'"Now wole I a newe game begynne": staging suffering in King Lear, the mystery plays and Grotius's Christus Patiens

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Annual, 2007 by Beatrice Groves

10. In the Towneley plays it is Caiaphas who is excitable, and Annas who is calm; in the York plays this characterization is reversed.

11. The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, Early English Text Society, Supplementary series 13 and 14 (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1994), 21.279-92, 330 (Caiaphas's threat to hang him).

12. See also N-Town Play, 30.97-98; Chester Mystery Cycle, 16.247-50; The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), 30.432.

13. For an overview of the argument, see Paul Winter, On the Trial of Jesus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1961), 14-15, 76, 88-89; J. Duncan M. Derrett, Law in the New Testament (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1970), 166n3.

14. O'Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 87-88.

15. James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979), 196, and passim; F. P. Pickering, Literature and Art in the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, 1970).

16. For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century examples of this typology, see Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547-71), ed. Mary Ellen Riches and Thomas B. Stroup (Gainesville, FL: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), 191; Joseph Hall, Contemplations Vpon the principal passages of the holie Historie (London, 1615), 191, 280; Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI Sermons (London, 1629), 473.

17. Marrow, Passion Iconography, 141-42, fig. 85.

18. John Bonaventure, Meditations of the Supper of Our Lord, and the Hours of the Passion, versified by Robert Manning of Brunne (1315-1330), ed. J. Meadows Cowper, Early English Text Society, o.s., 60 (London: Early English Text Society, 1875), ll. 965-72; Marrow, Passion Iconography, 71, figs. 21, 23, 31-3, 36-38, 49-51, 54, 69, 82, 106, 144. For evidence that this aspect of the secret passion was still known in Shakespeare's day, see: Richard Bancroft, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse the 9 of Februarie, being the first Sunday in the Parleament, Anno. 1588 (London, 1588), F6v-F7r. My thanks to Dr. Peter McCullough for this reference.

19. W. L. Hildburgh, English Alabaster Carvings as Records of the Medieval Religious Drama (Oxford: Society of Antiquaries of London, 1949), 78.

20. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 510.

21. Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Play (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 255.

22. Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath, Sherman M. Kuhn, and Robert E. Lewis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952-), s.v. "pille"; The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), s.v. "pill."

23. A Treatise of Miracles Pleying, ed. Clifford Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1993), 97. Most critics are agreed that this is an antitheatrical document (see ibid., 2), but Clopper has argued that critics have confused drama with ludi inhonesti; cf. Clopper, Drama, Play and Game, 69-74.