“An theater of mortality”: In Sincerity, Onstage

Abstract

A major dramaturgical tradition preceding the early modern period revolved around the annual performance of the medieval mystery cycles. As F. P. Wilson notes, these plays “continued to be performed with unabated popularity until the Reformation and even beyond,” on stages that “Shakespeare might have seen if he had visited Coventry before 1580” (3). The mysteries culminate in the central episode of the Gospels and the liturgical year—Christ’s passion. The performance of the Crucifixion play, while one of the last to be developed, grew to be the most popular in all of medieval drama (Craig 42). The subsequent Resurrection plays “offered the spectators ocular proof that Christ had risen” (Greenblatt Shakespearean 125). Between these two narrative climaxes lies the comparatively muted visit to the empty tomb—or rather, the tomb emptied of Christ’s body, with two angels reporting, in the Wakefield version: “He is not here, the sooth to say, / The place is void wherein he lay” (Beadle ll.241–42, 350).¹ As a twentieth-century Presbyterian minister would have it, “Here is not here: for he is risen” (Matthew 28:6) ought to be considered “THE EPITAPH THAT ENDS ALL EPITAPHS” (Macartney 191).