The Creation, and Fall of Lucifer by the York Realist was intended to provide a spectacular opening for the Corpus Christi cycle, of which the city of York felt very proud in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Since the York Realist appears to have been particularly sensitive to the conditions of production, this opening play provides a useful focus for attention to the staging used in the York cycle. The internal evidence of the Realist's Creation, and Fall of Lucifer demonstrates that he was not writing a mere literary exercise, but kept in mind the specifics of stage production.

A gifted anonymous dramatist, whom scholars now identify as the York Realist, contributed eight complete plays (XXVI, XXVIII-XXXIII, XXXVI) to the Passion series in the York cycle. These plays were probably written about 1425 to replace earlier plays and thereby were designed to enhance the dramatic effectiveness of the Passion series. This remarkable playwright's style was recognized long ago by Charles Mills Gayley, who spoke of his work as belonging to a “realistic period” and noted that the dramatist himself is distinguished “by his observation of life, his reproduction of manners, his dialogue, and the plasticity of his technique: whether in presentation of the comic, or of the tragic and horrible, aspect of his narrative.” Much more recently, J. W. Robinson has presented evidence to illustrate more specifically the nature of the playwright's concern for detail, for dramatic use of dialogue, and for realistic presentation of human behavior. Robinson's article, published in Modern Philology a little more than a decade ago, is an important piece of criticism, though now perceptive scholars will recognize that there are many ways in which his interpretations need qualification. Most urgently, we need a more precise understanding of the York Realist's realism, especially since this term as used in literary criticism has come under increasing attack. Furthermore, any such understanding of the realism of this dramatist must then be balanced with an evaluation of the traditional and iconographic elements in his plays, for if we may borrow some words by Rosemary Woolf out of context, these scenes “should not be … explained solely in terms of realism.”

Despite the renewal of interest in the Catholic vernacular drama of medieval England, critics generally have failed to understand the framework upon which the unity of the Wakefield Mactacio Abel (The Killing of Abel) rests. If, as I believe, the central issue in the play is the response of mankind to God's grace against the background of the whole of history, then those who would admire the play solely for its realism or for its farce are not properly responding to the drama. There are many who perhaps do find the theology implicit in medieval drama to be rather dull fare, but in no way can the religious doctrine be split away from other aspects of this play.