Re-editing Towneley

Abstract

In 1936, when the Surtees Society published the first modern edition of the contents of Huntington MS HM 1 — still at that point owned by the Towneley family in Lancashire — they entitled the work The Towneley Mysteries. While these plays have been edited several times since then, including twice for the Early English Text Society, they remain mysterious. Still often but erroneously referred to as the Wakefield cycle, this heterogeneous collection contains some of the best and best known examples of early English drama; the beautiful manuscript is also marked by disorder and confusion, both obvious and (as in the case of the Advent sequence) subtle enough to have been overlooked for generations. This article discusses some of the issues facing the modern editor of the Towneley plays, particularly an editor who is interested both in these plays as plays, and in communicating the richness of this material — and the scholarly debates that it has generated — to new student audiences.