Abstract:
Maria S. Murphy's An Annotated Bibliography of English Medieval Drama: 1969-1975 updated Carl J. Stratman's second edition of Bibliography of Medieval Drama. The purpose of the present thesis is to update further that bibliography. To that end all pertinent books, periodical articles, and dissertations for the years 1976 through 1980 have been cataloged and annotated. Chapter I summarizes the directions medieval drama scholarship has taken during this five-year period and relates it where applicable to the trends noted by Murphy. Receiving the most attention from 1976 through 1980 was the area of cycle drama and its development, staging, aesthetics, typology, records, modern revivals, and relationship to contemporaneous visual arts. No attempt has been made to draw conclusions from this study for such is not its purpose. However, Chapter concludes with the observation that though the average yearly number of dissertations focusing on medieval English drama decreased by a third from 1969-1975 to 1976-1980, the overall average of studies actually increased during the more recent period. Included with this thesis are four appendices. The first lists works pertaining to medieval English drama published in languages other than English during 1976-1980; the second 1ists articles that should have been annotated within the thesis but which were, for a variety of reasons, unobtainable; the third gives annotations for two articles that were unavailable to Murphy at the time of her study; the fourth is a table listing the number of dissertations and total publications for the years 1969-1975 and 1976-1980.
