ABSTRACT
The earliest morality plays date from a little later: the York Paternoster play was performed around 1385 and The Castle of Perseverance in East Anglia in about 1397. More certainly, the earliest record of the ‘Quem quaeritis’ trope – the dialogue spoken by priests enacting the visit to Christ’s empty tomb after the resurrection – occurs at Winchester towards the end of the tenth century. The first workable evidence probably comes from the palace of Northumbrian King Edwin at Yeavering in the seventh century. Dramatic activity increased in the fourteenth century. The Interlude of the Student and the Girl, dating from about 1300, consists of two fragments of dialogue, in the first of which the student protests his love to the unsympathetic girl, while in the second he seeks help with his suit from ‘Mother Eloise’. This seems to be what could be termed an ‘interlude’.
