The Borrowed Expositor

Abstract

If, as Peter Travis has argued, Expositors were incorporated in the Chester cycle in the early sixteenth century, what model did the reviser draw upon to construct them? I argue that the reviser could not have found a suitable template in cycle dramaturgy; rather, in bringing presenters into the Chester cycle, the reviser has adopted a technique hitherto found, in English drama, only in non-cycle plays - an innovation which is part of a wider pattern of rethinking cycle plays in the sixteenth century.