Negotiating the Reformation in the Northwest: The Reinvention of the Chester Cycle

Abstract

The final production of the Chester cycle took place in 1575, after a switch from the then traditional Whitsuntide date to four days at Midsummer. Scholars have read the switch to Midsummer as a last-ditch effort to preserve the cycle by associating it with a secular, rather than a religious, holiday, but have perhaps underestimated the continuous ability of the cycle to accommodate itself to similar earlier changes in the political and social climate, particularly those associated with the advancing Reformation. Extra-textual evidence, such as the fact that the Foxean martyr John Careless apparently took part in the nearby Coventry cycle in the 1550S, suggests a rather different role by that time for the Corpus Christi drama than that assumed by a unilateral thesis of Protestant suppression. Indeed, the earlier regrounding of the cycle's civic base in the Protestant auspices of Whitsuntide points toward a virtual reinvention of the cycle itself-a Protestant reappropriation comprising astute management of performance occasion, around the feast day central to the Protestant calendar, as well as substantial textual reorganization and revision. The social and political context in the northwest after the formation of the Chester bishopric in 1541, as well as the Chester records and cycle text, suggest that accommodation of the Reformation had advanced there to a significant degree by the time of the final performances. Not only do the often-remarked 'post- Reformation Banns' provide evidence, but also Newhall's 'Proclamation for Whitsonne Plays'. In addition, the centrality of the Pentecost play in the cycle's later design, as well as the texts of the Last Supper and the Antichrist plays, provide evidence of a revising Reformation hand at \\vork. Town officials seem engaged in accommodation and preservation rather than repression, and the result is a cycle in which it might not be incongruous for a Protestant like Careless to appear.