91 Gosford St
The common word for these craft-plays is pageants, a word of uncertain origin, which is also applied to the vehicle or movable stage whereon the acting took place. These pageants[670] were divided into two parts; the actors dressed—and no doubt waited also, when their presence was not required on the stage—in the under part, where they were concealed by hanging cloths; the play was set forth on the upper part, which was open to the view, and furnished with suitable scenery, and the floor strewn with rushes. Journeymen and other hirelings dragged the pageants from place to place, the play being repeated at convenient points within the city, beginning with Gosford Street. The second and third stations appear to have been at the end of Much Park Street, most likely the corner of Jordan Well, and at the New Gate respectively. Dr Craig thinks that there were ten stations, which would accord well with the number of pageants and of wards within the city, though I cannot think that each of the plays was performed ten times over. Flesh is weak, and it is difficult to see how either actors or spectators could have borne the strain.[671] Moreover even the long light days of May or June would hardly have sufficed for such a stupendous task: when it was once essayed, all the pageants being first played before Richard Wood's door to pleasure Queen Margaret, in 1457, daylight failed, and the performance of "Doomsday" was perforce abandoned. Indeed it seems that this particular play, which naturally concluded the series, was but thrice acted, since the drapers regularly order three "worldys"—for which in 1556 they paid Croo two shillings—one to be destroyed, it appears, in each performance.[672]
OLD HOUSE IN COX STREET
No doubt this mobility of the theatre, and the simultaneous acting of various pageants at different stations was necessitated by the lack of an open space within the city sufficient to contain the throng of spectators. The acting of single plays, not belonging to the traditional cycle, such as the play of S. Catherine acted in 1491, or that of S. Crytyan or Christian, "magnus ludus vocatus seynt Xpeans pley,"[673] performed at Whitsuntide in 1505, took place in the Little Park where space was ample. That a regular open-air amphitheatre was constructed—such as the plân an guare which survives at S. Just in Cornwall, is improbable; the Park-Hollows, where later Lollard and Marian martyrs suffered death, would maybe serve aptly for the purpose. Such an indelible impression did S. Christian's play make on those that beheld it, that years later when divers neighbours and friends were asked to give proof of Walter Smith's age—it was the Walter Smith who was after strangled by means of Dorothy, his faithless wife—they recalled that his baptism took place the year S. Christian's play was played in the Little Park.
There was possibly a convenient station close to the Greyfriars' church, where Henry VII. and his Queen viewed the plays in 1493. This is the explanation, whereat Dr Craig[674] has arrived after a careful sifting of the evidence, of the cryptic saying of some of the annalists that the King and Queen saw the plays acted by the Greyfriars. "In his Mayoralty," says one version, "K.H. 7 came to see the plays acted by the Grey Friers and much commended them"; another version, quoted by Dr Craig, varies the reading to "at the greyfriers," the probably correct interpretation.[675] The only other reference to the grey friars' acting comes from Dugdale, who goes further in attributing a particular manuscript to this particular house. The plays were "acted," he says, "with mighty state and reverence by the Friers of this House"; and further "I have been told," he continues, "by some old people, who in their younger years were eye-witnesses of these Pageants so acted, that the yearly confluence of people to see that shew was extraordinary great, and yeilded no small advantage to this City."[676] Here Homer distinctly nods. Dugdale does not seem to have heard of the craft plays, whereof the regular representation did not cease until 1580,[677] twenty-five years before his birth, and thirty-five years before his entry into Coventry grammar school, but it was clearly to these pageants that the old people aforesaid referred, since any hypothetical acting on the part of the friars must have ceased in 1538 with the suppression of their house, sixty-seven years before Dugdale's birth and seventy-seven years before the beginning of his scholastic life at Coventry.
It is also on the slenderest grounds that the historian of Warwickshire attributes the fifteenth century MS. of the Ludus Coventriæ to the Franciscans of that city. The first possessor of the manuscript was one Robert Hegge of Durham, after whose death in 1629 it appears to have passed into Cotton's possession and is still included in the great Cottonian collection in the British Museum.[678] Cotton's librarian, Richard James, described the MS. on the fly-leaf as scenes from the New Testament,[679] acted by monks or mendicant friars, adding that the book is commonly known as the Coventry plays or Corpus Christi plays.[680] A later librarian in 1696 omitted the Coventry attribution, but still alluded to the plays as represented by mendicant friars.
Here the matter must rest. Probably the last word has still to be said on the subject. Scholars are not agreed on the locale of the Ludus Coventriæ which have been assigned to districts as far removed as the northeast midlands and Wiltshire, or to their actors, who have been represented as strolling players, or even Coventry friars "on tour."[681] We might be disposed to accept—with caution—the view, evidently based on some tradition or other, that these plays were acted by friars,[682] but the objection to identifying these friars with the Coventry Franciscans, acting at any rate in Coventry, is that the city was furnished already with well-authenticated craftsmen-acted plays of great renown, whereof some examples are now left, and that it would be impossible for two sets of plays and actors to command attention at the feast of Corpus Christi. Nor is there evidence, so far as I am aware, to connect any of the Coventry religious with the stationary plays acted on occasions at Whitsuntide.[683]