Hypermedia enables us to link text to text, text to image, and image to image, on both a macro and micro level. We can show how the script of the plays relates to contemporary religious iconography, and mirror medieval processes of decoding traditional images.
Creating Points of View
It also allows us to look at the material evidence from as many different points of view as we perceive there were at the time. Just as there was no such person as ‘medieval man’, so there were different levels and types of participation in the mystery plays in medieval York. These shifting points of view reflect real life much more accurately than the monolithic narrative forced on us by a conventional book.
The archive will go beyond the purely theatrical in trying to place the play in its social, devotional, and economic context.
Our preliminary research here has already thrown up some very interesting new material, and has made us radically rethink some of the received opinions about the relationship between guild and play.
Recreations
We can also add imaginative recreations using sound and video. 3-D visualisation allows us to experiment with different solutions to problems of staging. Watch this space.
© The York Doomsday Project and Meg Twycross