ABSTRACT
The two unique festival plays for Good Friday and Easter in Bodleian Library MS. e Museo 160, dating apparently from the second decade of the sixteenth century, may have an importance far beyond what has already been suggested by the scant scholarship directed to their study.1 They were only briefly noted by E. K. Chambers, and were dismissed by Hardin Craig as a “literary exercise.”2 Rosemary Woolf saw them as lacking in “dramatic action.”3 Even the matter of whether the Bodley plays were originally dramas with which the scribe tinkered before deciding to retain their original genre has been questioned.4 Yet the alternative, that they are merely adaptations of meditative prose works, seems much less plausible under the circumstances. These plays, whether or not they were ever performed, provide important corroboration for the presence of vernacular drama inside churches in Holy Week and at Easter. As such, they differ substantially from out-of-doors plays such as the great civic cycles of York, Coventry, or Chester performed at Corpus Christi or on some other occasion in the summer. Hence, whether they were ever actually staged perhaps matters less than the intent to provide vernacular drama for liturgical occasions. To be sure, their connection with a Carthusian priory in the
1 These plays have not been separately edited, but have been included in The Late Religious Plays of MSS Digby 133 and e Museo 160, ed. Donald C. Baker, John L. Murphy, and Louis B. Hall, Jr., EETS, 283 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 141-93; quotations from this edition are cited by line number and the abbreviations CB (Christ’s Burial) and CR (Christ’s Resurrection). See also The Digby Plays: Facsimiles of the Plays in Bodley MSS Digby 133 and e Museo 160, introd. Donald C. Baker and J. L. Murphy, Leeds Texts and Monographs, Medieval Drama Facsimiles 3 (Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1976).
