The Chester Plays 3 & 4 - Noah & Abraham

This week in Exploring the Chester Mystery Plays we looked at plays 3 & 4, which cover Noah and Abraham.  The team gathered with autocued script and a live link up and off we went.
[All our Chester recordings are currently being archived and are being added, piece by piece, to this blog.]

It is in these plays that we start to encounter some of the more severe forms of the general buggering about that the Chester texts have seen (see blog about plays 1 & 2).  Chester has come to us, unlike the other 'cycles', in a number of texts, and there are some big differences between them for the Noah play.  The latter part of the play has differing endings, with the business of sending out birds to hunt for land cut in some.  It's patently a difficult play to stage and the ark must have been big, as hinted at in the stage directions.  There's a direction that the animals would appear as painted boards on the ark, for when the Noah family go through and list all the animals on board - of which there are a fair old number listed. 

And here are bears, wolves set,

Apes, owls, marmoset,

Weasels, squirrels and ferret...  (Note the assumed pronunciation of ferret, lovely!)

With a future echo to the Nativity, the family speak in wonder that the animals are content to live side by side, that cats and mice do not get up to any Tom and Jerry activity, let alone the lions.
Early on we get a return of the misogyny of the earlier plays - the dialogue of the unnamed women (only named as wives of the men) largely point out how useless they are:

And we shall bring timber too

For we mon nothing ells do;

Women be weak to underfoe

Any great travail.

And, as in other 'cycle' plays, Noe has a go at his wife for not getting on board the ark.  She refuses to go without her friends, her gossips, and has to be bodily carried on board, where the text suggests she gives Noe one hell of a slap.  

NOE:  Welcome wife into this boat.

NOES WIFE:  And have thou that for thy mote! 

We have our first anachronisms, as both Noa and his wife calls by Saint John - but we've yet to have anyone call out by God's wounds and the like.  Yet.

Noe's wife's refusal to board is the only note of disharmony in the play, and in comparison with other plays, her stand isn't so dominant a part of the narrative - it's fairly half-hearted.  Noe's wife helps build the ark and is swiftly part of the family unit again - the play uses music to suggest the ultimate harmony of the family, for they sing when they set sail.  There is a speech by Noah that covers a lot of time jumps - between stanzas he indicates that forty days have passed and that he's sent out two birds.  How these time jumps were staged (and as they were cut in some versions, perhaps they were never satisfactorily staged) we do not know.  There is also the telling detail of offering sacrifice to God and asking him whether they should leave the ark - the issue of sacrifice comes up in the next play - which is missing from some versions.

The Noah play is a more expansive piece of theatre - the set/setting for the play was obviously large and there are many effects that could and probably were used.  It is in a contrast to the more contained dramas of the previous two plays which, though they included a lot of music and occasional spectacle, are focused on the pride and fall of individuals.  Noa and his wife are not as deeply drawn here - they, and their many family members - are concerned with a grand project and life changing events.  The flood and the ark are the major players in the action and the amount of plot and detail to the actions of the family limits how much time the play has in looking at the characters inner lives.  At no point do the characters really question what is happening or even comment on how horrible it is to see the whole of humanity slaughtered.  The action of the play leaves the author/s no time.  It is only in plays which deal with simpler shorter stories where interior thoughts can come to the surface.  Which brings us to play 4.

The Abraham play is a very different kettle of fish - unlike other versions it is split into three separate parts of Abraham's life.  A gift giving section featuring himself, Lot and Melchysidech - a section dealing with God giving he and his wife a child and the usually staged story of the sacrifice of Isaac.  Each episode is flanked by the figure of the Expositor, who is presumably a post-reformation addition to the text who is there to explain to the audience what these episodes mean, theologically that is.

But before we even get to the rather irritating figure of the Expositor we get an even odder opening speech by someone calling the audience to order and generally turning their attention to this play, rather than the Noah play which, perhaps because it involved a lot of set, was stillin the way.  He comes across rather like a representative of the county council popping in at the start of the village production.  He feels added on, like he is just there to mark time as the Ark is got out of sight.  He calls himself Gobet-on-the-Green and is never heard of again, unless the last speech of the play, a messenger, is the same person.
The first part features the gift giving between Abraham and Melchysidech, which is interesting but feels incomplete - like we've walked in the end of a story.  It's supposed to follow pitched battles - and I wonder whether something of this was originally in the play.  We know that there were other Abraham plays, in the Towneley cycle for example, which dealt with acts after Abraham with Isaac and his sons after the sacrifice play, so why not have a play that tells us more about his life prior to that episode?  Either way, the continued existence of this brief episode is explained to us by the Expositor - who is, perhaps deliberately, patronising to the audience.

Lordings, what may this signify

I will expound apertly

that lewed standing hereby [unlearned]

may know what this may be. 

The Expositor claims that this episode, where gifts are given in thanks, rather than sacrifices, prefiguring the gift of the body and blood of Christ.  This explanation of the parallels between this Old Testament episode with the New, as presented, is not very convincing.  Much of what the Expositor says smacks of really desperate revisionism in a hope of keeping the plays alive in the new world order - even if there is a reasonable case in the text for the argument.  This opening could be seen as a parallel to the tithes offered by Cain and Abel - just reversed.  After the battle and the bloodshed, gifts are given to cement relations - rather than tithes are offered to God leading to murder.  It is, perhaps, a sign of an advance in culture - leading, as the Expositor argues - to the ceremony central to Christian worship.  If so, it is an advance not fully heeded, as animal sacrifice is central to the close of this play.

The second episode is extremely brief, a short chat Abraham has with God to have a son.  That is, a legitimate one - as Abraham points out he still has his 'nurry', his illegitimate child, and that it doesn't count.  This is mentioned almost in passing.  God tells Abraham that he'll have a child, so long as he's circumcised - where follows an appeal to the joys of circumcision, which Abraham and all his fellows must take on. 
The Expositor suggests that the circumcision of the Old Testament has been replaced by Baptism - a comment I am not theologically qualified to confirm or deny.  Finally he points out that the seed of Abraham will one day beget Jesus, which is fair enough.
Neither of these episodes appear in any other cycle - and as presented here it's not surprising really.  Until the arrival of Isaac there is little sense of a complete play - the episodes are brief and feel really random, not dramatically or theatrically well linked to the plays so far presented or as an individual play in itself.  How they ended up in this state - especially as there are other versions with the prophets as well - is largely lost to history.  Oh, to have an earlier version of the text to answer a few questions of dramaturgy - because these opening sections could function in a clear way.  There is a good dramatic reason to see Abraham pray for a son - so that you feel the more when he is asked by God to kill him.  However, as presented here, after the rather odd gift giving scene, it's too brief and somewhat jarring.
Anyway, now we reach the final and most effective part of the play, the meat, if you will.  Here there is something at stake and Abraham is genuinely torn between his love of God and Isaac.  When we were reading this section I stopped interjecting unless it was really necessary - and let the actors and the text speak and the play really held us, the first time since the first and second plays of the sequence.
Abraham plays the innocent to his son, asking him to carry the implements of his own death to the place of sacrifice.  There are echos of Cain in Play 1, guiding his brother away to his death.  I love the slow realisation of Isaac, as he starts to twig that something isn't right.  Going to the place of sacrifice he asks:

Father, if it be your will
where is the beast that we shall kill?

It takes a little bit more questioning before the truth comes out.  The scene is long, the longest individual scene in the cycle so far, and it just gets worse and worse for father and son.  When Abraham confesses what he is doing, his dialogue is almost bathetic.  It is an understatement and a half to say...

ABRAHAM:  O my son, I am sorry

to do to thee this great annoy.

Gods commandment do must I

his works are aye full mild.

The last statement being patently untrue.

By slow stages the boy is tied up, blindfolded and placed on the altar, all the while telling his father to not mention what he's done to mother.  Eventually the Angels arrive and the test ends - a sheep is provided for sacrifice and God appears 

DEUS: Abraham, by myself I swear...

Well, by who else can he swear?

And we have our first proper anachronism of the cycle - 

ABRAHAM: Jesu, on me thou have pity.  

But time is not linear in the medieval world, so it's not an error.

Next time we look at the unique play 5, Balaam and Balak, and the more universally known play 6, The Nativity.

The Exploring the Chester Mystery Plays Team:
Readers - Michael Harding, Kevin Roychowdhruy, Peter Drew, Liz Cole, Claire Lawrence and Mark Holtom
Tech Team - Tim Regester on live link, Marion Tuke on autocue, Mark Pavelin for photography and

Bexy Lou Johnston in Dictionary Corner

Host - Robert Crighton

This event was live streamed from the Quay Theatre in late 2013.

Claire Lawrence, Mark Holtom and Liz Cole preparing to go...

Peter Drew, Liz Cole and Mark Holtom - watch Bex in Dictionary Corner

Robert checking where the hell he is on Marion's autocue

Mark Holtom - occasional God

Foreground, Marion and Tim, working the tech...