The Rule of the Tudors 1485 - 1603

The cycle of plays enacted, scene by scene, and brought to life the events narrated in the Apostles'
Creed, which all the faithful were taught from an early age. In church windows, on rood screens,
on altars the twelve Apostles were portrayed, each carrying a banner with the article of the Creed
attributed to him. St Peter bore the first: 'Credo in Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem [I believe in God,
Father Almighty]'. The text was made available in English to assist the devout to a fuller understanding. In the fourteenth-century Lay Folks Mass Book the Creed was written in verse:

Under Ponce Pilate (tormented) was He,
us to save
Down on the + and dead He was,
and laid in His grave.
The soul of Him went to hell.

Moving from the past to the future, the play cycle ends in heaven, with God in judgement. At the
Last Judgement, the collective end of time, men and women will be judged not by what they have
promised, but what they have done. The saved will be those who have obeyed Christ's great
commandments - to love God and one's neighbour as oneself - and seen Him in the poor wretched.
The rejected, the damned, will be those who disobeyed. The plays end with the vision of hell's
mouth gaping and the sound of the interminable lamentation of the damned.
In the plays the audience saw the profane amidst the holy, and witnessed the real world intruding
into the Gospel story. Alongside the figures of Christ and His Apostles were shepherds portrayed
as turbulent adolescents; unjust judges; Noah's shrewish wife; a jealous Joseph in a May to
December marriage; raging tyrants - figures, in their frailities, closer by far to the audience's own
lives than were the Holy Family. There were quarrels among the players about who should take
each part, and who should pay for the production. The plays were staged by the craft guilds of the
towns, often with particular appropriateness to their calling: at York the shipwrights presented the
building of the ark; the fishermen the scene of the Flood; the bakers the Last Supper. The rich
mercers put on the most expensive and last play: the Last Judgement.
The plays, written in English, probably by the clergy, were intended to teach, to inspire, to admonish,
so that the audience might remember that they were subject to the same human frailty, the spiritual
blindness and lack of charity which made Peter deny Christ, or Thomas doubt the Resurrection, or
even made Judas betray and the soldiers crucify Christ. They were left with a vision of judgement.
But compellingly, through pity and grief and love for the Virgin and her divine Son, the audience
could understand the price of salvation, the depth of divine love, the sublimity of Christ's sacrificial
death for mankind, the need for sorrow and repentance of sin, the joyful possibility of heaven at
last. Before Christ's Incarnation and Passion all men were judged guilty of Adam's sin and had lost
heaven. Thereafter, there was hope of salvation. Eden would be restored, but not in this world.

Why was the 'play called Corpus Christi', the body of Christ? Because this narrative of salvation
through grace was originally performed at the great liturgical feast of the later middle ages, Corpus
Christi. With Corpus Christi, in May or June, the great cycle of feasts of the Church commemorating
the Redemption was brought to a close. Yet it stood apart from the liturgical sequence which
narrated the events in Christ's life - from Christmas, which celebrated His nativity and the mystery
of the Incarnation; His presentation in the Temple at Candlemas; through Easter which celebrated
the Resurrection; to the feasts of His Ascension and Whitsun or Pentecost, which recalled the descent
of the Holy Spirit and the foundation of the Church. Corpus Christi was the time to celebrate the
whole work of God, the redeeming power of Christ, rather than to sorrow for His Passion, which
was particularly remembered, in deepest mourning, on Good Friday. The feast of Corpus Christi
had been instituted to celebrate the sacrament of the altar, the Mass, which was divine mirale and
mystery, God among men, the focus of the hopes and longings of all Christians.