Thursday, March 20
I was studying abroad in England when I first learned about York’s mystery plays. Named for the “mysteries”, or craft-guilds, who sponsored each of the forty-some plays in this cycle, these were popular and elaborate medieval dramas on salvation history. Even for the ardent dramatist or thespian, it was a marathon of a production. The surviving text of the cycle calls for more than 14,000 lines with over 300 speaking parts. And the performances themselves had a style all its own. Staged on Corpus Christi day as a processional through the city, players would move custom-built wagons to twelve different stations, starting the first play at four-thirty in the morning and concluding the last play’s final performance sometime after midnight. As smaller revivals have revealed, the plays are uniquely suited to their form. While we can read for recurring symbols and language in the text, new resonances can be found when these plays are simulcast.
The plays are outwardly didactic, yet I appreciate their moments of subtle subversiveness. “I said but a thought,” Lucifer says of his crime in the first play, The Fall of the Angels. As the volume I hold suggests, we are meant to see the offense here as a type of inner pride. But I also see in this line how the play implicates its audience. Haven’t we all had the thought?
Largely missing from these Corpus Christi plays are the teachings and ministry of Jesus. The cycle focuses instead on the more, well, dramatic acts. Yet when I read today’s parable about Lazarus and the rich man, or Dives in literature, I thought it was well-suited to drama. We have a sense of the costumes (Dives’ purple garments, Lazarus covered in sores), staging (the rich man’s door; the place of torment), and even some props (food at the table, water to dip). As a thoroughly modern pageant-master, I’d probably opt for the same partition for the door and the chasm. The flames are imaginary. And when Dives looks up, Abraham and Lazarus are standing where he once stood.
God, who has speaking parts in some of the other mystery plays, would be noticeably absent here. Abraham, that grand patriarch of the old law, is who Dives sees, and who Dives appeals to. When Dives pleas, “have pity on me,” Abraham does nothing. He does not allow even a drop of water to cool Dives’ tongue.
Jesus includes many sensory details in this parable, which can be vocalized on stage. We can hear of licked wounds and burning flames, desperate hunger and unquenchable thirst, desperate pleas and silent anguish. As people outside of the action, we may register that all this pain feels alike. That suffering strikes the same chord in us. We might want someone to cross the threshold. Do something.
Unable to get mercy for himself, Dives appeals to Abraham on behalf of his five brothers still living. “I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father’s house…so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.” Abraham is dismissive. “They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.”
At this moment, we might hear Jesus speak from one of the other plays down the road: “Lazar, veni foras / Come fro thy monument.”
A new way is on the horizon. Dives wants to believe it will make a difference: people can change, they will repent. But like so many of us when it comes to careless men like Dives and his brothers, Abraham remains skeptical. “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.”
So ends this part in salvation history, with a great divide still uncrossed.
Gabriella Wilke is the marketing and audience development director at Commonweal. She lives in central Minnesota with her husband and cat.