Mystery plays and miracle plays are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song. They told of subjects such as the Creation, Adam and Eve, the murder of Abel, and the Last Judgment. Often they were performed together in cycles which could last for days. The name derives from mystery used in its sense of miracle, but an occasionally quoted derivation is from ministerium, meaning craft, and so the 'mysteries' or plays performed by the craft guilds.
Jesus Christ Superstar is a sung-through rock opera with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice. Loosely based on the Gospels' accounts of the Passion, the work interprets the psychology of Jesus and other characters, with much of the plot centered on Judas, who is dissatisfied with the direction in which Jesus is steering his disciples. Contemporary attitudes, sensibilities and slang pervade the rock opera's lyrics, and ironic allusions to modern life are scattered throughout the depiction of political events. Stage and film productions accordingly contain many intentional anachronisms.
Pontius Pilate was the fifth governor of the Roman province of Judaea, serving under Emperor Tiberius from 26/27 to 36/37 AD. He is best known for being the official who presided over the trial of Jesus and ultimately ordered his crucifixion. Pilate's importance in Christianity is underscored by his prominent place in both the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. Because the gospels portray Pilate as reluctant to execute Jesus, the Ethiopian Church believes that Pilate became a Christian and venerates him as both a martyr and a saint, a belief which is historically shared by the Coptic Church, with a feast day on 19 or 25 June, respectively.
The Passion is the short final period before the death of Jesus, described in the four canonical gospels. It is commemorated in Christianity every year during Holy Week.
The Gospel of Peter, or the Gospel according to Peter, is an ancient text concerning Jesus Christ, only partially known today. It is considered a non-canonical gospel and was rejected as apocryphal by the Church's synods of Carthage and Rome, which established the New Testament canon. It was the first of the non-canonical gospels to be rediscovered, preserved in the dry sands of Egypt.
The Oberammergau Passion Play is a passion play that has been performed every 10 years from 1634 to 1674 and each decadal year since 1680 by the inhabitants of the village of Oberammergau, Bavaria, Germany. It was written by Othmar Weis, J A Daisenberger, Otto Huber, Christian Stuckl, Rochus Dedler, Eugen Papst, Marcus Zwink, Ingrid H Shafer, and the inhabitants of Oberammergau, with music by Dedler. Since its first production it has been performed on open-air stages in the village. The text of the play is a composite of four distinct manuscripts dating from the 15th and 16th centuries.
Herod Antipas was a 1st-century ruler of Galilee and Perea. He bore the title of tetrarch and is referred to as both "Herod the Tetrarch" and "King Herod" in the New Testament, although he never held the title of king. He was a son of Herod the Great and a grandson of Antipater the Idumaean. He is widely known today for accounts in the New Testament of his role in events that led to the executions of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth. His father, Herod the Great, was alleged to have ordered the Massacre of the Innocents, marking the earliest Biblical account of the concerns of the government in Jerusalem regarding Jesus's existence.
Mark 15 is the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. This chapter records the narrative of Jesus' passion, including his trial before Pontius Pilate and then his crucifixion, death and entombment. Jesus' trial before Pilate and his crucifixion, death, and burial are also recorded in Matthew 27, Luke 23, and John 18:28–19:42.
The Archko Volume or Archko Library is a 19th-century volume containing what purports to be a series of reports from Jewish and pagan sources contemporary with Jesus that relate to the biblical texts describing his life. The work went through a number of versions and has remained in print ever since. The texts are otherwise unknown, and the author was convicted by an ecclesiastical court of falsehood and plagiarism.
The Wakefield or Towneley Mystery Plays are a series of thirty-two mystery plays based on the Bible most likely performed around the Feast of Corpus Christi probably in the town of Wakefield, England during the Late Middle Ages until 1576. It is one of only four surviving English mystery play cycles. Some scholars argue that the Wakefield cycle is not a cycle at all, but a mid-sixteenth-century compilation, formed by a scribe bringing together three separate groups of plays.
The York Mystery Plays, more properly the York Corpus Christi Plays, are a Middle English cycle of 48 mystery plays or pageants covering sacred history from the creation to the Last Judgment. They were traditionally presented on the feast day of Corpus Christi and were performed in the city of York, from the mid-fourteenth century until their suppression in 1569. The plays are one of four virtually complete surviving English mystery play cycles, along with the Chester Mystery Plays, the Towneley/Wakefield plays and the N-Town plays. Two long, composite, and late mystery pageants have survived from the Coventry cycle and there are records and fragments from other similar productions that took place elsewhere. A manuscript of the plays, probably dating from between 1463 and 1477, is still intact and stored at the British Library.
The Coventry Mystery Plays, or Coventry Corpus Christi Pageants, are a cycle of medieval mystery plays from Coventry, West Midlands, England, and are perhaps best known as the source of the "Coventry Carol". Two plays from the original cycle are extant having been copied from the now lost original manuscript in the early 19th century. Another, separate manuscript was initially titled the Ludus Coventriae by a 17th-century librarian who erroneously assumed it was copy of the Coventry mystery plays. The collection within this manuscript are now more commonly known as the N-Town Plays and are thought to have originated in East Anglia.
The Ordinalia are three medieval mystery plays dating to the late fourteenth century, written primarily in Middle Cornish, with stage directions in Latin. The three plays are Origo Mundi, Passio Christi and Resurrexio Domini. The metres of these plays are various arrangements of seven- and four-syllabled lines. Ordinalia means "prompt" or "service book".
Scenes from the Passion of Christ is an oil painting on a panel of Baltic oak, painted c.1470 by German-born Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling. The painting shows 23 vignettes of the Life of Christ combined in one narrative composition without a central dominating scene: 19 episodes from the Passion of Christ, the Resurrection, and three later appearances of the risen Christ. The painting was commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, an Italian banker based in Bruges, who is depicted in a donor portrait kneeling and praying in the lower left corner, with his wife, Maria Baroncelli, in a similar attitude in the lower right corner.
The Second Shepherds' Play is a famous medieval mystery play which is contained in the manuscript HM1, the unique manuscript of the Wakefield Cycle. These plays are also referred to as the Towneley Plays, on account of the manuscript residing at Towneley Hall. The plays within the manuscript roughly follow the chronology of the Bible and so were believed to be a cycle, which is now considered not to be the case. This play gained its name because in the manuscript it immediately follows another nativity play involving the shepherds. In fact, it has been hypothesized that the second play is a revision of the first. It appears that the two shepherd plays were not intended to be performed together since many of the themes and ideas of the first play carry over to the second one. In both plays it becomes clear that Christ is coming to Earth to redeem the world from its sins. Although the underlying tone of The Second Shepherd's Play is serious, many of the antics that occur among the shepherds are extremely farcical in nature.
The Vaux Passional is an illuminated manuscript from the late fifteenth to early sixteenth century. With thirty-four large miniatures in the style of the Flemish School, it is one of the most elaborately decorated manuscripts in the collection of the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. It retains an original binding of wooden boards covered in velvet from the early sixteenth century. The volume contains the book plate of Watkin Williams of Penbedw.
Vindicta Salvatoris is a text of New Testament Apocrypha that expands the story of the aftermath of Jesus's execution. It was often presented as a supplement to the Gospel of Nicodemus. The oldest known copies are two Latin versions of the Vindicta Salvatoris, both dated to the 8th or 9th centuries and likely when the work was authored. The work is thought to have been composed in southern France, perhaps the Aquitaine region.
The pageant of Magnus Herodes is the sixteenth of the pageants of the Towneley Cycle of medieval mystery plays. It occupies folios 55-60 of the unique manuscript of the cycle, Huntington MS HM 1. It is composed in the distinctive stanza-style rhyming associated by scholars with a putative poet known as the 'Wakefield Master'. In the assessment of A. C. Cawley, 'the Wakefield playwright's skill in characterisation is nowhere better shown than in this pageant'. Like other tyrant characters in medieval drama, the protagonist of Herod the Great fictionalises the audience as his own subjects, and this pageant 'presents one of the most extended displays of this figure's interactive antics'.
Peter Meredith was, prior to retirement, a lecturer in medieval and early modern English language and literature. He was editor of the journal Leeds Studies in English from around 1978 to 1981 and chaired its editorial board from 1985 until his retirement. He was also an editor of Medieval English Theatre. He is particularly noted for his contributions, through editing, research, and performance, to the study of medieval English theatre.
The Pilate cycle is a group of various pieces of early Christian literature that purport to either be written by Pontius Pilate, or else otherwise closely describe his activities and the Passion of Jesus. Unlike the four gospels, these later writings were not canonized in the New Testament, and hence relegated to a status of apocrypha. Some writings were quite obscure, with only a few ancient textual references known today; they merely survived through happenstance, and may not have been particularly widely read by early Christians in the Roman Empire and Christians in the Middle Ages. Others were more popular. The most notable example was the Gospel of Nicodemus, which proved quite popular and influential in medieval and Renaissance Christianity.
