...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...

...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...

...Bernardo S. Hinojosa In the fifteenth‐century Play of the Sacrament , a group of Jewish men torture a consecrated wafer, seeking to prove or disprove the Real Presence. The play juxtaposes their misguided empiricism, rooted in stereotypes about the literalism of Jewish reading...

... in the 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...

...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...

...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...

...H. M. 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 © by Duke University Press 2002 a Performing Feminine Sanctity in Late Medieval England: Parish Guilds, Saints’ Plays, and the Second...

...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...

... 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...

... 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...

... “Bottom’s dream” with a biblical passage, but the playful misquoting of  Corinthians lacks the didacticism of the cappers’ play even as it shares the Chester guild’s commercial motives. We can see, then, that there was never a moment when the ass underwent secu- larization; rather, its sacred...

... how an investigation of the shoes and other crafted objects staged in the play may shed new light on a neglected economy of female artisanal labor in early modern London and its transformative impact on the material culture of the early modern English stage. Examining a range of evidence, including...

...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...

... with 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...

... by King James’s refusal to offer military support to his son-in-law, Frederick V, against the Catholic Habsburg invasion of Protestant Bohemia, a conflict interpreted in apocalyptic-chivalric terms. Originally responding to the Gunpowder Plot, the reappearance of Dekker’s play in 1619 encourages a broader...