N-Town Plays

As its name might suggest, though, it was once the property of the 17th-century antiquarian Sir Robert Bruce Cotton and was housed in his large library.

[1] He was mistaken in both cases, but that mistake has proven very difficult to correct; the name Ludus Coventriae persists in the secondary and critical literature well into the 20th century.

[2] The true nature of the manuscript has been hidden by the fact that the scribe arranged all the episodes in "chronological order" starting with Creation and ending with Judgment, simulating an episodic play presenting salvation history as in the two northern civic cycles from York and Chester.

A final scribal feature of this manuscript is the stage directions which reflect a curious mixture of intent.

They seem to function as much as an aid to help a reader visualise the action as actual practical instructions to a director.

The details of costume and action in the stage directions in the Passion Play suggest a description of an actual performance.

Stephen Spector cautiously writes "The linguistic evidence indicates that the codex was recorded principally or exclusively by scribes trained in East Anglia" (Spector, xxix)[3] Meredith more positively asserts that The Mary Play comes from Norfolk (Meredith, 6).

It is possible, again on the basis of the paper, that the Assumption play, written separately by a different scribe and bound into the main MS., was copied slightly earlier.

The majority of the plays that make up the N-Town Cycle are based (some rather tenuously) on the Bible, while the others are taken from Roman Catholic legend, apocryphal sources and folk tradition.

The Trial of Mary and Joseph play has been identified as a pastiche of the East Anglian ecclesiastical court system.

Some recent published editions of the N-town plays include: A facsimile of the manuscript from the British Library was also published: The N-Town Plays: a facsimile of British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D VIII.

In 2014, "The Last Post" was performed by the Lincoln Mystery Plays company at The Drill Hall, based on the true story of the eight local Beechey brothers, five of whom were killed in World War I.Lincolnshire Archives.

These guild productions flourished over 200 years in English cities until Cromwell and the Protestant Reformation ended the tradition.

The company performed in Neustadt, Germany; Viterbo, Rome & Camerino Italy; Perpignan, France and Oregon, in the United States in 1989.