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A Suggested Location for the Digby Mary Magdalene
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
Extract
Of all the isolated plays and fragments of religious drama that have come down to us from fifteenth-century England, none has caused the literary or theatrical historian more difficulty than the mystery-miracle play of St. Mary Magdalene contained in Bodleian Digby MS 133. As Hardin Craig and others have stated, the rubrics call for the most elaborate staging indicated in any English medieval play. Unlike the short playlets of fifty to two hundred lines which comprise the bulk of such cycles as Chester or York, the Mary Magdalene is 2,144 lines long and demands a minimum of sixty-four speaking performers plus some twenty to thirty mute attendants.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1963
References
NOTES
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