The Towneley Noah Play

This image of Noah releasing a raven and a dove comes from The Holkham Bible Picture Book, an early fourteenth-century English bible held at the British Library (f. 8r, Add MS 47682). You can view digitized images of the manuscript itself here. You can also read and watch the British Library's introduction to the manuscript.

What is this play?

This particular play comes from the Towneley Manuscript, a collection of 32 plays depicting biblical episodes from creation to doomsday. Like others in the manuscript, this play--Processus Noe— was written in the late fifteenth century, in Middle English and in stanzaic verse. For this performance, we have modernized the language while retaining much of the original verse structure.

The play dramatizes the Noah story found in Genesis 6-9, though there are significant differences between the biblical account and this play's dramatization of it. In this play, God vows to destroy the earth by flooding it. But, in order to save the righteous Noah, his family, and the earth's animals, God instructs Noah to build and provision a massive ship in which all will ride out the 40-day storm. As it begins to rain, Noah loads the ship with animals and family members, but Mrs. Noah refuses to get on board. Finally, she relents and boards the ship. Nine months later, when the waters begin to recede, Noah and Mrs. Noah send out two birds--a raven and and a dove--to scout for dry land; the dove returns, an olive branch in its beak. When the ship comes to rest, the family disembarks, wondering at the flood's destruction.

Why this play?

We chose this play for research purposes: one of our members (who plays Noah) was writing a fourth-year Honours essay exploring the staging and significance of animals in medieval drama. We thought that staging one of the surviving medieval English Noah plays would be a good way to engage practically with the research issues he was investigating. It turns out that rehearsing and performing the play have raised even more questions to investigate.

Another factor played a part in our selection of this play: Mrs. Noah. A very interesting character, she responds to Noah in ways that make the play lively. More importantly, her interaction with Noah--and with the audience--offers a critical counterpoint to the destructive violence of the flood. We wanted to explore how that counterpoint would work in a physical space with a live audience.