York Plays | Richard Beadle (essay date 1984)
Richard Beadle (essay date 1984)
SOURCE: An introduction to York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, edited by Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1984, pp. ix-xxx.
[In the excerpt that follows, Beadle provides an outline of the narrative scope of the plays and an overview of several issues connected with the York plays: the historical context of the Corpus Christi festival; the evidence of the manuscript, the Register, and other relevant documents; the role of the York craft guilds; the processional presentation of the plays; and stagecraft and dramatic technique in the cycle.]
The York cycle of Mystery Plays is one of the great literary and theatrical monuments of the later Middle Ages in England, though to describe the cycle as solely a medieval phenomenon is in some ways misleading. Though it came into being in the later fourteenth century, when Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Langland's...
[The entire page is 7394 words long]
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