The Wakefield Mysteries

For the first time in 385 years, God was in his heaven last week in an English playhouse. Golden-crowned and brown-bearded, he looked down upon the stage of London's Mermaid Theatre from a cushioned wooden throne, surrounded by angels with blond wigs and paper wings. The occasion was the first performance of the Wakefield Mystery Plays--one of the treasures of medieval Christianity--since they were banned in 1576.

Life Was a Unity. In that year, when Shakespeare and Marlowe were twelve, and the Church of England was in its infancy, the townsfolk of Wakefield in Yorkshire were told that their annual Whitsun-week cycle of 32 mystery plays could no longer portray "God the Father, God the Sonne or God the Holie Ghoste or the administration of either the Sacra ments of baptisme or of the Lordes Supper." This effectively banned the plays altogether--as was intended by Queen Elizabeth I, who was determined to break the hold of Roman ritual on English minds.

Even then, some of the Wakefield plays were a couple of centuries old. They were written between 1350 and 1450 as a means of educating the illiterate medieval masses in the fundamentals of the Chris tian faith. The present production consists of 18 of the plays--skillfully edited into a 3 1/2hour evening in comprehensible English by onetime Cambridge Scholar Martial Rose. Performed by the Mermaid Players, the result is a smash hit with modern Londoners--it is heavily booked for a nine-week run.

Moving from Creation to the Last Judgment, the Raising of Lazarus to the Crucifixion, the Wakefield Plays open a window on a long-gone world when, in the words of the Mermaid's Founder-Director Bernard Miles, "life was a unity--swear words, sexual references, prayer and devotion unashamedly mixed."

"Bite on Boldly." Violence is vivid in the mysteries; Herod's soldiers slaughter three infants onstage, and even modern audiences blanch at green-faced, gloating Satan hissing among the writhing sinners before pitchforking them through the fanged jaws of Hell. Biblical characters have a buttonholing immediacy, like doddering, officious Noah, who groans:

And now I am old Sick, sorry and cold, As muck upon mould I wither away.

Cain is a dour, sly farmer with qualities still highly regarded by north-countrymen :--thrift, industry, independence ("By all men I set not a fart")--who tries to cheat God in the number of wheat sheaves he offers.

Much of the dialogue rings with alliterative beauty. Satan coaxes Eve to "Bite on boldly be not abashed"; Eve echoes to Adam, "Bite on boldly," and rueful Adam grieves that he has betrayed God and "Broken his bidding bitterly."

Whatever the reason for Queen Elizabeth's opposition to the plays, it was an impoverishment for Christianity; as the London Times noted, they are filled with "a reverence that makes nonsense of such a ban." Their essence is suggested by the Virgin Mary's final speech:

He is God and man that unto heaven rose:

Preach thus to the people that most

are of price . . .

To the whole city these tidings disclose, Tell the words of my son in the world

' most wise:

Bid them in him their relief to repose, Or else be they damned as men full of vice.

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