First published in 1993. Part of a series on medieval casebooks, this volume six looks at the Chester Mystery Cycle Play manuscripts and comparisons of the York and Chester Cycle. Theologically a product of the Middle Ages, historically a product of the Renaissance, what we today call the Chester Mystery Cycle is a series of twenty-four plays dramatizing the events of salvation history from Creation until Doomsday. One of four surviving English mystery cycles, the Chester Cycle, which originally included a twenty-fifth play of the Assumption surpressed sometime in the mid-sixteenth century, was, until more modern times, last performed in 1575.

A study of medieval drama, divided into two parts: part I, Mystery Plays, is the work of Christine Richardson and part II, Moralities and Interludes, is the work of Jackie Johnston. The general introduction was written jointly.

In Shakespeare's Medieval Craft, Kurt A. Schreyer explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and a tradition of late medieval English biblical drama known as mystery plays. Scholars of English theater have long debated Shakespeare’s connection to the mystery play tradition, but Schreyer provides new perspective on the subject by focusing on the Chester Banns, a sixteenth-century proclamation announcing the annual performance of that city’s cycle of mystery plays. Through close study of the Banns, Schreyer demonstrates the central importance of medieval stage objects—as vital and direct agents and not merely as precursors—to the Shakespearean stage.As Schreyer shows, the Chester Banns serve as a paradigm for how Shakespeare’s theater might have reflected on and incorporated the mystery play tradition, yet distinguished itself from it. For instance, he demonstrates that certain material features of Shakespeare’s stage—including the ass’s head of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theatrical space of Purgatory in Hamlet, and the knocking at the gate in the Porter scene of Macbeth—were in fact remnants of the earlier mysteries transformed to meet the exigencies of the commercial London playhouses. Schreyer argues that the ongoing agency of supposedly superseded theatrical objects and practices reveal how the mystery plays shaped dramatic production long after their demise. At the same time, these medieval traditions help to reposition Shakespeare as more than a writer of plays; he was a play-wright, a dramatic artisan who forged new theatrical works by fitting poetry to the material remnants of an older dramatic tradition.

A lively account of the modern staging of the medieval mystery plays, richly illustrated with stills and other photographs. The turn of the last millennium saw a sudden flourishing in the revival of the medieval mystery plays, with a number of different productions being staged across the country and further afield. But why were they staged? What features of the plays attracted the modern-day director? What can the mystery plays offer today's producers, directors, participants and audiences? This book seeks to answer these questions. Beginning with an exploration of the original staging conditions, the study goes on to examine the reasons why the plays are produced today, and through a series of case studies looks at how notions of community, identity and space are articulated within contemporary stagings: it considers productions at Chester, Chichester, Leeds, Lichfield, Lincoln, Toronto, Worsbrough, and York, as well as productions by the Royal National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, and the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry. Importantly, the author uses evidence gleaned from interviews with directors and producers, and observation of rehearsals, and performances, to bring a fresh and modern perspective to bear. Richly illustrated. KATIENORMINGTON is Professor of Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London.

The drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike, and this is an updated edition of a book which has established itself as a standard guide to the field. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, second edition continues to provide an authoritative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints' plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. Existing chapters have been revised and updated where necessary, and there are three entirely new chapters, including one on the cultural significance of early drama. A thoroughly revised reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an enlarged classified bibliography and a chronological table.

The Chester Cycle in Context, 1555-1575 considers the implications of recent archival research which has profoundly changed our view of the continuation of performances of Chester's civic biblical play cycle into the reign of Elizabeth I. Scholars now view the decline and ultimate abandonment of civic religious drama as the result of a complex network of local pressures, heavily dependent upon individual civic and ecclesiastical authorities, rather than a result of a nation-wide policy of suppression, as had previously been assumed.