Feminizing the liturgy: The n-town Mary play and fifteenth-century convent drama

Journal article

This paper began as an attempt to think through ways in which a little-known and understudied convent play might help us to shed new light on certain aspects of one of the best-known plays of the medieval English dramatic canon, the N-Town Mary Play. The uniqueness of the Mary Play, in the context of the N-Town collection, has been long-established: the compiler of N-Town appears to have sourced his dramatic material from a variety of different places, and thus includes individual plays with a variety of formal features, implied staging and cast requirements, and effects (see, e.g., ed. Spector, N-Town). Experiments using performance have confirmed that the Mary Play in particular stands out among the N-Town collection for its very small cast, the way it sets its action within particular enclosed spaces and moments, creating a particular ‘intimacy of tone’ and its probable integration of sung Liturgy alongside its dialogue (see Dutton, Smout and Cheung Salisbury, 95). A further aspect of the Mary Play’s uniqueness, of course, lies in its overwhelming and sustained focus on female protagonists: particularly St Anne, Mary herself, the Daughters of God, and Elizabeth.

Authors: Robinson, O

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Gunter Narr, Tübingen
• Journal: SPELL (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature)
• Acceptance date: 2015-05-08
• Language: English