Kate's Blog Entry Week 2

This week, we changed our plans a little bit. We talked with Will about our topic, and we discovered that we were being to specific with our focus. So in lieu of that, we readjusted our proposal a little. From our conversation with Will, we were told that the N-Town plays are the cycle plays that we have the least amount of information on, and therefore to research their dramatic structure would be incredibly difficult, too much so for this project. He suggested that we focus on talking about what exactly is a cycle play, and perhaps comparing the N-Town plays, to other cycle plays from the time, such as the York cycle, which is what I volunteered to research. 

I decided to do a more general search through Google to start instead of going through the library databases, and I found an Encyclopedia Britannica page devoted to York plays, as well as a page from the University of Rochester's website. They were mainly consisting of background information, so they talked about how these plays were always performed during the annual summer feast of Corpus Christi, which was always celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday (the day before Good Friday in Christianity), which this year will be celebrated on June 4th. They also stated that the York plays are the only complete play cycle associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi that is extant and was performed at a specific location in England, making it of particular interest and importance. As I continued to read on the University of Rochester site, it continued to talk about how much importance we place on the York plays because they are complete. It suggested that it's possible that leaflets from the original text could be missing because it's handled so much from people who are interested in studying a complete example of a cycle play. I thought that idea was interesting because it's kind of oxymoronic; if a leaflet is missing, then it isn't technically complete, but the leaflet is missing because people kept handling it because it was the only one that was complete. I'm talking in circles, but I really appreciated oxymoron present. 

Generally, this week has been mainly about gathering research on our new topic and playing catch-up with where the rest of the class is at this point in the process. We're coming in on Tuesday with our research about each of the known cycle plays and sharing our findings so that we can move on from there.