After REED, every history of early English theater will have to be re-written. Between 1400 and 1650, virtually every town in Great Britain, and notably southern communities, had religious and folk festival theater of some kind. The same is true for continental Europe and Germany. Wherever archival records from this period survive, you will, if you care to look, find references to theater. Between 1400 and 1650, theater was a church and civic mass medium of extraordinary importance.
Movies play a similar role in our society.
We only realized this when we started looking at unpublished archival sources. Dialects of German were then spoken as far east as Riga, as far south as northern Italy, and as far west as the Dutch towns of Arnhem and Deventer. The performances I am reconstructing were part of Carnival theater that also involved street dancing, running around in masks, and an early form of home invasion called mumming. But as in Great Britain, performance records tell an entirely different story. I have found about 700 of them so far.