Doubt and Religious Drama Across Sixteenth-Century England, or Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Plays?

Considering sixteenth-century English drama in the context of these shifting conditions suggests how audience members might have experienced religious belief in relation to key plays of the Chester cycle differently from how protestant reformers encouraged spectators to encounter drama that reworked cycle play conventions for evangelical purposes. Analyzing the stated goals and likely effects of religious drama from the time when the Chester cycle first shifted to Whitsun to the time when it was recorded in surviving manuscripts suggests that it was not just anti-Catholicism, iconoclasm, iconophobia, or a shift in the material conditions under which drama was written and performed that made a reform-minded protestant like Goodman hostile to religious drama. More significantly, Goodman's comments reflect an emerging understanding of the kind of belief generated by religious plays. Those who study mystery cycles have long abandoned the notion that such drama manifested and regenerated a communally coherent experience of religious faith.