Early Modern Tragedy and the Mystery Plays

s This chapter argues that the indebtedness of Elizabethan theatre to medieval drama is discernible both physically - through shared properties, costumes and aural technologies - and conceptually, in the kind of drama this physical legacy inspired. It explores this indebtedness through a close study of the clearest theatrical example of this material legacy: the 1584 Coventry Destruction of Jerusalem play. The Destruction of Jerusalem was a newly written Elizabethan tragedy, based on a Greek history and written by a young university playwright, but performed by the Coventry guilds, as civic drama, using the properties and staging practices of the Corpus Christi plays. Through a detailed reading of the guild records, this essay will illustrate new material connections between this Elizabethan tragedy and the mystery plays which proceeded it on Coventry’s pageant wagons and argue that this rarely-studied play is perhaps the most direct example of contact between Christ’s suffering body in the Passion plays and the authority of the suffering body in Renaissance tragedy

Art · Art history · Drama · Literature · Passion · Political science · Reading (process) · The Renaissance · Tragedy (event) · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Psychology · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies