ABSTRACT
Mystery plays remain for most readers and audiences today the most familiar form of medieval English drama. While there are many literary, textual, and cultural reasons for this, one major influence on their modern accessibility has come from performance. From the first re-staging of the York plays at the Festival of Britain in 1951, increasing numbers of community, university, and professional groups have brought performance of the mysteries to a wider audience than at any time since the Reformation. Besides this, on-going research into dramatic records has given a sharper insight into the material fabric of performance, which has fed into experimental reconstructions of medieval staging. Some of these have been extremely persuasive, though we hardly need to say that they prove nothing about actual medieval practice. On the other hand, they alert us to questions and possibilities, and it seems legitimate to refer to them in our discussion, with all the proper caveats.
