...Allen J. Frantzen © by Duke University Press 2001 a Tears for Abraham: The Chester Play of Abraham and Isaac and Antisacrifice in Works by Wilfred Owen...

...David Lawton © by Duke University Press 2003 Sacrilege and Theatricality: the Croxton Play of the Sacrament David Lawton Washington University in...

... Morality Play Wisdom Julie Paulson San Francisco State University San Francisco, California The Augustinian monk Walter Hilton, in his late-fourteenth-century guide to the contemplative life, The Scale of...

...Christina M. Fitzgerald The Croxton Play of the Sacrament paradoxically enacts anxieties about the propriety of Passion drama. Framing the play's central action—the Jews' testing of the Communion wafer in a parody of the Passion—with the story of a Christian merchant who enables or even sponsors...

...Kevin Brownlee © by Duke University Press 2005 Power Plays: Petrarch’s Genealogical Strategies Kevin Brownlee University of Pennsylvania...

...Sara Petrosillo This essay examines representations of the womb across late medieval and early modern performance. The N-Town Mary plays and the Elizabethan tragedy Gorboduc are separated by less than a century but are rarely examined in light of one another. Using microhistorical methods and...

...Helen Cushman The representations of the midwife Salome and the Apostle Thomas in the N-Town and Chester plays complicate the relationship between two modes of knowledge: “clergie” or male clerical learning, on the one hand, and knowledge derived from sensory experience on the other. The plays...

...Catherine Sanok a Performing Feminine Sanctity in Late Medieval England: Parish Guilds, Saints’ Plays, and the Second Nun’s Tale...

...Catherine Sanok While recent arguments for the saint play as a formal influence on the Shakespearean history play rely on a teleological notion of “secularization,” they may encourage us to rethink the genealogy of Shakespeare's earliest history plays, plays about the reign of Henry VI, who was...

...Gail McMurray Gibson Collectors of medieval religious drama manuscripts routinely bequeathed their names to the play texts they preserved; the titles of the Towneley cycle, the Digby plays, and the Macro plays attest to the importance of prominent bookish intermediaries in saving medieval drama...

... biblical play is also arguably his most medieval play, as its allegorical structure and homiletic themes mimic those of the medieval morality play. While Shakespeare's play participates in the religious celebration of the new monarchy, it does so with rich irony, revealing stark contradictions in English...

...Elizabeth Allen John Ford's play Perkin Warbeck uses sanctuary, which bookends the life of the titular pretender to the English throne, as a figure for the tension between justice and mercy. The play associates legal sanctuary with the medieval past, as crystallized in Thomas More's account of...

... relevant events, or to have knowledge of reputation accorded by spatial proximity. The play shows that the legal concept of the witness promoted local rather than central authority, and the play’s own dramatic practices can be theorized through legal concepts. In addition, the play draws attention to the...

...Brian C. Lockey Aphra Behns' The Rover harks back to an earlier period of intense Anglo-Spanish rivalry in which the iconography surrounding Queen Elizabeth played a central role. But the play also moves past nostalgia for late-sixteenth-century narratives of English national identity to a...

... narrative representations of the assumption of Mary, in which the son she has borne and taken into herself now takes her up and bears her to heaven. How, in King Lear , do these narratives and practices of assumption inform tragic action? How does the language of assumption enable this play’s peculiar...

...Nicole R. Rice This essay considers a critical moment in Chester’s premodern dramatic history. In summer 1578, the Shepherds pageant, formerly produced by the Painters and Glaziers Company within the town’s cycle of religious plays, was revived as part of a three-part civic spectacle honoring Henry...

... reality, the drama was understood as sig- nificant play.9 Kolve frames his picture of the “play” of drama in terms borrowed from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, terms that lead back to a picture of aesthetic activity as disinterested playful enjoyment deriving from Kant and Schiller.10 The...

... by its superior historical self-awareness. This essay reassesses these themes through a reading of Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634). This is a play of knighthood and chivalric spectacle, adapted from Chaucer's Knight's Tale , which brings Chaucer on stage in the play's prologue...

... sometimes received from modern scholars, who are typically interested not in the theatrical viability of the play as a staged performance but in its inge- nious and playful manipulation of the Italian language at a time when the vernacular, for all that it had been employed brilliantly and expressively...

...Kurt Schreyer This essay proposes a sixteenth-century provenance for the ass’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , a history that includes orthodox liturgies and festivals, mid-century Reformed polemics, and above all provincial mystery plays. What would it mean if this famous prop was inspired by...