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I suspect that Patrick Conner knew that he'd draw me out of the wall with his query about whether to teach anything about Latin drama in his survey course on English medieval literature. Let me say first, Pat, that the very words in which your phrase the question should indicate that something's wrong. The scholarly texts you are planning to cite are very old; the latest one, by Hardison, was written a quarter of a century ago. Where else would we get away with citing such dated texts as the final word on anything? The problem is not merely that these books, still excellent in many respects, do not reflect "new discoveries" or something like that, though that is the case too. More importantly, they reflect a paradigmatic way of thinking about drama which is not only out of sync with much recent study of the subject, but with the revolution that has taken place in the human sciences in the last two decades. For these scholars--even for Hardison--the burning questions concerning these texts had to do with "drama" and "origins." All their arguments about origins have rightly been debunked from a historical perspective. But much more to the point is that we have--or at least those of us who haven't worked very hard at remaining nineteenth-century positivists or historicists--become rightly suspicious of any appeal to origins. If nothing else they don't tell us anything that we want to know. Young's questions and Chambers simply are not ours. Even if we knew the "origin" (whatever that is) of the "drama" (whatever that is), what would we know? Why would we care? What would it tell us that makes any difference? Nothing, I think. A Platonist, with his believe that "as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be," might of course think differently. These remarks come from someone who published an essay 15 years ago on "The Roman Rite and the Origins of the Liturgical Drama." I might add that I not only have come to think that questions of origins are useless (and worse, ideologically insidious) but that the notion of a "liturgical drama" is wholly a construction of nineteenth-century scholarship that really needs to be abandoned since it is neither descriptive of a medieval phenomenon nor a useful concept that speaks to our hermeneutical situation at the end of the twentieth-century. I strongly suggest, Pat, that you drop the whole business of "the Latin drama" from your syllabus. It encourages your students to think in terms of outmoded paradigms. And it is largely incongruent with the way that we think about the vernacular texts that you plan to teach. Here the most interesting work has a synchronic orientation which takes its point of departure from cultural criticism and asks how these performances were related to various other practices with which they were contemporary. For a quick brush up on some of this scholarship see the volume on "Approaches to Teaching Medieval English Drama," edited by Richard Emmerson and published by the MLA this summer. Let me return in conclusion to the original question by quoting something that I wrote in that volume (I'm not usually this modest) that directly addresses the question which you raise. I point out that Hardison, and before him Wickham had recognized that the English "drama" and the Latin "drama" really represent two different and largely unrelated traditions, and then I comment that "It is significant that, while lip service is given to such claims, the study of the early English drama has, despite itself, persistently retreated from the implications to be drawn from these claims. Hardison and Wickham themselves fell back on alternative schemes of development in which the Latin "dramatic" texts are still seen as precursors of the vernacular cycle drama. Similarly, David Bevington's anthology "Medieval Drama" repeats Hardison's arguments against an evolutionary view in a chapter paradoxically entitled "Liturgical Beginnings." Rather than retreat to the discredited claims of past scholarship in this way, we should, at least initially, take with utmost seriousness what Hardison, Wickham, and others have taught us about these Latin texts: that they seem to belong more to the world of ritual than to the world of the literary and that their relation to later vernacular texts is problematic. "Our concern is with the implication of these views for the teaching of medieval English vernacular drama. We must, first of all, bluntly admit that a teacher need not include any Latin drama in the curriculum. The old misunderstandings of the history of the drama are, in fact, most readily perpetuated by courses that consider Latin 'liturgical beginnings' as a prelude to developed drama in the vernacular. Thus, at least on first consideration, historical scholarship seems to advocate the removal of texts like the Visitatio sepulchri from the English curriculum." Of course, I go on to say that matters are not so simple, but that's another story. Ok. I've said my bit. Let Patrick's hornets appear. Clifford Flanigan Comparative Literature Indiana University