is spirit by getting up a
miracle-play of "Sancta Katarina." He borrowed copes from St. Albans in
which to dress the actors; unluckily a fire took place, and the costumes
were burnt. Thereupon he seems to have rendered himself up as it were in
pious pledge for their loss, for he became a monk. In 1119 he was
elected abbot, and if we give him about twenty-one years in which to
rise to that dignity, we can date the St. Katharine play at 1098 or 9.
This passage in a life of that time is a clue to the further history of
the religious play in England. Geoffrey's attempt to present one at
Dunstable, no doubt a reproduction of one he had seen in France, is an
instance of the naturalisation process that slowly went on.

The distinct break in the history of the miracle-play that made it from
a church into a town pageant occurred about the close of the thirteenth
century. From a performance within the church building it went on then
into the church-yard, or the adjoining close or street, and so into the
town at large. The clerics still kept a hand in its purveyance; but the
rise of the town guilds gave it a new character, a new relation to the
current life, and a larger equipment. The friendly rivalry between the
guilds, and the craftsmen's pride in not being outdone by other crafts,
helped to stimulate the town play, till at length the elaborate cycle
was formed that began with sunrise on a June morning, and lasted until
the torch-bearers were called out at dusk to stand at the foot of the
pageant.

The earliest miracle-plays that we can trace in the town cycles date
back to the early years of Edward III. The last to be performed in
London, according to Prynne, was _Christ's Passion_, which was given in
James I.'s reign. It was produced "at Ely House, Holborn, when Gundomar
lay there on Good Friday at night, at which there were thousands
present." This was a late survivor, however, called to life by a last
flicker of court sunshine on the occasion of the state visit of a
Spanish ambassador. Here is an extreme range of over three centuries;
and the old religious drama was still being performed in a more and more
uncertain and intermittent fashion all through the dramatic reign of
Shakspeare.

The ten plays that follow in this volume represent in brief the late
remnant of this early drama, rescued at the point where it was ending
its primitive growth, soon to give way to plays written with a
consciously artistic sense of the st