SOURCE: "Plays of the Fall," in The English Mystery Plays, University of California Press, 1972, pp. 105-31.

In the following essay, Woolf discusses the treatment of the subject of the fall from grace in the mystery cycle dramas, contrasting the plays' dramatic interpretation of supernatural events with the description of those episodes in the Bible and in the commentary of theologians.

The mystery cycles begin and end in the heavens, the opening play of the Fall of the Angels being on a subject never dramatised before and rarely since. The story was reconstructed by the Fathers by the piecing together of a number of biblical texts: of these the most important were the apostrophes addressed to the Prince of Babylon (Isaiah xiv. 12-15) and to the King of Tyre (Ezekiel xxviii. 2-19), which were understood in the light of Christ's words in Luke x. 18, 'I beheld Satan as lightning...