York's Jesus: Crowned King and Traitor Attainted

Jesus is famously multiple in the York Corpus Christi play, appearing as baby, child, and adult in thirty-eight surviving pageants, and embodied by puppets, one youth, and twenty-four adult actors. The York pageants activate the play of meaning possible in this time between "king" and "traitor," and in doing so integrate political crises into a meaningful religious system. Scholars have neither examined the pageants' treatment of Jesus as both king and traitor nor delved into the English politics that might have influenced this startling idea of the deity. This essay fills in that lacuna, analyzing the play's overlooked political implications and discovering new meanings for Jesus in relation to English history over the course of the fifteenth century, roughly the first hundred years of the play's existence. As we will see, Jesus is above all a paradoxical figure, at once king and traitor, possessed of the power to correct injustice and yet unintentionally subject to unjust rulers.