Before we begin the study of the vernacular drama it is necessary to inquire into any continuity that may exist between the mystery cycles and the liturgical drama. When the German original of this book was published it was still usual for the standard histories to say that the vernacular genres had ‘developed’ out of the Latin. How exactly such development had taken place was not so clear. When the evolutionism of the generation of Chambers and Creizenach had fallen into disrepute, the incertitude about the nature of that evolution increased still further. Hardin Craig, who wrote the last one-man history of our genre, is probably representative of that watered-down evolutionism:

Craig would probably have rejected the charge of biologism, but his wording - ‘left the church and passed into the hands of the laity’ - still reflects the notion that between the liturgical drama of the twelfth and the mystery plays of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there must have existed an uninterrupted line of progeny pretty much as it is postulated by biologists when they claim the descent of one species from another. Such thinking will always be on the lookout for transitional forms which share some of their features with the earlier, some with the later species.