Pageants and Miracle/Mystery/Passion/Saint Plays

A 12th century Spanish mystery play.

The manuscript of the 14th-century mystery play 'The Day of Judgment' includes roles for 94 characters, 89 miniatures depicting the action of the play and three musical pieces.

We cannot revisit the original performances of the York Mystery Cycle in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, either to see how the plays themselves were staged, or to interview the people who put them on or who watched them. We have, however, a considerable body of surviving evidence surrounding these vanished performances, their organisation, and their audiences.

Scene from a medieval play c.1460 of the martyrdom of St. Apollonia.
Plan of the Lucerne Passion Play, 2nd day, by Renward Cysat, 1583.
Plan of the staging for The Castle of Perseverance, c.1425.
Middle English pageant wagon: Scene of Christ before Pilate.
A reconstruction of a pageant wagon.
Stage used in the Valenciennes Passion Play, 1547.
Rhetoric Stage, Antwerp 1561.
Mummers' Play at Haddon Hall.

The religious plays of the 12th and 13th centuries; the Miracle Plays and other religious dramas of the 14th century; the Mystery Plays of the 15th and 16th centuries; and other difficult-to-classify religious plays.

Texts of ''The Castle of Perseverance'' and the N-Town Plays.

Links to online versions and summaries of the Wakefield Cycle and the York Cycle.

From the Catholic Encyclopedia.

A gentle introduction to the York Corpus Christi Play, so that readers may better understand the significance of the computer simulation I conducted. This is also the document I would have liked to have read, before I began my own study of the York plays as a graduate student. PSim (Pageant Simulator) 2.1 for Java, a teaching aid and research tool, is computer software that models the motion of pageant wagons during a simulation of medieval England's York Corpus Christi Pageant.

This site maps the streets, sites, and significant boundaries of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century London. You will see many of the theatres and landmarks of Shakespeare's time, and learn about the history and culture of the city in which he lived and worked.