The Materials of Early Theatre: Sources, Images, and Performance

In 1978 I published in the REED Newsletter my first piece on medieval thea-tre, on the stations of the York Corpus Christi Play.¹ In it I attempted to identify the actual or possible locations of the houses outside which the Play was performed. This topic has subsequently been the subject of further detailed research by Eileen White, part of whose 1984 Leeds PhD thesis on the stations and their owners in the later sixteenth century was reworked and published by Medieval English Theatre in 1987,² and by David Crouch, whose 1990 York MA thesis on the fifteenth-century stationholders formed the basis for his 1991 article in METh.³

It would appear that one of the most memorable things I said in the REED Newsletter was this:

In trying to identify actual houses, I have been brought to an extremely interesting though necessarily tentative conclusion. Those stations which we can identify are all on the left-hand side of the route …

The left-hand-side theory has interesting implications for staging. The accounts of the Mercers’ pageant wagon suggest that it had not only a backcloth, but was, after the remodelling by Drawswerd, enclosed on three sides, much like a proscenium stage. If the audience scaffolds were on both sides of the route, to keep turning a heavy cart round so as to face them would be extremely awkward. If they are all on the same side of the road, this does not arise. The cart can, moreover, hug the right-hand kerb (or gutter, in many cases) and give the audience maximum room to dispose themselves, standing or sitting. (pp. 19–20)

Secondly, the evidence about the waggons. It is clear from my 1978 account that I, like most others at the time, assumed without question that the pageant waggon was sideways-oriented, ‘much like a proscenium stage’ (or possibly a booth stage) on wheels. This vision was probably unconsciously both created and confirmed by David Jee’s frontispiece to Sharp’s Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries anciently performed at Coventry (1825),⁵ backed up by a prejudged reading of the orientation of the biblical pageant cars in Denis van Alsloot’s Triumph of Isabella (1615), the other image most familiar to English-speaking theatre historians. At the time, it seemed axiomatic that the pageant-waggon stage was, as it had appeared in the Leeds and PLS York Cycle performances of 1975 and 1977 respectively, a side-on, wider-than-it-was-high box, probably enclosed on three sides. (It is interesting, in view of Philip Butterworth’s article in this volume of METh,⁶ that the one play at Toronto which seems to have varied from this was the Crucifixion, done on a plain waggon without superstructure. There Christ was crucified on the ground, and the cross raised to a standing position on the front end of a forward-facing waggon. The stage business appears to have forced them into lateral thinking. However, the waggon itself was not aligned down the ‘street’, but turned end-on to an audience seated on bleachers and the roadside grass.⁷ I cannot remember the 1975 Leeds’ Engineering Department’s production clearly enough to recall how they did it.) The 1971 reconstruction of the York Mercers’ waggon by Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Dorrell following the discovery of the 1433 Indenture,⁸ and Peter Meredith’s revised and improved version published in the first issue of METh,⁹ both took this for granted.

This image seems immensely tenacious. Eileen White’s highly ingenious diagrams showing the possible orientation of the waggon at street corners on the route are worked out on that assumption.¹⁰ David Crouch’s account of the pageant route and its problems, from the point-of-view of one who has been physically involved with the Lords of Misrule’s waggon-plays, also seems to take a side-on orientation for granted.¹¹

In the late 1970s, most of us had never seen a traditional pageant waggon in real life. But Alan Nelson, in the first-ever METh meeting in 1979, introduced us to the Spanish Holy Week pasos of Valladolid and Medina del Campo.12 These elaborate floats, in dimensions very near to those recorded for early Renaissance pageant waggons, carried like litters on the shoulders of the bearers, and loaded with life-size wooden figures rather than actors, are designed to be borne through narrow streets in procession, and their orientation is exclusively forwards. As Alan Nelson said in his METh article:

The principal axis of processional pageants is normally longitudinal, i.e. toward the front. Reconstructions of English pageants with orientation to the side should be considered problematic, as a) virtually without precedent in illustrations of medieval or Renaissance processions, and b) limiting visibility to one side of the pageant or the other, unless the pageant is turned around in its course. METh, 1:2 (1979), 69

My own work on the pageant-cars of the Flemish ommegangen, published in METh, 2 (1980),¹³ seemed to confirm Nelson’s arguments, or at least to suggest that they demanded serious consideration – though on re-reading, I appear to have been overly cautious about this.¹⁴ All the Antwerp waggons, and most of the waggons in Brussels and Leuven were conspicuously ‘longitudinal’ in orientation. The exceptions might be the Annunciation and Nativity waggons of Brussels (Christ and the Doctors is definitely front-facing, and so is the Jesse Tree, though artfully slewed for pictorial reasons). Also problematic are the Leuven waggons which show two people in conversation (the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, and Christ’s Appearance to his Mother; the Expulsion from Eden is, however, longitudinal), where the characters are ambiguously disposed on the ‘acting area’, possibly because a front-oriented scene has had to be adjusted by the painter for a book format which shows all waggons from the side. All these two-person waggons are transpicuous, and the processional audience would get a good view of the characters from all angles save possibly, in the case of the Brussels Annunciation, from the front stage left corner (as I commented, ‘Seen from the front, Van Alsloot’s Virgin would be totally obscured by her bedhangings’).¹⁵ Others, such as the Leuven Nine Orders of Angels, and possibly Pentecost, are multi-sided: no one point of view seems to predominate.

Since then I have seen both on video and in real life the pasos of Seville and the roques of Valencia (some of which are supposed, though with many renovations, to go back to the early sixteenth century), and the Japanese floats of Kyoto and Nagahama.¹⁶ These are all essentially processional pageant floats, but with interesting variations. The Seville pasos carry life-size wooden statues posed in dramatic scenes from the Passion and Resurrection.¹⁷ The Valencia roques carry statues (in the triumph-waggon mode) and live musicians. The Kyoto floats carry, variously, musicians, dignitaries, and groups of statues. The Nagahama floats are the most interesting, as they are set up for the performance, by boys, of quite elaborate Kabuki plays, and behave processionally exactly like the English pageant-waggons of York and Chester: they are manhandled along a fixed route, with some very narrow streets and sharp corners, stopping to perform at pre-arranged stations. The front of the waggon is arranged as a stage, the back as a tiring house; entrance is by a gallery along the stage-right side of the waggon, imitating the fixed stages of Kabuki and No. All these stages are definitely forward-aligned.

I am not suggesting that there was any form of cultural interchange between sixteenth-century Japanese or indeed Spanish pageant carts and the English mystery-play variety; I merely present it as an interesting non-culture-specific solution to a common situation. These pageants are drawn/carried processionally through the streets, and oriented so as to make the maximum visual impact as they approach. As John McKinnell said when discussing the 1988 York Festival pageant waggon plays: ‘The initial approach of the waggon makes an important impact when it is designed to be seen front-on, but looks as unimpressive as the side of a fairground booth when performance is side-on.’¹⁸ If it is true that the English pageant-waggon plays developed from processional floats, it seems unlikely that they would realign them without very pressing practical reasons.

However, with all these pageants, the side-view is also impressive, and in the case of the carved tableaux, is designed to be as ornamental and meaningful from the side as from the front. When we talk about a stage ‘picture’ we should not be misled into thinking of it as two-dimensional. Even the most stilted proscenium-arch stage picture is more than that. We should think in terms of sculpture. In theatrical terms, we are looking here at a thrust stage.

Even their retreating back-view is impressive. Some of the Valencia waggons feature a subsidiary statue facing backwards – e.g. the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception is backed up by her typological forerunner Judith carrying the head of Holofernes. The Japanese waggons have elaborately embroidered hangings with huge tassels: some of them display Flemish tapestries imported in the sixteenth century. In York in 1988, I was struck by the blankness of the back of our Doomsday waggon, a twenty-one-foot drop of empty red material. It was so conspicuous that it cried out for some kind of decoration. The original Mercers’ Doomsday waggon had ‘a grete coster of rede damaske payntid for the bakke syde of þe pagent’. This has always been thought of as a ‘backcloth’ in our sense, and the painting as some kind of scenic dressing, but it could equally well have been the answer to: ‘Have you seen yourself retreating?’¹⁹

I was sufficiently impressed by Alan Nelson’s suggestion to try it out with the Joculatores Lancastrienses’ waggon at the 1983 performance of the Chester Cycle at Leeds and subsequently in the mini-Cycle presented at Chester. (Both are reported in METh, 5.)²⁰ We set up our pageant waggon for the Purification and Doctors with a front-facing thrust stage, encouraging the audience to stand around it on three sides. The stage picture thus produced was very compact and suited the rhetorical detailed acting-style I had developed as a director first in Oxford and subsequently in Lancaster. It was not translatable to a wide horizontal staging – and we must have been a great nuisance to the Festival organisers when it rained, and we insisted on building the stage-setting portion of our pageant waggon in the body of the hall into which the plays were driven, instead of, like everyone else, using the conventional proscenium stage.

However, when we got to Chester, we did something that in retrospect seems both ludicrous and very revelatory: we used our front-facing pageant-waggon set – but turned it, with considerable physical effort, round through ninety degrees so that it stuck out horizontally across the street. In other words, having gone to all the trouble of working out a new orientation, we then treated it in the street as if it were merely a variant on the traditional side-on one.

(Eileen White’s illustrations to her 1987 METh article show that in 1960 Stewart Lack, who pioneered twentieth-century street waggon performances in York, did precisely the same with his Christ and the Doctors in Colliergate.)²¹

I think this was partly due to our inexperience: this was the first time we had taken to the actual streets of an original route, and the audience were as untrained as we were. Since all the other plays were sideways-oriented, we subconsciously assumed that the audience would be confused if asked to accept another orientation. (If we had been lucky enough to perform outside at Leeds, we would have had to cope with the audience seated in fixed spectator stands intended for a sideways-oriented performance. This may also be a major historical stumbling block to this theory: see below.) Secondly, Eastgate is very wide: there was plenty of room for us to turn round and for the audience to surround us. (Eileen White’s article shows Stewart Lack’s 1966 York Noah’s Ark turned at right angles across Stonegate, which it virtually blocks. This appears to be a sideways-oriented performance – I should be glad of further information – in which case he interestingly anticipates our sense that the audience needs to congregate down the length of the street, but keeps to the traditional view of the stage.) But it did make a nonsense of one of the most important parts of the experiment, of which more below. However, it proved to us that you could use a pageant waggon as a thrust stage and that the audience responded to this without any visible problems.

Five years later, when I was organising the pageant-waggon plays for the York Festival of 1988, where we played along part of the original route down Low Petergate from Minster Gates to King’s Square, I suggested to the four participating groups that we should all play head-on and see what happened. The result was revelatory. John McKinnell has described and discussed it in his article on ‘Producing the York Mary Plays’ in METh, 12:2 (1990). In the section headed ‘Side-on or Front-on?’, he lists (pp. 114–16) a mixture of practical and aesthetic reasons for the front-on solution. Practically:

heavy lifting machinery is more stable if the waggon is front-on;

at certain points on the route the road would be potentially too narrow to allow for a standing audience in front of a sideways-oriented waggon, but ‘a front-on waggon, by contrast, can use as much of the length of the street in front of it as the audience needs’;

it ‘involves the smallest possible amount of awkward manoeuvring for waggon pushers’.

Since then we have repeated the experiment, with five plays instead of four, at the York Festival of 1992 (Plates 1–3). This time the individual groups were given, implicitly, a free hand in how they played. Four out of the five chose a longitudinal orientation, though the actual waggon sets varied widely, according to the demands of the play. Phil Butterworth describes his Crucifixion waggon and the thinking behind his production in this volume of METh. The University of Groningen’s Hortulanus waggon also had no superstructure except for an arbour at the back of the pageant. The two actors skilfully directed their performance to all three sides. The Joculatores Lancastrienses’ Resurrection waggon had a heaven roof, borne on six columns, from which the Angel of the Resurrection descended by winch, but was otherwise transpicuous. The Durham Medieval Players played the Harrowing of Hell from a threatening pele-tower with a portcullis behind which the patriarchs and prophets were locked, and battlements manned

Plate 1 The Resurrection (Joculatores Lancastrienses) at Stonegate / Little Stonegate, 1992

by a nice derangement of devils, with a projecting ‘booth-stage’ platform in front, on which Christ and Satan disputed. The whole set, as I have already said, pointed backwards, and the audience had no apparent problems with this. Only the Lords of Misrule decided, because of the peculiar number of different groups of characters in the Death and Deposition, to play sideways. This time we were lucky enough to secure permission to play in Stonegate as well as Petergate, on two consecutive days, and had sizeable audiences – not all of whom were voluntary.

We therefore have a considerable body of practical experimental evidence on the way in which a sequence of pageant waggons fits into the original route. Of course, the fact that a particular method of performance ‘works’ does not conclusively prove that it was the original way, but at least it substitutes real theatre for the theatre of the imagination. As often happens, many of the problems raised by academic speculation about the practicalities of this kind of staging turn out either not to exist or to be minimal.

Firstly, if a waggon holds to the centre of the street, there is little chance of it taking side-swipes at overhanging jetties or (in the case of modern York) projecting shop signs. This danger has in any case been grossly exaggerated and probably had its genesis in the folk-myth that the waggons went down the Shambles – for no particular reason than that this is the most cramped and therefore ‘medieval’-looking street in tourist York. In any case, no jetties seem to project further than the modern pavements – our waggons were of course confined to the roadway. In 1988 we went down Low Petergate, the narrowest street in that section of the surviving route, which had been further narrowed by major roadworks on the pavement near Holy Trinity Goodramgate, with no overhead problems whatsoever, and two of our waggons, The Assumption and Doomsday, were, as I have said, around twenty feet high. The pageant route was after all not a random collection of narrow back streets, but the main official processional route of the city.

One reason for this is that the waggons themselves are not particularly wide. I have found only one record of a medieval or early Renaissance one over eight feet wide (it was ten feet square).²⁴ In practice an eight-foot waggon (as wide as a modern fire-engine – I had to measure those for the 1988 and 1992 plays) leaves plenty of space on either side of the street. According to Eileen White’s measurements, the tightest fit would have been on old Ousebridge, which was 18 feet 6 inches, so left five feet either side to play with, and the tightest turn at the junction of Ousegate and Spurriergate, though the fact that this was a crossroads must have allowed more room for manoeuvre. In 1988 during the performance of Doomsday, even at the narrowest station in Low Petergate, we managed to fit a Hellmouth and a flight of Heaven steps into the street on stage left and stage right respectively as well.

However, with a sideways orientation on a waggon hugging ‘the right-hand kerb (or gutter)’, as I suggested in 1978, this advantage would disappear. Moreover, it could cause real problems with the disposition of the audience. As John McKinnell points out, in a tight situation a sideways orientation ‘would force the audience too close to a left-side waggon for anyone to get a good straight-on view of the whole stage; a front-on waggon, by contrast, can use as much of the street in front as the audience needs’.

Earlier discussions seem to have been unnecessarily worried about the manoeuvrability of the audience: for instance, that ‘they would have to be moved, presumably unwillingly, ‘before the waggon could continue its journey’.²⁵ However, experience shows that an audience will move out of the way if it sees a pageant-waggon coming towards it, just as it would move if it saw a doubledecker bus bearing down on it. In practice, audiences are fairly suggestible, and the ‘tradition’ that has developed in our two York experiments of preceding each pageant waggon with a banner and the cast walking in procession is very effective in clearing the way and pegging out an acting space on the platea/street which can then be protected by a few simple theatrical devices. Similarly, at the end of each play, the audience breaks up and reforms to allow the waggon to pass, before reassembling themselves around the next one – if necessary, in a different pattern from the one they had adopted before.

The accompanying photographs from 1992 will show, better than words, how an audience disposes itself down the street (Plates 1–3). (Those interested in counting heads can also test Eileen White’s conclusion of ‘a round number of 100 people’ as an average station audience. We are of course assuming maximum interest in the plays.) At this point, the junction of Stonegate and Little Stonegate, the main street is about twenty-five feet wide. It is noticeable how the audience place themselves in relation to the type of staging adopted by the plays. As Phil Butterworth explains in his article, his Crucifixion was plotted virtually in the round, with the action directed outwards. The audience have responded by surrounding the waggon completely. The same tended to happen with the Hortulanus, which had no superstructure, though the arbour provided a certain ‘backcloth’ effect. The Resurrection was plotted for the thrust-stage configuration, with a slight but noticeable front orientation (as in the line-up of Pilate, Annas, and Caiaphas when speaking to the soldiers). Apart from a few people interested in the workings of the angel’s winch, the audience have arranged themselves round three sides, but mostly to the front – though some of them seemed to prefer a close position at the side of the waggon rather than a rather more distant one at the front. Unfortunately I have no aerial photographs of the Durham Harrowing of Hell, though it appears from above on the video. The interesting contrast comes with the Lords of Misrule’s sideways-oriented waggon for the Death and Deposition. Their audience are very tightly packed into a fairly narrow channel between the front of the stage and the building behind, and had it not been for Little Stonegate acting as a safety valve at the back, could have been potentially quite dangerous. One can imagine what it might have been like in a narrower street.

All this is of course very different from our normative concept of the controlled, immobilised audience in their theatre seats or even on spectator stands. The whole question of audience dynamics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is difficult to test in a modern setting, for the simple fact that modern audiences have not been trained and do not know what to expect. But even with an untrained audience, some kinds of behaviour seem to be instinctive.

Eileen White’s discovery that the last two stations in 1569 involved people who lived on opposite sides of the road makes the head-on theory much more plausible. It would be interesting to know if more information turns up about other joint holders of stations (e.g. Thomas Barbour, Christopher Tomlinson, Richard Croklyn, and Richard Sawer at the end of North Street in 1468) and their houses.

The main difficulty for the head-on theory lies, as she points out, in the fact that ‘scaffolds’ were apparently erected before the houses of the stationholders on the city’s land, i.e. the highway. The evidence for this is the 1417 City Council ordinance that:

omnes illi qui pro skafaldis quas ante eorum ostia super solum communitatis edificant in locis predictis de supersedentibus monetam recipiunt soluant tercium denarium monete sic recepte Camerarijs ciuitatis ad vsum communitatis eiusdem applicandum …

[all those who receive money from those sitting on them for scaffolds which they build in front of their doors in the aforesaid places on the land belonging to the City shall pay the third penny of the money so received to the Chamberlains of the City to be applied to the use of the same City …]

REED: York, p. 29

This is the only evidence in the whole of the York records for these scaffolds, but it sounds fairly comprehensive: it is implied that everyone who pays builds a scaffold. We do not of course know how big these scaffolds were, and at some of the named places in later years (e.g. halfway down Petergate) they sound frankly impossible if a waggon were also to get through, unless the scaffold was actually built across the mouth of e.g. Grape Lane. But the main problem, as Eileen White points out, is that: ‘If the waggons were designed to face down the street, then the lease-paying householders were offering their audience a sideways, and therefore perhaps limited, view of the waggon and its pageant, and one which could equally be enjoyed by the householder across the street who paid nothing’ (p. 53).

This would obviously only work if the waggons were largely transpicuous. The more enclosed the stage, the less likely the head-on orientation seems. Even with a stage fairly open on three sides, one can have problems. In 1988 we found that as the daylight faded, there was a visibility problem with the inner reaches of the Doomsday waggon under the roof, and I noted a similar one with the slightly set-back mandorla in the Assumption. This was obviously a specialised problem which could be solved with the use of some form of stage lighting, but it points up a potential objection. Clearly, if the waggon is used front-on, one cannot have a proscenium-style stage with hangings down the sides as well as at the back. (There is no reason why a small portion at the back cannot be curtained.) So what is the evidence for the three-sided enclosure of the pageant waggon which I cited in 1978?

it would have been necessary to provide some means to let in light so that the players on the wagon could be seen in the gathering darkness of a midsummer evening. This may have been provided by the ‘wendows’, which would not have been glazed but were probably ornately carved alabaster or wood frames set into the walls of the waggon.

I find these windows mystifying. Experience shows that they would not have been particularly successful ‘in the gathering darkness of a midsummer evening’: as we proved, nothing short of full-scale stage lighting would have been effective in the later stages of the route. The inventory also contains an equally mysterious pagand dure, which manages to create the picture of a totally enclosed Wendy house on wheels.²⁸ One has to agree with Peter Meredith that ‘there is very little to go on to get a picture of the Drawswerd waggon’: not enough, certainly, to help with this investigation. But by themselves the wendows do not prove enclosure of the whole waggon, though they may suggest that a part of it (the highest of Heaven?) was.

The comparison with a booth stage to suggest enclosure is in fact misleading. Surviving Northern European pictures (Brueghel, Callot, the various Dutch/Flemish Rhetoricians’ stages, Boonen’s Judgment of Solomon play at the end of the Leuven ommegang) do not show a fully enclosed ‘proscenium-type’ booth stage. They consist of a projecting thrust stage with a tiring-house behind, which can be adapted for use as an inner stage for reveals. Only some Royal Entry scaffolds have anything like an enclosed acting area.

The other evidence to be accommodated is the use of at least two pageant waggons, the Assumption and Doomsday, as shows for Royal Entries.29 In 1486, Henry VII was to be greeted ‘at thend of Swynegale Ioning of staynegate’ by ‘our lady commyng frome hevin’ (REED: York, p. 142) apparently on the Assumption pageant; this is the junction shown in our crowd pictures. The wording suggests that it is to be backed up ‘Swynegale’ (now Little Stonegate). However, for his actual Entry this was relocated ‘by yonde the brigge At the turnyng Into Quonyenx strete’, i.e. at the junction of Low Ousegate, High Ousegate, and Spurriergate. In 1541 when Henry VIII entered York, the Mercers’ Pageant was to be ‘Sett at Ousegate end as the kynges maiestie shall enter into Connyngstrete and þerin to be an oþer showe with asmuch melodye as may be deuysyd þerin’. Both these suggest to me that the waggon was to be backed up High Ousegate. Another pageant, whichever ‘shalbe thought most meyt and conuienyent þerfore’ was to be set ‘at the far end of Connyngstrete beyond the common hall yaites’ (REED: York, p. 272), possibly backed down Lendal. There is no real need to think of them as sideways-on fixed scaffolds. Illustrations of Flemish Joyous Entries occasionally show Ommegang waggons used as part of the show in their original longitudinal orientation.³⁰

What difference does this make to the stage picture? As John McKinnell said, it ‘presents the audience with a narrow, concentrated scene whose shape parallels that of much contemporary art, especially popularly available forms such as stained glass, alabaster carving, and woodcuts and engravings’. The portrait-format of most of these is an ongoing headache for the makers of films and videos, whose screens are landscape-format: so inevitably are these pageant waggons. In fact, the shape of the front-on frame is not vertical so much as square. Most of our modern reconstructions have gone for the eight-foot-wide stage evidenced by the records, with an ergonomically-based ceiling height of seven-and-a-half to eight feet. Within this, modern actors used to wide-open spaces need to be carefully deployed, but once they have got the idea that every movement counts, the proximity gives a strong sense of interaction, and one can create some striking stage pictures. Phil Butterworth’s Crucifixion showed that these are not dependent for their power on the flat two-dimensional ‘medieval illumination’ effect.

With a waggon anything from ten to fifteen feet long, one gets a strong sense of depth and recession, thematically powerful in plays which, like the Chester Purification, depend on the characters moving from the mundane world of the street into a Holy of Holies. The director can also deploy quite a large number of actors, provided s/he is prepared to think three-dimensionally. A Last Supper, for example, would have to replace the Leonardo tradition with Dieric Bouts. (It would actually reinforce the sense of community.) The 1988 Doomsday stage held twelve seated Apostles and Christ on his three-foot-square brandreth, economically if not comfortably. I gave up counting the number of Patriarchs and Prophets incarcerated in Durham’s 1992 Hell.

We should also think of the waggon’s contribution to the overall spectacle of the Corpus Christi Play itself. As I said in the Cambridge Companion:

Banners, pennants, processional singing and music – all features taken up by modern productions – emphasise that one of the main features of the Corpus Christi Play was this processional quality, a sense of marvel following upon marvel. We should remember that the whole event was a performance, not just the individual pageants enclosed in it.³²

One major effect of the 1988 and 1992 experiments was to show just how important this sense of a processional event is, even with so small a segment of the whole as we attempted. Unlike modern indoor theatre, the set does not disappear when the play is at an end, nor is it an ‘unworthy scaffold’ only brought to life by the actors. The humdrum business of dragging it along the street and setting it up is not an embarrassment to be got over as quickly as possible, but an essential part of the show, a trailer, an anticipation-stirrer. The main sense of this is lost if you allow your waggons to sidle into place.

Notes

1 ‘“Places to Hear the Play”: Pageant Stations at York, 1398–1572’, REED Newsletter, 2 (1978), 10–33. This was of course written before the first REED volume was published.

2 Eileen White, ‘Places for Hearing the Corpus Christi Play in York’, METh, 9:1 (1987), 23–63.

3 David Crouch, ‘Paying to See the Play: The Stationholders on the Route of the York Corpus Christi Play in the Fifteenth Century’, METh, 13 (1991), 64–111.

4 White, p. 53. She discusses the locations of the two Pavement stations in detail on pp. 45 and 46.

5 See John Marshall, ‘“The Manner of These Playes”: The Chester Pageant Carriages and the Places Where They Played’, in Staging the Chester Cycle, ed. by David Mills, Leeds Texts and Monographs, NS 9 (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1985), 17–48 (pp. 21–3) for an account of how our prejudices have been formed by this.

6 [Philip Butterworth, ‘The York Crucifixion: Actor/Audience Relationship’, Medieval English Theatre, 14 (1992), 67–76. Ed.]

7 See David Parry, ‘The York Mystery Cycle at Toronto, 1977’ METh, 1:1 (1979), 19–31 (p. 24, Figs 12 and 13). Their waggons were 12’ by 6’ (p. 19).

8 Alexandra Johnston and Margaret Dorrell, ‘The York Mercers and their Pageant of Doomsday, 1433–1526’, Leeds Studies in English, NS 6 (1972), 10–35: see diagram on p. 10.

9 Peter Meredith, ‘The Development of the York Mercers’ Pageant Waggon’, METh, 1:1 (1979), 5–18: see diagram on p. 14. He has since refined and altered this design.

12 Alan Nelson, ‘Easter Week Pageants in Valladolid and Medina del Campo’, METh, 1:2 (1979), 62–70.

13 Meg Twycross, ‘The Flemish Ommegang and its Pageant Cars’, METh, 2:1 (1980), 15–41 and 2:2 (1980), 80–98.

16 I am deeply indebted to Professor Takeo Fujii and Mrs Fujii for taking me to see the pageant-houses of Nagahama, and for sending me videos of the pageant waggons in action. It is remarkable how similar in size and construction these waggons are to both the surviving waggons of Valencia and our reconstructions.

17 Geoff Lester, ‘Holy Week Processions in Seville’, METh, 8:2 (1986), 103–18; Rafael Portillo and Manuel Gomez Lara, ‘Vestiges of Dramatic Performances of the Passion in Andalusia’s Holy Week Processions’, METh, 8:2 (1986), 119–31. See also Manuel Gomez Lara and Jorge Jimenez Barrientos, Semana Santa: Fiesta Mayor en Sevilla (Seville: Alfar, 1990).

18 John McKinnell, ‘Producing the York Mary Plays’, METh, 12:2 (1990), 101–23 (p. 114).

22 David Crouch suggests (pp. 99–100) that in the case of the subsidiary 1463 Doomsday pageant ‘for ye sallys to ryse owtof’ (REED: York, p. 95): ‘It is likely, in view of the restricted breadth of the roadways, that such waggons processed in line with the principal one, and that they remained side-by-side during performances, both in the interest of efficient movement en route and of sightlines when stationary.’ Our ‘pageant’ was a low box on wheels large enough to accommodate four actors lying flat, but not as high as the main waggon deck. (For obvious reasons it was called ‘the dead box’.) It preceded the main waggon and was set up immediately in front of it, which is iconographically more authentic and dramatically more pleasing than to station it at the side of the main waggon, as David Crouch seems to suggest.

26 ‘Places to Hear the Play’, p. 19: see also An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the City of York Volume 5: The Central Area, Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (London: HMSO, 1981), p. 189. The original ‘three-storeyed, timber-framed range, five bays long’ was divided into three houses in the early seventeenth century, and now comprises numbers 56, 58, and 60 Low Petergate. We watched from no. 58, now The Fudge Kitchen.

28 In other accounts of this period, pageant door seems to refer to the door of the pageant house: see REED: York, p. 207 (1508) ‘pro factura de lez pagyand Dores cum operacione carpentorium’, which comes with pageant house expenses under ‘Reparaciones facte de & Super tenementis supradictis’, as does the 1514 ‘Et pro le pageant dore vnum stancheon & nales’ (REED: York, p. 212). However, the 1521 ‘Et pro emendacione hostium ludiculo vocatum pagant doore ij d’ [And for mending the door of the little play called pageant door 2 d] is entered under ‘Reparaciones terre & tenementorum’ together with the repair of a pair of pipe organs (REED: York, p. 226). What is this ludiculus? REED suggests ‘pageant’. Could it, as with the 1526 helle dure, presumably for a full Hell Mouth (?), be the pageant for the souls to rise out of?

29 This also happened at Coventry in 1456, 1461, 1474 and 1566: see Reg Ingram, ‘The Coventry Pageant Waggon’, METh, 2:1 (1990), 9–10.

30 See illustrations to the Entry of Albert and Isabella in Johannes Bochius, Historica Narratio Profectionis et Inaugurationis Serenissorum Belgii Principum Alberti et Isabellae … (Antwerp and Brussels: Plantin-Moretus, 1602); of Ferdinand, Caspar Gevaert and Pieter Pauwel Rubens, Pompa Introitus …. Ferdinand Austriaci … a S.P.Q. Antverp … (Antwerp: Meursius, 1635).

31 Both Richard Beadle and I discuss this briefly in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, ed. by Richard Beadle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 47–48 and 99–100.

2The Left-Hand-Side Theory: A Retraction

Notes

2
The Left-Hand-Side Theory: A Retraction