ABSTRACT
When R. M. Lumiansky and the author began to prepare a new edition of the plays in the mid-1960s, they were aware of at least three possible meanings for the phrase "The Chester Cycle'. First, there was the hidden, practical performing cycle, constantly changing between some time before 1422 and 1575. Then there was whatever immediate hidden version or versions lay behind the extant manuscripts as exemplars. And finally there were the extant manuscripts themselves, no longer reflections of a living acting tradition but books, literary texts put together by their scribes for reasons very different from those that inspired the writers of the living plays. In his introduction, Hermann Deimling describes his unsuccessful attempts to trace this manuscript in preparing his edition, and the first volume of his text—published in 1892 and ending in mid-sentence, on a comma, at Play 13, line 282—drew only upon the four later manuscripts.
