A New Performance Strategy for a Twelve-Station, One-Day York Cycle

Abstract

One of the challenges of the York pageant cycle is understanding how up to fifty pageants could have been performed at each one of ten to seventeen stations within the span of a single day. This paper proposes a new model of York’s performance strategy based on staggered starting points. The strategy proposed here offers not only a complete, workable one-day cycle, but also a new breakdown of the pageants into four thematically rich subgroups. An appendix provides a schedule of the full playing day, plus timing calculations and alternative schedules accounting for varying numbers of stations and plays.