Introduction

In the previous chapter I discussed some of the contexts for the N-Town Play, and how its text reflects them. The evidence suggests that many commentators have been a little hasty in their assessment of the play as being firmly orthodox and conservative – one might even say boring – in its outlook. However, the epithet ‘liturgical’ seems entirely justified, and it is to this most important and, as I shall argue, innovative aspect of the play that I now turn. This chapter, the heart of the book, focuses on the play's liturgical content, and its effects on the text as a whole and on its audiences. The discussion, and that of other plays in the following chapter, assumes, for the most part, staged performance, since this is presumably what was envisaged by the original authors. But that is not to rule out similar effects on a private reader, visualising the performance in his or her head. Indeed, since I have seen staged only three of the 42 N-Town pageants, this is precisely what I have had to do, drawing on my personal knowledge of actual performances of liturgy and drama to create virtual performances of N-Town scenes. My analysis builds on but differs from earlier research in that the liturgical material is discussed here in categories: Latin quotations, sung set pieces, vernacular paraphrases, sacraments, structural borrowings from liturgy, and prayer which can be described as more informal and domestic in scale. The influence of liturgical readings on the text is not included for reasons of space and focus.