“The Second Shepherds’ Play”

Last updated on: December 15, 2016 at 10:57 pm by Dan Peterson

“The Second Shepherds’ Play” 2016-12-15T22:57:33-07:00 Dan Peterson

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The Folger Shakespeare Library sits just across an intersection from the seat of the Supreme Court of the United States. It’s an interesting neighborhood. (Wikimedia Commons)

It’s a bitterly cold night in the Washington DC area. But we enjoyed it nonetheless.

We attended a performance tonight, at the Folger Shakespeare Library, by the Folger Consort. They did The Second Shepherds’ Play, one of the most popular medieval English mystery plays. It survives in a sixteenth-century manuscript that belonged to the Catholic Towneley family of Lancashire — Protestant authorities shut the mystery plays down in England in the 1570s — and is now held in the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California (where I proposed to my wife).

The Folger people have reimagined it as a musical, retaining the original text and using only authentic music, both instrumental and vocal, dating from the 1500s or earlier. Only some of it was familiar (e.g., “Dives and Lazarus,” a tune that Latter-day Saints will recognize and that was collected and famously used by Ralph Vaughan Williams; the “Coventry Carol”; and “Greensleeves”), but it was very good.

The play is a mixture of comedy (involving a sheep-stealing couple and a group of Yorkshire shepherds who, by the play’s end, seem to have walked to Bethlehem, where the angels appear to them and they visit Mary, Joseph, and the Baby in the manger) and reverential worship.

I’ve always been intrigued by mystery plays (e.g. the fifteenth-century Middle English Everyman and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 Jedermann, which was inspired by it), both for their own intrinsic interest and for their connection with the sacral (temple) origins of drama.

By the way, I think that BYU ought to do The Second Shepherds’ Play at Christmas time. At least once. It would be a perfect fit.

Posted from Alexandria, Virginia

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