The Procession and the Play: Some Light on Fifteenth-Century Drama in Chester

Summary

Although the fifteenth century, based on evidence of the York plays and the work of the so-called Wakefield Master, is popularly viewed as the heyday of cycle drama production, scholars of the Chester plays have long suggested that the drama's structure underwent a major shift in performance format in the first part of the sixteenth century. Lawrence Clopper, for example, states:

Between 1521 and 1532 the play was sufficiently altered that it came to be designated by the plural. The decade 1521–32 proves … to be of great significance in the history of the cycle.

The period alluded to here by Clopper comes hard on the heels of the granting of the Great Charter in 1506 — a year which seems to have signaled a rise in civic fortunes for Chester by establishing it as a county in its own right. Indeed, the appearance of the “Early” Banns and the issuing of Newhall's Proclamation (1531–32) during this period indicate nothing less than a reintroduction and reinvention of the Chester “play.” In fact, the “cycle,” as the dramatic sequence is popularly known to us, with its performances at separate stations, apparently on pageant wagons, on three successive days during Whitsun week, is clearly a creature of this era.