Date and Composition of the York Cycle and the York Flood

• written text comes from the collection of plays in the manuscript called the "York Register" of the Corpus Christi play, dated ca. 1463-77
• author is unknown
• would have been performed on a pageant wagon, in a procession through the streets of York with other pageants of the cycle
• guild "ownership" ascribed to the Fishers and the Mariners
• written in a fourteen-line stanza, abababab4 cdcccd3
• Noah exemplifies a number of typological relationships (i.e., the characters, themes, and events prefigure characters, themes, and events that appear later in bibilical tradition or figurally refer back to earlier ones.)
  • The Flood itself can be seen as prefiguring both Christ's Baptism and the destruction of the world by God at the Last Judgment.
    • "The story of Noah is thus both a continuation of the Fall of Man and a prelude to the coming of Christ" (Bevington, 290).
  • Noah is a type of Adam: both are acting on specific orders from God but are then deterred from their duty by disobedient wives. Noah, however, does not give in to his wife whereas Adam does.
  • Noah is also a type of Christ, saving true believers from destruction.
  • Mrs. Noah is a type of Eve and also represents recalcitrant sinners who refuse to follow Christ.
  • The Ark is the true church of believers, saved from destruction.
• The argument between Noah and his wife does not appear in Genesis. The dramatic tradition of Noah's wife's "disobedience was rooted in Eastern legend, which told that, as had been the case with Eve, her violation of the natural order was due to the temptations of Satan, who sought once again to thwart God's plan through the agency of a woman" (Beadle amd King, 21).
  • The Shrewish Wife motif is also medieval tradition related to fabliaux, such as The Miller's Tale and was a motif common to classical drama and native British literature drama. For example:
    • Roman playwright Plautus' Menaechmi has shrewish "Mrs. Menaechmus."
    • Chaucer's Wife of Bath (14th c.) might also be considered a shrew.
    • The English version of the shrewish wife appears in early drama as "Mrs. Noah," who refuses to board the ark with her husband in order to stay with her friends.
    • In the Tudor period, dramatic interludes and farces relied for comic effect on the stock character of the "violent, intractable, sharp-tongued" wives who cuckold husbands and order them around.
    • By Queen Elizabeth's reign, plays, which often relied on classical sources such as Plautus and Terence, had adapted classical shrews to English styles.
• No stage directions appear to explain the York staging of the loading of the animals, the flood itself, the release of the raven and dove, or the appearance of the rainbow. We must glean information about these elements through
  • close reading of the dialogue of the pageant and through
  • reading more explicit stage directions in other versions of the Flood in medieval drama, such as the Chester Noah and the Towneley Noah.

Other Noah Links

The Towneley Noah in ME text with glossary is online at the Towneley Plays Project Website, University of Calgary and at Harvard University's

• Geoffrey Chaucer Homepage. This text is from the lightly regularized, EETS 1897 edition of the plays.

Chester Noah page

Link to photos of the 1997 PLS Toronto Fringe Festival production of the Towneley Noah

 

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