ABSTRACT
The history of the Chester cycle has undergone a substantial revision in recent years. It used to be fashionable to think of the Chester plays as the oldest surviving Middle English cycle, a conclusion that was derived from E. K. Chambers's interpretation of the Chester records. The most recent scholarship, especially that of Lawrence Clopper, would move date of inception—at least of the version of the plays in the surviving manuscripts—to the first quarter of the sixteenth century. What emerges from this revaluation is a Chester cycle that is Tudor in origin. It is still very much a medieval play in content and style, and in the course of its sixteenth-century history it became on that account a controversial text that seems to have been censored several times before its last performance in 1575. In the manuscripts, each pageant carries the title of its sponsoring guild, followed by the pageant number, and in some, the title of the episode proper.
