The York Corpus Christi Play as we know it consists of 47 surviving individual plays or “pageants,” 27 of which are included in this volume; together, these 27 plays represent the cycle’s core narrative of creation, fall, and salvation. This new edition offers extensive annotation (both marginal glosses and explanatory footnotes), an illuminating introduction, and a helpful selection of background contextual materials.

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.

THE STORY: The most controversial and talked about play of the 1998 theatrical season begins: We are going to tell you an old and familiar story. But from that point on, nothing feels quite familiar again. What follows is a story that parallels t

This volume offers 22 of the central pageants which make up York's famous Corpus Christi cycle. The York cycle is the oldest and best-known of the English mystery cycles, and its depth and scope are reflected in the selection printed here. The shape of the cycle was governed by subject matter of enduring spiritual significance, both to its contemporary audience and in later literary and artistic tradition, and the selection reflects these concerns. Included are plays on the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ, and the Last Judgement. The Passion sequence has been expanded by six of the eight plays generally attributed to the great poetic dramatist known as the York Realist: the authentic text of these plays is not otherwise available in paperback. As well as providing detailed annotation, this edition offers an introduction which examines the history of the cycle and discusses the immensely popular modern productions in York and elsewhere. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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.

This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (2016–2018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literary space. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices.

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.

Amid the crowded streets of Chester, guild players portraying biblical characters performed on colorful mobile stages hoping to draw the attention of fellow townspeople. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these Chester plays employed flamboyant live performance to adapt biblical narratives. But the original format of these fascinating performances remains cloudy, as surviving records of these plays are sparse, and the manuscripts were only written down a generation after they stopped. Revealing a vibrant set of social practices encoded in the Chester plays, Matthew Sergi provides a new methodology for reading them and a transformative look at medieval English drama. Carefully combing through the plays, Sergi seeks out cues in the dialogues that reveal information about the original staging, design, and acting. These “practical cues,” as he calls them, have gone largely unnoticed by drama scholars, who have focused on the ideology and historical contexts of these plays, rather than the methods, mechanics, and structures of the actual performances. Drawing on his experience as an actor and director, he combines close readings of these texts with fragments of records, revealing a new way to understand how the Chester plays brought biblical narratives to spectators in the noisy streets. For Sergi, plays that once appeared only as dry religious dramas come to life as raucous participatory spectacles filled with humor, camp, and devotion.