ABSTRACT
The Old Testament subjects in the English cycles are so often the same that critics have assumed that the medieval playwrights must all have used the same principle of selection to construct the Old Testament sequences; however, this principle has eluded us because the suggestions advanced thus far are so general that they can explain only the inclusion of topics but not the dissimilarities between or idiosyncrasies of individual cycles. Without denying that typology is a force at work in the English mystery plays, it is nevertheless apparent that figuration is not exclusive enough to function as a principle of selection. Every Old Testament story has a figural relationship to some New Testament event; consequently, figuration, at best, can account for the significance of an incident once it has been chosen for a cycle but it cannot account for the exclusion of other equally valid Old Testament subjects.
