N-Town Plays

Every other surviving English mystery cycle is named for the city that owned it: York, Chester, Wakefield. The N-Town Plays are named for the absence of one. The cycle's own opening proclamation, the banns that would have been read or performed before the plays themselves began, announces where the performance is about to take place using the letter N, standing for the Latin nomen, or name, a deliberate blank left for a traveling company to fill with whichever town's name applied on a given date. Where York's guilds staged their pageant year after year in the same streets, funded by civic trade money and recorded in a city register, the N-Town evidence points instead to a single company carrying a complete cycle from place to place across East Anglia, adapting the performance location on the fly rather than building it into a single city's calendar. The sole surviving copy of the text, now held at the British Library as Cotton Vespasian D.8, carries a scribal date of 1468 at its close, though linguistic and compilational evidence suggests the underlying plays were assembled from material written over a longer stretch, roughly 1450 to 1500, by more than one hand, into the touring script that survives today.

The manuscript that carries the N-Town Plays once belonged to the seventeenth century antiquarian collector Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, whose librarian, Richard James, examined it and concluded, wrongly, that it recorded the biblical plays performed in Coventry. James labeled it Ludus Coventriae, the Play Called Corpus Christi, and that mistaken name stuck hard enough to appear in reference works for centuries afterward, even though nothing in the text itself names Coventry and the linguistic evidence instead points squarely to East Anglia.

A second name entered use in 1955, when the scholar Hardin Craig proposed calling the cycle the Hegge Cycle, after Robert Hegge, a later owner of the manuscript before it reached Cotton's collection; that name saw some scholarly use but never fully displaced the older, wrong one.

The name now standard, N-Town, comes directly from the text's own words rather than from any owner or guess about origin: the banns that open the cycle name the performance location only as N-Town, N standing for the Latin nomen, meaning name, a placeholder built into the script itself for whichever town was hosting a given performance. Modern scholarship treats N-Town as the accurate name precisely because it is the one the play itself supplies, rather than one attached to it afterward by a collector, a librarian or an editor working from an educated but mistaken guess.