It is, however, the formal change with which I am here mainly concerned; and of this it will be the object of the present chapter to trace as briefly as possible the outlines. The principal factor is certainly that tendency to expansion and coalescence in the plays which has been already seen at work in the production of such elaborate pieces as the _Quem quaeritis_ of the Tours or that of the Benedictbeuern manuscript, the Fleury _Stella_, the Rouen _Prophetae_ and the _Antichristus_. This culminates in the formation of those great dramatic cycles of which the English Corpus Christi plays are perhaps the most complete examples. But before we can approach these, we must consider a little further the independent development of the Easter and Christmas groups. It is noteworthy that, during the period now under discussion, the importance of Christmas falls markedly into the background when compared with that of Easter; and a reason for this will presently suggest itself. The _Stella_, indeed, as such, appears to have almost reached its term[244]; for such further growth as there is we must look chiefly to the _Prophetae_. The process by which little episodic dramas, as of Balaam and Nebuchadnezzar at Rouen, bud out from the stem of the _Prophetae_, is one capable of infinite extension. By 1204 the play had found its way to Riga, on the extreme border of European civilization, and the _ludus prophetarum ordinatissimus_ there performed included scenes from the wars of Gideon, David, and Herod[245]. The text of the Riga play is unfortunately not preserved, but the famous Norman-French _Ordo repraesentationis Adae_ is an example of a _Prophetae_, in which the episodes, no longer confined to the stories of the prophets in the stricter sense, have outgrown and cast into the shade the original intention[246]. Most things about the _Adam_ are in dispute. Scholars differ as to whether the manuscript belongs to the twelfth or the thirteenth century, and as to whether it is the work of a Norman or of an Anglo-Norman scribe. The piece is manifestly incomplete, but how far incomplete it is hard to say. What we have consists of three sections. There is a long play of nearly six hundred lines on the Fall and Expulsion from Paradise, in which the speakers are Adam and Eve, the _Figura_ of God and the _Diabolus_. Then comes a much shorter one of Cain and Abel; and finally a _Prophetae_, which breaks off after the part of Nebuchadnezzar. Of the general character of this interesting piece something further will be said presently, but the point to notice here is that, although Adam and Abel may of course be regarded as prophetic types of Christ, if not exactly prophets, yet there is a real extension of the dramatic content of the _Prophetae_ in the prefixing to it of a treatment of so momentous a subject as the Fall[247]. For with the addition of the Fall to the already dramatized Redemption, the framework of a structural