SOURCE: An introduction to York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, edited by Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1984, pp. ix-xxx.

In the excerpt that follows, Beadle provides an outline of the narrative scope of the plays and an overview of several issues connected with the York plays: the historical context of the Corpus Christi festival; the evidence of the manuscript, the Register, and other relevant documents; the role of the York craft guilds; the processional presentation of the plays; and stagecraft and dramatic technique in the cycle.

The York cycle of Mystery Plays is one of the great literary and theatrical monuments of the later Middle Ages in England, though to describe the cycle as solely a medieval phenomenon is in some ways misleading. Though it came into being in the later fourteenth century, when Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Langland's Piers...