‘“Us Must Make Lies”: Witness, Evidence and Proof in the York Resurrection’
METh 20 (1998) 24-76.

A textual analysis showing how contemporary legal personnel, judicial procedures and offences: sheriffs, J.Ps, delegated power, eye-witnesses, evidence and proof, undermined by bribery, corruption, conspiracy and maintenance, may have been adopted by the play’s author to construct a plausible dramatic conflation of the variant biblical accounts of the Resurrection.

David Mills

‘Who are our Customers? The Audience for Chester's Plays’
METh 20 (1998) 104-117.

The commercial benefits of play-production were always important. Chester's records indicate the concern with cost-benefit and with the need to attract and satisfy the demands of an audience. The financial burden on the citizens, not the content of the Plays, was the charge against Mayor Savage for allowing the final performance in 1575. The same concern with trade and popular demand is found in the seventeenth-century records of Chester's Midsummer Show.