After a few stabs, we've put together this almost final edit of Adam and Eve, from the Drapers Play in the Chester Mystery Cycle. The play doesn't end here - there's a time jump and we move onto Cain and Abel, which we'll edit one day. We will possibly do one final version of these two (should we say three?) plays, telling the story of the fall of Lucifer, through to Cain and Abel as one sweep, with some cuts and changes to make a single play for audio.
Here's our thinking.
There's never not a good reason to do more versions of a thing. Especially when so few versions exist. If we can use these (admittedly flawed) recordings to create both an approximately 'accurate' textual rendering and then a more accessible version, then that would be great.
Also, just because the plays are presented as two pageants in these texts means very little. The play texts themselves are so buggered about with, 'proper' form is impossible to establish except at the moment those texts were created. We suggest that there's good evidence that these two plays were at some point three or even four separate units at some point in their life, and possibly put together as one. There's some discontinuity between the end of the first and second play which suggests two different approaches to the creation of the world. There's also a massive time jump in the middle of play two between the Adam and Eve section and the Cain and Abel section - with exposition in a speech from Adam to bridge the gap. The fact that we can split the Drapers play in two for these audio versions is suggestive that at some point someone else did - and the overall shape of the Chester cycle changed enormously over the years, so nothing need be fixed.
We'd also like to do a bit of a documentary about these plays - we have two recordings (the Exploring series and these dramas) to mix together, so if we can get some talking heads and a narration together, we'll be cooking with gas.
But that's for the future. For now, here's what has been done with The Drapers Play. You can listen to the Fall of Lucifer here.
From the earliest drama in English, to the closing of the theatres in 1642, there was a hell of a lot of drama produced - and a lot of it wasn't by Shakespeare. Apart from a few noble exceptions these plays are often passed over, ignored or simply unknown. This is a blog about what exists beyond Shakespeare, about the plays, fragmentary and extant, that shaped the theatrical world that shaped our dramatic history.
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