boy will always go before him, crying “Oyez! (hear ye)” and claiming the king’s protection. But the boy is mugging to the audience, punctuating each line with his own rhyming parody about what’s for supper.
Cain: “Oyez! Oyez! Oy!”
Boy: Brewes (soup), brewes, to thy boy!
Cain inventing the king’s safe-passage letter: “I command you in the King’s name—”
Boy: And in my master’s, false Cain!
Cain: “That no man them may fault or blame—”
Boy: Yea! Cold roast is at my master’s hame [home]!
In the end, the boy climbs a tree to get away, before Cain dismisses him and prepares to exit, saying, “Fare well less, and fare well more, for now and evermore I will go to hide!”