Medieval Drama Research Articles

From Jerusalem to Damascus: Bilocal Dramaturgy in Medieval and Shakespearian Conversion Plays

In medieval religious drama, the stage is a moral world stage spaces have moral significance which an audience perceives or apperceives as a complement to the action that takes place in and around them. The classic example is the conventional spatial relation between sinister Hellmouth and dexter Paradise Д An analogous stage direction in the Ordo Repraesentationis Adae makes clear how consciously early drama worked for emblematic effects through use of stage space:

European Influences and National Tradition in Medieval Hungarian Theater

European Influences and National Tradition in Medieval Hungarian Theater Gydrgy E. Szonyi I Although dramatic representation has been said to have been first developed with agricultural rituals, semi-professional and professional acting and theatrical performance cannot be imagined without the development of an urban society and independent town life which established production and trade at a distance from agriculture. Such social conditions, of course, characterized ancient Athens as well as the medieval cities, which were centers of Greek drama and mystery festivities respectively. When the dramatic spectacle is homogeneous, intui­ tive, and unchangeable, it is nothing more than a ritual. Theater begins with a specialization which generates detached institu­ tions of acting and staging and presupposes an audience and a demand for combining moral teaching or other elements with entertaining matter. Theater means competition. The basis for all these conditions is town life or urbanization with a con­ siderable population, rival guilds, and a cultural atmosphere influenced by monasteries, schools, or aristocratic centers. Theatrical activity requires not only an economical and cultural basis, but also stable political conditions as well. Medieval Hungary was not provided with the ideal condi­ tions for the development of drama present in such countries as England and France. Among the tribes of the Great Migration, the Hungarians had arrived last in Europe. When they occupied the basin of the Carpathian Mountains, they encountered an existing social and cultural system, to which they adapted themselves as a condition of their survival. While the reform of Cluny and the ars nova stirred up Western intellectual life, the Hungarian Church still found that it must occupy itself with the suppression of latent pagan rites among the natives. It was 159 160 Comparative Drama also busy Christianizing newly arrived nomadic tribes such as the Kuns and some Tatar groups. Another obstacle retarding the growth of an independent national culture was that not only Western norms but also intellectuals were simply imported by the first state-building kings. Foreign monks organized cultural centers and the school system. First Byzantine advisers were drawn upon for administration, and later men of German origin were utilized, though we must not ignore other influences— Czech, Italian, French, etc. Such a young and unsettled country was burdened by a constant state of emergency resulting from recurring attempts by its western neighbors to put an end to the independence of the kingdom and to reduce it to a vassal of the Holy Roman Empire. On the other hand, the eastern frontiers always had to function as a shield against attacking pagan hordes—e.g., the Tatars in the thirteenth century and the Turks from the beginning of the fifteenth century. The fourteenth century was a period of stabilization and of flourishing medieval culture, however. After the extinction of the Arpad dynasty which had ruled from the ninth century to 1301, the Naples branch of the Anjou family acquired the throne (1308-82), followed by Sigismund of Luxembourg (1385-1437) who brought again French and German cultural influences. Only in 1458 did Hungary acquire a national king, Matthias, who, being a great Renaissance prince, once more decided to import culture, in this instance from the Platonist academies and brilliant courts of the Italian quattrocento.1 But in the fourteenth century, the Anjou reign had created not only a prosperous economy in Hungary, but also a courtly tradition, a richly ornamented Gothic architecture and sculpture, a well developed school and university system, and a literary life as well.2 These developments were not reversed during the Luxembourg era. Towns also grew, and the network of guilds became complete. However, because of later destruction, we rarely find literary works from this period. Nor may we expect such a crucible of political and cultural crosscurrents to have produced a homogeneous Hungarian literature but rather a mishmash of different kinds of influence, dominated by Latin mixed with German. The national tongue thus only slowly rose to take its role. Nevertheless, drama in fact did exist in this part of Europe, and it is indeed interesting to see the transformations through which medieval drama reached the Gyorgy E. Szdnyi 161 frontiers of European culture. On the other hand, we cannot help noticing...

Surprised By Love: The Dramatic Structure and Popular Appeal of the Wakefield Second Shepherds' Pageant

The Wakefield Shepherds' Pageant has been one of the most discussed of medieval dramas and deservedly so. Edmund Taft's fresh and insightful essay provides a provocative view o f the play as popular drama, produced by the middle‐class and largely for the middle class. The popular appeal of this drama rests in the technique of dramatic surprise, used so effectively by the Wakefield Master to focus on such contemporary social and moral issues as oppression of shepherds, farmers and hired hands, unfeeling masters, unwanted children and marriages of contract only. The shepherds' play, with its powerful spiritual message of love and charity, reflects not only the Church which directed the drama but also the contemporary world of those medieval burghers who produced it.

The "Suppression Theory" and the English Corpus Christi Play: A Re-Examination

Most discussions of English medieval theatre and drama include at least a mention of the disappearance of the town cycle plays, those short plays ranging in subject matter from the Creation to Doomsday performed by the citizenry and craftsmen in several English towns.1 While factors such as economics and the Renaissance are mentioned in these discussions, the generally accepted viewpoint is that it was the Protestant Reformation which primarily accounts for their demise during the sixteenth century. Several studies written within the past thirty years have not only echoed just such a viewpoint, but have also refined it: the plays were popish relics which successive Protestant governments and churchmen actively attempted to abolish.

A Difficult Language

Journal Article The Language of Adam: On the Limits and Systems of Discourse (by Russell Fraser) Get access A Difficult LanguageThe Language of Adam: On the Limits and Systems of Discourse. By Russell Fraser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Pp. xiii + 288. $15.00. Eugene D. Hill Eugene D. Hill Eugene D. Hill, Instructor in English at Mount Holyoke College, has published an article on medieval drama in Modern Philology. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 1, Spring 1980, Pages 111–116, https://doi.org/10.2307/2869385 Published: 01 April 1980

The Staging of the Mystère D'Adam

In his recent overview of the staging of medieval religious drama, A. M. Nagler concludes his commentary on the twelfth-century Adam play with a statement made by Karl Grass in 1928: “As far as the question of structure of the stage is concerned, the stage directions leave us in the lurch. … A reconstruction of the stage, as it was intended for the play, is scarcely possible on the basis of these particulars.” Since the 1920s, when scholars such as Grass, Paul Studer, and Gustave Cohen examined the possible staging of the Anglo-Norman drama, attention has remained almost exclusively on the didascalia, the Latin stage directions interspersed throughout the text. Despite the more recent work of Grace Frank, Michel Mathieu, Uda Ebel, and Wolfgang Greisenegger, Grass's comment about the stage directions leaving us in the lurch is still true. There are other sources of evidence, however, which have been used insufficiently or not at all in reconstructing the staging of the Mystère d'Adam. Not all clues in the dialogue having to do with the position or movement of actors have been examined by theatre historians.

Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays

Anti-Semitism and the English Mystery Plays Stephen Spector The general tone of the medieval English mystery plays is affirmative. The early religious drama conveys a triumphant vision of temporal and cosmic symmetry that was designed to comfort and sustain the believing Christian. Yet there also exists within the plays a mood of unrelenting hostility, and this is directed in large part toward the disbeliever, the Jew. The mys­ tery plays comprise, in fact, one of the most vehemently antiJewish genres in the history of English literature. I propose in this article to explore the character of this anti-Jewishness and to speculate about its function. I shall argue that the perspec­ tives and dynamics of the drama parallel those of classic and clinical anti-Semitism: that the drama not only distorts and stereotypes the Jew, but more particularly that it assigns to the Jew the unwanted aspects of the Christian community and con­ sequently execrates him. I offer this analysis both in order to address an important issue that has been too often ignored, and also to attempt a more temperate and adequate assessment than those which now exist. This study is not an indictment of a single group, but rather a consideration of human failings. I describe here a mode of self-justification and self-defense that can operate in all men, Jews as well as Christians. Hannah Arendt, Jacob Katz, and others have demonstrated Jewish complicity in historical reli­ gious recriminations,! and this must be explored, as must Chris­ tian offenses, in the hope that both can be better understood and therefore avoided. Most of the critics who discuss the anti-Semitism of the religious drama do so with an indignation that impedes accurate appraisal. Their work is neither systematic nor analytical, but only loosely descriptive and condemnatory. For example, Ed3 4 Comparative Drama ward N. Calisch says in The Jew in English Literature that in the New Testament plays “there is no accusation [against the Jews] too horrible, no charge too monstrous to prevent its being given credence and repetition.”2 M. J. Landa says in The Jew in Drama that “in every possible way the representation of the medieval drama vilified the Jew,” and he adds that the Jews “were fair game for the merciless sport of the ignorant people whom the ecclesiastical writers of the Mysteries and the Miracle plays were anxious to impress. The convention of the Jew of the stage was thus bom amidst fanaticism, intolerance and ignor­ ance. . . .”3 These critics are right to condemn the anti-Semitism of the plays, but they are mistaken in their assessment of the insult and, in Landa’s case, in the attribution of motive. The Jews in many of the plays are demeaned, but not in “every possible way.” Rather, their vices are precisely and consistently delineated, and the nature of these vices reveals much about the plays themselves. To ascribe these stage-portraits to fanaticism, intolerance, and ignorance, as Landa does, is to ignore the sig­ nificance of the Jew to the drama—and to the community that wrote, produced, and attended the plays. That significance can be discovered by comparing the antiJewishness of the plays with the dominant psychoanalytic theory about real-life anti-Semitism. This conception of antiSemitism was first tacitly suggested by Sigmund Freud, and has since been reiterated by historians, social commentators, and clinical psychologists. In essence, it portrays the anti-Semite as a person who condemns in the Jew those qualities, real or attributed, that he cannot tolerate in his experience or in himself .4 The anti-Semite attempts to externalize inner conflicts and to relieve anxieties by unconsciously scapegoating the Jew.5 He seizes on the Jew because the Jew is the available or cultur­ ally-defined target, the suspect, alien element in the community, and he projects onto the Jew dangers that the anti-Semite finds threatening. In this way, the anti-Semite’s personal responsibility for his problems is reduced, and the problems themselves are readily located in an external and convenient repository: the Jew. The attributes perceived in the Jew are a function of the anti-Semitism, and will therefore reveal more about the...

On the Uses of Iconographic Study: The Example of the Sponsus from St. Martial of Limoges

On the Uses of Iconographic Study: The Example of the Sponsus From St. Martial of Limoges Clifford Davidson The great advantage of the study of iconography in relation to early drama is that it ruptures the usual self-contained struc­ tures that literary criticism has consistently attempted to impose on individual plays and on quasi-dramatic forms. Careful and systematic study of the iconography quickly determines that the dramatic structures being observed are not at all self-contained, and that instead they involve a careful focusing of our attention that paradoxically denies the unity of the dramatic action. Indeed, the concept of unity, which is still being applied to such plays by some American critics, is surely the most inaccurate conception that could possibly be utilized as a device to describe the “action” of early drama, which was never intended to be viewed as a self-sufficient art form. The religious plays in par­ ticular have their roots in cultic experience, and are deeply influenced by the manner in which the cult looks at religious scenes in the visual arts as well as in imagination. When we turn specifically to the medieval religious music drama as well as to the quasi-dramatic rituals to which it was so closely related, the purpose of the spectacle is quite easily distinguished; in the words of Dom Odo Casel appropriately quoted by C. Clifford Flanigan in a study of the Quem queritis trope, “God has made it possible for us, even in this life, to enter into the divine pre­ sent.”! Iconography therefore leads quite naturally to phenom­ enology and the recognition that perceived experience and observable structures need to be the focus of our attention as we attempt to place the individual medieval play, in this case the Sponsus from St. Martial of Limoges, into its proper critical context. 300 Clifford Davidson 301 Iconographie study itself, of course, needs to be disciplined and careful if it is to provide the kind of convincing information that will illuminate plays and create the groundwork for similarly meticulous work on the phenomenology of dramatic forms. This is particularly important at this time because of the methodo­ logical crisis that the study of drama as literature is now exper­ iencing. Some recent studies of texts have unfortunately tended to violate their integrity, to cut them off from attention to their original purpose, and to exploit them for political and other purposes.2 Therefore our work of scholarship and criticism needs to take the greatest care with regard to its approach to the many diverse aspects of even an individual scene, and indeed these aspects include much that can never be known through texts at all. Thus contemporary illustrations in the visual arts will be seen to contain crucial information that is very difficult to reduce to verbal equivalents. There are very specific ways in which the designs, for example, of manuscript illuminations from St. Martial of Limoges which are contemporary with the Sponsus would throw light on the way the scenes of the play were visualized.3 At the same time, of course, texts must not be neglected, for they are capable of providing the necessary linkage of ideas that will piece together for us the meaning of a particular frag­ ment of spectacle. Our methodology will avoid merely the tracing of iconographie ideas apart from their hermeneutic context, for it is true that iconographie configurations may have different meanings in different periods and different settings. We also need carefully to avoid neat schema of causes and effects, of assumptions ultimately based on rather simplistic notions about literary and dramatic sources. Hence it would seem appropriate to examine first the work of an influential critic, Émile Mâle, who has previously considered the Sponsus not in terms of its structure as play or in terms of its purpose, but in terms of finding missing links between examples in the arts and their presumed sources.4 Indeed, Mâle’s attempts to trace the widespread iconography of the Wise and Foolish Virgins in an entire region in France to the play at St. Martial would seem to place the Sponsus somewhat in the untenable position of the...

The York Cycle: 1977

On 1 and 2 October 1977 the entire surviving text of the York Cycle of mystery plays was performed on the campus of the University of Toronto. The event was co-ordinated by a committee made up, on the whole, of graduate students associated with the Poculi Ludique Societas, the medieval play troupe of the Centre for Medieval Studies. I was chairman of that committee and, as such, undertook the co-ordinating function of the mayor of York while the committee fulfilled the role of the city council. Under the supervision of these officials, from at least 1376 until the suppression in 1569, the long series of forty-seven pageants dramatizing biblical history from Creation to the Last Judgment was performed by the craft guilds of the city. Our production, though marred by heavy rain on 1 October and generally cold weather, was an extraordinary event. Such was its impact in human and community terms that I had difficulty in assessing its academic value in the immediate postproduction period. It has taken the passage of a busy academic year, many discussions with my colleagues and students, and three long and thoughtful reviews to bring me to the point of writing this article. Time has given me perspective and the discussions and reviews have clarified in my mind what we intended to accomplish and what we learned from the enterprise.

Building Miracles

That interest in medieval theatre and drama has generally been restricted to the academic community is an ironic though hardly surprising fact. As a popular form of drama — one that is inextricably linked with the beliefs and customs of the communities from which it developed — there is no reason to expect medieval plays to successfully transplant to distant times and places. Nevertheless, these plays are rarely successful in a classroom or in the study, where their theatrical values are invariably obscured. Written for the stage, medieval scripts even more than Elizabethan plays require theatrical presentation to be fully appreciated. Indeed, the occasional revivals suggest that medieval drama can provide a moving experience for a contemporary audience. And at a time when the search for viable popular forms has engaged so many of our most dynamic theatre innovators, one might have expected a more wide-spread revival of interest (within theatre, not only academic, circles) in medieval plays and staging conventions. But that interest has, to date, failed to materialize, and on the whole the medieval theatre continues to be the concern of a small handful of scholarly specialists.

The Montecassino Passion and the Poetics of Medieval Drama by Robert Edwards

The Montecassino Passion and the Poetics of Medieval Drama by Robert Edwards

The Breton Creation Ar Bet and the Medieval Drama of Adam and Eve

The Breton Creation Ar Bet and the Medieval Drama of Adam and Eve

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Towneley Cycle. A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM 1.. With an Introduction by A. C. CAWLEY and MARTIN STEVENS. Pp. xx+ ff. 1–132 and frontispiece (Leeds Texts and Monographs. Medieval Drama Facsimiles 2). Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1976. NORMAN DAVIS NORMAN DAVIS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXIX, Issue 113, February 1978, Pages 83–84, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXIX.113.83 Published: 01 February 1978

Why Do the Shepherds Prophesy?

Why Do the Shepherds Prophesy? Thomas P. Campbell The Wakefield Secunda Pastorum, by all means the bestknown pageant in the Middle English Mystery Cycles, has drawn much commentary, the majority of it directed toward the con­ trast between the humorous mock-nativity staged by Mak and Gill to conceal their stolen sheep and the pious conclusion of the play in which the shepherds reverently worship the Christchild at Bethlehem.1 Yet, much of this commentary has led us away from the connections between this superbly comic piece and the many other depictions of the shepherds in the history of medieval drama. If we are to understand the traditions under which the Wakefield Master is writing, we must examine more carefully a moment in this play which as yet has received little attention: the point at which the shepherds prophesy the birth of Christ. Typically, the Wakefield Master is able simultaneously to communicate both humor and reverence. The three shepherds have caught Mak red-handed. Realizing that they could by right hang this criminal for his robbery, they charitably “cast hym in canvas.” They fall asleep from their exertions, and are awakened by the song of the angel announcing Christ’s birth. They begin to imitate it haltingly, but are interrupted by the second shep­ herd, Gyb, who suddenly begins to cite Old Testament pro­ phecies: We fynde by the prophecy—let be youre dyn!— Of Dauid and Isay and mo then I myn— Thay prophecyed by clergy—that in a vyrgyn Shuld he lyght and ly, to slokyn oure syn, And slake it, Oure kynde, from wo; For Isay sayd so: Ecce virgo Concipiet a chylde that is nakyd.2 137 138 Comparative Drama Why should he interrupt the action of the play at this point? The transition from the mock-nativity to the real one has already been accomplished both by a demonstration of the shepherds’ charity and by the announcement of the angel. The prophecies seem to be an intrusion into the form of the play. In fact, how­ ever, the shepherds’ recognition of Old Testament prophecies of the Savior is one of the few elements which the Secunda Pastorum shares in common with all medieval English shep­ herds’ plays; and, as I shall argue, it may be traced back to the very roots of the Christmas drama itself. Yet, why should the shepherds prophesy? They do not in the scriptural source. Nor does there seem to be a firm tradition in the exegetical literature linking the shepherds with the recita­ tion of Old Testament prophecies.3 Scholarly opinion on this topic is divided. The standard view, which held that the mystery cycles were the linear outgrowths of liturgical drama, maintained that prophecy in the shepherd plays was attributable to its pre­ sence in liturgical plays; that it was a logical and evolutionary expansion of an established tradition.4 This view is now on the wane, and few modem scholars would assume a direct, linear relationship between liturgical and secular drama. In its place, more recent theorists have argued that the shepherds prophesy because they are antetypes of the clergy; or because they func­ tion to tie the Old Testament and New Testament together; or because the playwrights are drawing upon conventional folk wisdom.5 It is not enough to maintain, as the evolutionary cri­ tics held, that prophecy occurs in these plays simply because it appears in liturgical drama; nor can we synthesize the varying theories of the modem organicists. What is needed is a new attempt, drawing upon the insights of both schools. It is my purpose in the following paper to trace the function and meaning of prophecy in the medieval shepherds’ plays. We will begin with a brief literary analysis of the English cycle plays; but our study will take us back to the liturgical drama, and from there into the medieval liturgy itself. At that point I shall ex­ amine the reasons for the association of shepherds and prophecy from the earliest history of medieval drama. For it is my conten­ tion that this association is an important key to understanding the origin and meaning of the Christmas plays. The medieval English playwrights...

Teaching Literary Antisemitism

BEGINNING with the medieval drama and continuing through the writings of Langland, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Nashe, Dryden, Smollett, Defoe, Pope, Swift, Dickens, Hawthorne, Pound, and Eliot-to mention the perhaps betterknown examples-Jews and Judaism have been depicted in English and American literature largely in negative and offensive terms. In their recently published survey of contemporary antisemitism, Forster and Epstein state: From 'Shylock' to 'shyster,' words and images have been used and invented to depict Jews as canny, crafty, usurious, power-mad, conspiratorial, unassimilable, pushy, clannish, aggressive, stubborn, weak, greedy.' Obviously, Jews are not the only people who have been vilified in literature; indeed, there is hardly a religion, a race, a nationality, a people, which has not been, at one time or another, the victim of literary animosity. Nevertheless, it would seem fair to say that as much as anyone or any group-and in most cases more so-Jews have been subjected to extensive and persistent denigration in many of the most widely-taught works of English and American literature. A number of more or less obvious questions arise concerning these works, and others like them, especially in light of their exposure to thousands of public school and college students each year. The first question, and perhaps the most obvious, is should such works be taught at all? Antisemitism is, after all, a conditioned reaction; no one, we assume, is born antisemitic, nor has there been any evidence to show that antisemitism is transmitted geneticallv. As with any other group or personal prejudice, antisemitism derives from an individual's personal and social experiences, including the reading and studying of literature.2

<italic>The Towneley Cycle. A Facsimile of Huntington MS. HM 1</italic>, with an introduction by A. C. Cawley and M. Stevens. Leeds Texts and Monographs. Medieval Drama Facsimiles, II. Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1976; pp. xix, 263 pp. of facsimile, one colour plate; price not given, paper

<italic>The Towneley Cycle. A Facsimile of Huntington MS. HM 1</italic>, with an introduction by A. C. Cawley and M. Stevens. Leeds Texts and Monographs. Medieval Drama Facsimiles, II. Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1976; pp. xix, 263 pp. of facsimile, one colour plate; price not given, paper

Medival Theatre in the Round

In the last 20 years the study of medieval English drama has virtually been revolutionized. Scholars such as H.C. Gardiner, F.M. Salter, Richard Southern, Glynne Wickham, and O.B. Hardison Jr. have re-examined the conclusions of E.K. Chambers, Karl Young , and Hardin Craig , challenging their evolutionary tendency to see medieval drama as merely a prelude to the age of Shakespeace , and, in particular, questioning their assumption that the norm for presenting the great mystery cycles was the pageant-car method of Chester and York. In doing so, they have made us look at the cycles more closely as plays for staging, with the happy result that we have rediscovered their theatrical worth and are beginning to see them revived more and more frequently. To no one do we owe a greater debt for this than to Richard Southern whose classic study of 1957 has been reissued , dedicated like the original significantly to Bertolt Brecht.

To Out-Herod Herod: The Development of a Dramatic Character

Though Hamlet refers to the presentation of Herod as a raging braggart in the English mystery cycles, he is selecting only one of the two divergent strains which form medieval drama's continual fascination with the depiction of Herod. Hamlet's admonishment to the players, his objection to overacting, is based on the ranting tyrant who appears in some of the cycles. Within the figure of Herod, however, medieval drama finds much more than merely a bragging buffoon. Some cycles portray Herod as a tragic figure, the fatal victim of overreaching pride. More than any other single character in medieval drama, Herod becomes a variety of persons under one name. From the wretched villain of biblical and apocryphal accounts, Herod grows in liturgical drama to a figure of potential comedy, potential tragedy, and increasingly less villainy. In the mystery cycles he reaches the apex of his dramatic career as he becomes at times the comic braggart, at times the tragic ruler, at times a combination of comic and tragic hero. Through a brief study of Herod's growth, first in the apocryphal works and biblical commentaries and then in the liturgical drama, we can begin to see the formation of two separate strains,

The Trinity in Medieval Drama

Although drama has been closely associated with religious rites in many ages and in many parts of the world, only Christianity of all the great world religions has produced a drama that can truly be called a theophany and that at only one period of its history: the high Middle Ages. For medieval drama does not only put God on the stage as a deus ex machina or part of a ritual enactment; it portrays in most intimate and revealing detail every aspect of the history of God's relationship with Man, from the Creation to the Incarnation and beyond to the end of the world. In order to do this, the dramatists go far beyond the limits of mere dramatization of biblical stories: with a sublime naivete that robs their work of blasphemy, they lift the veil and show us the very innermost councils of the divine Trinity. It might truly be said that in this as in all things God had been the first to act, for the theophany of God in Christ was the starting point for the growth of Christianity and it was from the ritual re-enactment of this revelation of God in the liturgy of the Church that medieval religious drama developed. It is not surprising, therefore, that the person of the Trinity most commonly found in the plays should be the Second Person, the Logos, the Salvator, Christ Jesus, the Lord. Not until late in the Middle Ages did the First and Third Persons of the Trinity tread the boards, and Father, Son, and Spirit together justify the ways of God to man.

Typology, Criticism, and Medieval Drama: Some Observations on Method

Students of medieval drama frequently suggest that typological exegesis provides a method by which the essential poetic meaning and the unifying compositional principle of the cycle plays become intelligible to its audience. The following essay examines the manner in which systems of doctrinal concordances appear in the pictorial programs of biblical art. Hopefully, by looking at selected examples of religious art we can develop an awareness of when and how typology was used in the depiction of the bible story; and, more importantly, we can develop a standard for a more trustworthy reading of the cycle drama.