A literal reading of the story of The Flood would surely see God in the dock for genocide. Apart from one family, life in the world is washed away by a Deity impatient with the sinful state of humanity. According the Genesis 5:7, it is a decision to ‘blot out form the earth the human beings I have created’. In the York Mystery Plays performing this week, it is only Mrs Noah who makes a ‘din’ at this sudden and devastating loss of life:

But Noah, where are now all our kin
And company we knew before?

The resonance of these words to audiences that lived through plague years can only be imagined. People survived and wondered what had become of their neighbours; their extended families; and their friends. All the guilds that performed in the plays would have experiences the painful deaths of colleagues, with the plays being performed after a gap caused by the worst excesses of infection. Perhaps a full cast was harder to find and familiar figures were noticeable by their absence?

Some of the problems of the story are touched on in the narratives of the play. At the end, when the waters subside, an innocent son asks: ‘how shall this life be led Since none are in this world but we?’ Populating a new world from one family raises its own problems and risks. There is humour in the son’s question but also a serious point about the regeneration of humanity. In the streets of York such blunt questions were permitted in a way that was unlikely to be acceptable in the Minster and churches of the city.

In England the Archbishop of York proclaimed that the plague was “surely… caused by the sins of men who, made complacent by their prosperity, forgot the beauty of the most high Giver”.

Beidler, P. G. (1981). Noah and the Old Man in the “Pardoner’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review, 15(3), 250–254. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25093759

Understandably, and perhaps addressing the unspoken questions of an audience wondering about the repetition of such a catastrophe, one son asks whether the empire of the world will now last forever. Noah gives the assurance that there will not be another flood – but that the world ‘shall once be waste with fire, And never worth to world again’. The final cataclysm will be a blazing end to God’s creation. In current circumstances it might indeed feel that this is where we are heading – although the Deity only needs to sit back and watch as we pursue lifestyles that may lead to this ultimate conflagration. As the Mystery Play wagons roll through York this week they will follow a pattern, and repeat the words, used back into the mists of time. In every age they offer food for thought and hopefully, entertainment, which reflects on both our place in the world and the consequences of our actions.

We travel upon the Ark, in mud and rain,
Our oars promises from God.   
We live—and the rest of Humanity dies.   
We travel upon the waves, fastening
Our lives to the ropes of corpses filling the skies.
But between Heaven and us is an opening,
A porthole for a supplication.

The New Noah, by Adonis, translated by Shawkat M. Toorawa