A four line ceremony performed by monks around a draped altar does not obviously lead to city streets crowded with pageant wagons, guild actors and audiences of thousands, but the theatre historian Karl Young traced exactly that line of growth across his 1933 study The Drama of the Medieval Church, still the standard scholarly account. Once the Quem Quaeritis exchange existed inside the Easter liturgy, it proved impossible to leave alone. Clergy elaborated it into the fuller Visitatio Sepulchri, the Visit to the Tomb, adding more characters and dialogue, and eventually non-biblical figures such as spice merchants selling the women their burial ointments, a comic addition with no scriptural basis at all. The same expansive logic was applied at Christmas too, where Young shows the shepherds' visit to the manger, the Officium Pastorum, directly imitating the Quem Quaeritis pattern of question, recognition and proclamation.
As these ceremonies grew longer and more elaborate, they grew harder to contain inside the liturgy itself, and by the thirteenth century vernacular language, comic character types and non-clerical performers had begun entering what had started as monks' Latin. Plays moved from the choir to the church porch, then to the marketplace, carried increasingly by town guilds rather than religious houses, a transition that by the fourteenth century had produced the full cycle mystery plays staged by craft guilds in cities such as York and Chester, covering the whole of biblical history rather than one Easter morning. The Reformation eventually ended the tradition across Protestant Europe, but the four line exchange at Winchester is where the scholarly record says European religious drama in fact begins.