The Towneley Plays

The Towneley Plays
Author: Garrett P J Epp
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Total Pages: 610
Release: 2018-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1580442846

The Towneley plays are a collection of biblical plays in the Huntington Library's MS HM 1, a manuscript once owned by the Towneley family of Towneley Hall, Lancashire. Once thought to constitute a cycle of plays from the town of Wakefield in Yorkshire's West Riding, the collection includes some of the best-known examples of medieval English drama, including the much-anthologized Second Shepherds Play.

The Towneley Cycle

The Towneley Cycle
Author: Peter Happé
Publisher: University of Wales - Religion
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2007
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

This volume provides a detailed overview of the Towneley cycle of plays, which were written c. 1500. The plays begin with the fall of Lucifer and end with the Last Judgement. Peter Happé examines the cycle's textual and manuscript history and discusses issues of language and style, the structure of the cycle, and its possible sources and analogues. He also addresses the historical and religious context of the cycle and its performance history.

The Wakefield Mystery Plays

The Wakefield Mystery Plays
Author: Martial Rose
Publisher: W W Norton & Company Incorporated
Total Pages: 552
Release: 1969
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780393004830

The complete cycle of thirty-two plays.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre
Author: Richard Beadle
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 402
Release: 2008-07-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139827928

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 N-Town Plays

The N-Town Plays
Author: Victor I Scherb
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2007-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1580444385

In the late 1400s in eastern England, a scribe was in the process of compiling a large dramatic manuscript of over two hundred vellum folios. The manuscript contains components of an independent Mary Play, parts one and two of an independent Passion Play and an independent Assumption of Mary Play, as well as ten play subjects that appear in no other English cycles - the killing of Lamech in the Noah Play, the Root of Jesse, the story of Joachim and Anne, the Presentation of Mary in the Temple, the Parliament of Heaven, the Trial of Mary and Joseph, the scene of Mary and the cherry tree in the Nativity Play, the Death of Herod, the scene of Veronica's handkerchief in the Procession to Calvary, and the appearance of the risen Christ to the Virgin Mary in her Assumption Play. This edition acknowledges the N-Town compiler who took plays from various contexts and integrated them into an existing cycle of plays, thus treating the manuscript as if it were a superstructure whose parts could be replaced, renovated, and supplemented without altering the fundamental coherence of the overarching design.

The York Corpus Christi Plays

The York Corpus Christi Plays
Author: Clifford Davidson
Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
Total Pages: 616
Release: 2011-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1580444539

The feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated annually on Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was devoted to the Eucharist, and the normal practice was to have solemn processions through the city with the Host, the consecrated wafer that was believed to have been transformed into the true body and blood of Jesus. In this way the "cultus Dei" thus celebrated allowed the people to venerate the Eucharistic bread in order that they might be stimulated to devotion and brought symbolically, even mystically into a relationship with the central moments of salvation history. Perhaps it is logical, therefore, that pageants and plays were introduced in order to access yet another way of visualizing and participating in those events. Thus the "invisible things" of the divine order "from the creation of the world" might be displayed. The York Corpus Christi Plays, contained in London, British Library, MS. Add. 35290 and comprising more than thirteen thousand lines of verse, actually represent a unique survival of medieval theater. They form the only complete play cycle verifiably associated with the feast of Corpus Christi that is extant and was performed at a specific location in England.

Medieval Drama

Medieval Drama
Author: Christine Richardson
Publisher: Red Globe Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1991-01-16
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0333454774

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.

The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama

The Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama
Author: Christina M. Fitzgerald
Publisher: Broadview Press
Total Pages: 595
Release: 2012-12-05
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1554810566

The past generation has been an extraordinarily active one in medieval drama scholarship; our appreciation of the range of medieval drama has been significantly broadened, and our understanding of certain medieval genres—most notably, biblical drama—has been fundamentally altered. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature has been widely praised for the degree to which it has taken this scholarship into account in its selection of and presentation of medieval plays. Now Broadview launches a new anthology that takes those plays as its base while expanding very substantially beyond them to represent the full range of drama in English (and, where strong connections exist, in French, Latin, Cornish, and Welsh as well) through to 1576. In all, over forty plays are included. Each work has been fully annotated and is prefaced by a substantial introduction. In many cases the language is to some extent modernized in order to make the plays more accessible to readers today.

Gender and Medieval Drama

Gender and Medieval Drama
Author: Katie Normington
Publisher: DS Brewer
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2004
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781843840275

Evidence from Records of Early English Drama, social, literary and cultural sources are drawn together in order to investigate how performances within the late Middle Ages were both shaped by, and shaped, the public image of women."--BOOK JACKET.