Realism in the Medieval Mystery Plays

Abstract

An intensive study and analysis of some of the medieval mystery plays—remnants of the York, Townley, Coventry, and Chester Cycles—will inevitably show that realism was very prevalent in the literature of the fourteenth century. Of course Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales are even better evidences of this fact, but somehow the spirit of any age is nowhere in literature as vividly and correctly depicted and reflected as in its plays. To account for this dominant realistic literary tendency, perhaps a brief survey of the political and social background, followed by a short antecedent history of the English drama might here be, both appropriate and enlightening.