A wealth of details in civic documents, guild accounts and church records survives for the organisation and performance of the York Mystery Cycle and the text survives complete in one manuscript which clearly indicates its provenance from York. Although this material gives many indications as to the method of staging the plays and to the status the cycle had in the life of the city, it does offer certain contradictions and is still far from providing a clear, full picture of the presentation of the cycle. The role of the trade guilds is quite clear and both civic records and the manuscript show the assignation of the individual plays to particular guilds.

The York material also records the method of financing the plays through 'pageant silver' collected from each member of the guild and augmented by contributions from fines for shoddy work or breaking guild rules. Each guild appointed a 'pageant master' who was responsible each year for the preparation of the play and who organised repairs to the pageant wagon, costumes, the purchase of items necessary for the performance, selection of actors and holding of rehearsals. A document surviving from the accounts of the York Mercers' guild, which produced the spectacular Last Judgement Play, shows that wagons could be highly decorated and contain machinery for an actor playing God, or an icon of God, to be raised and lowered from the floor of the wagon playing space. Maintenance of and responsibility for the wagon was therefore a demanding job for the pageant master.

All the details in the York records point to a 'true processional' manner of performance whereby the individual pageant wagons of each craft guild on which the plays were performed gathered at the Gates of Holy Trinity Church, Micklegate, at 4.30 a.m. on Corpus Christi Day and were then drawn to a number of sites, or 'stations', in the city where they stopped and performed their play, ending up outside the Church of All Saints, Pavement…. Despite these details some crit ics have felt that such a method of staging is not practically possible, for the time required to perform sequentially the 52 pageants of the York Cycle at the ten to sixteen stations which are indicated in various years would far exceed a dawn-to-midnight playing period on Corpus Christi Day. Others have felt that even if this were the case for York, there is no reason to assume that this was the method of staging the cycle plays in other cities. Until we discover a full eye-witness account of the Corpus Christi plays in performance, clearly dated and referring to a named city, this kind of debate can never firmly be closed, but for York at least it seems reasonable to respect the records we do have and accept the 'true-processional' mode of staging for the York Cycle.

A record relating to the Crucifixion Play gives support to the theory that all the plays were performed at all the stations. In 1422 representatives of the Guild of the Painters and Stainers and the Guild of the Pinners and Latteners (workers with brass or similar metals) went before the Mayor and Council to propose an amalgamation of their two pageants as 'the play on the day of Corpus Christi…is impeded more than usual because of the multitude of pageants…knowing that the matter of both pageants could be shown together in one pageant for the shortening of the play rather profitably…'. It was decided that the Painters' and Stainers' pageant 'should be…removed' and that the Pinners' and Latteners' pageant be maintained with the addition of 'the speeches which were previously performed…in the pageant of the Painters and Stainers'. Both guilds were to be responsible for the financing of the new combined play. The stretching and nailing of Christ on the Cross, which had previously been the responsibility of the Painters and Stainers, was added to the raising up of the Crucified [Christ] on the Mount, which had been the responsibility of the Pinners' and Latteners' Guild, to produce the play which has survived in the manuscript of the York Cycle as No. XXXV or Crucifixio Christ, The Crucifixion.

The Crucifixion or Passion Play represents the central climactic point of the Mystery Cycle to which all the preceding action and all that follows is directly connected. After the Old Testament plays have demonstrated the Fall of Man and the foreshadowing of his Salvation through Christ, the Nativity plays have shown the birth of the Saviour and the plays of the Life of Christ have demonstrated His divine nature, in the Passion Play Christ is killed by those who do not recognise His true nature and refuse the offer of Salvation He represents. Following the Crucifixion, the plays of the Harrowing of Hell show the first effects of Salvation in redeeming the patriarchs from their captivity in Hell and the breaking of Satan's dominion over the dead, the Resurrection shows Christ affirmed in His divinity and the final Day of Judgement illustrates the consequences of the choices now possible through Christ's sacrifice. The Passion Play is also the illustration of the Corpus Christi feast. The physical body of Christ is sacrificed on the Cross so that mankind can be redeemed for the sins originated in the Garden of Eden which the Mass celebrates in the consecration of the host, the symbolic body of Christ, in the Communion ritual. In previous centuries the emphasis in the church year had been on the Resurrection, as indeed the earliest liturgical dramas seem to have been those created around the discovery of Christ's resurrection by the three Maries, but by the time of the Mystery Cycles focus had passed to the Crucifixion as the sequence most worthy of attention and celebration in both personal piety and art. The liturgical drama had not represented the Crucifixion but had celebrated the Resurrection for its focus was celebratory rather than participatory and didactic. Within the liturgical Quem quaeritis pieces the 'actors' and 'audience' are already participants within a sacred ritual, the Mass, and are already aware, through their very presence, of what they should do in order to live as God would have them live and thereby attain salvation. The liturgical drama is perhaps a more complacent drama in that it concentrates on what has already happened with no attempt to relate this to the actual lives of those present. In contrast, the Mystery Cycle plays focus on the present, showing the past of the biblical events to be integrally connected both to the present of the audience and actors and also to their future in terms of salvation or damnation. The cycle plays work within 'God's time' which is universal and contemporaneous, fixing the individual within the flow of Christian history. They are an active, didactic drama.

In order to appreciate the importance of Christ's sacrifice, which occurred in a past specific time and place, to appreciate the possibility of salvation which it offered to Christians of all times and places and to apprehend its relevance, late medieval theology and practical religion recommended the intense concentration on and contemplation of the Passion of Christ. Franciscan theology in particular exhorted the consideration of the practical details of the Crucifixion and Christ's suffering as a means of understanding the immense gift which the Sacrifice offered to mankind. The preaching of the Franciscan friars, who travelled extensively throughout the country giving sermons in churches or wherever a crowd might be gathered, was an important means of spreading this idea to all levels of the general populace. Works written for the private consumption of the more highly educated and pious such as the various versions of the Meditationes Vitae Christi, translated into English by Nicholas Love as the Mirrour of the Blessyd Lyf of Jesu Christ (1410), explicitly recommended the contemplation of the minute details of the Crucifixion as a meditation aid to understanding the nature of Christ's sacrifice and to appreciate the potential of Salvation which it represented:

who soo desyreth with thappostle Poule to be Joyeful in the crosse of oure lorde ihesu crist / and in the blessid passion / he must with hely meditacion theryn for the grete mysteryes & al the processe therof yf they were inwardly consyderyd with alle the inward mynde and beholdyng of mannes soule / as I fully trowe they shold brynge that beholder in to a newe state of grace. For to hym that wold serche the passion of oure lorde with all his herte and all his inward affection there sholde come many deuoute felynges and sterynges that he neuer supposed before.

To a certain extent this interest in consideration of details was part of the general intellectual climate in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The nominalist philosophers at Oxford in the early fourteenth century had introduced the idea of the importance of details in defining the individuality of things and of experience of these details as being the key to reality. Something could be understood through direct personal experience of it. The same focus on and exploration of details can be seen in the visual arts of the fifteenth century as attention moved from the earlier exclusive concentration on the symbolic, iconographical element or action which is characteristic of Romanesque art. In fifteenth century art, and in the drama, the symbolic action does not disappear, but is surrounded by a greater display of contextualising place; it no longer takes place in an abstract, symbolic environment, but in perceptually visible and identifiable surroundings. Detail is not added merely for decorative effect, but in order to relate the event it portrays to the life of those who look at the picture. In the same way, the cycle plays illustrate the events of Christian history with the details of character, dialogue, humour, pomp and cruelty which can relate them more immediately to the lives of the spectators. The portrayal is more immediate for drama enables the enactment of sequences of events, showing cause and effect and progression, which pictorial representation cannot achieve so effectively. The involvement of the individual spectators is more intense and effective as the characters speak directly to them.

The Passion Play is the moment of the cycle which most directly affects the audience and which doctrinally most requires audience-involvement. The spectators must experience the sacrifice of Christ to understand its relevance but they must also be made aware of how they too are involved in the killing of Christ as representatives of Fallen Man whom He died to save. This twofold experience and recognition is achieved in the Mystery Cycle Passion Plays through extensive use of brutal physical detail and the use of executioners, torturers or simple soldiers who are ordered to carry out the Crucifixion by their leaders. In the York Crucifixion Play the religious and political authorities are entirely absent and the only characters are Christ and four soldiers who go about the practical business of performing the Crucifixion. The use of these four 'rude mechanicals' achieves both the doctrinal points of the play: the details of their work stress the suffering of Christ and their interest in their work, their banter and their blatant unawareness of any kind of moral responsibility for what they are doing establishes the implication and guilt of Common Man in the Crucifixion.

The four soldiers go about the Crucifixion purely in terms of a job that has to be done. They are unnamed, like almost all of the non-biblical characters in the cycle plays, standing as representatives of Common Man who follows his orders and does his job without worrying about any higher moral responsibility or indeed the moral consequences of what he is doing. For them, crucifying Christ is merely a problem of stretching and nailing which they affront with hammers, nails and ropes and any unwillingness to perform it or doubts that they might have stem exclusively from the amount of effort involved or the fact that the equipment they have to work with has been badly prepared. Their concerns are all physical and practical, with no spiritual or moral overtones and this is already an indication of their status in the moral framework of the Mystery plays. Like Cain, they perceive the physical rather than the spiritual import of what they do; like Fallen Man, they cannot recognise the spiritual universe represented by the possibility of grace. When they attempt to fix Christ's hands to the cross they discover that the nail-holes are badly placed and too widely spaced to accommodate His arms. The same problem occurs when they attempt to fix His feet, for the hole has been made too low down on the Cross (11. 107-12, 126-7). 4 soldier remarks that the 'work is all unmeet', but he is referring only to the bad workmanship they are being confronted with and must attempt to adapt in order to perform an efficient crucifixion, not to any moral qualms about the justice or cruelty of the Crucifixion of Christ. It is left to the spectators, the potentially saved, to grasp the extra, spiritual, meaning to his words.

When the soldiers have managed to nail Christ to the Cross, having overcome the practical problems of the wrongly-spaced holes by the cunning use of ropes to stretch His limbs longer to meet the holes (ll. 113-14, 129-40) they next have to confront the task of raising the Cross, with the crucified Christ on it, so that it stands on 'yon hill' as they have been instructed. They are less than enthusiastic at the prospect of such heavy work and once they have begun (1. 186), they begin to make loud complainst at how much they are suffering under the weight:

For-great harm have I hent:
My shoulder is asunder….
This cross and I in two must twin,
Else breaks my back asunder soon.
(11. 189-94)

There is no concern expressed for the suffering of Christ which is obviously many times greater, the soldiers are interested only in the pain that they feel, in the physical effects of their work, not in the spiritual implications of what they are doing. Of course, to the members of the audience watching the play the contrast in suffering is very apparent, and the attention given by the soldiers to their petty suffering underlines all the more the enormity of Christ's physical suffering as well as the spiritual implications of this which are evident to the privileged point of view of the audience. Once again the soldiers can only perceive how their work affects them materially, while the audience can appreciate the effects that this 'job' will have on the spiritual destiny not only of the four soldiers but of all mankind. When the soldiers complain of aching backs the audience can identify on a personal level, remembering that in performing similar tasks of lifting or stretching they too have suffered such aches or pains, or would suffer them and no doubt similarly voice their pain. In this way, Christ's silence is all the more dramatic and revealing. He who suffers infinitely more is silent while those who cause him the pain make loud moans and groans. Christ's silence is a motif which appears in all the plays of the Passion sequence, from the Arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane through the Trials and Buffetings, and is indeed attested to in the scriptural narrative. Christ makes no answer to his accusers either to deny their claims or to attempt to save Himself. The contrast here between the response to pain of the four soldiers and Christ, particularly with respect to the amount of pain and proportional response, is perhaps the most moving and effective dramatic use of this silence.

Throughout their work, the soldiers treat Christ merely as another piece of their equipment, as an object rather than a person and certainly not as a God. Once the job is done and the Cross finally fixed securely with wedges so that it remains upright without wobbling (11. 229-48), the soldiers can relax a little and turn to Christ to ask Him, mockingly, what He thinks of their handiwork. Once again the irony is there for the more informed and perceptive spectator who can understand the larger meaning of the 'work' they have 'wrought' and it is to the audience, rather than to the soldiers, that Christ replies. His answer is concerned with the wider issues of their 'work' and calls on 'All men that walk by way or street' to contemplate the soldiers' handiwork and to think about it carefully, just as the friars and the writers of the Meditationes Vitae Christi invited the pious to feel experientially the details of the Crucifixion and the pain that Christ must have experienced.

All men that walk by way or street,
Take tent ye shall no travail tine;
Behold my head, my hands, my feet,
And fully feel now, ere ye fine,
If any mourning may be meet,
Or mischief measured unto mine.
(11. 253-8)

In the context of the staging of the pageants, of course, the men that walk by the way or street are the spectators themselves, gathered around the pageant wagon in the streets of York. Christ then asks for forgiveness, in the play time for the soldiers who have nailed Him to the Cross, but in God's time for all mankind, including the audience, and for salvation:

Therefore, my Father, I crave,
Let never their sins be sought,
But see their souls to save.
(11. 262-4)

The involvement of the audience now passes from direct identification with the soldiers to a sequence of suspense and hope engendered and inevitably denied by foreknowledge of the story. The soldiers remain unaware of what they are caught up in even after Christ's speech, and their response demonstrates yet again their lack of recognition both of who Christ is and what He represents. The audience is necessarily struck by this refusal to appreciate what is happening, for from their privileged position in God's time they understand the implication. The soldiers begin to associate Christ with rumours they have heard of someone who claimed to be God's son and said he would destroy the Temple (1. 273). This offers a tantalising hope to the audience that recognition is imminent, but once again the soldiers are capable of perceiving only the physical and not the spiritual, for they reject such claims stating that Christ had neither enough physical strength nor sufficient followers to knock the Temple down and build it up again. It is the audience who understands the metaphorical, spiritual meaning. The soldiers' last words on the matter are that they have done as Pilate ordered them to do, a final refusal to accept any kind of responsibility for what they have done.

Like the Shepherds as ordinary representatives of Common Man to whom the possibility of salvation is first offered, the soldiers or torturers are representatives of ordinary working men who refuse to recognise and accept this possibility. They can be seen as the negative image of the Shepherds and are just as important to the doctrinal technique of the cycle plays. Each individual Christian is responsible for his or her own destiny in making the decision whether or not to accept the possibility of salvation which Christ's sacrifice represents. The Shepherds accept, the soldiers do not. The Shepherds recognised the Christ-child as the Son of God and worshipped Him, the soldiers refuse to consider His God-head and nail Him to the Cross. These are in essence the two choices available to individual Christians and the cycle plays offer portrayals of these two groups of characters which will ease the identification of the audience with them and thus help them to see that the choice is relevant to their lives too.

The dramatic expression of the Crucifixion as a job of work and the practical exponents of it as ordinary working men assure audience identification. The medieval trade and craftsmen watching the play could apply details of the work and problems of adapting awkward materials to their own life and work. Many in the medieval audience and indeed today could recognise the concern only with the present moment of their work and the refusal to think about what would happen to their work, or the stage in a long piece of work for which they were responsible, once it left their hands. Responsibility is often deferred to those higher in the labour hierarchy whose task it is to plan, judge and consider consequences. The four York soldiers are quite clear about the requirements of their job and their position in the order of authority. When 1 Soldier begins to get authoritarian and tell the others what to do they are quick to resent such a presumption: 'Yea, thou commandest lightly as a lord; / Come help to hale him, with ill hail!' (11. 115-16).

Although the soldiers are not given individual names they are by no means types or abstractions. Their dialogue is recognisably realistic and personalities can be seen through their responses. 1 Soldier appears to be the foreman of the gang, or at least takes on this role. He orders the work to start, tells the others what to do, asks how they are getting on and suggests solutions to the technical problems they encounter. He also noticeably does less hard work than the others, choosing the head of the Cross to hold (11. 87-8) and later preferring to order rather than help haul (11. 117-18). 4 Soldier is the most conscientious and it is he who notices the defects in their equipment and who then wishes to report the job done to their superiors as soon as they have attached Christ to the Cross (11. 151-2).

Staging requirements seem to have influenced the number of soldiers in the York play. There are four soldiers in the play rather than the standard grouping of three used in both scriptural narrative and other plays presumably because a minimum of four men were required to raise the Cross, one at the head, one at the foot and one each side. The actors in the play lift the Cross upright from the ground where it lies as they attach Christ to it to slot it into a mortice which holds if firmly for all to see. The mechanics of this elevation must have been carefully worked out and its execution represented a testimony to the skill of the actors and their guild just as much as it did within the play time to the four soldiers carrying out their commission from Pilate. The play itself has no stage directions and the sequence of actions and techniques involved must be drawn out from the dialogue. No list of props or details of the wagon used survive in the records of the Pinners' and Painters' Guild, but from the text the minimum properties appear to be a wooden cross, hammers, nails, a mortice, wedges, ropes and for the final section of the play where the soldiers squabble over Christ's clothes, a coat.

The soldiers refer several times to a hill on which they are supposed to mount the Cross and the 1415 description of the play in the general plays list refers to the raising of the Cross 'upon the mount of Calvary'. The stretching and nailing section of the play must surely have taken place on the wagon itself so that it would be clearly visible to the spectators, rather than on the ground in front of the wagon. The elevation of the Cross could also be played here and the slipping of it into a mortice fixed onto the wagon floor. Unless the Pinners and Painters had two wagons, one of which was smaller, like the Mercers' second Hell-mouth wagon, and represented Mount Calvary, it is difficult to imagine how the hill references in the dialogue could be realised in practical staging terms. It is unlikely that all the dialogue with reference to carrying the Cross to 'yon hill' and the lengthy complaints about how heavy it is would be inappropriate to the action. Because of this it seems likely that the sequence from lines 211 to 218 could cover carrying the Cross either onto the wagon from the ground or down from the wagon and onto a secondary wagon representing the mount. Lines 219 to 225 could then represent the final upright elevation of the Cross and the sliding of it into 'this mortice here' (1. 220). The iconographical importance of Christ on the Cross seems to require that this final image be well visible, on an elevated place, to the whole audience.

The fixing of Christ to the Cross on the ground, or 'supine Crucifixion' was already a common iconographical and narrative feature and many visual representations of the Passion also show ropes being used to stretch Christ's limbs and the holes in the cross being obviously too widely spaced. The technique is also featured in the Cornish Cycle Passion Play and it is interesting to note that the Chester Passion Play was performed by the Guild of the Ironmongers and Ropers. It is difficult to say whether drama drew its inspiration here from the narrative or visual tradition or vice versa, but the use of ropes was certainly necessary in the cycle plays in order to attach the actor playing Christ firmly to the Cross. The stretching motif may have been introduced in order to give a motivation for the necessary introduction of these ropes. Although the actor playing Christ no doubt did suffer physical discomfort, it is clear that actual nails were not used to fix his body to the Cross in performance. The image of the Crucifixion was extremely diffuse in fourteenth and fifteenth-century religious art, yet the physical demonstration of the fixing, elevation and hanging of a live actor representing Christ must have been a much more effective and emotionally striking portrayal than that offered in the visual arts. The associated immediacy for the audience of witnessing the Crucifixion in the familiar surroundings of their own town, played out by people they knew socially or commercially is not to be underestimated in the creation of strong religious feeling and as exhortation to repentance and God-fearing life.

The use of realistic details in order to evoke emotional apprehension is used in all the plays of the York Passion sequence and indeed in many other of the Mystery Cycle plays, but only in the Crucifixion Play is it used primarily to create identification between the members of the audience and the physical perpetrators of the killing of Christ. In the other plays of the York sequence the details are not so clearly physical but rather psychological and this has led critics to identify them as the work of one author, now generally known as the York Realist. This playwright was careful to add details which motivated or explained decisions or actions and followed through 'processes of behaviour' so that the events became comprehensible to the audience in terms of individual characters doing certain things for reasons stemming from their lives and situations rather than merely because they were part of a preordained symbolic sequence. The Crucifixion Play is not generally considered to form part of the canon of the York Realist, … and in this play the realistic details are physical rather than psychological and are used both to heighten the emotional effect of the Crucifixion and to force an awareness of direct identification with the soldiers and thereby an implicit involvement in the responsibility for Christ's sacrifice.

Mankind's responsibility for the Crucifixion comes about because the Fallen world to which we belong is the result of Adam and Eve's original sin. In this sense the Crucifixion is a necessary corollary to the Fall of Man and as mankind sinned once in the Garden of Eden, so mankind will sin again in killing the Redeemer. The significant difference this time is that there will now be a possible happy outcome for those who choose to recognise Christ's sacrifice. Following the Fall, even the good souls were trapped in Hell from whence Christ liberates them after the Crucifixion in the Harrowing of Hell. Paradoxically, if Christ had not been crucified then mankind could not have been saved, but the Crucifixion was a result of mankind's choice, not of God's predetermination, a choice was made not to recognise good but to follow evil just as Adam had the choice not to follow the evil of the serpent's offer of the apple and disobedience in Eden. In Christ's first speech in the Crucifixion Play, he points to the inevitable link between His sacrifice and Adam's sin (ll. 49-60). He does not plead to be spared the pain of the Crucifixion but for His suffering to gain defence for mankind from evil:

That they for me may favour find;
And from the fiend them fend,
So that their souls be safe
In wealth withouten end.
(ll. 56-9)

The York Passion sequence clearly demonstrates that the responsibility for the Crucifixion is mankind's and not Satan's, though the Chester sequence suggests that Satan was principally to blame. The Dream of Pilate's Wife incident which is included in Play XXX, Christ before Pilate I, in the York sequence exculpates Satan by showing how he tries to stop the Crucifixion by sending a warning dream to Pilate's wife, not from any good will to mankind, but because he realises that once Christ is killed mankind will no longer be under his dominion.

The chattering of the soldiers and their interest in their work not only enables the members of the audience to see themselves in them and so establish their own role in the Christian story, but it also serves as a means of demonstrating the divinity of Christ. The soldiers are noisy and brutal, their physical violence towards Christ is matched by a violence of language in their swearing by Mahomet (ll. 61, 129), their jeering and their quarrelling. They are full of energy and as they bustle around attempting to finish their job they represent Common Man at his most vital yet least refined. They are fixed on the physical level and cannot comprehend moral responsibility or spiritual meaning. The overwhelming contrast between their noise and energy and Christ's silence and passivity is striking even in a reading of the play and in performance it would have been even greater. Christ does not talk to the soldiers even when they directly address Him but talks only to God and to mankind in general as represented by the audience. He is cooperative, yet passive; He lies down on the Cross when ordered to do so and makes no complaint as the soldiers stretch His limbs with the ropes, nail His hands and feet and then jar Him violently as the Cross is dropped into the mortice: 'This falling was more fell / Than all the harms he had;' (ll. 225-6). Christ is not what the soldiers are, Fallen Man in unbridled, ungoverned state, His dignity and silence before their rowdy brutality establishes this, yet He is Man, He has chosen to be born as a Man and to be killed for mankind's sake. The delight the soldiers seem to take in detailing the pain they are causing Him underlines Christ's physical nature. His sinews can snap when stretched, and do, His veins can burst as no doubt a sachet of paint provided by the Painters was burst to demonstrate at line 147, yet He makes no complaint. The soldiers, able to perceive only at the physical level, interpret this as a demonstration of His lack of God-head, for surely a divinity would be immune from such pain (ll. 187-8), yet, as is apparent to the audience, this is in fact a proof of His divinity and the payment He has agreed to make for Adam and Fallen Man's sins.