Did the Wakefield Master Write a Nine-Line Stanza?

Abstract

Did the Wakefield Master Write a Nine-Line Stanza? Martin Stevens Surprisingly, with all the critical attention that has been given to the work of the dramatist commonly known as the Wakefield Master, few have inquired into the basic structural unit of his poetry, the famous so-called nine-line stanza which is the hall­ mark of that poetry and perhaps the only measurable criterion by which his contributions can be identified. The tendency has always been there to assign to him everything in the Towneley cycle that is realistically comic, racy, vital, and dramatically exciting, and thus, for example, the best edition of his work, that by A. C. Cawley entitled the Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1958), includes the entire Mactacio Abel as one of his six plays, even though it contains but one true Wakefield stanza.1 Some years ago, Arnold Williams commented on this tendency: “Either the Master wrote the well-known nine-line stanza, with easily recognizable variations, or he wrote a number of stanzaic forms. If the latter, then we had better abandon altogether the task of fixing his canon on the basis of stanzaic form, for qualities so incapable of objective measurement as tone, style, raciness, vividness, proverbiality can never afford adequate criteria for attribution.”2 I want, in this paper, to reexamine the Williams premise first by inquiring into the form of the so-called nine-line stanza and then to see whether, in fact, “objective measurement” is possible in fixing the Wakefield Master’s canon. In the process, I hope also to examine the Master’s stanza from a critical point of view and to question its relationship to other stanzas in the extant corpus of Middle English literature. I We must recognize from the outset that the Wakefield stanza, as we have it in all available editions, is an editorial 99 100 Comparative Drama interpretation. A quick glance at the scholarly editions of the Wakefield plays shows that all but one, the Surtees edition of 1836 which made no stanzaic divisions of any kind,3 print the stanza of the Wakefield Master (whose name was invented by Charles Mills Gayley4) as a nine-line unit. We owe that nineline stanza to the Early English Text Society edition by George England and Alfred W. Pollard, published in 1897 and still the standard text for the entire Towneley cycle.5 In that edition the two halves of the first four long lines are separated by slanting strokes (but no other marks of punctuation) to high­ light the internal or central rhyme. Later, the edition of the Wakefield Pageants by A. C. Cawley, now the standard text for the plays attributed to the Wakefield Master, omits the slanting strokes and adds standard punctuation where necessary, thus providing greater coherence but minimizing, in visual terms, the rhyme and the endings of the first half-lines in the frons of the stanza. The point is that the Wakefield stanza has been uniformly edited as a nine-line unit. Before we take a closer look at the edited stanza, I need to make some rather general observations about stanzaic poetry. I believe that all stanzas are primarily designed for the eye of the reader. While it is true that stanzas may add regularity to the aural structure of a long poem—surely the closing Alexan­ drine of the Spenserian stanza works that way—it is equally true that good poets as a general rule do not ¿low themselves to be read aloud in a string of equal units, particularly when those units are measured out in invariable rhythms and end rhymes. Even in such a measurable unit as the rhyme royal stanza with its noticeable closure, Chaucer manages frequently to enjamb his stanzas and thus to allow the ear to hear contin­ uities that the visual format of the stanza inherently denies. The same can be said of much of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry. Without the text in front of us we would, I am sure, have trouble recognizing that Romeo and Juliet meet within a sonnet. And we would have that problem even if the actors chose to punctu­ ate...