ABSTRACT
Some of the earliest examples of medieval vernacular drama incorporate within their texts evidence of a real or imagined performance of those literary texts. Such evidence of staging, sometimes explicit in the form of stage-directions, sometimes implicit in the text itself, seems to provide external evidence for the otherwise internal evidence constituted by the literary text. Whether privileged or not by literary historians, that evidence seems to be of a different order from purely literary evidence.But is it? The following chapter considers the cases of two of the earliest examples, one religious and one secular, from medieval vernacular drama.
