Introduction

In the previous chapter I established a theoretical basis for looking at ritual, drama, and liturgy, upon which to set the discussion of the liturgical content of the N-Town Play and the possible effects of that liturgical material on the reception of the play as a whole. The aim of this chapter is to set theory in context, preparing the way for the detailed examination of the liturgical material in the N-Town Play that is the subject of chapter three.

The first section of this chapter looks at drama and liturgy not as theoretical concepts but as scholarly disciplines. Then the focus turns to the N-Town Play itself, beginning with its interpretation by previous commentators. The structure of liturgical worship is based on typology, particularly in the selection of lections; this typological approach has been transferred to dramatic and other cycles, and accordingly I examine N-Town's use of typological organisation and allusion. Various epithets have been applied to the N-Town Play, and this study stems from one of them, namely that it is liturgical. Other epithets include ‘learned’, ‘orthodox’, ‘instructional’, and ‘conserv-ative’. In the later sections of this chapter, I discuss the meaning of these terms and whether they are justifiably applied to this play. This involves looking not only at the text but at its wider, fifteenth-century East Anglian, context, including heresy as a prime source of ideological conflict in East Anglia.