(Ebook) The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre by Richard Beadle; Alan J. Fletcher ISBN 9780521682541, 9780521864008, 0521682541, 0521864003

(Ebook) The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre by Richard Beadle; Alan J. Fletcher ISBN 9780521682541, 9780521864008, 0521682541, 0521864003

The drama of the English Middle Ages is perennially popular with students and theatre audiences alike, and this is an updated edition of a book which has established itself as a standard guide to the field. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, second edition, continues to provide an author- itative introduction and an up-to-date, illustrated guide to the mystery cycles, morality drama and saints’ plays which flourished from the late fourteenth to the mid sixteenth centuries. The book emphasises regional diversity in the period and engages with the literary and particularly the theatrical values of the plays. Existing chapters have been revised and updated where necessary, and there are three entirely new chapters. After a new general introduction there are chap- ters devoted to the York, Chester, Towneley (Wakefield) and N-Town cycles of biblical plays. Attention to the contribution of different regions is developed in a chapter on East Anglia, and continued in essays on the morality drama and the saints’ plays. Two illustrated chapters are devoted to the performance of medieval plays, both in their own time and in recent modern revivals. A new chapter on the cultural significance of early drama has been added. A thor- oughly revised reference section includes a guide to scholarship and criticism, an enlarged classified bibliography and a chronological table.Richard Beadle is Reader in Medieval English Literature and Historical Bibli- ography at the University of Cambridge. He is co-editor, with Colin Richmond, of Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, Part III (2006), and he is currently preparing a two-volume edition of The York Plays, due to be published in 2009–10.Alan J. Fletcher is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Language and Literature at University College Dublin. His most recent projects have been The Presence of Medieval English Literature, and a forthcoming book on medieval preaching in Great Britain and Ireland. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy.