I recently learned why the medieval mystery plays
were so named: there was no mystery in the stories.
In a Christian society Jesus was the only story.
The mystery was who paid for the actors, the scripts,
the rehearsals, and the staging of the performance.
The clues to the mysteries lay in the jokes
that peppered the script with local character
which might have pointed to carpentry, nail making,
and many other skills, where what the jokes
were about told the audience who paid for it all:
which guild of craftsmen who kept secret
how their craft worked had paid for the entertainment.
Product placement, in scripts, is older than we think.
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