San Antonio College Library

"This is the English genius: the passion, the tragedy, the comedy of life mirrored in these seven great plays which illustrate the incomparable art of English theater. The miracle play of Abraham and Isaac is symbolic of medieval theatre; pristine in form, innocent and joyful in its praise of God. Man has lost a portion of his innocence, but still sees life as a struggle between good and evil, in Marlowe's great play Doctor Faustus. The morality play...

Publisher description: This volume represents less than half of the projected history of "Elizabethan" drama which the late Professor F. P. Wilson was working on at the time of his death in 1963. It begins were Volume II, Part 2, by the late Sir Edmund Chambers, left off--at the accession of Henry VII. It chronicles the decline of the Morality forms, and discusses the tentative new dramatic impulses produced by the combined presure of Reformation...

Hone's summaries and excerpts from medieval Coventry plays or mysteries in the British Museum.

This important new study of the English mystery plays has a twofold purpose. It is concerned to investigate the antecedents of the four extant cycles and to demonstrate the dramatic value of the plays themselves The opening and concluding chapters place the plays in their historical context by discussing on the one hand the emergence and achievements of genuine religious drama (as opposed to liturgical drama) in the twelfth century and on the other...

Through a revised study of Shakespeare's dramatic heritage in its social context, the author questions the idealizing view that Shakespearean drama enacts an 'Elizabethan world picture' as well as the materialist view that the plays laid the foundation for modern radical ideology. Instead the author locates Shakespeare's skepticism about power in his heritage from medieval religious drama. Always responsive to the taste of the ruling class, Shakespeare,...