ABSTRACT
The earliest printed play known to us is Fulgens and Lucrece by Henry Medwall. Only four pages are extant but from these fragments of 1512–16 we can see what the earliest extant dramatic text was like in print. For knowledge of the form of dramatic texts before it, however, an examination of dramatic texts in manuscript of the late tenth century onwards is a prerequisite. John Heywood fortunately happens to have had his play, Witty and Witless, come down to us in manuscript form. There is a manuscript play that supports the establishment of the standard dramatic form. It is John of Bordeaux, a work in about 1590, more than ten years younger than Merbury's Wit and Wisdom. The influence of translation on the form of dramatic texts became decisive during the first five years of the 1580s.
