SOURCE: Houston, Julia. “Transubstantiation and the Sign: Cranmer's Drama of the Lord's Supper.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (winter 1994): 113-130.

In the following essay, Houston argues that Cranmer's writings on Christ's transubstantiation in the Eucharist had important, if indirect, implications for English drama.

The foundations of the vast and varied English Renaissance debate over the propriety of the drama involved numerous definitions of what, precisely, constituted drama itself. If we adopt the Prague School understanding of drama, so central to semiological dramatic theory, that “all on stage is a sign,”¹ we can find a significant moment in the English Renaissance definition of theater in the works of Thomas Cranmer.

Cranmer's work provides an example of one of the redefinitions of the Eucharist by reformers who rejected transubstantiation in all its forms and turned the “miracle” of the Lord's Supper into a dramatic presentation. As defined centuries earlier...