SOURCE: "Miracle Plays—Dramatic Values," in The English Religious Drama, The Macmillan Company, 1913, pp. 168-200.

In the following essay—originally a lecture delivered in July, 1893—Bates discusses the role of the apocryphal gospels in certain sections of the mystery cycles, emphasizing what she perceives as the restraint evidenced by the plays' authors in light of the pervasive influence of these legends on the popular interpretation of scripture. Bates views the plays as sincere depictions of what the medieval mind perceived as the true history of the world, free of literary "consciousness."

There are two ways of regarding our old Miracle Plays. Many students of English literature think of them confusedly, contemptuously, as the primal dramatic chaos out of which the Elizabethan stage rose, not by process of evolution, but by divine fiat,—"Let there be Shakespeare," and there was Shakespeare. Others see in this five-centuried growth not merely...