SOURCE: An introduction to English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1955, pp. 1-18.

In the following essay, Craig discusses how the Corpus Christi plays reflected the "symbolic " and "naïve" dramatic conventions of medieval drama, and explains how these conventions themselves arose from the highly effective organization of the church and the innate conservatism of the medieval worldview.

When one considers the origin of the mystery plays within the medieval church, an origin without thought of dramatic or histrionic effect, and when one considers also how these plays passed into the hands of very simple medieval people—authors, players, managers, and all—one can see that their technique was inevitably naïve and firmly conventional. Their distances were symbolic distances, and their time was symbolic time. Noah had to build the ark in the midst of his taunting neighbours, had to get his...