N-Town Cycle | Gail McMurray Gibson (essay date 1981)
Gail McMurray Gibson (essay date 1981)
SOURCE: "Bury St. Edmunds, Lydgate, and the N-Town Cycle," in Speculum, Vol. CVI, No. 1, January, 1981, pp. 56-90.
[In this seminal essay, Gibson asserts that the N-Town plays originated not in Lincoln but in the abbey of Bury St. Edmunds.]
No scholar of medieval English drama needs to be reminded of the old and unsolved puzzle of the provenance of the fifteenth-century cycle of mystery plays preserved in MS B. L. Cotton Vespasian D.viii. The socalled N-Town Cycle has been plagued by a series of misnomers, erroneous catalogue descriptions, and confusions of place attribution ever since about 1629, when Sir William Cotton's librarian wrote on the flyleaf of the manuscript, "vulgo dicitur hic liber Ludus Coventriae." Three hundred and fifty years and many errors later, all that can be said with complete confidence about the Cotton manuscript is that [according to Mark Eccles in "Ludus...
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