noahtalk

The Chester Noah Play

The Noah play you are about to hear, is one of the plays which have survived from a series of dramatised episodes which cycled through the stories in the Christian bible — starting with the Creation and ending at the final Judgement.

The first plays, in the early fifteenth century, began at dawn and continued until the cycle was finished, all on the same day. By the sixteenth century, the plays at Chester were performed over three days, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in Whitsun week. After Henry VIII, the production of the plays was discouraged and for that, and other reasons — notably the Reformation and severe inflation after 1550 — they became more and more intermittent until the last one was acted in 1575.

The plays were under the control of the City Council, but organized, acted and paid for by the guilds —who kept accounts which have come down to us. The guild responsible for this Noah play was, very appropriately, that of the water carriers, who drew and carried water from the river Dee. Elsewhere, the Noah play was, of course, put on by the Shipwrights and the Mariners. The earliest mention of these plays is of a performance in 1422 when the Coopers and the Ironmongers had a barney over their responsibilities for the Scourging and the Crucifixion and it was recorded.

The plays were put on in the streets of various English cities to entertain and instruct the general populace and were performed outdoors. By the early sixteenth century the plays were set up on wagons in a great procession and each play was repeated at a number of designated playing stations. People standing at one playing place would see - if they stayed there all day — the entire cycle of plays as the wagons on which they were performed came round. Each play had its own cast, so that if there were ten plays featuring the adult Jesus, the role would be played by ten different players. A mediaeval 'day out'.

The wagon-and-procession style was not the only way to put on religious drama in the Middle Ages, but it is the way the great cycles which have survived from York and Chester were performed. Two other great cycles which have survived are from Wakefield in Yorkshire (the one known as the Towneley Cycle), and one from East-Anglia (enigmatically called the N-town Cycle —'N' standing for nomen).

The plays are sometimes called Corpus Christi plays. Corpus Christi is a moveable feast. It is the Thursday after Trinity Sunday which is eight weeks after Easter. This was an ideal time for outdoor plays, and provided a long summer day for a long performance. The cycle play was doctrinally appropriate for the celebration of Corpus Christi, centring on the redemption of humankind through the sacrifice of the body of Christ. A full cycle play begins with the Creation and Fall, dramatises some Old Testament episodes; deals at length with the Incarnation, then events from the life and ministry of Christ, and most fully, with the Passion, Harrowing of Hell and Resurrection. The plays that follow the Resurrection vary in their episodes (Chester, for example, includes an Antichrist play; York has a series of Mary plays), but all end with the Last Judgment.

The Noah play is an essential episode in the Old Testament section. From the beginnings of explanatory writings (by the saints Ambrose and Augustine for example) the Noah story has been loaded with significance. There has been a great deal of symbolic interpretation of this event. Some people have seen a correspondence between the eight persons saved in the Ark on the water, and salvation through baptism. The wood of the Ark prefigured the wood of the Cross. The Ark was a type of Church, within which sinners can find refuge and salvation. The dove is linked to the Holy Spirit. And so on - everything about the Ark and the Flood was charged with spiritual significance. But perhaps the most important parallel was that which existed between this first judgement on a sinful world by water, and the Last Judgement to come.

However, all this elaborate symbolism cannot hide the fact that the Noah story is also basically funny.

Modern cartoonists love it — you may remember that sad Addams cartoon of the pair of unicorns gazing forlornly after the departed vessel . .. . that wasn’t what really happened to them though — as you will find out . . .).

Perhaps Noah's wife attracted some of this absurdity. All but one of the surviving English plays have gone for the boisterous, rebellious, and plain difficult Mrs Noah. However, the unruly Wives aren't just farcical figures of misogynistic fun. Their doctrinal role is clear: we are meant to see Noah’s wife as representing the sinner who rejects the Church and is only saved by the skin of her teeth at the very last moment. The Wife’s disobedience towards her husband represents the disobedience of humankind towards God. Noah is a virtuous patriarch, he whom, of all mankind,God has not found wanting. Noah is very godfearing — in our play, he refers to God or the Lord twelve times. This contrasts with his wife who twice (anachronistically) uses the name of Christ as an oath but never mentions God thereafter, and the rest of the cast who make no reference to the deity whatever.

The plays, as we would expect, have with a good deal of legendary material added in to the biblical story. As well, some of the dramatists have reinterpreted biblical figures in a strikingly dramatic way, especially by deliberately using anachronism to relate them to the audienceÕs social experience. You will notice that Noah’s Wife speaks of a 'pottle of malmsey'. A pottle (first mention 1413) was not a 'little pot' as you might expect but the opposite: it held two quarts — roughly two and a half litres. 'Malmsey' was a very mediaeval drink of strong sweet wine — you may know it from Thomas More’s probably apocryphal tale of Richard III’s Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a butt of it.

Earlier, I mentioned in passing, that the plays were shown on pageant wagons drawn through the town from one stopping place to the next. Each of these wagons was a self-contained stage on wheels, dressed with whatever pieces of set were required for the performance, and it was usually moved through the streets of the town by man-power. In the sixteenth century, some of the guilds shared wagons because they were performing on different days, but the Noah wagon would have been purpose built for this play alone.

Some of the stages were quite elaborate and had upper levels: there were clouds which parted to reveal God; actors could descend from the heavens. Copper sheets and rotating casks of stones were used for thunder; firecrackers were used for lightning and, at Coventry, someone was paid 4d for minding the fire in the Hell-mouth and so on. They used what they had . . . and, in the spirit of the thing, so have we!

Performing the Noah story presented some unusual problems. There's the Ark itself, for a start. It has to be big, and in those places where the plays were performed in processional style it had to be mobile. If the cycle was performed at one fixed place, the Ark has to be removed before the next play begins, so again it's likely to be on wheels.

Different towns used different strategies, and different styles of Ark, too. In the Towneley play, Noah assembles the Ark on stage, apparently from prefabricated sections. The playwright wittily draws attention to the staginess of this device by making Noah comment on the surprising and miraculous way it all comes together under his inexpert hands. The Towneley Ark is something like a medieval ship, with mast and sail, tiller and topcastle.

Other Arks may have been more boxy, like floating chests, and there are some useful illustrations of this kind of vessel in manuscripts.

The N-town play solves the problem of building the Ark by taking the whole Noah family out of the acting area (N-town was performed at one site, not processionally) to build the Ark Ôoff-stageÕ. While they are absent, there is an interlude in which Cain is killed, and after this the family returns, bringing the completed Ark with them (presumably it is a wheeled vehicle).

York solves the problem by having two plays - one for the building of the Ark and a separate one for the Flood.

Chester seems to have used a different strategy. According to the opening stage directions in one of the manuscripts (the one we are using), Noah and his family are standing outside from the beginning of the play. The stage direction is also interesting for showing the variation in sites for plays performed in procession:

And first in some high place, or in the clouds — if it may be, God speaketh unto Noah . . .

Which means: 'If you can manage it where you're performing, make sure God is up high, and if you can put some property clouds around heaven, all the better — but you won't always be able to do this’.

When it comes to the time to build the Ark, the stage directions are:

'Then they make signs as if they were working with different tools'

This Chester play is the only one of the English Noah plays to indicate how the business with the animals might be worked:

Then Noah shall go into the Ark with all his family (his wife except), and the Ark must be boarded round about, and on the boards all the beasts and fowls hereafter agreeing must be painted, that these words [that the cast are about to say] may agree with the pictures.

The other big problem is how to manage the raven and the dove. Again, it is this Chester play that reveals how the device could be worked:

Then he shall send forth a dove; and there shall be in the ship another dove bearing an olive-branch in her mouth, which Noah shall let down from the mast by a cord in his hand.

In 1998, there was a very good production of the entire York cycle at Toronto, performed in processional style (using four playing stations). Betsy Taylor (our expert in the University English Department) has some photos of the Noah play. Although it's the York play some of the effects relate to the Chester play. The size of the pageant wagon probably corresponds well to the size of a medieval wagon. The use of the street level for performance as well as the raised stage and the 'above' area for God also reflects known medieval usage:

This production had an amusing and effective solution for the raven and dove problem - God used a long pole and wire, rather like a fishing rod, and controlled the flight of the raven and the dove away from the Ark, and then put the olive branch into the doveÕs beak and swung the dove back to Noah's hands. God was always in control.

Eventually, the flood ended, the rainbow rose in the sky, the family disembarked singing God's praises. The audience applauded.

Then the players quickly and neatly folded the set back to its original state, took away the chocks that held the wagon steady, and pushed the whole thing on to the next playing station.

This is something we usually forget when reading the texts of medieval plays. We still tend to think of the lights going down and the curtain closing to signal the end of the play. But in this kind of performance, the actors leave the stage in full sight of the audience, and whatever bits of set need to be changed are changed now before the play can be performed at the next station. If Christ is on the Cross, he must be helped off by the other players — who have just been crucifying him. If the rainbow marking the end of the Flood or the beginning of the Last Judgement has appeared during the performance it must now be taken down. The waters of the Flood or of the Red Sea must be rolled up again before they can once more wash away the sins of the world or overwhelm Pharaoh's army for the delight and instruction of the audience waiting at the next station.

These plays are 'games', , and the texts repeatedly draw attention to their theatrical nature; they represent a true reality, but there is never any danger of mistaking the representation for the reality.

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