York’s Jesus: Crowned King and Traitor Attainted

The York Play develops Jesus as both king and traitor, tropes that resonate in relation to the city’s fifteenth-century political history and the Wars of the Roses. The York playwrights probably derive their idea of Jesus as king and traitor from one or more of the several texts from which they borrowed, which include Northern Passion and Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. Like other works studied in this book, the Play contributes to a historical process in which various images of Christ and theories of redemption are continually (re)combined to construct meaningful symbolic meanings. The York pageants depict the conqueror Jesus defeating the devil; tricking the devil by hiding his divinity in his humanity; paying the price of sin; and dying to show his love for humanity, and asking only that believers turn from sin and love him in return. Mary expresses a range of intellectual and affective responses to her Son: she worships the infant Christ as his subject; pities him on the cross; teaches the audience about redemption; and adores him in heaven. Jesus’s two natures are vital to the playwrights’ conception of the human and divine king. Jesus’s sovereignty enables the playwrights to comment on relations between English kings and the city of York, and many pageants present Jesus as the ideal model for earthly monarchs. While Jesus is reverenced as king from his birth to Doomsday, Jews accuse him of treason against Herod, Pilate, and Caesar. This dramatic treatment of Jesus as traitor-king develops during a fifteenth-century English crisis of kingship, when the residents of York participate in a harrowing civil war and are keenly aware of the grotesque abjection that befalls attainted traitors in their midst. As a traitor, Jesus suffers from royal injustice similar to that imposed on some of York’s residents, and the pageants enter the city through a gate commonly adorned with traitors’ heads. The Play ends on the Pavement, where traitors were regularly beheaded. By fashioning the deity as a traitor, playwrights critique the tyrants who condemn him, question kings’ claims of power over their subjects’ bodies, comment trenchantly on the experience of being subject to royals, and transform treason into martyrdom. Like other works in this study, the Play treats Jews as God’s enemies, their leaders maliciously opposed to Jesus, and their unbelief a warning for Christians.