8
‘Transvestism’ in the Mystery Plays

Most of us know, academically speaking, that in medieval English mysteries the women’s parts were played by men, but no-one seems to have followed through the implications of this in terms of theatrical style. This paper is an attempt to explore some of these implications.

It is based on work done during 1982/3 with my Medieval Theatre students at Lancaster, and owes a great deal to their skills and enthusiasm. I am particularly indebted to Peter Norton, who did a practical project on the subject: I shall quote fairly extensively from his paper and verbal reports. I would also like to thank Nick Murchie, Tony Bell, and Mike Elliston of Lancaster University and John Turner, then at Lancaster Royal Grammar School, for playing the women on the various occasions.

It all arose from my decision to revert to medieval practice and cast men to play the parts of Anna the prophetess and the Blessed Virgin Mary in the production of the Chester Purification and Doctors which was our contribution to the Leeds Festival performance of the Chester Cycle on 30^th April–2^nd May 1983, and which we also performed at Chester itself and in various other places during the summer of 1983 (see Plates 1 and 2). Peter Norton’s project was designed to look more closely at this aspect of the production, and was first presented to a largely undergraduate audience at Lancaster, where it occasioned a lively and useful discussion, but we also took it to the METh meeting on ‘Characterisation’ at Salford on 26^th March 1983. He chose two strongly contrasting scenes: the N-Town Visitation, which centres on the two serious female roles of Mary and Elizabeth, and the first fight episode from the Towneley Noah, which shows Mrs. Noah at her most comically combative. Each of these scenes was played twice, first with women and then with men playing the female roles. The male characters were played by the same actors both times. At Lancaster, the male and female actors had not seen each other’s performances; for Salford, when they had, we worked on slightly different aspects of the characterisation, which I will explain when I come to each in detail. Most of my illustrations in this paper will be taken from these performances, and my thinking owes a lot to the discussions in and outside the seminar.

I am not very happy with the word ‘transvestism’ in my title: it has too many irrelevant and catchpenny connotations. ‘Cross-playing’ (by analogy with ‘cross-dressing’) sounds more sober, and I shall use it where it seems to be called for. But in fact, the wearing of female clothes was at the centre of the sixteenth-century discussion about the playing of women’s roles in stage-plays: the text which was invoked against it was Deuteronomy 22:5:

Non induetur mulier veste virili, nec vir utetur veste feminea; abominabilis enim apud Deum est qui facit haec.

A woman shall not be clothed with man’s apparel, neither shall a man use woman’s apparel: for he that doeth these things is abominable before God. (Douai Rheims translation)

Practically, this is an acknowledgement that the transformation is most conspicuously wrought by the change of garments, but the image that develops is that of ‘putting on’ a role as one puts on a garment, and this has interesting effects on their perception of the nature of this kind of acting. But more of this later.

Historical evidence

Since even at Salford there seemed to be a residual reluctance to accept the original premise, it is worth spelling out the evidence. For the English mystery plays, we are limited, as usual, to those guild accounts which show payments to named actors with named roles, and these are, not surprisingly, thin on the ground. Of the major Cycles, Coventry is the most helpful. The Weavers’ play of the Purification, as ‘newly translate’ by Robert Croo in 1534, has two substantial female roles, Mary and Anna, and by a stroke of luck we have the names of three actors who played Anna, one before and two after the ‘translation’, and of one actor who played Mary. The relevant entries are:1

1524	Resseyvyd of our lady Rychard byrscow	x d
	Resseyvyd of Anne thomas sogdyn	x d	(122)
1525	Item payd to mare	x d
	Item payd to sodden for Ane	x d	(124)
1527	Resseyvyd of Rychard brysco	x d	(126)
1544	Resseyvyd of rychard ye capper borsleys man that playth ane	wax	(168)
1550	Item resseyvyd of hew heyns pleyng anne for hys fyns	vjd
	Item payd to anne	xx d	(186)
1551	Resseyvyd of hewe heyns capper	viij d	(188)

These are the only occasions when the players are named, though the roles continue to be mentioned. As Reg Ingram points out, Hugh Heyns and Richard, Borsley’s man, were both Cappers, not Weavers; had the Weavers to go outside the Guild for specialist roles?²

The other named Coventry actor playing a female role belongs to the Smiths: Ryngolds man Thomas þat playtt pylatts wyffin 1496. There are payments to Pilate’s wife from 1477 to 1499 (after which individual roles are not mentioned in the surviving records): the two runs of dates thus cover 74 years of playing:

1477	Item for sowing of dame pracula [Pilate‘s]
	Wyff Shevys [?shoes]	iij d	(60)
	Item for mendyng of dame pracula garments	vij d	(61)
1488	Item to reward to Maisturres grymesby for lendyng Off her geir ffor pylatts wife	xij d	(69)
1489	… heyrynge of procula is gowne	ij d ob.	(72)
1496	Ryngolds man Thomas pat playtt pylatts wyff		(86)
1499	Item payd to dame Percula for his wages	ij s viij d
	Item paid to pylatts wyffe for his wages	ij s	(93)

More ambiguous is the name of the actor who played Solome (Salome) in The Destruction of Jerusalem in 1584, Fraunces Cocckes. The sixteenth century did not make the modern spelling distinction between Francis and Frances; however, since the other apparently female part, Zilla, was played by one Henry Chamberleyne together with that of Pristus and ‘a pece of Ananus’, the actor is almost certainly a Francis.³

Unfortunately there are no named actors playing female parts in Chester.⁴ As Peter Meredith has pointed out, however, there are some interesting gaps.⁵ In the Smiths’ Purification of 1561 (p. 67) it looks very much as if Thomas Ellam, listed next to Anna as earning 12d for his performance, played the missing role of the Virgin Mary. However, since the role of Joseph is also missing, he might have played that, leaving Mary for another male actor, William Loker, who is paid 16d for plleyinge (sic: Mary is usually paid slightly more than Joseph in this production). Ellam is not listed in 1561 as a member of the company, and the Freemen’s List turns up two Thomas Ellams, one a clerk and tayler made free on 28^th August 1559, so possibly about 23, another a singer made free 11^th October 1574, which unless it was an unusually late admission (possible, considering his profession) would make him only about eight at the time of playing. Loker or Looker is named as a member of the Guild, and if he was the furbour, alias William Richardson, who was made free on 26^th September 1544, would have been about 38 at the time. One of the Ellams seems the most plausible.⁶ As always, there is no guarantee that the men with these names in the Freemen’s Lists are the ones mentioned in the accounts. But the important thing there is that the names are all male.

A substantial piece of evidence comes from New Romney in Kent in 1555, when the players engaged for a large-scale place-and-scaffold Passion play signed recognisances binding them to learn their parts, appear at rehearsals, and perform.⁷ The lists of actors and roles give nearly a full New Testament cast:

… Iohn Crockey Annas handmayde …
… Iohn Watt St. Philipe & y^e blynd mans mother …
… Iohn Wallys martha / Iames Christian magdalen /
 Henr(y) Standen marthas servaunt …
 … Robert Gallyn Marye the vyrgyn … Leonard Iolly marye
 salome …

The play was apparently produced at least at early as 1428.⁸

The female character one might think least susceptible of being played by a man is Eve, but in the Norwich Grocers’ play of the Fall in 1534, she was played by Frances Fygot.⁹ His Christian name may again be spelled ambiguously, but he is not the only male Eve on record in Britain. In Perth, on 23^rd May 1553, the Hammermen’s Accounts record:

Item þis instant ȝeir ar chosen playaris to wit george allan trinitie / Andro brydie adam / dauid horne eue / patrik balmen þe mekle devill / Robert colbert þe serpent / Williame [?] þe angell / Andro kelour þe litill angell … Iohne robertsoun sanct eloy / Andro throskaill marmadin …¹⁰

The mermaid seems to belong to the story of St. Eloi, the patron saint of the guild.

Some clues can be picked up from accompanying music. In Coventry, the Mothers of the Innocents in the Shearmen and Taylors’ play were played by men, as their famous ‘lullaby’ is scored for alto, tenor, and bass.¹¹ (Richard Rastall has some interesting things to say about the way in which is it scored.)¹² Liturgical drama is slightly different, as the tradition is more obviously single-sex, but it is worth noting that the Shrewsbury Fragments contain a part written for someone who apparently played the Third Mary, Third Shepherd, and Cleophas the pilgrim to Emmaus, and the accompanying music is written for male voices.¹³

So far the overwhelming evidence is for male actors. There are no unambiguously female names recorded, either attached to named roles, or in the lists of players willing to play, as for example for the Cappers at Coventry in 1566; Ingram notes that since Halliwell-Phillipps’ ‘interest at that time was in the possibility of women acting’, his only comment on the list is ‘all men’.14

At this point someone is sure to invoke the Chester Early Banns:

The wurshipfful wyffys of this towne
ffynd of our Lady thassumpcion
It to bryng forth they be bowne
And meyntene with all theyre might. (1539–40)¹⁵

The Banns do not however say that the Worshipful Wives are to act the play. They are to ffynd, bryng forth, and meyntene it; in other words, they produce and finance it, and make sure that it appears on the streets of Chester on the third day at the right time. Unfortunately we need not even imagine an early Joan Littlewood directing the play; all the Wives would have to do would be to hire some male pageant-master to do it for them. The guilds were not chary about having their female members pay for the play, but they do not seem to have invited them to act.¹⁶ One is reminded of the present-day situation at Elche, also an Assumption play, where the women are allowed to make costumes and do the washing, but not, as far as one can see, to come anywhere near rehearsals, which are the men’s mystery. In any case, though The Assumption of Our Lady is an appropriate subject for the Townswomen’s Guild to sponsor, it is not a particularly rewarding one for women to act: the York Assumption features only one female role (Mary) to twelve Apostles and several (male) angels.

The one genuine exception to this rule in English theatre seems to be, as John Marshall pointed out at the Salford meeting, the dancers in Wisdom. The stage direction for the third dance stipulates:

Here entreth six women in sut, thre dysgysyde as galontys and thre as matrones, wyth wondyrfull vysurs congruent; here mynstrell, a hornepype.¹⁷

This does seem to suggest that we have a professional troupe of female dancers, three of whom are dressed transvestitely as galontys (dysgysyde merely means ‘costumed’ – it does not have the connotations of deceit that our use of the word now has). They could be boys, but as Eccles says, ‘it is not easy to see why boys disguised as gallants should be called women’.¹⁸ Will says of the proposed dance ‘Here forme ys of þe stewys clene rybaldry’ (line 749), and it is possible that a professional troupe might have been called in to dance something professionally lewd. It is interesting to speculate on the relations between the dancers and the rest of the cast, especially if they were, as has been suggested (though not on particularly strong grounds) ecclesiastics.

It should be stressed that the fact that a stage direction may call a character ‘she’ or ‘her’, or a guild account entry list a female role, does not mean it is evidence of the sex of the actor. Without the name Hugh Heyns, Thomas Sugden, or Richard Briscoe, we would never have known that the Anna and Our Lady of the Coventry Cappers were played by men. Stage directions indicate the role rather than the performer, and experience shows that this tends to happen in production as well. There comes a point in the proceedings where everyone starts to refer to the role rather than the actor (‘Where’s the Virgin Mary?’) and gets a certain evil pleasure from deliberately twisting the answer (‘She’s in the Gents having a shave’). Paid to dame Percula for his wages sounds like a tongue-in-cheek version of the same thing.

How and why this convention of cross-playing arose we can only speculate. It seems likely that it echoes the casting of liturgical plays, where the clergy were naturally all men (exceptions like the Nuns of Barking or Hrotswitha’s colleagues are due to very particular circumstances). This, combined with the low reputation of female tombesteres and other professional entertainers, of whom we know very little, but whose name seems to have been synonymous with ‘harlot’, would be enough to create a tradition, and the tradition to engender a taboo.¹⁹ An Elche-like sense of acting as a male prerogative was probably combined with a fear of the dangers to female modesty (in every sense) of allowing your wives and daughters to act in public with men not of their own immediate family. It should be remembered that we are talking about amateurs.

Other theatrical events

It is interesting and useful to compare this with other forms of show, from religious processions to disguisings. One might think that in processions, where the danger to female modesty would be far less, one might find women enacting female roles. At first some of the evidence seems to point this way: for example, the Coventry Corpus Christi Day procession which featured the Blessed Virgin Saints Catherine and Margaret, and up to eight virgins, seems always to refer to Mary’s wages and her gloves, but again, this is not necessarily an indication of ‘her’ actual sex.²⁰ The Beverley records newly edited by Diana Wyatt contain detailed instructions (dated in a return of 1389) for two dramatic processions, one of St. Helena and one of the Purification.²¹ Both heroines are enacted by men: the Guild of St. Helena are to assemble on the Feast of the Invention of the Holy Cross:

& ibi ordinatus pulcherrimus Iuuenis qui ad hoc apcior inuenire poterit & decenter ornatus & vestitus ad modum Regine & ad instar sancte Elene & quidam Senex ante eundem Iuuenem baiulans quandam crucem & alius senex portans vnam vangam similiter ante eundem Iuuenem in signum Inuencionis crucis predicte …

[and there the fairest young man and the most suitable for this role who can be found having been appointed, and appropriately arrayed and robed in the manner of a Queen and in the likeness of St. Helena, and a certain old man, preceding the same young man, bearing a certain cross, and another old man carrying a [lit. one] spade similarly preceding the same young man, in token of the aforesaid Discovery of the Cross …]

are to process two by two to the church of the Friars Minors and to the altar of St. Helena to make their offering.

The ceremony of the Purification is even more play-like: the Guild of St. Mary are to assemble:

eritque ibi ordinatus quidam de gilda qui ad hoc apcior inuenietur nobilissime & decenter vestitus & ornatus vt regina virgo instar gloriose virginis Marie habens quasi filium in vlnis suis / eruntque ibi alij duo assimilantes Iosephum & Simeonem / eruntque duo Angeli portantes candelabrum formam cratis habens & super se xxiiij^or grosses cereos cum aliis magnis & grossis luminaribus precedentibus et sic cum omnia melodia & exultacione / dicta virgo cum filio suo / & Iosephus & Simeon sequentur dicta luminaria in processione versus dictam ecclesiam / sequenturque tunc immediate dictam virginem omnes sorores dicte gilde & postremo omnes fratres … ad dictam ecclesiam et cum ibi peruentum fuerit: offeret ibi dicta virgo filium suum Simeoni ad [ad] summum altare instar Purificationis gloriose virginis Marie …

[and there shall be appointed a certain [man] of the Guild, the most suitable for this role who may be found, most nobly and appropriately robed and arrayed as a virgin queen in the likeness of the glorious Virgin Mary, having as it were a son in her arms; and there shall be two others there representing Joseph and Simeon, and there shall be two angels bearing a candlestick in the form of lattice work and on it twenty-four thick candles, with other large and thick lights preceding [them]; and thus with all melody and exultation the said virgin with her son and Joseph and Simeon shall follow the said lights in procession to the said church; and then shall follow immediately after the said virgin all the sisters of the said guild, and finally all the brothers … And they shall there go two by two, in sober order and at a moderate pace thus in procession to the said church, and when they shall have arrived there, the said virgin shall offer her son to Simeon at the high altar, in the likeness of the Purification of the glorious Virgin Mary …]

I have quoted this last in more detail, and shall return to it again, because in many respects it resembles what happened in our production of the Chester Purification. Here, however, notice how, though the sex of the person portraying the Virgin Mary is definitely male, he is thereafter described as dicta virgo, ‘the said virgin’; the role takes over from the actor.

Street pageants seem occasionally to have used women or, as seems more likely, young girls. In the London Lord Mayor’s Show of 1523, payments are recorded:

to Gleyns daughter for thassumpcion & Childes eldest daughter for Saynt Vrsula & vj virgens w^t hyr bothe nyghtes after viij^d apece. Summa v^s iiij^d.22

Twelve years later, 2s 8d was paid out:

to Elyn Tuck that plaied the ladye .M. Elizabeth smyth agnes Newell & to Margret Cristean the iij ladies that satt in þe same pagent after viij^d a pece.²³

This would seem to be clear evidence of ‘actresses’, as the Malone Society edition indexes them, but later in the same accounts there are references to the Children in the pageants, and it looks as if Ellen Tuck and her fellow actresses were not full-grown women; the use of the term Gleyns daughter suggests the same.

A century and a half earlier, at the Coronation of Richard II, a pageant castle was built in Cheapside in the towers of which:

quatuor virgines speciosissimae collocatae fuerant, staturae et aetatis regiae, vestibus albis indutae, in qualibet turri una …

[there had been placed four very lovely maidens, of the same age and height as the King, dressed in white robes, one in each of the towers …]²⁴

As the King approached, they wafted gold leaves, and scattered imitation gold florins on him and his destrier. Note that they are said to be the same age and stature as the King, that is, ten years old. Groups of ‘maidens’ playing various roles appear in most Royal Entries thence onward.²⁵ In 1501, Katherine of Aragon was greeted at the Drawbridge by

a faire yong lady w^t a whele in hir hand, in liknes of Seint Kathryn, w t right many virgins on eu(e)ry side of her; and … another lady in likenes of Seint Ursula, w^t her great multitude of virgyns right goodly dressed and arrayed.²⁶

But this ‘multitide of virgins’ are not necessarily all they seem. Glynne Wickham and Hillebrand point out that they are often choirboys: ‘Singing Childerne. Some arrayde like Angells and others like vyrgyns’.27 In 1464 at the Coronation of Elizabeth Woodville, the pageant on the Drawbridge also showed female saints – apparently the Holy Kindred – but the accounts show that the performers paid for playing the parts were boys:

Et Salamon Batell pro labore suo vice & loco Sancti Elizabeth loquentis Regine ad pontem traxentem – xx d. Et Edmunde Herte ibidem extistenti loco Marie Cleophe – xx d.²⁸

Other female figures in the pageant were literally ymagines muliebris. The angels and the ‘girls’ both wore saffron-dyed flax wigs, which suggests that they were choirboys.

The use of children in pageants, especially complicated mechanical ones, was partly dictated by the convenience of having someone lightweight to ‘fly’ from heaven or stand in an elaborate structure: in Katherine of Aragon’s Royal Entry, the ‘III armyd Knights’ which turned the wheel of the Zodiac at the approach of the Princess turn out to be ‘iiij yong stripelinges of the age of xij or xiij yeres’.²⁹ The girl playing ‘thassumpcion’ had to be flown in a harness.³⁰ Thus, it would appear that the ‘virgins’ of the pageant stages were either boys or very young girls. It seems to have been permissible for the girls to appear (both here and on the Continent), just as it is permissible for girls below the age of puberty to appear in public in Gulf Arab countries with uncovered faces; they are officially sexless, as it were. After puberty, they have to wear the traditional mask.

The same seems to happen in the secular processions that feature female characters. Fairly late on in Chester, when the plays had ceased, we find the Mercers dressing a ‘lady’ for the Midsummer Show in a dress of russet fustian and buckram, with gold parchment lace and gold buttons, and corseted with whalebone (1605), but the Mercers’ Company Book makes it plain that while the boy that accompanies the ‘lady’ is a ‘comely stripling’, his companion is ‘some other childe, to Ride as a gentelwoman or ladye’.³¹

In the same way, I suspect that the Alewife figure in the Cups and Cans Show of the Innkeepers was probably not a woman but a Betty, despite the ‘geven to heare for heare paynes’.³² ‘She’ would fit in with the tradition of men dressing up as women in masquerades which was frowned on and frequently legislated against by the authorities, which would partly explain why Mayor Henry Hardware decided to put her down.³³ In post-Reformation Scotland the authorities invoked Scripture against mummings involving transvestism, as, for example, in Aberdeen on 4^th August 1605:

anent the delation geven in to the sessioun aganis sum young men and young wemen of this citie, for dansing throcht the towne togidder this last vlk, the tyme of the brydellis; the young men being cled in wemennis apparell, quhilk is accompted abhominatioun be the law of God that ony man suld put on wemennis rayment, Deuteronomie 22, vs 5; and the young wemen for dansing opinlie with thame throw the streittis, with maskis on thair faces, thairby passing the bounds of modestie and schamefastnes, quhilk aucht to be in young wemen, namely in a reformed citie.34

The one form of entertainment in which grown women were apparently allowed to take part were the Court masking and disguisings. Since these were private entertainments, even royal ladies were allowed to play a leading, though possibly silent, role: Of these foresayd .vi. ladyes, the lady Mary, syster vnto the kyng was one, the other I name not.³⁵ However, the more play-like entertainments at court featured Cornish’s Children of the Chapel playing female roles, which leads us to the beginning of the boys’ companies, about which much has been written.³⁶

Continental parallels ³⁷

On the Continent, things seem to have been much the same as in England, though there is no room here to attempt an exhaustive survey. The exception appears to be France and occasionally the Low Countries.³⁸ (The appearance of French actresses in London as late as 1629 caused considerable scandal.)³⁹ But even France did not consistently practice what we would consider to be the normal pattern. Women did appear on stage: for example, in the Romans performance of Le Mystère des Trois Doms in 1509 all the female roles were apparently taken by women,⁴⁰ and in 1535 at Grenoble Francoise Buatier played the Virgin Mary and charmed everyone by les gestes, la voix, la pronunciation, le débit.⁴¹ In general, however, the rule seems to be that young girls were allowed to play, but older women were not. The Mary of the Avignon Presentation of 1372 and her two companions were only circiter trium aut iiij^or annorum; though the rest of the cast list suggests that women were used, it later becomes clear that Ecclesia, described in the introduction as mulier pulcerrima etatis circiter .xx. annorum (‘a most lovely woman of about twenty years old’) is in fact quidam pulcerrimus iuuenis circa xx. annos sine barba et … capillis mulieris extensis super humeris (‘a very lovely young man of about twenty years old, beardless, and … with the most beautiful woman’s locks spread over his shoulders’) – it thus seems plausible that Synagoga and Anna are also men.⁴² This is liturgical drama, where one might expect to find men, but the same applies in the mystery plays. In Mons in 1501, ‘the daughter of George de la Motte’ played the Virgin Mary aged seven, and ‘Waudru, daughter of Jorge de la Nerle’ played Mary aged fourteen (up to and including the Nativity), the bride of John the Evangelist, and Florence the daughter of Herodias. But Eve was played by a man, Colin Rifflart; Elizabeth by Colart Olivier, who also appeared as St. John the Evangelist; Mary Magdalene by Jehan Maisnard, priest and Canon of Saint-Germain; as were most of the other women’s parts. Waudru also seems to have played Victoria, the Fourth Daughter of Sion, but the other three Daughters were played by men, one of whom, Jehan Macquefosse, also played Satan before he fell.⁴³ In Valenciennes in 1547 a number of jeunes filles appear at the end of the cast list: Jennette Caraheu played the Virgin Mary and Hagar, servant of St. Anne, and Jennotte Watiez, Jennette Tartelette, Checille Gerard, and Cole (? a boy’s name) Labequin several minor female rôles, including those of the maidens of the Temple and the Daughters of Jerusalem. But the maidens of the Temple also included boys: Guislain Rasoir played la jonesse de la Vierge Marie, and Josse le Ricque doubled the child Christ confounding the Doctors and Jairus’ daughter. There are no adult women in the cast list: certain men seem to specialise in female roles, for example, Jehan le Trieure ‘dict l’Enfant’ played Magdalene, Jhennot de la Myne Herodias and St. Anne, Jehan Denis Truth and the Queen of Iscariot, and the other three Daughters of God were also men.⁴⁴

The most striking example of the apparent interchangeability of boys and girls in female roles comes from Metz: in 1468 a girl of around eighteen, daughter of Dediet the glazier:

portoit le personnaige de saincte Catherine … et fist merveilleusement bien son debvoir, au gré et plaisir d’un chescun. Touttes fois avoit ladite fille vingt trois cents vers de personnaige, et neant-moins elle les scavoit tous sur le doigt; et parla celle fille si vivement et piteusement qu’elle provocqua plusieurs gens a pleurer, et estoit agreable a toutes gens.⁴⁵

A gentleman soldier of Metz fell promptly in love with her and married her. In 1485, however, when Metz put on a play of St. Barbara, the part was played by a boy called Lyonnard:

ung jonne fils bairbier … qui estoit ung tres beaul filz et ressembloit une belle jonne fille … qui fist – le personnaige de saincte Barbe si preudemment et devotement que plusieurs personnes pleuroient de compassion; car il tenoit si bonne faconde et maniere avec si bonne mine et gestes avec ses pucelles, qu’il estoit a chescun agreable et n’estoit possible de mieulx faire.⁴⁶

His reward was to be sent to school, and he eventually became a Master of Arts and Canon of Metz. The next year he played St. Catherine, but with less success, because his voice had begun to break (ledit Lyonnard avoit desja un peu mué sa voix), and the part was not as well written as that of St. Barbara.⁴⁷

Elsewhere in Europe the pattern was more like that in England: in Spain, a husband, wife, and baby team played the Holy Family because it was thought that this would be edifying to the audience, but this seems to be the exception.48 At Lucerne Renwart Cysat began his dramatic career by playing the Virgin Mary, and while Regent of the play he implemented regulations to try and clear even serving maids out of the acting area during performances.⁴⁹

Attitudes ancient and modern

So much for the evidence. What we have, then, is a theatre in which men (and boys) are the rule: girls are a very rare exception. Women never appear in England, unless they are professional entertainers of a particularly specialised (and it must be said, hardly evidenced) kind.

Any attempt to assess the effects of this on theatrical style is bound to be distorted by our twentieth-century assumptions. For us, men playing women are the exception, not the rule, and fall into two categories; the pantomime dame and the drag-queen. Both these stereotypes do, in my opinion, turn up in the mystery plays: Mrs. Noah is a classic Dame, and the York Percula, Pilate’s Wife, has distinct traces of the drag-queen. Both are traditional theatrical and, before that, folk figures: there are good reasons for their existence, and we shall look at them in due course. But we are not used to having the serious women’s parts played by men: the Maries, the Magdalens, the Elizabeths. For us, men playing women means transvestism of one sort or another; it has either an element of parody or of misaligned sexuality. It is very difficult for a modern audience not to feel some kind of gut reaction against it. My students sensed this at the Salford meeting, where the audience should certainly have been used to the idea intellectually, but the majority seemed to react instinctively most strongly against it. When pushed, they were clearly happier with the idea of boys playing women than with the idea of full-grown men, for what seemed to be more than logical historical reasons.

Oddly enough, the students who worked on the project and discussed it were much more open and matter-of-fact about both accepting the concept and analysing their reactions to it. This student generation is currently more interested not only in sex roles, imposed or genetic, but also in the areas in between, the overlapping of roles and characteristics. They recognise, even if they do not actually imitate, the Boy George figure: they enjoy playing the ‘is he or isn’t he?’ game. It may be that this is a passing fashion – and possibly only a British one – but it meant that it was much easier to engage on the project than it would have been, say, twenty years ago. Even so, the degree of willingness to take part depended on the person. Our Mary in the Purification was eager to play the role, partly because he felt it would improve his outré image with his contemporaries; our Anna (who had last appeared as Harry Hotspur) shared the reactions of Peter Happé [METh 5.2, p. 110 Ed.] and Francis Flute the bellows-mender, with the horror outweighing the fascination. He always kept at a distance from his role, and tended to send it up, consciously and unconsciously; he ended up playing a very stagey old woman (see Plates 1 and 2). One wonders if the fines meted out to Hugh Heyns, the Coventry Anna, were due to a similar reluctance.

Our reactions are bound not to be medieval, for the simple reason that for us, in the serious theatre, men play men and women play women, and any departure from this norm is thereby highlighted. In our post-Stanislavskian era, this also goes with an assumption that any actor playing a woman must necessarily have been trying to impersonate one naturalistically. There is very little, however, to suggest, either from the way in which the plays are written or from what we know of the general mode of presentation, that this was likely to have been the case, and here the alienation effect produced by this to us unnatural proceeding may in its distorted way tell us something by practical experiment about the mode of medieval theatre.

The effects of cross-playing are also peculiarly difficult to assess because it assaults our sense of our own sexual identity, and there is no real way of gauging how far it would have done this when there was no other pattern against which to match it. Moreover, your reaction to what is going on is bound to be conditioned by your own sex. This complicates the matter even further: if we talk of ‘audience reaction’ which half of the audience are we talking about? ‘Medieval Man’ or medieval Woman? When we tried the experiment for the first time at Lancaster, we found a distinct split between the reactions and preferences of the men and the women members of the audience. The Towneley Noah actually makes use of the split by setting the two halves of the audience against each other:

Yee men that has wifis, whyls they ar yong,
If ye luf youre lifis, chastice thare tong ll. 397–8

And

We women may wary all ill husbandis ll. 208

though here the use of the dichotomy is a lot more sophisticated and tongue-in-cheek than it at first seems, when you remember that Mrs. Noah was played by a man.

I am therefore at a disadvantage because though I can imagine what a man’s reaction to our male Mary or Mrs. Noah might be, I can never experience it at first hand, and I have a suspicion the plays were written primarily by men for men. Partly for this reason, we (as editors) asked a variety of people to write down their reactions to the Salford demonstration and/or the Chester Purification for us: it will be interesting to see whether they do in fact have different reactions or see different features as important [see METh 5.2, pp. 110–18 Ed.]. On the whole, with some honourable exceptions, I have found that when I have talked about it to my friends, the women have reacted to the whole concept much more positively than the men, possibly because they feel less threatened by the subject, possibly also because at present they are more interested in exploring the redefining their own sexual roles.

It is also a minefield of buried assumptions, and almost everything you say could potentially cause offence somewhere. But one can fall over backwards trying to be balanced: when I found myself writing ‘On the average, most men are larger than most women’ and worrying because I didn’t have statistical proof, I decided to be well and truly subjective, but to allow other voices, especially Peter Norton’s, to balance my reactions.

However, despite the barriers of modern stage convention and modern sexual assumptions, I believe we can find out something about the probable effects of men playing women on medieval theatrical style. In many respects one must accept that it is a matter of ‘If such and such happened, then the effect was likely to have been such and such’, and that this is one thing that we as a twentieth-century audience are never likely fully to understand. However, though I cannot prove all my contentions, they fit in so well with other features of medieval theatre that they must be at least partially valid.

We are not completely without contemporary evidence. Some of it is negative: for example, one might expect Of Miraclis Pleyinge to cite the text from Deuteronomy, but it does not, which suggests that cross-playing per se was not considered particularly offensive. The comments on the French boy, Lyonnard, show that beauty, poise, and pathos were valued. However, most of the serious discussion of cross-playing comes from the latter end of the sixteenth century, and the bulk of it is of course directed at the professional theatre. The polemic rapidly solidified into conventional patterns, and as the anti-theatrical party brought up the big guns of Scripture and the Fathers, it shifted from the living experience of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to the theatre of late-classical Rome: Prynne’s Histriomastix,50 the bulkiest of them all, is a treasure-house of fourth- and fifth-century opinion, and each time you think you have detected him in a comment on the modern stage, you find him in the next breath quoting Apuleius. But among these one can find the odd voice which seems to reflect actual experience.

One such is John Rainoldes Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes (printed 1599).⁵¹ Rainoldes was a Puritan divine and don at Queen’s College, Oxford; he later became President of Corpus. In February 1591/2 he was invited to a performance by Christ Church undergraduates of a group of Latin plays, starting with the Ulysses Redux of William Gager, the distinguished Latin playwright and don of Christ Church.⁵² Rainoldes refused the invitation, but Gager unfortunately added to his Ulysses a comic epilogue by one Momus, a sour thea-tre critic who parroted all the stock arguments against stageplays, referring them particularly to the performance of Ulysses just witnessed, so that one of the actors could then refute them. Rainoldes took Momus as a caricature of himself, and wrote to Gager; Gager replied, and there was an exchange of letters. Rainoldes then published his side of the correspondence – inevitably one-sided, though he quotes large passages of Gager’s letters in order to refute them. However, Rainoldes preserved Gager’s main letter together with his own, and the collection still exists as MS CCC 352. Though the letters repeat the standard arguments, they are anchored in the real event: Gager, naturally, is particularly concerned to defend his play and his actors from the imputations Rainoldes flings at them. Sometimes he sidesteps the points at issue, but even his sidestepping reveals his attitudes and his hidden worries. Rainoldes, too, does not come at the subject entirely from the outside: he reveals halfway through his first letter that ‘when I was about the age that they [Gager’s undergraduates] are, six and twentie yeares since, [I] did play a woman’s parte vpon the same stage, the part of Hippolyta’, in the famous play of Palamon and Arcite presented before Queen Elizabeth in Christ Church in 1566.⁵³ Above all, they are discussing amateur actors, not professionals. The main difference between the mystery-play actors and the undergraduates was not so much that the undergraduates were better educated and acting in Latin as that the women’s parts they played were more sexually orientated, with ‘amatorie pangs expressed in most effectual sort’.⁵⁴

The mainstream objection to cross-playing was based on the text in Deuteronomy:

The Law of God very straightly forbids men to put on womens garments, garments are set downe for signes distinctiue betwene sexe & sexe, to take vnto vs those garments that are manifest signes of another sexe, is to falsifie, forge, and adulterate, contrarie to the expresse rule of the worde of God. Which forbiddeth it by threatening a curse vnto the same.

All that do so are abhomination vnto the Lord, which way I beseech you shall they bee excused, that put on, not the apparrell onely, but the gate, the gestures, the voyce, the passions of a woman?⁵⁵

Faced with this wholesale condemnation:

some Play-patrons [object] that this Scripture extends to those alone, who usually clothe themselues in womans array from day to day; or to those who put it on with a lewde intent to circumvent or inamor others: or to satisfie their lusts … not to such who only weare it now and then to act a womans parte or in case of necessity to saue their liues, as some haue done. (Prynne Histriomastix, I, 179)

If the intention is blameless, they argue, then the anathema of Scripture cannot apply. The argument then widens out into the stock discussion of whether theatrical illusion was by definition a lie:

Let vs therefore consider what a lye is, a lye is, Actus cadens super indebitam materiam, an acte executed where it ought not. This acte is discerned by outward signes, euery man must show him selfe outwardly to be such as in deed he is. Outward signes consist eyther in words or gestures, to declare our selues by wordes or by gestures to be otherwise than we are, is an act executed where it should not, therefore a lye.

The profe is euident, the consequent is necessarie, that in Stage Playes for a boy to put one the attyre, the gesture, the passions of a woman; for a meane person to take vpon him the title of a Prince with counterfeit porte, and traine, is by outwarde signes to shewe them selues otherwise then they are, and so with in the compasse of a lye. which by Aristotles iudgement is naught of it selfe and to be fledde. (Gosson, Playes Confuted, E 5^r)

The putting-on of stage costume extends into a metaphor of the putting-on of a stage persona, which is made up of words, gestures, attyre, and passions. This suggests something of their concept of acting technique as a series of external skills (and incidentally tells us which were considered most important), but they are also concerned with:

Plate 1 Anna the Prophetess (Nick Murchie), Purification, Chester Waggon Plays 1983

Photo: Joe Thompson, Lancaster University

the care of making a shew to doe such feates, and to doe them … lively … [which] worketh in the actors a maruellous impression of being like the persons whose qualities they expresse and imitate: chiefly when earnest and much meditation of sundry dayes and weekes, by often repetition and representation of the partes, shall as it were engraue the things in their minde with a penne of iron, or with the point of a diamond. (Rainoldes, Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes, p. 19)

Plate 2 The Virgin Mary (John Turner), Purification, Chester Waggon Plays 1983

Photo: © Rose Bugler (née Rosemary Cross)

They are afraid that even if the actors may not have identified with their roles at the beginning, concentration and constant rehearsal will end up making them do so: by imitating at last the actor becomes the thing he imitates.

I want now to move on our experiment and try to see among other things where our experience seems to match with these theories.

The project: practical observations

Our project attempted to compare the effect of men in women’s roles with women in women’s roles by a controlled experiment. After a lot of thought, we settled on two scenes. The first, the encounter between Noah and his Wife in the Towneley Noah, showed a domestic affray in terms of what our Dutch friends charmingly call ‘the conjugal farce’. The second was also domestic in a sort: the Visitation from the N-Town Mary plays. Here the two women, Mary and Elizabeth, are cousins, friends, and pregnant. They move from affectionate and homely greeting to the spiritual heights of the Magnificat and back to an affectionate farewell. These scenes were played twice: first with women, and then with men playing the female roles. The same men played the male roles in both scenes each time. As I said at the beginning, neither group saw the other’s performance until the Lancaster seminar: after that we made certain further experiments which I will chart in more detail when we come to them.

In the Purification, the cross-playing was merely one production feature among many: we also tried the effect of gilding ‘Little God’s’ face, and giving the Angel a gold mask and gold lamé curls. The plot calls for a miracle, when the writing in the book is changed, and a very formal liturgical style in the ceremony of Purification itself. So much of the play is in the symbolic mode that it probably provided an easier framework for an audience to accept the male actors as part of the overall style.

As far as possible, we dressed the male and female ‘women’ of the experiment in identical costumes. The male Mary and Elizabeth wore the costumes I had already designed for Mary and Anna in the Purification. Both hung from the shoulders in a trapeze line to the ground: Elizabeth was loosely belted, but Mary’s dress hung straight – I was partly thinking of the triangular Virgins in South American churches, stiff, bejewelled, and elaborately crowned (the crown appears in the Chester Smiths’ accounts).56 Mary had a long slightly auburn wig under her veil; Anna/Elizabeth was encased in a widow’s wimple with pleated barbe, tight-fitting cap, and two veils, which concealed ‘her’ hair completely. Both these costumes were asexual in the sense that they did not emphasise features like busts or waists, and attempted to minimise shoulder-width, but they were certainly not unisex. The male and female Mrs. Noah both wore dusky pink dresses, though the woman’s was more obviously waisted, pinafores, and mop caps which completely concealed the hair.

The first and most obvious difference that you noticed was, of course, physical. It was not so much the presence or absence of busts or hips – we didn’t pad Mrs. Noah out in the relevant places, though we could have, which would have been in the pantomime-dame tradition – it was one of scale. Even a slight man makes an above-average-sized woman. The result is a cast of Olympians. It is no accident that the model for the drag-queen is the six-foot showgirl rather than the slighter or more cuddly type of woman, and of course this height can be turned to threatening effect in the pantomime-dame stereotype. In the low-ceilinged room at Salford, some of the audience found them oppressively oversized; in the open air, however, this becomes an eye-catching asset. It also, I think, emphasises the heroic and archetypal quality of the female figures: not excessively, in a Statue of Liberty sense, but enough to impress themselves effortlessly as figures of importance by just being, whereas a woman in the same situation has either to be startlingly beautiful or have a 1,000-watt stage presence to produce the same effect.

The same thing applied to gesture. Men’s shoulders are on the average much wider than women’s, and their gestures more expansive. I had to prevent my male Mary gesturing with her arms spread wide or she looked like a windmill. Walking in a cloak with her arms held out, she all too readily suggested Superman rather than the Virgin Mary. Men’s hands are also much larger than women’s. We disguised their lack of surface delicacy with gloves (another good reason for wearing them), but even so, they looked proportionately bigger, and gestures made with them were much more emphatic. I had to restrain Mary from clenching her fist to emphasise a point; she looked threatening rather than decisive.

Feet, too, are on the average much larger – the Virgin Mary wore size nines – and though this is not so important, as feet are usually hidden under skirts, the way in which men walk is different. This may be partly a learned characteristic, but it is also to do with the way in which men are hinged. Several people remarked on Mary’s non-feminine gait. Our men also found it very difficult to manage long skirts, both in walking, and getting up and sitting down: this is presumably a modern difficulty, though female garments have tended through the centuries to be more restrictive in one respect or another than men’s. The Purification Anna particularly felt trapped inside her sixteenth-century widow’s headdress, which restricted not only her field of vision but her hearing. Costume has more effect than one might at first think in defining patterns of gestures and even sex roles.

Facially, the effect was not so much more rugged as more strongly marked. A young man in a long wig can be strikingly beautiful, but it is a Technicolor beauty, a kind of facial assertiveness that in real life you tend to find only in professional actors or models. A good shave can produce a reasonably smooth cheek (in the case of old ladies the odd bristle doesn’t of course matter); this was no particular problem, though a Virgin Mary with a five o’clock shadow is a horrific sight. But there is a noticeable lack of softness – not anything definable, but something more brilliant and larger in scale, which again is overwhelming in a small space but suits outdoor performance. Everything becomes slightly larger than life. (It seemed, interestingly, to depend on personal taste (and again, sex) whether the audience found this effect strikingly beautiful or over-brilliant to the point of being tarty.)

The transforming moment comes when the actor puts on a wig or disappears completely into a headdress. The mere existence in a Guild inventory or set of accounts of ‘maries heare’ is not first-grade evidence that the part was played by a man, but it is good supplementary evidence.57

Voices and ages

Richard Rastall is writing about this for our next issue [METh 7.1, pp. 25–51 Ed.], so I will not go into it at length, but since it became one of the central arguments at Salford, it must be mentioned. We made no attempt to alter the pitch of our ‘women’s’ voices or, in the case of Elizabeth and Mrs. Noah, the voice quality. John Turner, playing Mary, altered his natural speaking voice to a more female timbre, but a large part of the Salford audience still seemed to find this unacceptable, and it led to the suggestion that we should have cast a true boy actor in the part instead of an eighteen-year-old man. The unstated sub-text seemed to be that it would have been more acceptable for a pre-pubertal boy to play a woman, but the argument focussed round the pitch of his voice. The problem nowadays is that to find a boy with an unbroken voice I would have had to have looked for a twelve- or thirteen-year-old (who would, incidentally, have looked very strange as the mother to our twelve-year-old Little God). It seems, as Richard Rastall told us at the Salford meeting, that boys’ voices broke much later in this period, which might have made it possible to find an actor with a wider emotional range and a more assured stage presence than one would expect to find from the present-day First Former.

We do not have sufficient information about the ages of the mystery-play ‘women’ to talk about this with any surety. Lyonnard, the French actor in Metz who played St. Catherine when his voice was beginning to break, seems to have been about fifteen.58 It is interesting that at least two of the named English Guild actors are referred to as someone else’s ‘man’, ‘rychard ye capper borsleys man that playth ane’ (Coventry Weavers 1544), and ‘Ryngolds man Thomas þat playtt pylatts wyff’ (Coventry Smiths 1496), which suggests that they were journeymen and so probably teenagers. Unfortunately I have not been able to find out any more about the Coventry men and their ages. As we have seen, the boy street-pageant ‘virgins’ are not really relevant to our subject. The undergraduate actors at Christ Church who played women are referred to indiscriminately as ‘young men’, ‘boys’, and ‘youths’: the wanton maidservant Melantho was acted by ‘an ingenuous boy’, and the discussion speaks of ‘a youth of tender yeares’, and ‘a hansom boy apparelled like a woman’⁵⁹ – the younger end of the undergraduate age range was fourteen or fifteen.⁶⁰ Rainoldes implies at one point that some of the ‘damsels’ were below the age of legal responsibility. They appeared in a cast of mixed ages. However, it seems that he himself was possibly seventeen when he played Hippolyta in 1566, and, to take a fictional example, Pyrocles in Sidney’s Arcadia, who disguises himself successfully as the Amazon Zelmane, is said to be eighteen, the same age as our Mary.⁶¹ (Boys’ companies cannot really provide evidence, as they played roles of all ages: Salathiel Pavy specialised in old men. The ‘squeaking Cleopatra’ may have belonged to a boys’ company.)

I think, however, that the analogy with singing voices is not as relevant as we thought at the time it was. Pitch is only one of the features which distinguishes a woman’s voice from a man’s. One is sheer volume and carrying quality: men have larger and stronger larynxes. This was extremely noticeable during the outdoor performance of the cycle, where women’s voices were very hard put to it to carry naturally over the audience area without straining. It was also interesting that the one person in our cast whose voice did not carry very well was Mary, because he was trying to adapt it to a female voice pattern.

In fact, many of the features which distinguish a woman’s voice from a man’s in our culture are learned ones. (I am here relying on information given to me, with some practical demonstrations on the fundamental frequency analyser, by my phonetician colleague Dr. Gerry Knowles. It makes no claim to scientific accuracy.) Others include the degree of breathiness, specifically ‘female’ intonation patterns, and the use of pitch-range. If you listen to a female impersonator, the one thing he will not do is alter the essential pitch of his natural voice, in the sense that you would have to alter the frequency of the machine to a female range to pick it up. What he does do is to select certain features of speech, intonation, breathiness, and turns of phrases which spell ‘female’ to the listener. This tends to be most successful when the female impersonated is of a highly idiosyncratic kind: the county swoops and gravelly tones of Hinge and Bracket are a particularly good example. (The same is true of Mike Yarwood’s impressions: he doesn’t reproduce the actual voice of his victim, but makes a selection of the most characteristic mannerisms and intonations.) The only concession to pitch is sometimes to cut out the lower frequencies in the male voice and thus give the impression that he is speaking in a higher voice. I did precisely this in reverse when I attempted to say something at exactly the same pitch as Gerry: to my astonishment, the machine showed that I had not altered the actual pitch at all, which still remained a musical octave above his, but I had flattened out my top frequencies. (Apparently American women restrict their pitch range to the higher frequencies, and American men to the lower, which is why British men seem to them effeminate.) When John played Mary, he tended automatically to restrict these lower notes and also to introduce breathiness to his natural voice.

If we stop thinking of pitch as the only criterion, then there becomes less point in concentrating on the choirboy voice. Younger children tend to have a much narrower pitch range (measured in semitones) than adult women – or, to put it in lay terms, you would not mistake a child’s voice for a woman’s if you heard it in the street. Nor, I think, would you mistake a boy’s for a girl’s, for all the reasons I have gone into above. Only when there were sufficient other features present – imitation of intonations and so on, coupled with female dress and behaviour – would a boy be an acceptable substitute for a woman. A very young boy would not only not have the emotional range, he would not have the pitch range and flexibility to be able to sustain a demanding speaking part; though, as I suggest later, the women’s parts in mystery plays are emotionally restricted in several ways, the techniques required are different from and much more varied than those required by, for example, the boy singers in the Elche play, where I at least got the curious impression that the women belonged to a completely different world from the men.

Did they try consciously to imitate female voice patterns? Gosson talks of men putting on ‘the voyce … of a woman’;62 Rainoldes seems to imply it when he says of Quintilian ‘Hee would not haue his youth to counterfeit a womans voice: you procure Minerva, Penelope, Euryclea, Antonoe, Eurynome, Hippodamia, Melantho, Phaedra, and Nurse, the Nymph … to bee played by yours’.⁶³ But this need have been no more than the semi-instinctive way in which John adapted his normal speaking voice.

It seems likely that they were cast for a variety of features, particularly, as mine were, for acting ability and looks. It is clear that looks were highly important: the Beverley St. Helena was to be pulcherrimus Iuuenis qui ad hoc invenire poterit; Lyonnard was ung beaul filz et ressombloit une belle jonne fille; Rainoldes talks of ‘beautifull boyes transformed into women’ and ‘such children as God had adorned with comlines of body’.⁶⁴ There is a certain delicacy of feature, which is not girlish though it is often termed so, which does not outlast one’s teens, and which would seem to put an age-limit on the playing of female roles. On the other hand, if you found a good actor, you would be likely to use him as long as you could: Richard Briscoe, the Coventry Cappers’ Mary, seems to have played for at least four years.⁶⁵ In the professional theatre, of course, technique could extend this period indefinitely, as it does in traditional Japanese theatre.

Another determining factor might be costume: the Coventry Pilate’s Wife apparently fitted Mrs. Grimsby’s clothes, though of course we know nothing about the size of Mrs. Grimsby. Lady Powis of Lincoln lent her kirtle for one of the Maries, who was presumably a man.⁶⁶ Julia, disguised as a page in Two Gentlemen of Verona, recalls how

              at Pentecost
When all our pageants of delight were played
Our youth got me to play the woman’s part
And I was decked in madam Julia’s gown,
Which served me as fit, by all men’s judgement,
As if the garment had been made for me;
Therefore I know she was about my height

IV. 4. 165–71

which again suggests, in modern terms, a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old, but it is very hard to speculate about relative sizes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

It would seem therefore that for young women they are likely to have used young men in their middle to late teens. We should remember that according to The Golden Legend, the Virgin Mary was only fourteen at the time of the Annunciation.⁶⁷ Older women are no problem: everyone seemed to accept our Anna’s gruffer voice; some were uncertain as to how old he was (in fact twenty) and some even failed to notice that he was a man. The mystery plays probably used an age range which is not really available for us, not so much because of the voice problem, but because fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys are edgy about their sex-roles and tend to be excessively loutish – Third- and Fourth-Years are notoriously unmanageable – and definitely unwilling to play the woman. I did in fact at first ask the English teacher at Lancaster Royal Grammar School if he could find me a Fourth Year, but he said this was impossible. I was driven up the age-range to John (who had been my first choice, for the other two reasons); Peter Happé’s English master down it to his thirteen-year-old St. Joan.

Representation and the ‘dual consciousness’

We also found, especially in the Visitation, a distinct difference in the way in which the actors related to each other emotionally on stage. The women players in the Visitation immediately gave the impression of warm and affectionate interaction. They sounded concerned and supportive, and they had a whole vocabulary of affectionate gesture. This included a great deal of body contact; they seemed to embrace easily and touch each other naturally. The men, on the other hand, kept their distance: they spoke at rather than to each other, and naturally stood at arm’s length, as if unwilling to invade each other’s territory.

This diffidence on the part of the men may have been due purely to modern British cultural conditioning. We have no stage vocabulary for male affection except the hearty slap on the back. This reflects real life; any physical expression of male friendliness seems to be cloaked socially in jesting aggression. With no stage vocabulary and no real-life experience to draw on, our male actors were at a loss. At Lancaster, where they had not previously seen each other’s performances, the contrast between the women’s naturalness and the men’s stiffness was extremely marked. For Salford, I was roped in, as a woman as much as a director, to try and help the men develop this side of their performance. I found myself not only explaining how two women would feel, but also demonstrating, movement by movement, and out of my own experience, how they would relate to each other physically.

There is enough evidence in sixteenth-century discussions of the stage to suggest that their male actors would also build up their ‘female’ performances in this external way. Rainoldes implies that it was generally accepted that to play a woman the actor had to learn to imitate a series of mannerisms and behaviour patterns: quoting Statius, he says:

Thetis taught Achilles how to play the woman in gate, in speech, in gesture: Sic ergo gradus; sic ora, manusq[ue] nate feres, comitesq[ue] modis imitabere fictis⁶⁸

[‘And so you must walk in this way, my son; carry your head and hold your hands in this way; imitate your companions with counterfeit mannerisms.’] And because his mother had not taught him enough, or he was but a bad scholer: Deidamia gave him farder advertisements, how he must hold his naked brest, his hands, and so foorth. These are wemens maners vnseemlie for Achilles to imitate: he should not have done it.

Th’overthrow of Stage-Playes, p. 17

The fact that anti-theatrical polemic stresses the unnaturalness of a man adopting ‘not the apparrell onely but the gate, the gestures, the voyce, the passions of a woman’ suggests that the accepted codes of male and female signals were, as one might expect, even more distinct than they are today.69 Gager agrees that ‘different behavioure becummethe different sexes, and it beseemethe not men to followe weemens maners, in the common course of lyfe, to the pervertinge of the lawe of nature, honesty, and semlynes’.⁷⁰ There were certainly more formal external signs of the distinction – for example, Gager mentions, as evidence that his undergraduate actors had not actually ‘studied’ to identify with the women they were playing, that ‘when one of owre actors shoulde have made a Conge like a woman, he made a legge like a man’.⁷¹ This distinctiveness probably made it even easier for a male actor to imitate the more conspicuous features of ‘a womans … gesture, countenance and behaviour’ sufficiently adequately to provide the audience with a recognisable series of signals which they would read as ‘woman’.⁷² How far in the amateur theatre it became a fully developed set of stage conventions, as in the professional Japanese Kabuki theatre, we cannot tell.

Our actors had no such clear-cut conventions to follow. Moreover, the lack of a physical vocabulary seemed to make it very difficult for them to relate to each other emotionally. But the reason may be more deep-seated and simpler (and thus possibly more universally applicable?) than the lack of a traditional grammar of female gesture. Peter Norton suggested that the very fact of their being men got between them and the stage relationship:

… the men were more detached from the content of the script: rather than acting a character and ‘getting under its skin’ they were presenting a situation. When we went to the Salford conference I took the part of Elizabeth, and I was aware of a distance between myself and the part I was playing: at no stage did I identify with the part of Elizabeth. I felt comfortable on stage with John [the Virgin Mary], but I did not relate to him as I would have if he had been playing a man, or if his part had been taken by a woman. When women take the parts of Mary and Elizabeth they not only relate more closely with the character they are playing, but also with the other female character on stage.

The men were unable to think themselves into the character naturally, either because they were not physically at home with the way in which these emotions should be expressed, or, more basically, because they just could not imagine what it was like to be women in this particular situation. The women did not have to overcome these twin barriers and could proceed to build up their parts semi-instinctively.

It may be that this problem was thrown into particularly high relief because we had chosen one of the very few scenes – possibly the only scene – in the mystery plays which features two women interacting seriously on a subject of peculiarly female interest. It was noticeable that when John also played Mary in the Purification, he was much better at relating to Joseph in a ‘female’ way than he was in this scene to Elizabeth; in fact, in rehearsal, in his ordinary clothes, the incongruity between his masculine appearance and his feminine behaviour was very funny. Presumably this was a relationship he recognised and could therefore reconstruct. It is, I think, true to say that most of the scenes from the mystery plays which involve female characters allow for this by showing them either interacting with men, or if with other women (I am thinking especially of the Three Maries) on a very formal level. Even in the Elizabeth-Mary scene, the intimacy is suggested rather than made explicit. How strongly it comes over, and in what way, depends largely on the non-verbal element in the acting, which is precisely where, according to our experiment, the difference between the sexes lies.

This verbal formality would presumably make it easier for male actors, like ours, to keep within their learned patterns of behaviour. Even intimate male/ female scenes tend to be enacted ceremoniously:

Joseph, my owne trewe fere,
Now redde I – if your will weare …

Chester, Purification, ll. 207–8

Often the formality is underlined by the familiar ‘third-person’ commentary: Anna takes leave of Joachim,

For dred and ffor swem of ȝour wourdys I qwake
thryes I kysse ȝow with syghys ful sad
and to þe mercy of god . mekely I ȝow be-take
and þo þat departe in sorwe god make þer metyng glad.

N-Town, Conception of Mary, ll. 53–6

This type of self-description also, of course, emphasises the representational quality of the characterisation and emotions.

This distancing fits precisely with what happened in our experiment. As Peter Norton describes, the male players remained detached from their roles. The effect of this was interesting. The audience at Lancaster, where we discussed it in rather more depth than was possible at Salford, seemed to agree that when the women played Mary and Elizabeth, they came over as two individuals, each with their own character, history, and experiences, who almost incidentally were also the Virgin Mary and Elizabeth. It was easy to relate to the warmth of their feeling for each other, and the naturalism of the situation came to the fore. They were ‘people like us’. The men communicated none of this: in Peter Norton’s words, what came across was ‘a representation of Mary and Elizabeth, and the “alienation” of the actors combined with their female clothing help[ed] to stress the narrative content of the play’. We were very much aware that they ‘stood for’ Mary and Elizabeth, rather than feeling in any way that they ‘were’ Mary and Elizabeth.

The Lancaster audience split on their reactions to this, very interestingly, by sexes. The men on the whole preferred the female version for its warmth and what they called its ‘femininity’. The women preferred the male version, because they felt that with the female version the naturalistic individuality conferred on the characters got in the way of the story and its significance. The inbuilt naturalism of the female version made it somehow too cosy and fussy: it detracted both from the status of the characters and the spiritual force of the scene. The women were also not particularly attracted by an abstract quality called ‘femininity’ – indeed, they didn’t recognise that it existed. They were interested in role and situation, and took the femaleness of the characters for granted, whoever was playing them.

This latter was probably closer to the medieval reaction, since for them there was of course no ‘feminine’ option. This does not mean, however, that they would have been restricted to a dispassionate, distanced, narrative version of the scene. In the male version, the detachment of person from role did not mean that we were equally alienated from the experience that they were presenting. Indeed, in a curious way it made it easier for the audience to react directly and strongly to the situation, its emotions as well as its implications, because we were not filtering them through the individual personality of the actress.

There are probably several reasons for this. It may well have helped that we knew the story already, and the actors had only to present the familiar pictures and speak the familiar words to trigger off a stock of strong traditional responses. Mary and Elizabeth are invested with more power if they are icons rather than individuals. In that case the audience is more of an active partner in the construction of responses than we normally expect. But the same is probably true of the representational mode as a whole: it is interesting that both Sarah Carpenter and Carl Heap talk independently in this context of puppets. Carl Heap refers the strength of this effect to their ‘selectivity’; Sarah Carpenter to the fact that, since you cannot ‘become personally psychologically involved in the puppet’, you are released to respond to ‘the situation itself, or the emotion itself … not the presenter’. Either way, the fact that the synthesis takes place more obviously inside our imaginations than on stage seemed to make it even more powerful in effect.

This effect has obvious implications for the style of playing. For the Visitation we adopted a very formal stylised pattern of gesture which was designed to underline the exposition of the text, especially for the Magnificat, and to emphasise this representational quality, and the gap between player and role. The Salford audience, many of whom were clearly uncomfortable with the man/woman convention, focussed its unease on this, which at first seemed to us irrelevant – it wasn’t what we had come to discuss – but which was in fact obliquely talking about the same thing. As Diana Wyatt points out, the stylisation of men playing women is no different in kind from the stylisation of Little God with his gold face, or the masked angel with his gold lamé curls. It is part and parcel of a ‘non-naturalistic’ theatre. But our demonstration also incidentally revealed the power of familiarity and unfamiliarity in stage conventions. Nobody objected to the ‘stylisation’ of Mr. and Mrs. Noah, but only Jane Oakshott pointed out that the scene had been as carefully planned and was as ‘artificial’ as the preceding one – it just happened to be a form of artificiality with which we are familiar, the comedy routine combined with ‘low’ characters and a colloquial vocabulary, which unwary students tend automatically to call ‘realistic’.

We used the same formal visual style for our production of the Purification, since the play is centred on a very formal and liturgically-based ceremony, and again it was read as highly stylised because of its context. But I have used an equally ‘constructed’ style for the Wakefield Mactacio Abel, where because the central characters are low and the vocabulary, verbal and visual, obscene, it was read as a ‘realistic’ comic routine.

Our modern expectations of casting can lead us to make the same sort of judgements even within the one play. Peter Meredith made a very interesting distinction when he observed that for him, the stylisation of the Purification ‘women’ seemed to clash with the ‘naturalism’ of the men. Both were using the same stylised gestures, but because the men were of the ‘right’ sex, these came across as naturalistic, whereas their use underlined the fact that the female roles were representational. In fact our thirty-year-old Simeon playing extreme old age was no more ‘naturalistic’ than our male Mary or Anna; we are just more used to the one form of representation than the other.

In the Purification, we also underlined the stylisation by giving Mary a very obviously blank-faced doll with a halo for a baby. It would have been interesting, pursuing the ‘mixture of styles’ motif, to see what would have happened if we had given her a real baby, as the director of the Shepherds play did for his Mary, and, as it seems likely, the Coventry Purification play gave its Mary (see Plates 3 and 4).

It is encouraging that such medieval descriptions as we have (the late fourteenth-century Beverley documents, for example) tend to use forms of words which suggest that they too acknowledge this representational quality.73 The Beverley St. Helena is described as

pulcherrimus Iuuenis qui ad hoc apcior inuenire poterit … decenter ornatus & vestitus ad modum Regine & ad instar sancte Elene

[the fairest young man, and the most suitable for this [role] who can be found … appropriately arrayed and robed in the manner of a Queen and in the likeness of St. Helena]

and the Virgin Mary of the Purification

quidam de gilda qui ad hoc apcior inuenietur nobilissime & decenter vestitus & ornatus vt regina virgo instar gloriose virginis Marie habens quasi filium in ulnis suis]

[someone from the Guild, the most suitable who can be found for this [role], robed and arrayed as a virgin queen in the likeness of the glorious Virgin Mary having as it were a son in her arms]

(which suggests that the baby, like ours, was a doll). Both these descriptions make it quite plain that the actor is representing, not ‘being’ the woman he is dressed up as. Another form of words is ‘vice & loco Sancte Elizabeth’.⁷⁴ The English version of the idiom is ‘in liknes of Seint Kathryn … and … in likenes of Seint Ursula’.⁷⁵ John and Peter appeared ad instar and vice et loco of Mary and Elizabeth.

The term ‘alienation’ clearly takes us into Brechtian territory; this was something that the students recognised without my prompting. It seems to me to go furthest towards explaining the effects I am discussing. Most writings on boy actors, for example, tend to concentrate on how convincing they are likely to have been as women, or talk about parameters of ‘acceptability’. But they then assume that the actors are attempting fully to impersonate women, and that we will gauge their success by the degree to which they make us forget that they are really men. The unacknowledged criteria used are those of naturalistic theatre.

To a certain extent these are valid, at least in so far as it is clear that they tried, as our actors partly tried, to approximate female appearance, gesture, voice, and mannerisms. The match has to be sufficiently good to make the audience accept the role as being that of a woman. But there is one essential difference. When men play women, no matter how well they do it, we as audience are always aware in some corner of our consciousness that they are men. Shapiro, writing about the Elizabethan boy actors, calls this the ‘dual consciousness’.⁷⁶ This knowledge can never be entirely shaken off. We as audience cannot relate to a man in a female role in exactly the same way as we do to a woman in that role: there is always a tension between the role and the player.

Plate 3 Joseph and Mary (David Cross and John Turner), Purification, Chester Waggon Plays 1983.

Photo: Geoffrey Newcombe

Plate 4 Chester Shepherds’ Mary (name unknown), Chester Waggon Plays 1983.

Photo: © Rose Bugler (née Rosemary Cross)

The same must have been true of the audience of the mystery plays. The sixteenth-century apologists for the professional and university theatre were certainly aware of it. Gager denies that his actors could be said to ‘wear’ women’s apparel,

because wearing implyes a custome and a common vse of so dooinge, wheras we doe it for an howre, or twoe, or three, to represent an others person, by one that is openly knowne to be as hee is in deede.

MS CCC 352, p. 52

Sir Richard Baker’s Theatrum Redivivum (printed 1662), though late for our period, makes perhaps the best statement:

But what is it, wherein Players are such Hypocrites? Forsooth! because men weare womens Apparel, and counterfeit the gestures, and behaviours of women, and soe appear to be women, when they are men: and to appear other than they are, is plain Hypocrisie. It is plain Hypocrisie, no doubt; but it is not plain, that it is unlawfull Hypocrisie … For the evil of Hypocrisie is not in the Act, but in the End: and though Players may be guilty of the Act; yet certainly of the End they are not. For, seeing that, which they do, is not done to Circumvent, but to Represent; not to Deceive others, but to make others Conceive: though it may without question be called Hypocrisie, yet it is not Hypocrisie, that can be called in question.77

The actor takes on the costume and mannerisms of a woman in order to represent a woman: not in order to deceive the audience into thinking that he really is a woman, but so as to give the audience material to create their own perception of the role. It is interesting that in the controversy between the two Oxford dons, the incident that Rainoldes seems to find most shocking is:

Howe many did obserue, and with mislike haue mentioned, that Penelopes maides did not onely weare [wemens raiment] but also sate in it among true wemen in deed, longer than David wore Saules armour? neither were more knowne to them to bee men, then Achilles was to Deidamia; vntill they suspected it, seeing them entreated by the wooers to rise and danse vpon the stage.

Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes, p. 102

The Christ Church undergraduates inadvertently deceived the audience into thinking they were women until it became plain they were part of the play, when knowledge of current stage conventions told everyone that they must be men. The audience, apparently, reacted as a modern audience would to the deception: it unsettled them. Recognising who is a man and who a woman is one of the most essential features of our social relationships. The same sort of reaction but with a different cultural background greeted our Mary in the Purification: the audience tended to assume he was a woman until they heard his voice, and there was always a murmur of surprise and often startled laughter.

We have seen how Elizabethan critics assumed that the male actor built up his part by imitating female behaviour patterns. It is more difficult to assess quite how far he was also expected to identify emotionally with his part as a woman, since any suggestion that he should do so instantly brings down charges of effeminacy and worse:

Yea, witnes … M. Stubbs, his Anatomy of Abuses p. 105. where he affirmes, that Players and Play-haunters in their Secret Conclaves play the Sodomites: together with some modern examples of such, who have beene desperately enamored with Players Boyes thus clad in womans apparell, so farre as to solicite them by words, by Letters, even actually to abuse them. (This I have heard credibly reported of a Scholler of Bayliol Colledge, and doubt not but it may be verified of divers others.)

Prynne, Histriomastix, p. 208

The fear of being thought to have corrupted their undergraduate actors runs very strongly through both Rainoldes’ and Gager’s arguments. It is not a frivolous one, considering the average age of the actors, which was more like that of present day Fifth Formers. Their teachers must have been aware of the dangers of confusing them at an impressionable age about their own sex-roles, especially if they were exposed to potential solicitation from homosexual members of their audience, or, in the heightened emotional atmosphere of a production, from each other. Gager is anxious to point out that no overt sexual behaviour took place on stage, though his undergraduates did present amorous females:

As for the danger of kissinge of bewtifull boyes, I knowe not howe this supposition shoulde reache to vs, for it is vntrwe, whoesoever toulde you so, that owre Eurymachus did kisse owre Melantho. I have enquyred of the partyes them selues, whether any suche action was vsed by them, and thay constantly denye it; sure I ame, that no suche thinge was taught

MS CCC 352, p. 55

and that

if I coulde suspecte any suche thinge to growe by owre Playes, I would be the first that should hate them, and deteste my selfe, for gyvinge suche occasion … I haue byn often moved by owre Playes to laughter, and somtyme to teares, but I cannot accuse eyther my selfe, or any other of any suche beastly thought styrred vp by them.

MS CCC 352 p. 56

It is a delicate business: I was conscious of it even though I was rehearsing undergraduates presumably old enough to know what they were doing in a play which could hardly be described as inflammatory. I also felt happier that I was a woman acting as it were as a consultant on the customs of an exotic tribe and therefore to a certain extent distanced emotionally from my actors, rather than a man, where I think it could have become dangerously weighted.

Depersonalisation, sexuality, and virginity

One way of avoiding the ‘bad effectes’ both on actors and audience of representing the passions ‘lyvely expressed’ is to depersonalise them. Gager maintains (justly) that he has done this: ‘Whoe could be the worse for [Phaedra’s] wooing Hippolytus, in so generall termes?’78 He sees this distancing as contributing to the moral function of his plays: it presents general examples, instead of engaging actors or audience too closely in particular cases. But it also fits perfectly with the alienation of role from person which we have already seen, and indeed seems to be an integral part of this kind of theatre.

It would be very interesting, and is the one part of the experiment that I regret I have not yet done, to see a boy playing a female part which depends for its effect on sexual appeal. I suspect that he would convey a very strong sensuality, but not a particularly female sexuality. Instead it would be a curious thing, a boy’s sexual appeal divorced from the boy himself and presented as a woman’s. (It would thus avoid being either homosexual or transvestite in the accepted senses.) Followers of the Japanese Kabuki theatre apparently say that no woman can ever be so strikingly feminine as a male actor can: it must be partly because the femininity is being presented to the audience as a concept rather than as part of a real person. Brecht says in passing, ‘if the part is played by somebody of the opposite sex, the sex of that character will be more clearly brought out’.⁷⁹ I suspect that this is because it is separated from the person playing and produced as a series of signs and signals; we are aware that the sex of the character is something to which the actor wishes to draw our attention, rather than something we take for granted as a natural part of him.

It is difficult, however, to find such a role in the mystery plays. This is not entirely due to the subject matter; at least one role, Mary Magdalene, is traditionally a courtesan. But she never in the mystery plays appears behaving as such: we first see her (and the Woman Taken in Adultery) as she repents, in, as Gager would say, ‘so generall termes’ that they might almost refer to anything:

þer was nevyr woman of mannys kynne
so ful of synne in no countre
I haue be ffowlyd be fryth and ffenne
and sowght synne in many A cete
but þou me borwe lord I xal brenne
with blake ffendys Ay bowne to be

N-Town, Last Supper, ll. 477–82

This generality would help a boy to play the role; it is also part and parcel of the overall style of self-presentation – ‘Mary mavdelyn is my name’ (470) – and self-description which can be used to set a distance between the actor and the role. Again, this does not mean that it would necessarily be distanced in emotional effect; it could even be stronger because generic.

It is interesting that the one female character who flaunts her sexual attractiveness, Pilate’s Wife in the York Plays, does it not primarily to Pilate but to the audience, also in this self-descriptive mode, and in terms so extravagant they inevitably suggest the exhibitionism of the drag-queen:

I am dame precious Percula, of prynces þe prise,
 Wiffe to ser Pilate here, prince withouten pere.
All welle of all womanhede I am, wittie and wise,
 Consayue nowe my countenaunce so comly and clere.
 The coloure of my corse is full clere,
   And in richesse of robis I am rayed,
 Ther is no lorde in þis londe as I lere
 In faith, þat hath as frendlyar fere
   Than yhe, my lorde, myselffe þof I saye itt.

Play 30, ll. 37–45

She and Pilate embrace histrionically, on which her comment is ‘All ladise we coveyte þan bothe to be kyssid and clappid’ (l. 54), another generalisation which underlines the fact that ‘she’ is not really a woman at all.

It would be interesting to see a boy playing Lechery in The Castle of Perseverance. Here sexuality is conveyed by explicit but again generalised statement, which I suspect would be much more compelling and less confusing if it were to be spoken by a boy:

ȝa, whanne þi flesche is fayre fed,
 þanne schal I, louely Lecherye,
Be bobbyd wyth þe in bed;
 Hereof serue mete and drynkys trye.
In loue þi lyf schal be led;
 Be a lechour tyl þou dye.
þi nedys schal be þe better sped
I þou ȝyf þe to fleschly folye
    Tyl deth þe down drepe.
Lechery syn þe werld began
Hath avaunced many a man:
þerfore, Mankynd, my leue lemman,
I my cunte þou schalt crepe (ll. 1178–90)

When a woman says these words, we refer the invitation to her personal sexuality: the sense of personal involvement can even make it embarrassing. If a boy were to say it, I think we would be much more conscious of it as a person-ification of sexuality. In fact, if it were not for the final line, and the invitation to her bed, there is nothing to indicate that this speech is meant to be spoken by a woman: it is an external description of a temptation, the more chilling for its total lack of personal involvement – the Playboy view of sexuality. There is nothing much in it that a female actor could identify with.

The nearest to a naturalistic seduction scene comes in the saint’s play of Mary Magdalene. I suspect that if Magdalene were played by a boy, the seduction scene would carry a much stronger sense of innocence corrupted, and yet essentially untouched. For a modern audience, when the role is played by a woman, we feel the sense of personal involvement on the naturalistic level, but I think we also have a residual sense (cultural, certainly, as well as instinctive) that she is not that much to be blamed since she is after all doing something natural and even, if mistakenly, generous. If she were played by a boy, not only would this sense be removed, thus strengthening the play’s moral point (something that would also remove our modern and distracting sympathies for the sin of the Woman Taken in Adultery), but we might also feel subconsciously that a boy was being corrupted by the man, thus bringing into play all the confusions and revulsions revealed by Rainoldes. At the same time we would be much more aware that he was playing a part, and so take it as a demonstration of innocence corrupted rather than the reality.

There are cases in which the femaleness of the actress can be a definite drawback. Eve, who seems at first a ludicrous part to be played by a boy, is not in the English plays a temptress in the sexual sense. Rosemary Woolf points out that in all the plays, Eve’s temptation of Adam seems unnecessarily brief (especially when compared with the Jeu d’Adam).80 The only two Fall plays that suggest that her temptation of Adam might be reinforced even by ordinary conjugal affection are the Chester Play 2 and the Norwich Grocers’ Play B. The latter is expansive but, again, formal in expression:

Man: My love, for my solace I have here walkyd longe.
Howe ys yt nowe with you? I pray you do declare.

Woman: Indede, lovely lover, the Heavenly Kyng most stronge
To eate of this apple his angell hath prepare;
Take therof at my hande th’other frutes emonge,
For yt shall make you wyse and even as God to fare.
Then Man taketh and eatyth and sayethe:
Alack! alacke! my spouse, now se I nakid we ar (ll. 59–65)

The Chester Eve is more briefly affectionate:

Adam, husbande liffe and deare,
eate some of this apple here.
Yt is fayre, my leefe feare;
hit may thou not forsake (ll. 249–252)

Woolf comments ‘These loving endearments suggest that it is Eve rather than the apple that Adam cannot bring himself to reject’, but ‘at what point, if any, innocent affection merges with feminine wiles, it is impossible to detect’.81

We assume that Eve’s temptation must be sexual, I think, automatically, because she is naked. But Eden is not a Carry On nudist camp: Adam and Eve are naked and unashamed, and only become aware of their nakedness after the Fall. The English playwrights seem to play down anything potentially sexual that would make the part difficult for a boy actor. I suspect that modern productions, which present an actress as Eve in the semi-nakedness of a leotard, and thus force the sexual side upon us, are introducing an irrelevant distraction. (In the same way, the nakedness of the Christ-figures tend to distract with too-human fleshliness from the archetypal quality of the action.) Played by a boy in a suit of whitleather and a long blonde wig, Eve would be a representation of naked femininity without any of its distracting actuality; we could concentrate on the role. She would I think come over a lot less frivolous than our modern sexy Eves: less of a simpleton, more of an innocent. It might also make the fig-leaf episode less irresistibly funny, which seems to be its fate on the modern stage.

The effect of our ‘dual consciousness’ can therefore vary quite strikingly depending on the role. In the case of the Virgin Mary, it cuts out the signals of female sexuality which inevitably are received from a young and pretty girl. Since all the other signals being sent out, however, spell ‘woman’, and since she is not acting sexual attraction, this has the effect of de-sexing her. If this is combined with physical beauty, it can produce a sense of ‘otherness’ that can be read both as chastity as a positive quality and as other-worldliness. The Golden Legend echoes this uncannily: Candlemas was established

propter ostendendam virginis puritatem … virtus sanctitatis ejus usque ad alios extendebatur et transfundebatur, ita quod in aliis omnes motus carnalis concupiscientiae extinguebat. Unde dicunt Judaei, quod cum Maria pulcherrima fuerit, a nullo tamen unquam potuit concupisci.⁸²

[and to show forth the purity of the Virgin Mary … the power of her holiness reached forth and was poured into others, so that it quenched any instincts of fleshly desire in them. And so the Jews tell that though Mary was surpassingly lovely, no man could ever look upon her with desire]

The same effect must have operated in a different context with chilling veracity when Lady Macbeth calls on the ‘spirits that tend on mortal thoughts’ to ‘unsex me now’. Our Mary could be almost frighteningly ethereal when he chose. At the same time he managed to convey a certain strength, without which Mary becomes insipid, but which again related more to the role than to the person of the actor. Mary has in fact to take the leading part without seeming self-assertive, a difficult part for a woman, where any attempt at domination is read as self-assertiveness, but one which is accepted from a man.

The ‘beautiful woman’ roles, then, seem to be written so as to make it possible for a young man to play them. They are not aggressively feminine, though they give the actor scope to be poised, graceful, and to show emotions that are within his range. In rehearsal, I was conscious of directing John as the Virgin to suppress certain stances and movements which were distractingly masculine – many of which had to do with managing the costume, which itself dictated much of the ‘impersonation’. For the rest, I was more concerned with establishing relationships, especially with Joseph (affectionate, respectful to him as her husband, protective, as he is to her) and with Little God (for example when He apparently rejects them to be about ‘My Father’s work’, and the desire to protect, which she had shown to the baby when Simeon prophesied of the sorrow to come, fights with the knowledge that He is growing up into independence). The key phrase was ‘think family’. In retrospect, I am most conscious of working on the relationships and letting the picture he presented do the other half of the work: ‘John, remember you’re an icon!’ One of the main qualities required was stillness: naturalistic fussing with the baby, for example, would have destroyed this iconic effect.

It may be that what I have been saying about actors also applies to producers, and that because I was a woman I automatically stressed relationships as they were filtered through my own experience. An insensitive male director might well have produced something far more stereotyped and flat. But I don’t think any of this is peculiarly ‘female’, and in any case, the whole trend of meditative literature which lies behind the plays stresses and explores precisely these emotions.

There is much less to say about the old women. They could be played by a much wider age range of men, since a slight gruffness of voice and more strongly marked features are acceptable. We did not explore Anna nearly so thoroughly, partly because I sensed the actor was unwilling, partly because she is a very unrewarding part as far as motivation and character go: most of the time she plays bookends with Simeon, reacting to his doubts with prophetic certainties. More could probably have been made of her: in our production she lacked any real warmth, which an actress might perhaps have given her.

Noah and his wife

In contrast, the domestic affray between Noah and his Wife in the Towneley Noah’s Flood brings traditional sex roles to the fore. It is a battle between the sexes, inevitably a power-struggle over who shall have the maistrye, in which the audience are invited to take sides (lines 208, 388–403).

The problem for us is that Mrs. Noah is a part which was written for a man to play, but which says certain very decisive things about the character, status, and proper behaviour of women. Initially, I think, because she was written to be played by a man, the role developed in a certain direction. She became the archetypal male portrait of a shrew, a role which is sustained as long as the plot demands it – is Noah going to be able to save the world or will she frustrate him? As soon as the plot demands, she does a complete and unnaturalistic volte-face into wifely obedience. While she was played by a man, she presumably came over as an admitted caricature, an incarnation of Misrule, entertaining and theatrically attractive because she is a rebel, but not to be taken too seriously. Nowadays, when she is played by a woman, she becomes a person, and her rebelliousness gains overtones and raises questions that it was never meant to raise. Add to this a generally feminist climate of opinion, and you have a problem play, not a straightforward demonstration of the rightness of hierarchy. (I should be interested to see the reactions of a strict Muslim family to the basic plot.)

The reasons for this change lie in much the same processes as I have described when discussing the serious characters of Mary and Elizabeth, but the fact that the context is comic instead of serious produces a different set of responses. It also depends rather more on the stage relationship between her and Noah, as woman and man. Again, it is sited partly in the audience’s ‘dual consciousness’, and partly in the processes of the actor’s characterisation.

An actress playing Mrs. Noah has to ‘find’ her character and her relationship with Noah as a woman. Her portrayal is likely to be recognisably something of what she herself might, under other circumstances, or with a different temperament, have become. But the part was originally written for a man to play. Both because of this, and because her literary persona is that of a harridan, that is to say an ‘unwomanly’ woman, her major characteristics in the script are scolding and fighting. She is aggressive towards her husband:

Yit rede I no man let me,
ffor drede of a knok (ll. 341–2)

and to her children:

Yit for drede of a skelp
Help well thi dam (ll. 323–4)

and shows a lack of proper wifely submissiveness:

I will not, for thi bydyng
go from doore to mydyng (ll. 375–6)

Both aggression and self-assertiveness are ‘mannish’ traits. In a part written to be played by a man, they are perfectly acceptable: they exploit his mannishness. If she is played by a woman, where the instinct is to see her naturalistically, they stand out as ‘unnatural’ and extreme, and we have to find psychologically valid reasons for them if we want her to be a sympathetic character – which we do partly because her gusto is theatrically attractive and partly because our view of husband/wife relationships does not include the right of the husband to chastise his wife with a walking stick.

The fight scene we chose illustrated this very well. In it, the war between the sexes is fought on two fronts: Mrs. Noah attacks Noah verbally (lines 191–216); when he threatens to beat her (line 217), the affray becomes physical (lines 218–34); it ends in an uneasy truce with both parties retiring to regroup (lines 235–43).

The differences between the male and female performances were even more striking than they were for the Visitation, and for initially very obvious reasons. For a start, sheer physical size affects both the stage relationship between the characters and the way in which the audience are led to react. Peter Norton had started off, unconsciously, by seeing Mrs. Noah in female terms:

I envisaged Mrs. Noah as a shrewish character, always complaining about her husband, constantly badgering and taunting him. For the Lancaster seminar I decided to have a large Noah and a smaller wife, so that the intimidation of the former by the latter was psychological rather than physical, and the audience were presented with the comic situation of a small wife bossing around a large husband.

This was very much a male-female stage situation. The comedy here arises out of inversion of expectation: we expect the larger person (normally the man) to be the dominant one. But women are traditionally supposed to have subverted this state of affairs by learning to excel in the war of words; physical warfare is replaced by psychological, where they stand more chance. As this scene is written, Mrs. Noah wins hands down, not so much by argument as by sheer unstoppability. It is not just meaningless abuse; she is subversive because she invents and sustains a role for Noah as a mean, whingeing old sourpuss who has his long-suffering family completely under his thumb, a role which is ludicrously forced on him as he stands there unable to get a word in edgeways. He is reduced to threatening physical violence to shut her up (i.e. regain the dominant role): ‘We! hold thi tong, ram-skyt, or I shall the still’ (line 217).

However, with a woman playing Mrs. Noah, once they move on to physical combat, the balance of power switches, despite her willing aggression. A small woman is not supposed to win a physical struggle with a large man (judo not yet having been introduced). Our Mrs. Noah used the distaff as a weapon, which helped to redress the balance and even gave her an initial advantage, but even though her sallies were vicious and her methods distinctly dirty, there was not much doubt of the outcome. When Noah wrested the distaff from her and flung her over his shoulder, she was rendered helpless, though fighting back gamely – it became an honourable defeat. I think everyone felt a considerable degree of admiration and sympathy for her, even though Noah had the moral advantage.

Substitute a man, and for a bumblebee attacking a St. Bernard, you get a bulldog. Even a smaller male Mrs. Noah becomes disproportionately large for a woman; une femme forte, as the French say. He takes up much more space, especially if he squares his shoulders and stands arms akimbo. His aggression is male: the effect of the verbal tirade was like a dam bursting, and Noah was completely overwhelmed. And there was no change in the balance of power when the fight began. At Salford, where he was actually larger than Noah, he:

was much more physically dominating than the … female Mrs. Noah. The male Mrs. Noah came across as being capable of hammering Mr. Noah into the ground (literally so when armed with the distaff!). It was only when Mr. Noah disarmed his wife of the distaff that they were on equal terms, and he finally gained the decisive upper hand when he started to chase her with the distaff (line 227). When Jane played Mrs. Noah, the fight was one-sided from the beginning (line 219): she takes on Noah on his own terms (i.e. physically), and puts up a spirited fight, but the reassertion of male dominance is predestined.

At Salford the distaff actually snapped in two (throwing Noah over backwards in possession of the pieces!) in the struggle. The size and strength of the male Mrs. Noah – he was much too heavy for Noah to fling him over his shoulder, as he had with his female ‘wife’ – made it very much an equal fight ‘in which’, to quote Peter Norton again, ‘Noah comes from behind to win’. There was some genuine doubt about whether he would. He was the under-dog, and our sympathies lay with him throughout.

Oddly enough, in most modern productions of both the Towneley and Chester Noah that I have seen, the directors have chosen the other possible variation in size: knowing that the fight is traditionally the central theatrical happening of the play, or just because they see Mrs. Noah as a virago, they cast the smallest and gentlest man they can find as Noah, and the largest and toughest woman, or at least the least prepossessing in the Nora Batty mode, as Mrs. Noah, almost as if they were instinctively trying to reproduce the medieval balance by giving Mrs. Noah the largest number of male characteristics possible. (An exaggeratedly busty Mrs. Noah is also a ‘male’ version, for reasons which I will explain later.) This certainly wins Noah our sympathy, but it has the effect of making him the ‘little man’ figure throughout, the gentle incompetent who nevertheless manages to muddle through to fulfil God’s commands and save the human race. This is one possible way of playing it, given the Towneley Noah’s Joseph-like references to his age and disabilities, but it necessarily either weakens his authority or means he has to play in effect two disparate roles: the henpecked husband and the confident patriarch. We too like to laugh at the gaps between the private and public images of our patriarchs, but if we are looking for psychological coherence, it necessarily undermines our sense of his authority. The choice seems to be between a domestic tyrant or a henpecked nonentity. If, however, Mrs. Noah is not naturalistic, we can take the episodes separately, one as a theatrical ‘turn’, the other as serious theatre. Neither Noah reflects on the other.

The main difference between the male/female and the male/male struggle is that the first is naturalistically possible and the second isn’t. In the first, we can become involved in the stage relationship between Noah and his wife as a human one, even as a sexual one. When we played it in front of the seminar at Lancaster, there was a roar of delight when Noah, throwing his female ‘wife’ over his shoulder, inadvertently revealed her legs up to the knees. The effect was irresistibly Sabine Women. When he tried to repeat this success with his other ‘wife’, all he managed to do was reveal ‘her’ rolled-up trousers. The audience howled again, but the reason was rather different, and it points up the basic difference in comic reaction.

If Mrs. Noah is played by a man, our ‘dual-consciousness’ comes into play. Our whole attitude to him will be affected by the fact that we know he is a man. But the difference in effect also grows out of the process of characterisation. As we have seen already, instead of playing a woman from the starting point of being a woman, the actor has to build up the impression of being a woman out of a set of observed mannerisms. As director, you keep on having to say to your actors, whether they are playing serious or comic roles, ‘No, stand like this, take shorter steps, don’t sit with your knees apart’. It is much more like assuming a disguise. Because of our dual consciousness, the better he does it, the more, in the context of comedy, we shall applaud his ability to imitate life. Doesn’t he do it well? The artificiality of the construct is an essential part of the joke.

In building up a comic character the actor will tend to base his characterisation even more on physical and vocal quirks, whether he finds these from his own observation or from theatrical stereotypes. If he is imitating a harridan, he will display a range of characteristics which are not appreciated in a woman, so he comes across as presenting evidence against her – not against her as an individual, but against the whole sex. We applaud his virtuosity and the accuracy of his indictment.

At the same time, the material for his indictment is drawn partly from observation of particularly disagreeable women, and partly provided by his own unwomanishness. Physically, his maleness appears as a comment on her lack of sexual attractiveness, and therefore lack of value, as this is still one of the main male indices of female value. Alternatively, he can exaggerate the outward signs of female attractiveness to the point of caricature: a tendency shared by the drag-queen, partly because these signs can be easily faked by make-up and padding, partly because they are the least stereotypically male sexual call-signs. Paradoxically, because they are known to be artificially produced even in women, they are therefore associated with female deceit and sexual voraciousness. A good example is Mark Heap’s terrifyingly predatory Tyb in the Medieval Players’ Johan Johan, a devouring houri who looked as if she could break her lover in half, let alone her minuscule husband.

It seems very difficult for an actor in a comic role not to parody femaleness. Peter Norton actually tried two versions of the male Mrs. Noah: the first, at Lancaster, was a straight ‘pantomime dame’ – the role into which the actor most easily fell. At Salford he:

wanted to minimise differences in the plotting of action on stage and also in the actors’ psychological interpretation of the character, in order to point up the effects of transvestism [alone]. Because of what I regarded as the unique ‘maleness’ of the panto-dame type-character, I worked away from a parody of Mrs. Noah towards a psychological realism …

However, instead of being more convincing as a woman, the actor was merely robbed of an essential comic substitute for it. At Lancaster, the audience had laughed at two difference things: when Mrs. Noah was played by a girl:

the audience laughed at the comic relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Noah … rather than at the absurdity of the character of Mrs. Noah that came across in Mike’s performance.

The female version, came over as situation comedy, the male as pantomime. At Salford, when the man tried to be as ‘straight’ a woman as possible:

the female version [was] more amusing. The male Mrs. Noah wasn’t uneffective, but less effective, not unfunny, but less funny. Interpreting the character ‘straight’, without parody, meant that Tony found himself in a role [which had been interpreted] for a woman.

The actor came out as a second-class woman, unable to get as many laughs out of the natural situation, and forbidden to try by emphasising his non-female femaleness. Peter Norton concluded:

The only way to properly make the role a male one would be to parody Mrs. Noah in the sort of way Mike Elliston did, making her into a panto-dame figure. This interpretation would completely alter the ‘battle’ that I have talked about: the dominant-woman figure would become ridiculous and absurd from the outset, and the point of view entirely male-biased, with the fight being Mrs. Noah’s come-uppance, rather than a spirited resistance. The battle is no longer a battle – instead it becomes, from the start, a celebration of male dominance.

In fact, I doubt anyone at Salford who had not seen the Lancaster performance laughed at anything but the parodic qualities, which arose naturally from the stage situation.

Mrs. Noah thus becomes a pantomime dame. Several of my colleagues instinctively resist this because to them ‘pantomime dame’ means parody, and they want to take Mrs. Noah seriously as a person; it makes the play less admirable, in modern terms, if they can’t. They want to find psychological reasons for her behaving as she does, and they want to sympathise with her. (I might add that they are also mostly men.) But it may well be that the playwright never intended us to do either of these things. He was unlikely to believe that, in a non-topsy-turvy world, she had a claim to wear the trousers. He clearly enjoyed her uppishness, but I doubt he or his audience took it seriously. This critical situation has much in common with the Wife of Bath dilemma. Several of the literary qualities which create the impression of a rounded character and make critics try to psychoanalyse the Wife of Bath are missing from Mrs. Noah – the life history, the explicit self-revelation, the ‘human’ inconsistencies – but there is sufficient continuity of character in her mannishness, at least up to her sudden conversion to true wifeliness, and sufficient ‘life’ from her colloquialness, for it to be tempting. But it has curious effects on the role if it is played by a woman, and is almost impossible on the naturalistic level if the part is played by a man.

I was interested in David Mills’ report in our last issue of the militant feminist Mrs. Noah of the Toronto Chester Cycle: in the modern context this would explain her behaviour and even make it sympathetic, but, again, it eventually runs against the grain of the play and what the character herself turns into. She is very similar to her Towneley counterpart, with the added complication that the only affection she shows is for her gossips, and that in modern performances this introduces a note of pathos and a hint of unfairness in God’s proceedings that are almost certainly not what the original wanted us to feel, because again it unbalances the play. If we think of them as a chorus-line of drunken (male) harridans, they become far more grotesque, and though their drowning may well have its pathos, it will not be of the personal kind which distracts from the main line of the play.

Can one take a parodic character seriously? Could you take a male Mrs. Noah seriously? I think yes, but not on a naturalistic level. Instead, we recognise the situation, which is sufficiently like life, and relate to it without being particularly involved in her as a person. Everything said about her, and everything she does, is generic, because she is a stereotype: as the Wife of Bath says:

Deceite, wepyng, spynnyng, God hath yive
To wommen kyndely, whil that they may lyve.

Canterbury Tales D, ll. 401–2

The Towneley Mrs. Noah is the anti-Jovinian woman whose distaff is the mark of Eve, and who chides ‘like a leaky roof on a wet day’: the Chester Mrs. Noah – ‘Lord, that weomen bine crabbed aye!’ (line 105) adds the stereotypical drunkenness. Provided there is enough truth in the stereotype, whether it be in character or situation, in a funny way our reaction to this can be stronger than to the plight of an individual woman because it has been abstracted from her as a person and become part of a universal plight. An individual can be sympathised with purely as an individual but she will not become really moving unless she has something generic about her as well.

However, here we have an added complication. The battle is explicitly set up to divide the sexes in the audience, which suggests there is enough truth in the situation for them to respond. But if Mrs. Noah is played by a man, can it do so in the straightforward way that it seems in the script to suggest? Possibly yes and no. On one level, again, we recognise the real-life situation and respond to the truth and implications of that: and there is no difficulty, presumably, in the men lining up behind Noah, who is a man. On the other, theatrical, level, we have the loaded situation of a man disguised as a woman appealing to the women to line up behind him.

This seems a fifth-column sort of thing to do, designed to sell the women down the river. But I’m not sure that in fact is works or worked that way. As a woman, I personally don’t feel either offended or threatened by, for example, the transvestite sketches of the Two Ronnies or Les Dawson, because I feel that the laugh is on them: no matter how hard they try, they can’t ever be women: they are nothing more than a caricature. Also, since we recognise them through the disguise, their male characteristics are transmuted into undesirable female ones, and you can’t take them seriously as men any more. At Lancaster, the eruption of Mrs. Noah was greeted by a shriek of delight, partly because of ‘her’ ungainly size and threatening stance, partly because the audience recognised the actor and found it hysterical that he should have been transmuted into a woman.

(I recommend this to women as a useful teaching technique when they are feeling annoyed or browbeaten by the lordly behaviour of their male colleagues: imagine them in a skirt and high heels, and then imagine what kind of a woman they would be, and what would be said about them, if they behaved as women as they do as men.) Women are still not taken seriously and we belong to a society considerably less hierarchical than the one which gave birth to Mrs. Noah. No woman could take Mrs. Noah seriously, in that sense, either as a woman or as a man, which robs her of offence.

On the other hand, since we do recognise the situation, perhaps Mrs. Noah’s appeal to the women in the audience makes us recognise our allegiance but robs the battle of its seriousness. Instead, the conflict becomes a ritual in which honour is satisfied, because the subject has been given an airing, but which doesn’t seriously involve on a personal level.

I can only speculate what it does or did for the men in the audience. I think one strand may be the ritualisation of Misrule. I have said that physical combat is traditionally a male affair: men have created rules for it. Women have no rules for fighting, and so when like Mrs. Noah they do, the result is total anarchy. If the combatants are played by men, as with Carl and Mark Heap’s Gammer Gurton and Dame Chat (see Plate 5), we have a horrified and delighted vision of what could happen if women were also as strong as men. It is a glimpse into primal chaos.

I suspect that Mrs. Noah has a folk ancestor in the Betty, the man-woman figure who dressed up on New Year’s Eve to go rioting in disguise round the town, and who is inveighed against by the same Decretals and legal proclamations which inveigh against masks and face-blackenings, as well as incurring the full anathema of Deuteronomy 22:5.⁸³ They belong to the area of misrule which was both a release from inhibition and potentially dangerous. (The pantomime dame, who appears at the same time of year, seems to have succeeded to the first of her functions, whatever her actual history.) But mis-rule is only liberating if it is eventually brought under control, and the participants return at the end to their accustomed roles – so Mrs. Noah returns at the end of the series of fights to her role as obedient and compliant wife.

It also seems to give some men a chance to exorcise their own fears of the unknown. When one of them dresses up as a woman, it not only frees them from the rules imposed on their own sex in everyday life, it also seems to act as a ritual exorcism of their fear of the opposite sex. Peter Happé mentions the ‘fascination and horror’ with which he approached the playing of St. Joan. I don’t think you’d find a woman feeling the same about dressing up as a man:

Plate 5 Medieval Players: Gammer Gurton’s Needle, 1982. Gammer Gurton and Dame Chat (Mark and Carl Heap)

Photo: © Tessa Musgrave

she might revel in the freedom, but I don’t think there would be that sense of the unexplored:

A woman is a foreign land,
Of which, although he travel young,
A man can ne’er quite understand
The customs, practises, and tongue.84

Presumably in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with sex-roles so much more stereotyped, this sense of moving into strange and forbidden territory was even stronger.

But one of the characteristics of this exorcism seems to be that it must be expressed in crude and eventually belittling terms. How far could a man play a naturalistic Mrs. Noah? She has no coherent character: she is there to be a figure of anarchy and then to be tamed. Her aggression, her obstinacy, are not the psychological traits of an individual woman, they belong to the anti-woman stereotype. The more human the actor tries to make her, the more he goes against the grain of the role.

Alternatively, could a woman play a pantomime dame? I have never actually seen a sufficiently outrageous female Mrs. Noah. Can a woman caricature being that kind of woman? Surely whatever she does is going to come out as an attempt to naturalism? The nearest thing I have seen to a parody of a woman as woman is Marti Caine, who sends up the male stereotype of glamorous femininity. She does this by being in herself breathtakingly glamorous, but letting us see the real woman underneath, a down-to-earth Northern housewife with husband trouble, prone to ladders in the incredibly sexy tights. She epitomises our failure to live up to the glossy standards of what is expected of us as sex-objects. But Mrs. Noah is hardly a sex-object. Perhaps Nora Batty is more her mark, but Nora Batty would never surrender, and to Compo she is a sex-object: she comes across as a person, which makes this, even if remotely, possible. The trouble with both of them is that they are played by women, and the part of Mrs. Noah was written for a man.

Should women act in the mystery plays?

Just try to stop them. But there are certain things an actress and a director could bear in mind.

At Lancaster, a (male) colleague of mine suggested that since the plays were written by men for men to perform, they necessarily created women from the male point of view, and these were likely to be stereotypes, visions of impossible purity or impossible shrewishness. I would prefer, at least in the case of Mary, to call them archetypes, since ‘stereotype’ suggests a limited and unthinking characterisation. The playwrights have not individualised their serious women, in the sense of giving them unique and detailed quirks of character. What they have done is to work on role, function, and relationships, and left it to the personality of the actor to provide what individuality is necessary. The plays belong partly to the meditative tradition which interested itself in emotional responses and relationships, and where the cast is often predominantly female: the N-Town Visitation is in this tradition. I have found it most productive to work on these responses and relationships, rather than trying to create a ‘character’ for Mary: the character will arise naturally out of the situations. They may not be overtly expressed in the words; the Chester Purification does not immediately suggest all the patterns which we finally found in it, but it is based in a tradition of such strength and complexity that they were there subliminally waiting to come out.

The director and actress should therefore explore this side and not bother about ‘characterising’ her part, in the sense of making her quirkily individual. She will already probably show too much individuality by the very fact of being a woman. It could be no bad technique to think what the part would be like if it were played by a man. I have seen one successful young Mary, Kathy Despicht, who played the N-Town Mary at Oxford for us in 1970, and she succeeded because of her strength, coupled with strikingly Marian good looks. (She later played Eve with equal distinction.) Casting, as both Diana Wyatt and Henrietta Twycross-Martin suggest, is extremely important. If it is a choice between a softly pretty curly blonde and a strong-looking punk brunette, pick the punk – you can always make up the deficit with a wig.

The director should realise that what his actresses gain in warmth, they will lose in remoteness, and that the spiritual dimension of the action is in danger of disappearing: he should take steps to underline this.

Another suggestion made at Lancaster was that here we had a theatre without sex. I would not entirely agree, but as we have seen, it operates differently, and this is again something that an actress will find difficult. In the modern theatre, sexual attractiveness is part of the general attraction of the actor or actress, at least when they are also chosen for their good looks, and it is presumably impossible to command an actress to switch this part of her personality off completely. But she must strive at least to seem untouchable, which may mean restraining anything that may suggest softness or yieldingness, except, as Henrietta again pointed out, in non-sexual relationships as with the baby – or presumably with Joseph. (‘Superman loves everybody.’)

I have no suggestion for Mrs. Noah. I think she should be played by a man.

University of Lancaster

Notes

I should like to thank all those with whom I have discussed this topic, especially Richard Rastall, Richard and Marie Axton, Helen Phillips, Peter Meredith, Henrietta Twycross-Martin, Nick and Cicely Havely, and above all Sarah Carpenter, who has also patiently read and commented on several drafts of several sections of this article.

I should also like to thank the Archivist of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for allowing me to consult CCC MS 352, the collection of letters between Rainoldes and Gager.

1 Records of Early English Drama: Coventry, ed. by R.W. Ingram (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1981). Page references are to this edition.

2 REED: Coventry note to p. 121 (pp. 562–3).

3 REED: Coventry, p. 308; Oxford Dictionary of Christian Names, ed. by E. Withycombe, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), svv Frances, Francis.

4 Page references to Records of Early English Drama: Chester, ed. by Lawrence M. Clopper (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1979).

5 ‘“Item for a grone – iij d” – records and performances’, in Records of Early English Drama: Proceedings of the First Colloquium, ed. by JoAnna Dutka (Toronto: Records of Early English Drama, 1979), pp. 26–59, especially pp. 32–36 and note 40. He miscalculates on one point: the second Thomas Ellam, clerk and tailor, was probably about twenty-three, not ‘about thirty’. (Incidentally, William Loker in his late thirties may not be ‘an obvious type-casting for the aged Joseph’, but in this play, the ‘old man’ role is taken over by Simeon; our Joseph was in his early thirties, and fitted the role well, more because of character than age.) In 1567, the characters missing are Mary, Simeon, and the First Doctor, but there is only one actor’s name to share between them, Robert Rabon. He gets 16d, which puts him in the right salary range for both Mary and the First Doctor, but since he was made free in 1547, that would make him about forty-one at the time of playing, which does not sound like a Mary.

6 The Rolls of the Freemen of the City of Chester I: 1392–1700, ed. by J.H.E. Bennett (n.p.: Record Society for … Lancashire and Cheshire 51, 1906): the Ellams pp. 35, 48; Looker or Locker pp. 24, 49 (as father of Thomas Richardson); Rathbone (see n. 5 above) p. 23.

7 Plays and Players in Kent 1450–1642, ed. by Giles Dawson, Malone Society Collections 7 (1965), pp. 202–4.

8 Dawson, p. 189.

9 Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. by Norman Davis, EETS, SS 1 (1970), p. xxxii.

10 Anna J. Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1927), p. 273.

11 Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry (Coventry: Merridew, 1825), pp. 116–17

12 Richard Rastall, essay on ‘Music’ for forthcoming book on Contexts of Medieval English Drama edited by John Coldewey and Marianne Briscoe, to be published by Toronto University Press. He points out that the Mothers’ lullaby is restricted in pitch range in exactly the same way as I have described for speaking voices later in this article. I should like to thank Dr. Rastall for letting me see part of his article in typescript. [See Richard Rastall, ‘Music in the Cycle Plays’, in Contexts for Early English Drama, ed. by Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 192–218 Ed.]

13 Non-Cycle Plays, pp. 1–7.

14 REED: Coventry, pp. 235–6, 574.

15 REED: Chester, pp. 37–8.

16 See REED: Chester, pp. 65 (1561), 77 (1566–7), 85 (1568), where contributions to the upkeep of the pageant are recorded against names of members of the Guild: the women seem to be widows of Guild members who have succeeded to their membership.

17 The Macro Plays, ed. by Mark Eccles, EETS 262 (1969), p. 139. Line references to the play in this edition.

18 Macro Plays, p. xxxiv.

19 OED, sv harlot 4 (b); the Catholicon Anglicum (1483) glosses harlot as ioculatrix … pantomima … histrix. Earlier the term seems to have been applied to travelling players, tumblers, and jugglers in general: see sv (3), where ‘tumbleres and harlotis’ seem to go together. The ‘loose-living’ connotations of the word as attached to women seem partly to have been acquired via this connection with the professional stage. Allardyce Nicoll’s Masks, Mimes and Miracles (London: Harrap, 1931) makes random references to professional female entertainers, though most of his evidence is late classical (pp. 92–9).

20 REED: Coventry, pp. 152 (1539), 154–5 (1540) etc.

21 PhD thesis, University of York, 1983, to be published as REED: Beverley. PRO C47/46/446 (Certificates of St. Helen’s Guild, 1389) thesis 396–7; PRO C47/46/448 (Certificate of the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1389) thesis 402–4. I have slightly adapted her translations.

22 A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London 1485–1640, ed. by Jean Robertson and D.J. Gordon, Malone Society Collections 3 (1954), p. 14. One of the ‘virgens’ seems to have been called ‘Gallys doughter’ (15). In 1519 ‘2 Maidens’ appeared in the pageant of Our Lady and St. Elizabeth (4), but I have not seen the original document, and it is possible that these ‘maidens’ were boys, like the ones in 1464 (see below).

23 Malone Society Collections 3, p. 24.

24 Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, 3 vols, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1980), I, 55: from Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana. My translation.

25 H.N. Hillebrand, The Child Actors (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964) gives an excellent summary of the use of children in pageants (pp. 28–32), and Wickham, Early English Stages, provides further information and documentary evidence in his chapter on ‘Pageant Theatres of the Streets’. Gordon Kipling is writing a book on Royal Entries which will provide yet more information. [See Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) Ed.] The earliest recorded pageants after the Coronation of Richard II include the Reconciliation of the king with the citizens of London in 1392, when he was greeted at the Conduit by a castle hanging in the air from which descended: ‘juvenis formosaque virgo / Hic velut angelus est, haec coronata fuit’. (Richard Maydiston, De concordia inter regem Ric. II et civitatem London, quoted by Wickham, Early English Stages, p. 69). Henry V on his return from Agincourt was greeted by ‘a choir of most beautiful young maidens’ who sang to him as the daughters of Israel did to David returning from the slaying of Goliath (Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. by Frank Taylor and John Roskell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 108–11).

26 Quoted Wickham, Early English Stages, I, 87.

27 Hillebrand, Child Actors, p. 29; Wickham, Early English Stages, I, 106. Hillebrand quotes a pageant at Norwich in 1575 where Elizabeth was greeted by ‘eyght small women chyldren spinning worsted yarne, and at the other side as many knittyng of worsted yarne hose’ (32); one suspects that the girls had to be employed because they knew how to spin and knit.

28 Wickham, Early English Stages, I, 330–1.

29 Wickham, Early English Stages, I, 97.

30 Malone Society Collections 3, p. 29.

31 REED: Chester, pp. 215 (1605) and 471.

32 REED: Chester, p. 135.

33 REED: Chester, p. 198, see note 83.

34 Mill, Mediaeval Plays in Scotland, p. 163.

35 Edward Hall, Hall’s Chronicle (London: J. Johnson, 1809; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1965), p. 514 (1509/10): see also pp. 519, 526, 535 etc. For an extended discussion of these entertainments, and of Cornish’s part in them, see Gordon Kipling, ‘Henry VII and the Origins of Tudor Patronage’ in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. by Guy F. Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton N.J.: Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 117–64.

36 See especially Hillebrand, The Child Actors, and Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).

37 I make no attempt at thoroughness. Much of my information comes from The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages: Texts and Documents in Translation, ed. by Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, EDAM Monograph Series 4 (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1983). W.M. Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978) has a useful if necessarily brief summary in Chapter 7 (pp. 199–200).

38 In the Low Countries, my evidence relates mainly to street pageantry of various kinds, where the same rules seem to apply as in the English street pageants: for example, at Leuven in 1495 ‘Barbara, the daughter of the landlord of the Star’ played the Virgin Mary seated on top of the Jesse Tree (Edward Van Even, L’Omgang de Louvain (Louvain: C.-J. Fonteyn, 1863), p. 31, note 2).

39 William Prynne, Histriomastix (London: Michael Sparke, 1633; repr. New York: Garland, 1974), pp. 214–5. He also mentions ‘they have now their female-Players in Italy, and other forraigne parts’.

40 Gustave Cohen, Histoire de la Mise en Scène dans le Théâtre Religieux Français du Moyen Age (Paris: Champion, 1951), p. 206. I have not been able to get hold of the details of the Romans production.

41 Petit de Julleville, Les Mystères, 2 vols (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1968) I, 127.

42 Philippe de Mézières: Campaign for the Feast of Mary’s Presentation, ed. by William E. Coleman, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts (Toronto: Pontifical Institute, 1981), pp. 85, 88. A translation of the staging instructions is in Meredith and Tailby, Staging, pp. 207–24. The Virgin Mary herself is played by a small girl of three or four.

43 Gustave Cohen, Le Livre de Conduite du Régisseur et Le Compte des Dépenses pour le Mystère de la Passion joué à Mons en 1501 (Paris: Publication Séries bleue, 1925), pp. c–cv.

44 Petit de Julleville, Mystères, II, 147–9. The list of ‘noms de junes filz et junes filles juant plusieurs parchons’ follows that of the adult actors. They seem to be divided according to sex, though Cole Labequin, who appears at the end of the girls’ list, is surely a boy?

45 Petit de Julleville, Mystères, II, 32.

46 Petit de Julleville, Mystères, II, 48.

47 Petit de Julleville, Mystères, II, 52.

48 Meredith and Tailby, Staging, pp. 55–6. However, in the Castilian Trial in Heaven God was doubled with Our Lady, and two of the Four Daughters of God with two of the shepherds (p. 54). In Florence in 1439, the part of the Virgin Mary in the Annunciation and Ascension was played by ‘a beautiful youth richly dressed in a maiden’s clothes with a crown on his head … very much like the Virgin Mary to look at’ (p. 243).

49 Meredith and Tailby, Staging, p. 55.

50 See note 39 for edition.

51 John Rainoldes, Th’Overthrow of Stage Playes (Middelburgh: Schilders, 1599; repr. New York: Garland, 1974). For Rainoldes and this controversy, see F.S. Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), pp. 230–46, and also T.J. Manning, The Staging of Plays at Christ Church, Oxford, 1582–1592 (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan 1972; published University Microfilms, Ann Arbor), Chapters 4–7.

52 For Gager, see Boas, University Drama, pp. 165–246 passim, and also Manning.

53 Rainoldes, p. 45.

54 Rainoldes, p. 104.

55 Stephen Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (London: Thomas Gosson, 1582; repr. New York: Garland, 1972), sig E 3^v.

56 REED: Chester, p. 67 (1561).

57 REED: Coventry, p. 277 (1576). In Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1518/19 the choristers playing a Hortulanus play paid out among other things pro crinibus mulieribus (Chambers, Medieval Stage II, 389).

58 Petit de Julleville, Mystères, II, 53. A friend of his ‘so alike that I was often taken for him’, who played one of the saint’s maidens, was then fifteen.

59 Rainoldes, pp. 78, 107, 105.

60 Kenneth Charlton, Education in Renaissance England (London: Routledge, 1965), p. 131.

61 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593), ed. by Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977), p. 66; ‘her’ costume pp. 130–1.

62 Gosson, Playes Confuted, sig E 3^v.

63 Rainoldes, p. 122.

64 Rainoldes, pp. 34, 35.

65 REED: Coventry, pp. 122 (1524), 126 (1527).

66 Records of Plays and Players in Lincolnshire, ed. by Stanley J. Kahrl, Malone Society Collections 8 (1974, for 1969), p. 49.

67 Jacobus a Voragine, Legenda Aurea, ed. by T. Graesse (Leipzig, 1846), p. 589 (Nativity of the BVM).

68 Publius Pampinius Statius, Achilleid, ed. by J.H. Mozley Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1928) II, 534 (Bk I, lines 339–40).

69 Gosson, Playes Confuted, sig E 3^v.

70 MS Corpus Christi College 352, pp. 54–5.

71 MS CCC 352, p. 56.

72 Prynne, Histriomastix, p. 206.

73 See note 21.

74 See note 27.

75 See note 26.

76 Children of the Revels, p. 103.

77 Sir Richard Baker, Theatrum Redivivum or The Theatre Vindicated (London: Francis Eglesfield, 1662; repr. New York: Garland, 1973), pp. 22–3, a lively and sensible contribution to the discussion which gives the effect of someone thinking about the nature of drama in his contemporary theatre rather than chewing over old arguments.

78 Gager, MS CCC 352, p. 57.

79 Berthold Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’ (59), in Brecht on Theatre, ed. by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1978), p. 197. I would like to thank Sarah Carpenter for this reference.

80 The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 116–17. The Jeu d’Adam of course presents Eve fully clothed.

81 English Mystery Plays, p. 117.

82 Legenda Aurea, cap 37, p. 164.

83 See Chambers, Medieval Stage I, chapters on ‘The Mummers’ Play’ and ‘Masks and Misrule’, for scattered references, also appendices on ‘Winter Prohibitions’ (II, 290–305); also The English Folk Play (OUP, 1933) pp. 5, 125; Alan Brody, The English Mummers and their Plays (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 20–21 and 61; Mill Mediaeval Plays in Scotland, pp. 16, 163, 239, 242, 246, 263, 282. She points out (p. 23) that there is no Maid Marian mentioned in the Robin Hood plays; David Wiles, The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Cambridge: Brewer, 1981) thinks that the Maid’s role was taken over by a man in the early sixteenth century (pp. 23–4), after which we got Nashe’s heroine ‘his face handsomely muffled with a diaper-napkin to cover his beard’ (p. 5).

84 Coventry Patmore, cited in The Penguin Book of Quotations, which throws up an alarming number of quotations on this theme.