\u201cDives and Lazarus,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0a tune that Latter-day Saints will recognize and that was collected and famously used by Ralph Vaughan Williams; the \u201cCoventry Carol\u201d; and \u201cGreensleeves\u201d), but it was very good.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
The play is a mixture of comedy (involving a sheep-stealing couple and a group of Yorkshire shepherds who, by the play\u2019s end, seem to have walked to Bethlehem, where the angels appear to them and they visit Mary, Joseph, and the Baby in the manger) and reverential worship.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always been intrigued by mystery plays (e.g. the fifteenth-century Middle English Everyman\u00a0<\/em>and Hugo von Hofmannsthal\u2019s 1911 Jedermann<\/em>, which was inspired by it), both for their own intrinsic interest and for their connection with the sacral (temple) origins of drama.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
By the way, I think that BYU ought to do\u00a0The Second Shepherds\u2019 Play\u00a0<\/em>at Christmas time. \u00a0At least once. \u00a0It would be a perfect fit.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Alexandria, Virginia<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 It\u2019s a bitterly cold night in the Washington DC area. \u00a0But we enjoyed it nonetheless. \u00a0 We attended a performance tonight, at the Folger Shakespeare Library, by the Folger Consort. \u00a0They did The Second Shepherds\u2019 Play, one of the most popular medieval English mystery plays. \u00a0It survives in a sixteenth-century manuscript that belonged […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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