Introduction

I have shown in previous chapters that the N-Town Play is a multifaceted text. It consists of four originally separate pieces of drama, each containing a variety of material taken from or based on liturgy. It is a liturgical anthology within an anthology of drama, each element reacting with and changing the other. In its treatment of liturgy the play reflects the culture of its East Anglian context. The extant N-Town text, arguably more than any other late-medieval English vernacular drama, is complex and difficult to categorise. It may be described as an oeuvre mouvante, not in the sense of a work preserved in several different forms in a number of manuscripts, but in the sense of its separate parts having been brought together, changing in the process into something new.

In this final chapter I want to suggest that not only did the play evolve, but that its purpose may also have changed. To this development I believe that the liturgical content holds a clue. There are no performance records supporting the staging in fifteenth-century East Anglia of any drama on the scale and complexity of the N-Town Play – or even, for that matter, of the Digby Mary Magdalen which, as we have seen, is its closest East Anglian rival in terms of length and theatrical effects. And there is no full working text of N-Town: the play is incomplete and its compilation remains unfinished.