Before the sixteenth century, England had a religious drama that made a profound impression on life and thought.  The old religious plays helped to educate the public, the playwrights, and the actors for the later drama.

Any one may to-day form some idea of the rise of the religious drama, by attending the service of the Catholic church on Christmas or Easter Sunday.  In many Catholic churches there may still be seen at Christmas time a representation of the manger at Bethlehem.  Sometimes the figures of the infant Savior, of Joseph and Mary, of the wise men, of the sheep and cattle, are very lifelike.

The events clustering about the Crucifixion and the Resurrection furnished the most striking material for the early religious drama.  Our earliest dramatic writers drew their inspiration from the New Testament.

Miracle and Mystery Plays.—­A Miracle play is the dramatic representation of the life of a saint and of the miracles connected with him.  A Mystery play deals with gospel events which are concerned with any phase of the life of Christ, or with any Biblical event that remotely foreshadows Christ or indicates the necessity of a Redeemer.  In England there were few, if any, pure Miracle plays, but the term “Miracle” is applied indiscriminately to both Miracles and Mysteries.

The first Miracle play in England was acted probably not far from 1100.  In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries these plays had become so popular that they were produced in nearly every part of England.  Shakespeare felt their influence.  He must have had frequent opportunities in his boyhood to witness their production.  They were seldom performed in England after 1600, although visitors to Germany have, every ten years, the opportunity of seeing a modern production of a Mystery in the Passion Play at Oberammergau.

The Subjects.—­Four great cycles of Miracle plays have been preserved:  the York, Chester, and Coventry plays, so called because they were performed in those places, and the Towneley plays, which take their name from Towneley Hall in Lancashire, where the manuscript was kept for some time.  It is probable that almost every town of importance had its own collection of plays.

[Illustration:  MIRACLE PLAY AT COVENTRY. From an old print]

The York cycle contains forty-eight plays.  A cycle or circle of plays means a list forming a complete circle from Creation until Doomsday.  The York collection begins with Creation and the fall of Lucifer and the bad angels from Heaven,—­a theme which was later to inspire the pen of one of England’s greatest poets.  The tragedies of Eden and the Flood, scenes from the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Moses, the manger at Bethlehem, the slaughter of the Innocents, the Temptation, the resurrection of Lazarus, the Last Supper, the Trial, the Crucifixion, and the Easter triumph are a few of the Miracle plays that were acted in the city of York.