N-Town Cycle | Peter Meredith (essay date 1990)
Peter Meredith (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: An introduction to The Passion Play from the N. Town Manuscript, edited by Peter Meredith, Longman, 1990, pp. 1-36.
[In an excerpt to his introduction to this edition, Meredith discusses the staging and general themes of the Passion Play.]
Play and pageants
It is sometimes implied or stated that the present Passion Play is a revision of earlier pageants (those described in the Proclamation) to make a continuous play. While it is impossible to disprove this it seems to me that in the case of Passion I and the first part of Passion II (up to I. 880) this is unlikely. The demonstrable overlaps between the episodes in the play and the Proclamation are not numerous. Passion I deals with the events from the beginning of the Conspiracy against Christ to his taking in the garden of Gethsemane. The scribe has numbered the play as a series of pageants, 25 to 27...
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