Spectacle and Self-Knowledge: The Authority of the Audience in the Mystery Plays

Abstract

The Towneley Second Shepherds' Play, probably the medieval drama best known to English-speaking audiences, opens in a world in desperate need, both physical and (though the shepherds do not always recognize this) spiritual, and although most of the play concerns its characters' attempts to meet their physical needs, it ends in a world still cold and hungry, but spiritually satisfied (the second passage above clearly contradicts one critic's view that physical cold represents spiritual need).2 It arrives at this state by means of a theatrical experience within the play itself; Mak and Gill, the sheep-stealers, put on a performance designed to deceive their victims, pretending that the stolen lamb is actually their newborn child:

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