This book began with a set of related questions: why are other languages so conspicuous in English plays of the sixteenth century? what does their presence mean? and how do they address a range of different spectators, from those who understand only English to those with a smattering of foreign vernaculars from their travels and those who can understand, even converse in, academic Latin?

In attempting to answer these questions, this study aims to examine individual plays within their cultural context and to look at how changes in English culture from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century produce the need to keep reworking and restaging the interface between English and alien languages. Attitudes to alien language are closely tied up with religious change and developing nationalism, so that these are two dominant concerns of the book. Protestant England defines itself against both Babel and Babylon, the voices of other nations and other faiths, and at the same time seeks to strengthen its own position by collapsing distinctions between the two.

Chapter 1 begins by surveying attitudes to language in the fourteenth century and assessing the impact of the Lollards on linguistic thinking. Latin, until now the sacramental language of authority, becomes the potential enemy in the newly politicised linguistic arena of the late fourteenth century.

In chapter 2 I compare two mystery cycles, N-Town and Wakefield, in terms of how they stage English and Latin.