Staging Scripture is the fourteenth volume of a series by the same editors, entitled Ludus: Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama. The chronological scope of this volume moves impressively from the Middle Ages to Elizabethan England. In addition to major theatrical changes, this period witnessed a series of major shifts in biblical production and use, which the volume traces: the Vulgate's hegemony is challenged by new Latin and vernacular translations, notably the Wycliffite translation; various early Tudor translations; and the Geneva Bible, the dominant Bible of Elizabethan England. In spite of the historical range, almost all of the plays studied in these sixteen essays fit what would conventionally be described as medieval: for example, the Newcastle Noah play in the essay by Katie Normington; Herod's killing of the children, by Bob Godfrey; the modern staging of the York plays, by Philip Crispin; Mary's role in the N-Town Crucifixion, by James McBain. Other essays, mixed in with these, touch on broader aspects of medieval drama, such as Peter Happé’s essay on dramatizing the resurrection, or Diana Wyatt's investigation of the records of a lost cycle play in Beverley. Dramatists of the Tudor Renaissance, such as John Bale or George Peele, receive passing attention, if they are mentioned at all.

On a structural level, then, there is a lost opportunity here: many of the plays discussed are composed or revised in Tudor England, and yet the period implications of this—the fact that medieval biblical plays coexist in a sixteenth-century context, overlapping a set of plays that are now differently anthologized—is never really explored. Although the Stationers’ Register and Henslowe's Diary record a large number of biblical plays in the late sixteenth century, none of these are cited in this book. Furthermore, the logic behind the order of chapters is unclear, as the first chapters attend most to the end of the book's chronology.

In spite of these structural concerns, the individual essays are often excellent. Highlights include Sarah Carpenter's exploration of biblical drama after the Reformation. Carpenter shows how the new practices of reading vernacular scripture shape dramatic production. She compares Nicholas Love's fifteenth-century theories of devotional reading and Erasmus's methods of biblical reading in Nicholas Udall's 1548 translation of the Paraphrases of the New Testament. The comparison shows a shift in emphasis from affective devotional experience to scripture as a source for the “teaching of eache other in common” (17). Protestant doctrine is worked into the texts of early Tudor drama, and the biblical subject matter shifts away from the earlier emphasis on the life of Christ toward Old Testament stories (24). Catholic drama is also inflected by the shifts in reading habits, as in Godly Queen Hester, written to criticize the trial of Katherine of Aragon. Greg Walker's chapter that follows similarly explores the blurred lines of confessional orientation and new, seemingly Protestant forms of expression in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis by Sir David Lyndsay. Walker shows that the message of reform in Lyndsay's play—its critique of clerical abuse—comes from a Catholic orientation, connected to a program promoted by Archbishop Hamilton and others “eager to advance essentially Erasmian reforms” (59). Later translators of this play use the Geneva Bible to replace Lyndsay's Vulgate, seemingly converting a once Catholic self-criticism into a Protestant critique.

Several of the plays discussed exist in a blurred area between Catholic form and possible Protestant repurposing, or as a Catholic form that simply passes under the wire of Protestant sensibilities, as Philip Butterworth suggests in his study of biblical allusions in the Towneley Isaac and Jacob plays (109). While recently dated in a Marian context before 1558, they may have been written or revised later, as they seem to draw from the 1560 Geneva Bible. Similarly, Roberta Mullini argues that the B-text of the Norwich cycle presents “features that manifest the anonymous playwright's desire to adapt an old tradition to the new Reformist episteme so as to turn a Catholic text into a Protestant (if not Puritan) one” (126). The cycle plays do not survive long after the Elizabethan religious settlement, with mysteries ending in Chester in 1575, a year before the opening of James Burbage's Theatre; in Norwich they ended some ten years earlier.

Such confessional blurring is not evident in the N-Town plays, which Charlotte Steenbrugge places in the midst of controversies about preaching to the laity, suggesting that the text had an orthodox rather than Lollard affiliation. David Bevington illustrates how the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament merges theater and liturgy in a way that “while characteristic of other medieval religious plays, is here given a sharpness of focus that may owe its sense of urgency to then-current debate over the Real Presence of Christ in the Mass” (237). A few essays on the York cycles are placed near the end of this volume, including those by Clifford Davidson and Margaret Rogerson. The volume is well made, but its high price will limit circulation.