SOURCE: "The Great Cycle," in English Miracle Plays and Moralities, 1907. Reprint by AMS Press, 1969, pp. 31-48.

In the excerpt below, Moore discusses the connection between the York pageant plays and the celebration of the annual Feast of Corpus Christi. By 1426, Moore notes, the festival was characterized by crowds and boisterous revelry—inappropriate for the observance of a sacramental feast—and in that year the religious procession itself was formally separated from the staged production of pageants.

The latter half of the fourteenth century saw the translation of the Bible into the English tongue, for those who were fortunate enough to have learned to read; for the many to whom this was an impossibility, the Bible was already a familiar book, thanks to the nationalising of the Theatre—the only Theatre—which was the religious one. The rapid growth of religious drama all over the country was at this...