SOURCE: "Medieval Drama," in English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages, 1945. Reprint by Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1947, pp. 1-65.

In the following excerpt, Chambers summarizes the background of the miracle plays, discussing performance season and location; the literary, ecclesiastical, and cultural sources used; the use of humor in the plays; the history of written records of the dramas; and their literary merit.

Miracle plays are traceable during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in some forty English localities, predominantly perhaps in the northern and eastern parts of the country. Others can be added from sixteenth-century documents. They were known also in Scotland, and at Dublin in Ireland, which was much under the influence of English customs. The fact that most of the surviving texts represent performances of a particular type has perhaps rather obscured the variety of organization which the records disclose. It is probable that...