The Digby Conversion of Saint Paul

They make up a comic scene between the demon Belial (whose first line is "the usual Satanic exclamation of the mystery writers 'Ho ho'"[1]) and his messenger, named Mercury.

Adams believed the play to have been written by an author from the East Midlands, to be performed at stations in a small village on 25 January, that being the Festival of the Conversion of St.

[10] The interpolations to the original text (the marginal "daunce" stage directions and the three leaves containing the scene between the devils) seem to come from an early sixteenth-century revival of the piece, and were possibly the work of a man named Myles Blomfylde (whose exact identity is unclear), who may have played the role of Poeta.

[3][5][8] The play was not much admired by its 19th- and early 20th-century editors: Furnivall wrote that it (and the Digby mysteries as a whole) pointed to "the decay of the old religious Drama in England"[7] and Manly found it "uninteresting" and of only historical value.

[11] Adams has sympathy with the later author's attempt to introduce more excitement to the piece and goes so far as to omit almost entirely Saul's long sermon on the Seven Deadly Scenes on the grounds of its having "no dramatic value".

""Poeta: Honorable frendes, beseechyng yow of lycens / To proceede owr processe … / … / … with yowr favour, begynyng owr proces""Poeta: Fynally, of this stacon thus we mak a conclusyon, / Besecchyng thys audyens to folow and succede / With all your delygens this generall processyon"The play's earliest editors all agreed the original production would have been of the processional sort, with a wagon travelling between three different stations to perform the three scenes of the play, and the audience following, rather as they would performing the Stations of the Cross.

The need to accommodate a horse must have meant that the wagon would be fairly large, and with an upper story in order for the Holy Spirit to appear above and from which thunderbolts could be thrown.

[7] Lines in Saul's sermon – "thys semely [assembly] that here syttyth or stonde" – led scholars to conjecture that a scaffold may have been erected for this and perhaps other stations.

It was not until the 1970s that Glynne Wickham, first in an essay and then in his edition of the play, challenged this conception, arguing that the three stations had taken the form either of mobile "pageants" or fixed "mansions" grouped together on a single acting area, or "platea".

[5] Victor I. Scherb, taking the processional staging as read, builds from it an interpretation that sees the play as a theatrical triptych that uses framing devices which serve to draw the audience's focus on the central scene, that of Saul's conversion.

[14] In November 2000, The Marlowe Project, a production company devoted to early theatre, performed The Conversion of Saint Paul at the Church for All Nations in New York City.