Meg Twycross - The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images, and Performance: Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies

by Sarah Carpenter and Pamela King

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In 1446 William Revetour, chaplain of St Williams Ousebridge, York, and a theatrically minded clergyman, left in his Will to the Brotherhood of Corpus Christi in York, a certain book called Le Crede Play , with the books and banners thereto appertaining to the Guild of St Christopher, a certain play of St James the Apostle, put together in six pageants/pages (the word paginae is ambiguous here), and to the Girdlers Guild, a gilt crown and girdle for their Corpus Christi play, the Massacre of the Innocents.

Revetour may not have written the Creed Play himself, though he seems in some undefined way to have been in charge of it, but he would clearly have agreed with the sentiments later attributed to him by the Corpus Christi Guild, that it was to be performed to the glory of God and the instruction of the people. The books in English, though he may have used them himself, sound as if they were meant to be read aloud to lay people, as Margery Kempes spiritual director read aloud to her. In his Will he leaves them to lay friends. We ought, I think, to look at the religious plays of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the light of the devotional and instructional reading of men like Revetour, their potential authors, and men like Tubbac, most certainly their audience.

J.W. Robinson and Clifford Davidson have already written in some detail about this affective approach, particularly to the Passion of Christ.

Margaret Deanesley suggests that its popularity may be partly due to the fact that it was used by lay people as a substitute for the Bible, especially once it had been translated: a vernacular Life of Christ, with the orthodox editors interpretation often inserted, was less likely to mislead the laity than the naked text of the Gospels and no appeal could be made to it in support of theological argument. In England at the beginning of the fifteenth century, when the plays were first becoming established, Archbishop Arundel not only took the negative step of prohibiting, in 1408, the reading of English Bibles without episcopal licence, but before 1410 he took the positive one of licensing a substitute. This authorised version was the translation of the Meditationes by Nicholas Love, Prior of the Charterhouse of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, which itself, to quote Deanesley, was probably more popular than any other single (English) book in the fifteenth century.