Morality Play, Barry Unsworth, a Sin to Miss

Barry Unsworth is Booker Prize winning author & a master of historical fiction.  Morality Play is a play within a play about morality set in the 14th C English countryside. This is a time when rampant religious & judicious corruption reigned. The story begins with Priest Nicholas fleeing to excape discovery of his adultrous liasion by the husband.  Haven fallen from grace, Nicholas becomes an outcast, alone in the difficult & treacherous countryside.  He is destitute and vulnerable. Survival appears bleak when he stumbles upon a troupe of actors.  Nicholas convinces the group of his value as a man of the cloth and with the gift of gab.  The band led by Martin, agree to bring him into their fold despite the his questionable predicament.  As a member of the troupe, Nicholas hears complaints against both Church & Nobles who rule the land.  "The Church works with the Nobles and keep folks tied to the land."  Men were not permitted to leave their townships without permission of their Lords or risk "being taken & branded as fugitives on their foreheads for all to see."  They enter a town where a young boy has just been murdered and a woman condemned to hang for the crime.  A monk brought the woman in for questioning.  Martin devises a new type of play to draw in a paying audience that  will depict the murder.  Plays were only performed from biblical stories at this time.  Hear ye, a large audience hath come forth to their performance bringing the wrath of the Nobel Lord upon them.  This historic novel is worth reading for its historic depiction, its crime mystery, and for the philosophical quandries it raises  "It was the Church that first made God a player, the priest played before the altar."  And, for its clever irony, Nicholas muses, "I was a priest playing a priest, dressed for the part in my own dress."  I hereby order you to read this novel.  When it is performed, I wouldn't tarry to attend.