N-Town Cycle | Hardin Craig (essay date 1914)
Hardin Craig (essay date 1914)
SOURCE: A note to the University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. 1, October, 1914, pp. 72-83.
[In the following excerpt, Craig surveys nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholarship on the N-Town plays and suggests Lincoln as the home of the cycle.]
It has never been known where the cycle of mystery plays published by the Shakespeare Society in 1841 as "Ludus Coventriae: a Collection of Mysteries formerly represented at Coventry on the Feast of Corpus Christi," were acted, although it has long been known that they are not the Coventry plays. The editor of the cycle, J. O. Halliwell(-Phillips), follows a tradition to the effect that this cycle was formerly acted by the Grey Friars of Coventry. The first connection of the manuscript with Coventry is an entry on folio l*r, said by Halliwell to be in the handwriting of Dr. Richard James, librarian to Sir Robert Cotton to the following...
[The entire page is 5905 words long]
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