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Popular Culture Review
Churchwardens’ accounts reveal that much had been “scattered abroad,” that
much had been “spoiled and mangled,” and that individuals had to be taken to
court to recover the former possessions of some churches. In most parishes the
Protestant renovations carried out under Edward Vi’s orders necessitated a
complete re-renovation of church interiors to restore them to Catholic use
(Haigh 208-18). Given these conditions, attempts to revive traditional parish
and city drama were tepid. Only three full-scale attempts at revivals of local
drama in smaller communities have come to light during Mary’s reign—a St.
Thomas a Becket pageant in Canterbury in 1554, Wakefield’s Corpus Christi
play in 1555, and plans by New Romney to revive its passion play in the years
from 1556 to 1560 (Lancashire xxix-xxx).
And with Elizabeth’s succession and her reversion to the Protestantism
of her brother, for all intents and purposes, by the middle of her reign the local
cycle plays or passion plays forever disappeared. Such probably was not the
result of the gleeful acceptance throughout England of Elizabethan
Protestantism, the “happie time of the gos V