Discursive Competition in the Towneley Crucifixion

Abstract

1 All quotations from the Towneley Crucifixion are from Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, 2 vols., Early English Text Society, s.s. 13 and 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 287-308. This and subsequent citations will be noted par enthetically within the text by stanza and line. manuscript, San Marino, CA, Hunting ton Library MS HM 1, recently has been dated to the mid-sixteenth century (Barbara D. Palmer, Recycling 'The Wakefield Cycle': Records, Research Opportunities in Renais sance Drama 41 [2002]: 88). MS most likely did not have any connection to actual per formance, and probably was copied from several exemplars (Stevens and Cawley, eds., Towneley Plays, xv and xxiv-xxv). 2 For the planctus's roots in both the Eastern and Western traditions, see Rosemary Woolf, English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 246 48; and Woolf, English Mystery Plays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 264-65. For further discussion linking the planctus with the Byzantine Marian lament, see George R. Keiser, The Middle English Planctus Mariae and the Rhetoric of Pathos, in Popular Literature of Medieval England, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan (Knoxville: Uni versity of Tennessee Press, 1985), 169. For a discussion of the relationship between the non-dramatic English planctus and the miracle plays, see George C. Taylor, The English 'Planctus Mariae,' Modern Philology 4 (1907): 605-37. discursive similarities and devotional motifs common between English medieval drama and the English religious lyrics of the late Middle Ages are far too numerous to be listed here, but see Taylor's The Relation of the English Corpus Christi Play to the Middle English Religious Modern Philology 5 (1907): 1-38; and Woolf's English Religious Lyric, passim, and English Mystery Plays, passim. 3 Scholars have long challenged the idea that the Towneley plays constitute a uniform cycle compiled by a single author/reviser. There is not the space here to detail the some times contentious debate concerning the authorship and provenance of the plays, but for an account of the major arguments, see Palmer, Recycling 'The Wakefield Cycle,'