The text of the play was lost until the 19th century, when a manuscript was found in a commonplace book dating from around 1470–80 at Brome Manor, Suffolk, England.[2] The manuscript itself has been dated at 1454 at the earliest.[1] This manuscript is now housed at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.[3]
While Joseph Quincy Adams reckoned the Brome Abraham “must be dated as early as the fourteenth century,”[2] most other scholars assign various periods of the fifteenth century for the play's composition.
All of the surviving English mystery cycles (such as the N-Town Plays, Wakefield Mystery Plays, York Mystery Plays, and the first part of the Cornish language Ordinalia, along with another individual fifteenth-century English play, the so-called Northampton Abraham (or Dublin Abrahamso called because the manuscript is kept at Trinity College Library, Dublin).[4]) deal with the story of Abraham and Isaac. However, the Brome Abraham seems to be most closely related to the barbers' play of Abraham in the Chester Mystery Plays. A comparison of the texts reveals around 200 lines of striking similarity, in particular during the debates between Abraham and Isaac that are at the hearts of the plays. A. M. Kinghorn judged the Brome play to be a superior reworking of the Chester pageant, and accordingly dated the play to late in the fifteenth century.[5] However, comparing the two, J. Burke Severs decided that the Chester play was an expansion and reworking of the Brome one.[6]
It is not known whether the play was originally part of a larger cycle of mystery plays or if it stood by itself, as Osborn Waterhouse of the Early English Text Society believed (though he conceded that it was to be supposed “that the stage was the usual pageant, and the mode of performance practically identical with that of the regular cycle plays”).[2]
The play is often considered the best of Middle English Abraham plays, humane in its treatment of infanticide, inventive in its language;[1] Lucy Toulmin Smith, a nineteenth-century editor, found it to be superior to others of the period on the same subject and in the twentieth century George K. Anderson thought the play, its "human qualities" and characterisation, "unusually good",[7] and Gassner thought it "a masterpiece".[8] Adams noted that it was often reprinted due to its being "justly regarded as the best example of pathos in the early religious drama".[2]
