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These vernacular religious performances were taken over by the Guild s, with each guild taking responsibility for a particular piece of scriptural history. From the guild control they gained the name mystery play or just mysteries, from the Latin ''mysterium'' (meaning ''handicraft'' and relating to the guilds). Mystery plays should not be confused with ''Miracle plays'', which specifically re-enacted episodes from the lives of the Saint s. Also, Miracle plays were performed in Latin, unlike Mysteries which were meant to be understood by the common man. The mystery play developed into a series of plays dealing with all the major events in the Christian calendar, from the Creation to the Day of Judgment. By the end of the 15th century, the tradition of acting these plays in cycles on festival days (such as the '' Feast Of Corpus Christi '') was established across Europe, each play was performed on decorated carts called ''pageants'', that moved about the city to allow different crowds to watch each play. The entire cycle could take up to twenty hours to perform and could be spread over a number of days. Taken as a whole, these are referred to as ''Corpus Christi cycles''. The plays were performed by amateurs and used the stanza form that was already well known; they were often marked by the extravagance of the sets and 'special effects'. Some plays were staged on elaborate traveling "pageant wagons" that could tower up to three levels with various trap doors and devices built in. ENGLISH MYSTERY PLAYS There are four complete or nearly complete extant English biblical collections of plays; we may no longer call all of them "cycles": the ''York cycle'' of forty-eight pageants; the ''Towneley plays'' of thirty-two pageants, once thought to have been a true 'cycle' of plays acted at Wakefield ; the ''N Town plays'' of forty-three pageants (also called the ''Ludus Coventriae cycle'' or ''Hegge cycle'') acted probably in Lincolnshire or Norfolk, and the '' Chester Cycle '' of twenty-four pageants. Also extant are two pageants from a New Testament cycle acted at Coventry and one pageant each from Norwich and Newcastle-on-Tyne. There are three surviving plays in Cornish , and several cyclical plays survive from continental Europe. These biblical plays differed widely in content. Most contain episodes such as the ''Fall of Lucifer'', the ''Creation and Fall of Man'', ''Cain and Abel'', ''Noah and the Flood'', ''Abraham and Isaac'', the ''Nativity'', the ''Raising of Lazarus'', the ''Passion'', and the ''Resurrection''. Other pageants included the story of ''Moses'', the ''Procession of the Prophets'', ''Christ's Baptism'', the ''Temptation in the Wilderness'', and the ''Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin''. In given cycles, the plays came to be sponsored by the newly emerging Medieval craft guilds. The York mercers, for example, sponsored the ''Doomsday'' pageant. The guild associations are not, however, to be understood as the method of production for all towns. While the Chester pageants are associated with guilds, there is no indication that the N-Town plays are either associated with guilds or performed on pageant wagons. Perhaps the most famous of the mystery plays were those of Wakefield. Unfortunately, we cannot know whether the plays of the Towneley manuscript are actually the plays performed at Wakefield but a reference in the Second Shepherds' Play to Horbery Shrogys ( {Link without Title} line 454) is strongly suggestive. The most famous plays of the Towneley collection are attributed to the Wakefield Master, an anonymous playwright who wrote in the fifteenth century. Early scholars suggested that a man by the name of Gilbert Pilkington was the author, but this idea has been disproved by Craig and others. The epithet "Wakefield Master" was first applied to this individual by the literary historian Gayley. The Wakefield Master gets his name from the geographic location where he lived, the market-town of Wakefield in Yorkshire. He may have been a highly educated cleric there, or possibly a friar from a nearby monastery at Woodkirk, four miles north of Wakefield. It was once thought that this anonymous author wrote a series of 32 plays (each averaging about 384 lines) called the Towneley Cycle. The Master's contributions to this collection are still much debated, and some scholars believe he may have written fewer than ten of them. A cycle is a series of mystery plays performed during the Corpus Christi festival. These works appear in a single manuscript, which was kept for a number of years in Towneley Hall of the Towneley family. Thus the plays are called the Towneley Cycle. The manuscript is currently found in the Huntington Library of California. It shows signs of Protestant editing — references to the Pope and the sacraments are crossed out, for instance. Likewise, twelve manuscript leaves were ripped out between the two final plays because of Catholic references. This evidence strongly suggests the play was still being read and performed as late as 1520, perhaps as late in Renaissance as the final years of King Henry VIII's reign. This fact says something about the power and influence of the medieval mystery play — the genre was still popular when Shakespeare was a small boy, and he might very well have grown up watching such plays before writing his own. The best known pageant in the Towneley manuscript is ''The Second Shepherds' Pageant'', a burlesque of the Nativity featuring Mak the sheep stealer and his wife Gill, which more or less explicitly compares a stolen lamb to the Saviour of mankind. The '' Harrowing Of Hell '', derived from the apocryphal '' Acts Of Pilate '', was a popular part of the York and Wakefield cycles. The dramas of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods were developed out of mystery plays. The Mystery Plays were revived in York in 1951 as part of the Festival Of Britain . EXTERNAL LINKS
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