The York Play: Expanding the Boundaries of Civic Drama 1 Sheila Christie* University of Alberta, Canada Abstract While current scholarship on late medieval, civic cycle drama warns against assuming an either antagonistic or unifying function of that drama, scholars continue to reinscribe a conflictual relationship negotiated through cycle production. Examining assumptions about both participants and the pageant route, this article reveals how pre-conceived notions of the York cycle’s cultural function have limited our interpretations of the text and context. The article concludes with a brief case study which demonstrates that, during a time of economic recession, sources of pageant funding expanded to include all civic labourers, altering the very conception of ‘civic’ negotiated by and through the play. The York cycle was once considered the quintessential Corpus Christi play. For many years, scholars assumed that this large-scale, late medieval text represented the standard form of civic cycle drama, and that other plays of a similar nature had simply been lost to history. The extant Chester Whitsun plays, the N-Town and Towneley compilations, and numerous other traces of civic cycle activity did not match the York model, but these discrepancies were explained away as reflecting the pressures of protestant reformation and economic recession. In recent years, however, medieval drama scholars have realized that the York play is an unusual form of civic drama. Several factors make the York cycle unique: the large number of pageants that comprised the play (around fifty) and stations at which it was performed (generally twelve, but at times as high as sixteen); the narrowness of the streets in which performances took place; and the date and scope of performance, which displaced the city’s Corpus Christi procession to the following day. 2 Beyond these factors, however, the York cycle is also unique to the city and crafts that sponsored it because it serves to negotiate multiple conceptions of civic identity. Looking in depth at the history of pageant sponsorship allows us to attend to these different perspectives, and to see how the definitions of civic identity changed over time. I begin this article by reviewing the work of other scholars who have explored the relationship between the crafts which sponsored pageant production and the civic authorities who authorized the play’s performance. Earlier discussions of the cycle’s cultural function tended to characterize the © 2007 The Author Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd History Compass 5/2 (2007): 485–494, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00421.x