ABSTRACT
The casual reader of academic journals given over to medieval matters could be forgiven for thinking that more medieval drama has been produced in the twentieth century than was in its own time. The occurrence of medieval drama revivals in the twentieth century may seem an historical phenomenon that encapsulates in time a single purpose, but it would be misleading to assume that the motives of revivalists were always the same, even though it may be possible to detect three generally distinct phases within the movement. The question of whether to modernize the pronunciation or idiom of the original text or to attempt a reconstruction of medieval speech is one that concerns all directors of medieval plays. Location is a aspect of the context which separates modern revivals from original performances. In many ways this encapsulates a predicament faced by all modern revivals of medieval drama: their place on the ‘reconstruction’ to ‘reinterpretation’ production scale.
