Word: wakefields
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...serious painting on a large scale never suited the Rowlandson temperament. A ?7,000 legacy from an aunt gave him a taste for high living, and he wandered through Europe and England, drinking, talking, gambling-and drawing. He illustrated a dozen books including Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. His work became so popular that a new industry arose in London: producing fake Rowlandsons...
...heaven last week in an English playhouse. Golden-crowned and brown-bearded, he looked down upon the stage of London's Mermaid Theatre from a cushioned wooden throne, surrounded by angels with blond wigs and paper wings. The occasion was the first performance of the Wakefield Mystery Plays-one of the treasures of medieval Christianity-since they were banned...
Life Was a Unity. In that year, when Shakespeare and Marlowe were twelve, and the Church of England was in its infancy, the townsfolk of Wakefield in Yorkshire were told that their annual Whitsun-week cycle of 32 mystery plays could no longer portray "God the Father, God the Sonne or God the Holie Ghoste or the administration of either the Sacra ments of baptisme or of the Lordes Supper." This effectively banned the plays altogether-as was intended by Queen Elizabeth I, who was determined to break the hold of Roman ritual on English minds...
Even then, some of the Wakefield plays were a couple of centuries old. They were written between 1350 and 1450 as a means of educating the illiterate medieval masses in the fundamentals of the Chris tian faith. The present production consists of 18 of the plays-skillfully edited into a 3½hour evening in comprehensible English by onetime Cambridge Scholar Martial Rose. Performed by the Mermaid Players, the result is a smash hit with modern Londoners-it is heavily booked for a nine-week...
Moving from Creation to the Last Judgment, the Raising of Lazarus to the Crucifixion, the Wakefield Plays open a window on a long-gone world when, in the words of the Mermaid's Founder-Director Bernard Miles, "life was a unity-swear words, sexual references, prayer and devotion unashamedly mixed...