Peter Gill and the Queering of the York Realist

Summary

In a recent study of medieval drama, Tison Pugh argues that the interplay between the Old and the New Testaments in the York Mystery Cycle “unleash[es] the queer potential of a theological production.” But The York Realist, a 2001 drama by the Welsh playwright and director Peter Gill, presents a more nuanced queering of the York Cycle. Among the cycles of English mystery plays, that from York (sometimes called the Corpus Christi Play) is the longest and may be the earliest. Forty-seven of what were once fifty individual plays, or pageants, survive and recount the whole of salvation history from the Fall of the Angels to Doomsday. The plays themselves were produced and performed annually by the city’s guilds for nearly two centuries on Corpus Christi Day. The earliest record of the York plays dates from 1376; the last performance until the twentieth century was in 1569, an attempt to revive them in 1580 having failed.

No one knows who wrote any of the individual York plays, though many seem to have been revised multiple times, some perhaps by a single author whom scholars have called the “York Realist.” The plays were written in the same long alliterative lines found in other literature from the north and west of England at the time. The eight plays attributed to the York Realist contain an overabundance of realistic detail and underscore the psychological motivations of characters, especially villains.

Besides an interest in the York Realist, recent scholarship has grounded the York Plays in the culture and history of medieval England’s second city. The centrality of the guilds and their conflicts with local civic and ecclesiastical authorities informs the dialogue and individual scenes in many of the plays. Similar plays from other cycles lack such sustained emphasis. As Clifford Davidson and Sheila White have shown, there is an ongoing concern within the York Plays with bullying, as individual characters, especially Christ, suffer at the hands of those who abuse their power. That abuse is often notable for its realistic cruelty. Such abuse may further reflect tensions between the guilds and local authorities when the York Cycle was produced. Furthermore, the York Plays are unique among the surviving English Corpus Christi cycles in their concern with homosocial male bonding to create a hypermasculine backdrop against which salvation history plays out.