Of the many books (chiefly transatlantic) on English medieval drama that have appeared since the war, this study by an American Rhodes Scholar is certainly the most readable and perhaps the most important. Curiously enough, no other investigator has attempted to define the unique artistic structure of the Chester, Towneley, and Coventry cycles, to discover what a heterogeneous medieval audience would have made of these plays as staged, or to indicate the complex religious inheritance on which the sophisticated dramatists drew in order to provoke a deeper response to the Christian theme ("The Times Literary Supplement").
Author(s): Verdel A. Kolve
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Year: 1966
Language: English
Pages: X+338
A Note on Medieval Orthography x
Chapter One. Introduction: The Medieval Dramatic Image and Its Audience 1
Chapter Two. The Corpus Christi Drama as Play and Game 8
Chapter Three. Corpus Christi Feast and the Impulse toward Cycle Form 33
Chapter Four. Corpus Christi Form: Principles of Selection 57
Chapter Five. Medieval Time and English Place 101
Chapter Six. Religious Laughter 124
Chapter Seven. The Invention of Comic Action 145
Chapter Eight. The Passion and Resurrection in Play and Game 175
Chapter Nine. Natural Man and Evil 206
Chapter Ten. Goodness and Natural Man 237
Chapter Eleven. Conclusion 265
Notes 275
Bibliography 317
Index 331
