Karl Young included in his monumental 1933 work The Drama of the Medieval Church all three plays contained in Laon 263, but he was baffled by the Ordo Joseph. One can understand why. On first glance the play appears to be, as Young intimated, an anomaly, as its subject matter is distinctly unrelated to the other two dramas contained in the Laon source, the Ordo Prophetarum and Ordo Stellae. The stories of these latter two are well-known parts of the medieval celebration of the Christmas season. The Ordo Prophetarum, while not a part of the biblical infancy narrative of Christ, depicts the Jewish and pagan prophets who foretold Christ's coming; though not without a number of its own unique characteristics, the Laon Ordo Prophetarum is recognizably one of a large number of dramatizations of a sermon read during Advent. The Ordo Stellae, the Play of the Star, dram¬atizes the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles – the Magi – and the massacre of the Innocents ordered by Herod. Following these texts, the Joseph play appears as if it were copied alongside them merely for the convenience of having all of the cathedral's dramas collected in one place.

Young certainly saw it that way. He presents the Ordo Joseph almost as a curiosity, one of only four plays in his collection that deal with Old Testa¬ment subjects. He judiciously avoids proposing a day on which it would have been performed, given the complete lack of “satisfactory information,” and chooses instead to observe only that the Joseph story was read during the second week in Lent.3 (Though this is true as a general statement, at Laon the Joseph story was actually recounted during the third week of Lent, not the second.) In fact, while the Ordo Joseph was clearly intended for perfor¬mance on Epiphany and is therefore part of Christmastide, there remains a Lenten, even paschal, connection through the varied exegetical understand¬ings of the events in the story and the relationship between them and the other two Christmas dramas. In performance, for example, Joseph is not merely the Old Testament patriarch but the ideal ruler and the ideal cleric; he is at different times and in different ways Christ, Daniel, the Innocents, and the Laon subdeacons themselves.