N-Town Cycle | G. K. Chesterton (essay date 1920)
G. K. Chesterton (essay date 1920)
SOURCE: "The Humor of King Herod," in The Uses of Diversity: A Book of Essays, Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1920, pp. 96–100.
[In the following essay, Chesterton relates the so-called Coventry Nativity play to more familiar Renaissance dramatic conventions and asserts that the proximity of comedy and tragedy began with medieval miracle plays.]
If I say that I have just been very much amused with a Nativity play of the fourteenth century it is still possible that I may be misunderstood. What is more important, some thousand years of very heroic history will be misunderstood too. It was one of the Coventry cycle of mediæval plays, loosely called the Coventry Mysteries, similar to the Chester Mysteries and the Towneley Mysteries.
And I was not amused at the blasphemy of something badly done, but at a buffoonery uncommonly well done. But, as I said at the time, the educated seem to be very ignorant...
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