ABSTRACT
The Harrowing of Hell, presented by the Cooks and Innkeepers in the Chester mystery cycle, includes three scenes. The first sets forth Christ's descent into Hell, and the second shows Adam in Paradise. The final scene is comic: a woman, a sometime dishonest tapster, laments the fact that because of her chicanery she must dwell always with Satan. Frances A. Foster, who in 1926 studied the source of the Chester plays, simply assumed in the case of The Harrowing of Hell that the comic scene was not an authentic part of the play; R. H. Wilson in 1931 and Hardin Craig in 1955 seem to have adopted the same assumption. This chapter shows that the charges are founded on misconceptions, and that the comic scene is a functional and effectively unified portion of the Chester Harrowing of Hell. There remains only the Harrowing of Hell, which has 260 lines without the comic third scene, and 320 lines with it.
