N-Town Cycle | Lynn Squires (essay date 1978)
Lynn Squires (essay date 1978)
SOURCE: "Law and Disorder in Ludus Coventriae," in Comparative Drama, Vol. 12, No. 3, Fall, 1978, pp. 200-13.
[By exploring fifteenth-century law, Squires suggests that many of the plays of the N-Town cycle contain severe criticism of the contemporary legal establishment.]
My purpose is to provide a new context for the late medieval cycle of plays traditionally referred to as Ludus Coventriae by investigating the fifteenth-century legal conditions reflected in these plays. Critics of medieval drama have not recognized the importance of laws as a religious ideal and so have not noticed its significance in late medieval and early Renaissance religious drama. Because we no longer link law with religion, we must remind ourselves that law, for the medieval Englishman, was the formal expression of divine will; it was the common belief that the common as well as the ecclesiastical law originated in the mind...
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