First published in 1975, The English Morality Play is the extended history of the English morality play, its persistence and flourishing as a dramatic tradition. The book sheds light on the intellectual and social origins of the morality play, its relationship to the medieval Corpus Christi cycle plays, its subject, purpose, conditions of original staging, and the abstract characters of its dramatis personae. The changing tradition is revealed within Renaissance drama, in the works of Skelton and Medwall, and the Reformation plays of Lindsay, Bale and Udall, as the morality play altered under the pressure of political events, escaped from the general suppression of religious drama, and in complex ways came to influence the dramatic conceptions of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Contemporary parallels to the English morality tradition in European drama are investigated, as is the rediscovery of the texts of the plays by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics. In the final chapter, Dr. Potter examines the revival of the morality tradition on the twentieth-century stage and its influence on such dramatists as Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats and Bertolt Brecht. This book will be of interest to students of literature and drama.

First published in 1957. This edition re-issues the second edition of 1965. Recognized as one of the leading books in its field, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare presents the most comprehensive account available of the English historical drama from its beginning to the closing of the theatres in 1642 and relates this development to Renaissance historiography and Elizabethan political theory.

"If, as Chesterton claimed, the devil's greatest triumph was convincing the modern world that he does not exist, Jeffrey Burton Russell means to rob him of his victory. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages is both a scholarly assessment of the development of diabology in the Middle Ages and an impassioned plea to the 20th century to recognize and acknowledge the existence of real, objective evil. The third in a series of works tracing the history of the devil from his Judeo-Christian roots, it represents a formidable undertaking: the devil's history is integrally related to the problem of evil, which is in turn at the heart of Western religious thought. Each of the volumes on Satan comprises, in essence, a judicious and able tour of Christian theology from the villain's point of view... Book jacket.

"Take example, all ye that this do hear or see..." The Morality Play was popular in England between 1400 and 1600. It offers moral instruction and spiritual teaching with personal abstractions representing good and evil. Surviving plays from that period number about sixty and the three in this edition were among the first ten. Mankind is a plain, honest farming man who struggles against worldly and spiritual temptation. The bawdy humour and violent action in the play serve to make the moral point and instruct by example. Everyman portrays a man's struggles in the face of death to raise himself to a state of grace so that he may experience everlasting life. It is exceptional among the Moralities for this narrow focus on the last phase of life, and conveys its message with awe-inspiring seriousness. Mundus et Infans is more typical of the Morality genre. It shows an arrogant, bullying protagonist led astray by a single evildoer into a life of debauchery, before the inevitable conversion to virtue. In showing the whole of man's life it is the antithesis of Everyman, the action of which seems to take place in a single day.

In this study, Murakami overturns the misconception that popular English morality plays were simple medieval vehicles for disseminating conservative religious doctrine. On the contrary, Murakami finds that moral drama came into its own in the sixteenth century as a method for challenging normative views on ethics, economics, social rank, and political obligation. From its inception in itinerate troupe productions of the late fifteenth century, "moral play" served not as a cloistered form, but as a volatile public forum. This book demonstrates how the genre’s apparently inert conventions—from allegorical characters to the battle between good and evil for Mankind’s soul—veiled critical explorations of topical issues. Through close analysis of plays representing key moments of formal and ideological innovation from 1465 to 1599, Murakami makes a new argument for what is at stake in the much-discussed anxiety around the entwined social practices of professional theater and the emergent capitalist market. Moral play fostered a phenomenon that was ultimately more threatening to ‘the peace’ of the realm than either theater or the notorious market--a political self-consciousness that gave rise to ephemeral, non-elite counterpublics who defined themselves against institutional forms of authority.

From folk ballads to film scripts, this new five-volume encyclopedia covers the entire history of British literature from the seventh century to the present, focusing on the writers and the major texts of what are now the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In five hundred substantial essays written by major scholars, the Encyclopedia of British Literature includes biographies of nearly four hundred individual authors and a hundred topical essays with detailed analyses of particular themes, movements, genres, and institutions whose impact upon the writing or the reading of literature was significant.An ideal companion to The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, this set will prove invaluable for students, scholars, and general readers.For more information, including a complete table of contents and list of contributors, please visit www.oup.com/us/ebl

This is the first comprehensive study of the English crime play, presenting a survey of 250 plays performed in the London West End between 1900 and 2000. The first part is historically orientated while the second one establishes a tentative poetics of the genre. The third part presents an analysis of some 20 plays adapted from detective fiction.