This book provides a detailed survey of the hundreds of non-biblical serious plays which survive from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. The performers vary from civic groups and literary societies to courts and convents: mainly amateurs, but they left a legacy of stories that was drawn upon by the writers for the professional theatre companies of Elizabethan England, Golden Age Spain and the rich baroque theatre of France. Stories from the Golden Legend and collections of Marian miracles appear side by side with folk tales and traditional stories brought from the Middle East by merchants, pilgrims and other travellers. Muir considers what she terms the 'legacy' of these tales: when playwrights for the public theatres such as Shakespeare and Lope de Vega retain the situations and settings of the older stories but transform them by the emphasis on psychology and the gradual disappearance of the religious element.
