English medieval drama has been understood throughout most of the modern period to consist chiefly of two dominant categories of play. The categories ‘mystery play’ and ‘morality play’ – also known as ‘moral interlude’ – were devised from the evidence of the few scripts which survive from the pre-Reformation period. Both categories are devotional in focus, treating aspects of the narrative of the Fall and Redemption of humanity. This narrative derives from orthodox Western European medieval theology and is reflected across the arts and culture of the later Middle Ages. Mystery plays present the narrative as biblical history. Four surviving ‘cycles’, known as the York and Chester Cycles, and the Towneley/Wakefield and N. Town Plays, are understood as being virtually complete. In addition, two long, composite, and late mystery plays have survived from Coventry, and there are records and fragments of other similar productions which took place elsewhere. Where plays, or records of plays, survive which do not appear to have been part of larger cycles, they were assimilated into the same category. The moral interlude, on the other hand, has been distinguished by the fact that it presents the same narrative trajectory of Fall and Redemption in the allegorical mode.

This simple convergent model has come under increasing pressure, particularly since the work of the Records of Early English Drama project has revealed a plethora of dramatic activity in late medieval England which does not conform to the binary model derived from surviving scripts.