Daisy Black is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton

'This book was a pleasure to read. The writing is clear and accessible; the voice is engaging, with sections of lovely phrasing and surprising humour.'The Review of English Studies'Given Black’s clear and accessible handling of theory, and the ways in which she embeds her argument in the critical history of each play she addresses, I look forward to assigning her work to my graduate students. Overall, Daisy Black’s Play Time has much to offer scholars of early English drama and of literature and culture more broadly.'Studies in the Age of Chaucer'Given its focus on some of the greatest hits of the canon of early English drama and its fresh and insightful readings of familiar texts, Play Time will reward the attention of both scholars of medieval drama and those working in adjacent fields… Black demonstrates conclusively that multiple temporalities exist playfully side by side within medieval biblical drama and that the hegemony of Christian time is always under threat from history, which rarely is content to remain in the past.'The Medieval Review

• Introduction: what God was doing before he created the world1 The old man and the pregnant virgin: linear time and Jewish conversion in the N-Town plays2 Grave new world: fantasies of supersession and explosive questions in the York and Chester Flood plays3 Time out of joint: queering the Nativity in the Towneley Second Shepherds’ Play4 Passion meets Passover: temporal origami in the Towneley Herod the Great5 Conclusion: the spectator's God’s-eye viewEpilogueBibliographyIndex