The Stonyhurst Pageants

Old Testament Adaptation in <em>The Stonyhurst Pageants</em>

“…In his review of the pageants, Greg suggests that the plays were a kind of school exercise. 47 Yet if the plays were no more than an exercise, the intended recipient of the painstaking explanations and clarifications remains a mystery. The playwright's care in his adaptation seems especially strange if the 'school exercise' was undertaken only for other educated Jesuit readers who, one assumes, were already comfortable with the particularities of Latin and Greek.…”

“…3 No precise composition date exists, though the plays were probably written before the end of the 1630s. 4 While we cannot be sure of the terminus ad quem for the pageants, Carleton Brown provided as clear a terminus a quo as one might wish for when he published his transcription of them in 1920. His 'happy discovery' (as Hardin Craig puts it 5 ) that the plays borrowed heavily from the Douay-Rheims translation of the bible means that the pageants could not have been composed before the publication of the two-volume Old Testament in 1609 and 1610.…”

“…Harold N. Hillebrand calls them 'the latest and longest and dullest of the Old Testament play cycles'. 7 W.W. Greg speaks of their debt to the Chester cycle, 8 and Craig suggests that the plays might be a post-Reformation redaction of a now-lost cycle of traditional plays, though no such original has come to light. 9 Poor reviews, it seems, can bury a piece of historic drama as quickly as they close a modern play.…”