The purpose of this special section of Theatre Survey has been to bring together scholars in the field of medieval studies working specifically in theatre studies and those whose work reflects new strategies and current concerns in theatre historiography.

Appended to Folcard's twelfth-century Vita of Saint John of Beverley is an account of a play of the Resurrection of Christ that was enacted by masked players in the churchyard of Beverley Minster in the presence of a great number of spectators. The story tells of some boys who, apparently desiring a better view of the play, entered the church and climbed up to the vaulting to look down at the performers from a window above. The church wardens, fearing the window might be damaged, chased after the boys in order to punish their rashness. One of the boys was able to dodge the blows inflicted upon his companions by scampering further up the stairs, but a stone was loosened by his foot and fell crashing to the pavement below. Shocked by the noise, the boy lost his balance and tumbled to the floor of the nave, where he lay, presumably dead. A group of people, who had entered the church to escape the crowds outside, gathered around the body that, to their amazement, rose from the dead without a mark of injury. And so it was brought about that those who were unable to see the representation of the Resurrection outside the church were provided with a sign of the Resurrection inside the church.

In the autumn of 1159, scarcely five years after the twenty-one-year-old Henry Plantagenet ascended to the English throne, John of Salisbury was already describing what he clearly regarded as a moment of historical transition. Midway through the Policraticus, the treatise on statecraft he was compiling for his friend and colleague Thomas Becket, then Chancellor of England, John remarked how the entire political character of the nation had been changing in recent years, the result of a new infusion of educated clerics into the workings of government.

During the course of her summer's progress in 1575, Elizabeth I spent nineteen days at Kenilworth, the Earl of Leicester's Castle in Warwickshire, where she was presented with various entertainments—including plays, fireworks, bear-baitings, water-pageants, acrobatic performances, and dancing—at a cost of over a thousand pounds a day, as part of what has been called “unquestionably sixteenth-century England's grandest and most extravagant party.” Robert Langham, a minor court functionary who wrote an eyewitness account of the party, describes a “lyvely morisdauns” that was featured in this festive show of fealty to the queen. According to Langham, the morris performed for Elizabeth was danced “acording too the auncient manner” and featured “six daunserz, Mawdmarion, and the fool.” The dance was part of a bride-ale procession made up of “lusty lads and bolld bachelarz of the parish” arranged two by two in “marciall order,” who preceded sixteen horsemen and the bridegroom; after the horsemen came the morris dance, followed by three “prety puzels” carrying spicecakes and leading the bride (“ill smellyng” and “ugly fooul ill favord”), who was accompanied by “too auncient parishionerz, honest toounsmen” and a dozen bridesmaids. The procession marched to the castle in the great court in which a quintain had been set up for feats of arms; when these games were concluded, a performance of the traditional Hock Tuesday play from nearby Coventry was enacted. Though these festivities were staged outside her window, apparently the queen did not see much of them because, Langham tells us, “her highnes behollding in the chamber delectabl dauncing indeed: and heerwith the great throng and unruliness of the peopl, waz cauz that this solemnitee of Brydeale and dauncing had not the full muster waz hoped for” (11. 722–26). Elizabeth asked that the Hocktide play be performed again for her on the following Tuesday; Langham does not mention whether or not the morris dance was also repeated for the queen's pleasure.

In the fifteenth-century East Anglian play, The Conversion of Ser Jonathas the Jewe by the Myracle of the Blissed Sacrament, five Jews desecrate a host to challenge the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation. In the play's image of Jewish characters, fifteenth-century English Christianity constructed an ethnic, religious, and cultural alterity. A Jewish merchant, Jonathas, bribes a Christian merchant, Aristorius, to steal a consecrated host from a local church. Five Jewish characters then stab the host, nail it to a pillar, boil it, and bake it in an oven over a fire. In this last trial, the oven bursts open to reveal the image of Christ as a bloody child. At the sight of the Christ, and upon hearing his reproach, the Jews confess and are baptized into the Christian faith.

The Corpus Christi celebrations of medieval York provide a good opportunity for studying how symbolic power structures social relations, and how institutions reproduce their legitimacy at a time when the procession as well as the presentation of the pageant wagons were rigorously supervised by the city council. The elaborate procession of torches honoring the sacrament, a little discussed aspect of these celebrations, is particularly useful for such a study, because the records of the guilds provide surprising indications of the extent to which the supposedly solemn procession honoring the sacrament was characterized by disruption. These documents contradict those historians who normally treat both the procession and the pageants as representations staged in civic space that mirrored a united civic body. The negotiations surrounding the Skinner's participation in the Corpus Christi ceremonies of 1419 and the conflict of civic, religious, and royal authority in determining the position of the Cordwainers in the celebrations of 1490 provide traces of a different history—a history of a representation of social distinctions rather than a representation of undifferentiated community. This is a history of struggle between groups with different interests, engaging in symbolic struggle to maintain or alter the social distinctions embodied in the form of the procession.

When Constantin Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares first appeared in English translation in 1936, the Moscow Art Theater had already made a great impact on American theatre. Particularly influential in the Soviet director's theories of acting was his concept of emotion memory. In An Actor Prepares, the young actor, Kostya, tries to understand how to access the “memory of life” rather than the “theatrical archives of his mind” and has an epiphany at the moment when he recalls and relives the violence of an isolated vehicular accident that had dismembered its victim: