We’re missing several of York’s plays for key events in the life of Jesus; all of the guilds were required to keep a script on file at the city registry and update them as needed, but over time, some scripts were lost. There’s a gap between the Temptation in the Wilderness and the Entry into Jerusalem in which four stories were told but we have scripts for only two relatively short ones.
The Vintners chose “The Wedding at Cana,” in which water is turned into wine, and that’s no surprise. The Ironmongers put on the next one, “The Feast at Simon’s House,” in which Mary Magdalene was introduced. But these scripts are lost, so we can only speculate. There’s a silent partner in all of these productions, little noted in the scripts: music. Some scripts indicate that characters are to sing church music, like Te Deums or Glorias. But there were surely interludes of instrumental music and perhaps even a dance or two. How was that worked out?
By the late Middle Ages, when the Corpus Christi plays were at their height, the old wandering minstrel pattern of music performance was settling into a new pattern of town bands. They were far from the oompah bands of later folk imagery, but they had some simple brass and a few of the fingered woodwinds of the time. They would also have had string players, since early forms of violins and cellos were available. Percussion was mainly done by a set of tom-toms hung on a drummer’s belt, but they had a range of other options like triangles and cymbals. Additionally, there were church choirs and organists.
We know from some other town records that the guilds competed to hire the best musicians first. If you were putting on “Herod and the Magi,” you would want a trumpet fanfare for Herod’s entrance. If you were producing creation plays, you’d want some of the choir singers as angels. And I think the lost plays about the wedding and the feast would have featured instrumental ensembles — viols, shawms, flutes, and drums — to play dance music and evoke a festive atmosphere.
It’s also likely that some musicians set up busking stations to play music between dramas, when the wagons were moving and setting up. Some of the stops were probably more prestigious, and larger, than others. Some of them may have attracted more people from out of town. Musicians being a constant factor in human society, I can’t imagine there weren’t buskers or even entertainers hired by the groups who had leased the viewing stands.
We have a nearly-full play script for both “The Woman Caught in Adultery” and “The Raising of Lazarus.” These plays had been passed around among some minor guilds over the years. The Capmakers, the Bottlers, and the Pouchmakers were responsible for the woman caught in adultery, while the Plumbers and Pattenmakers took on Lazarus. (Pattens were the medieval form of rainboots; they didn’t protect shoes from raindrops, but they created a raised platform to keep leather moccasins up away from muddy streets.) But after 1422, the Hartshorners took over Lazarus. This is interesting because hart’s horn may have been a medicinal component, so raising someone from the dead would be of interest to their marketing. We don’t know why the other guilds gave up the production, but the up-and-coming Hartshorners were standing by.
“The Woman Caught in Adultery” opens with a group of Jewish men discussing how they are about to put to death this woman who was caught in the act of adultery. Medieval people, ever on the look-out for comic potential, wanted to know what had happened to the man involved; since she was caught in the act, surely they had him, too? So another version of this play, one produced in various towns in northern England, opens with the man actually running away with his pants around his ankles. We don’t see that in the York script, but they might have done it anyway.
We’re missing a key part of the woman’s story, since the script has lost a page. Other northern English versions fill in that the Jews discuss asking Jesus to be a judge as a way of trapping him into a mistake. Jesus agrees, but he asks them which of them is without sin, stooping to draw in the dust while they gradually go in different directions off stage. The woman is left with no accusers, and the script picks up as Jesus admonishes her, “Loke thou no more to synne assentte.”
“The Raising of Lazarus” is certainly a drama-worthy event. The play opens with the action not yet at the tomb, and again we are missing a few pages, probably the most emotional section. Mary and Martha express their sorrow:
“Allas, for ruthe (grief, pity), now may I rave
And febilly fare by frith and felde.
Wolde God that I wer grathed (buried) in grave,
That dede hadde tane (taken) me under telde (cover).”
But we don’t see where Jesus walks to their town and joins them in weeping before the grave. Although the audience knew what was coming, some of them probably joined with their own tears. At this time, in the late Middle Ages, it was seen as very devout and praiseworthy to participate in the sorrows of Jesus’ life and death by deep sympathy that moved the audience to tears. The script picks up where Jesus is praying then commands, “Lazar, veni foras.” When Lazarus emerges, he calls Jesus a “peerless prince.”
Lazarus’ tomb was probably a sarcophagus, a long box with a lid on top. It would have been made of wood, but painted to look like stone. It might have been covered with a cloth, then uncovered when Jesus “arrived” at Bethany, or it could have been rolled out from behind a curtain. The actor playing Lazarus was already in the box. Did they make him up to look like a medieval corpse? Medieval death art after the plague became very gory: not just skeletons, but in some cases rotting and missing body parts. Just as they exploited all comic situations, they were never shy to show something gory or violent, so he probably looked like a zombie. As the wagon moved on to the next stop, he climbed back into the box, ready to do it all again.