Lawrence M. Clopper
London and the Problem of the Clerkenwell Plays
Volume 34.3, Fall 2000

Scholars and antiquarians at least since John Stow’s Survey of London (1590) have believed that there was a cycle of biblical plays performed over several days by clerics at Clerkenwell (or at Skinners’ Well) in the fourteenth and the opening decades of the fifteenth century, even, according to Stow, until his own day. The essay publishes all extant references to this supposed play in order to establish that Stow actually mentions only the same dates, 1390 and 1409, several times as evidence of the tradition. His accounts along with those of other chroniclers are contaminated by descriptions of tournaments in the relevant years. The plays were said to have been put on by the clerics of London over a three-day period, though we have no evidence of such a schedule in England until the Chester plays were moved from Corpus Christi to Whitsontide, ca. 1521–32, and there is no evidence of a clerical organization in London in the early sixteenth century, let along before that, with sufficient resources to have put on such a spectacle. There are some sixteenth century documents that describe a sumptuous play from Creation until Doomsday, but this model may have been based on the plays of Coventry, Chester and York. The tradition of the Clerkenwell Plays is essentially unsubstantiated. London was far more interested in tournaments, processions and royal or noble entrances than in public drama on this scale.

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