The Records of Early English Drama (REED) series aims to establish the context for the great drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries by examining the historical manuscripts that provide external evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until Puritan legislation closed the London theatres in 1642. Oxford (University and City), the series' latest volume, brings together, for the first time, all of the evidence for performance in the whole of Oxford, including colleges, halls, university, town government, parish churches,...

This volume brings together a selection of the major articles of Alexandra F. Johnston, which along with similar volumes by the late David Mills, Peter Meredith and Meg Twycross makes up a set of "Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies." Alexandra Johnston, the founding director of the research project, Records of Early English Drama, is one of these four key scholars whose work has had a profound influence on the study of medieval and early modern English drama.

This collection of essays focuses especially on the York plays: on the Mercers documents that initiated the...