They Got it Wrong: How the Misunderstanding of the Nature of the Creation to Judgment Manuscripts of the English Biblical Drama Distorted our Knowledge of the Genre

Abstract

Biblical drama performed in the late medieval period all over England was condemned and largely destroyed by the religious and political struggles of the mid to late sixteenth century. What little was saved by seventeenth-century antiquarians came to the attention of nineteenth-century protestant scholars in Britain and America whose prejudice against Roman Catholicism and their misunderstanding of the nature of the few surviving manuscripts led them to imagine a form of dramatic presentation that never existed. Since the twentieth century the public and professional production of this drama, the creation of new scholarly editions and the availability of hitherto unknown external evidence of performance practice through Records of Early English Drama has created a new understanding of the dramatic tradition from which Shakespeare grew.