Coldewey - Early English drama: an anthology

Fewer than thirty-five vernacular English play texts and fragments survive from the late middle ages. Of them, four are long compilations of dramatized Biblical episodes that illustrate the cycle of human destiny from the creation of the world to the last judgment. These, the famous cycle plays, were vast, corporately-sponsored productions, performed by prosperous cities on special feast days like Corpus Christi Day or Whitsunday, usually with the cooperation of local craft and religious guilds. They flourished from the late fourteenth until the mid-sixteenth centuries. Manuscripts of complete Biblical cycles have survived from York, Chester, and the vicinity of Wakefield. The text of a fourth cycle, known as the N-Town Plays, derives from East Anglia, though its origins and history of performance are obscure. It may have been a travelling text, a compilation of various playtexts gathered together by a travelling company, or perhaps a flexible sequence of plays sponsored by a monastic institution. In addition, a few pageants, or individual episodes, from other cycle plays also survive, and they attest to the vigor of the cycle play tradition in a number of towns like Coventry, Newcastle, and Beverley. The list of sponsoring towns has been extended considerably with the systematic collection of documentary records of play performance undertaken by the Records of Early English Drama project at the University of Toronto. Understandably then, it has long been thought that the mainstream tradition of late medieval drama was defined by the cycles, whose scope, shape, poetic elaboration, and production difficulties have rightly attracted a good deal of attention.

But most of the early English theatrical productions were not connected with cycle plays at all. Recent scholarship on records of early English drama has shown that in number, frequency of performance, and geographical distribution, non-cycle plays were the rule, not the exception, for hundreds of communities in England during the late middle ages. This is particularly true for East Angliathe region including Norfolk and Suffolk and parts of Cambridgeshire and Essexthough the activity was by no means limited to that area of the country; everywhere, it seems, as performance records now show, non-cycle plays were an astonishingly popular source of entertainment, instruction, and profit. Earlier prevailing notions of the English dramatic tradition are slow to change, however, and it should come as no surprise that in our anthologies of medieval English drama few non-cycle plays appear.

One purpose of this collection, then, is to present as large a sampling of non-cycle plays as possible, in the belief that they represent a different mode of dramatic composition and theatrical experience from the cycle plays. The term non-cycle is here taken literally to refer to plays that have not come down to us as parts of one or another of the large cycle enterprises. Generally speaking, such plays fall into three categories: saint plays, morality plays, and Biblical or secular history plays. Saint plays dramatize the lives, the conversions, the miracles, and sometimes the grisly deaths of saints; they are represented in this collection by the Digby plays of