Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/28

1 6 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH period that ended with the complete secularization of the plays did not come to an end before the middle of the thirteenth century at earliest. We now come to what is, I think, the most obscure part of the development of the religious drama, namely its transference to the hands of the guilds, its association with the procession of Corpus Christi, and its consequent elaboration into the highly specialized form which we find more or less perfectly or imperfedtly represented by the extant English cycles. This form and this manner of representation were not universal. In France the tendency was for the plays to be afted by societies formed for the purpose. Something of the same sort seems to have occurred in London. But, so far as the extant English cycles are con- cerned, there can be no doubt what was the typical method of production, and ample evidence exists in the records of many towns for regarding it as at any rate a very usual method in this country. How and at what date the religious plays fell into the hands of the craft guilds is uncertain. But whether the guilds already had charge of them when the Corpus Christi feast became popular, or whether they assumed charge as being them- selves as it were branches of the Corpus Christi guild, there is no question of the importance of the festival itself, and consequently of the date 1311, in the history of the religious drama. It was namely through the procession, which appears from the first to have been the chief feature in the rites of the new festival, that the drama acquired