York Corpus Christi Pageant, Toronto, June 7

I’ll be in Toronto next week to observe and document a full production of the York Corpus Christi Cycle. The event, which took place annually for hundreds of years in the streets of the medieval city of York, dramatizes the Christian salvation story from the creation of the universe to the final judgement. The plays, which were very effective at teaching the doctrine of the medieval church, were suppressed for that very reason in England during the Protestant Reformation.

The master copy of the plays (the “York Register”) was confiscated by the authorities as part of an attempt to crush a Catholic rebellion against Elizabeth, a few years after Shakespeare was born.

I’ll be touching on these echoes of the medieval theater when I teach “Shakespeare in Context” this fall.  Though his family had Catholic ties, Shakespeare lived a public life that conformed to the official Protestant religion of the land.  Nevertheless, he would have would certainly grown up in Stratford seeing street theater informed by medieval pageantry. Perhaps older actors in his troupe would have told him stories about their own experiences. At any rate, Hamlet’s critique of overdone acting that “out-herods Herod” is a reference to the medieval tradition of playing King Herod as a bombastic villain. In a similar way today, we might refer to “a mustache-twirling villain” or “riding off into the sunset” and be fairly confident that many echoes of melodrama and Westerns have filtered into the cultural mainstream.

I have a personal interest in the York plays because a 2D computer simulation of the York Cycle was the subject of my first published scholarship some 30 years ago, and I’m happy to catch up on the field, as I continue to work on my 3D update to the York pageant simulation.

For the Toronto performance, dozens of different theatrical groups, comprising hundreds of actors, will be performing at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, for an event expected to last from 6am until well past midnight. 

The organizer will be setting me up with a fancy new 4K videocamera. I’m bringing along some of my own low-resolution cameras (including possibly a webcam) for static wide-angle shots, so that if the fancy main camera misses something important on stage because I’ve zoomed in elsewhere, I’ll still have the action covered.

I’ll be arriving a few days early so I can practice with the camera.

Since June 8 is the rain date I’m scheduled to leave June 9. 

I haven’t been to Toronto since I defended my dissertation. I have great memories of the years I spent there.