19 The Play’s the Thi for once the slang held true, that everybody got in on the act. It wasn’t professional. Each of a town’s guilds would commit to the play nearest their hearts; so that the carpenters might stage the one about their hero, Noah the ark-builder. The plays would be performed on wheeled platforms, what we’d call floats, moving from station to station through the town, from chapel to chapel, over the three days. Imagine it! Fifteen or twenty or thirty plays, and who are the actors but your neighbors? Who built that “special effect” spring-action Gate of Hell that Christ bursts open with a finger-touch? You did. Who prepared the bread and meat and sweets for the crowds? You did. Who stood a-tiptoe in the audience, mouthing the words you knew your boy had to say, and laughing inside when he got them right? Who could sit at a fireside forty years later and recall with your friends the words of Jesus to Pilate, or how the big-bellied miller was “struck” in the forehead by the stone that David slung? You could do that, you and your neighbors, from Prague to Lisbon, from York to Rome, for almost four hundred years. What happened then It was a rollicking, bumptious theater, smelling less of the schools than of the grocer’s. Look at the plays from Wakefield. A sheep-stealer named Mak tries to “hide” his theft in a manger, pretending that
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