Towneley Cycle Research Articles

Manuscript as Sacred Object: Robert Hegge’s N-Town Plays

Collectors of medieval religious drama manuscripts routinely bequeathed their names to the play texts they preserved; the titles of the Towneley cycle, the Digby plays, and the Macro plays attest to the importance of prominent bookish intermediaries in saving medieval drama from annihilation by reformers’ zeal and from neglect and time. These same collectors also inscribed new cultural histories on these manuscripts, which could make them material sites for articulating ideological investment, could even charge them with the numinous power of sacred relic connecting present to past. This essay focuses on the afterlife of the East Anglian N-Town plays, exploring the ways that the Cotton Vespasian D.8 manuscript continued to be “performed” (in an extended sense of that word) in ideologies of recusancy and antiquarian possession in the life of its little-known early modern collector, Robert Hegge.

<i>The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre Claire Sponsler The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher. 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xxii + 400; 38 illustrations. $90 (cloth); $29.99 (paper). A glance at the Index to the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatrehighlights some of the changes that have taken place in the field of early English drama studies since 1994, the year in which the original edition was published. Newly added entries covering such topics as animals in plays, audience, Boy Bishop, church ales, Clerkenwell, Lord of Misrule, suppression and decay of plays, transvestism, traveling companies, and Yiimimimangaliso—The Mysteries, chart a broadened field that includes more paratheatrical material, a wider geographic scope, and new areas of scholarly inquiry. These changes extend to other parts of the volume as well. The revised edition still contains twelve chapters, but there is an additional editor (Alan Fletcher, joining Richard Beadle), three new authors, one topic dropped and another added, several changed titles that reflect currently preferred terminology in the field, and updated and expanded discussions and bibliographies. Fresh content is provided for the introduction; a chapter on the Cornish drama has disappeared, replaced by one on "The Cultural Work of Early Drama"; and chapters on "The York Cycle," "The Towneley Cycle," and "Saints' Plays" are now renamed "The York Corpus Christi Play," "The Towneley Pageants," and "Saints and Miracles." The volume also includes a number of new illustrations, especially of modern productions, and a map of East Anglia showing places mentioned in the text. The bibliography and notes to individual chapters have been brought up-to-date, while new subheadings have been added throughout for easier reading. These deletions, additions, and expansions mirror recent work on medieval English theatre. The scholarly activity of the past decade and a half has led to a rethinking of the kinds of performances the extant dramatic texts represent (hence the change from "The Towneley Cycle" to "The Towneley Pageants"), has pushed beyond the well-known scripts of the Biblical plays to embrace texts that today look non-dramatic but may well have been performed, and has discovered performances for which no play-texts survive. At the same time, inquiry has shifted away from the two critical modes that dominated medieval drama studies in the 1990s—archival research and modern reenactments—and toward cultural studies approaches that are attuned to the complex relations linking past and present. Like its predecessor, this revised edition presents itself as a standard guide to [End Page 234]the field of English drama from the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Its chapters cover the major kinds of plays in the period—especially Biblical cycles and pageants, moralities, and saints' plays—while providing an introduction to key interpretive issues, extensive discussion of modern performances or medieval plays, and a guide to criticism. As we might expect from a volume that envisions itself as an authoritative handbook of the field, there is little that's cutting edge in this revised edition, but the material has been updated and accurately reflects current scholarship. Thus the wealth of new material that has been discovered about early theatrical conditions is for the most part adequately represented in this revised volume. The reediting of many texts of early English plays, work that has yielded important bibliographic information about the textual corpus, is frequently noted. Also making an appearance are results from the archival evidence that continues to be published (particularly under the auspices of the Records of Early English Drama [REED] project) and interpreted, as well as findings about original performance occasions that have been gleaned from modern revivals of early plays. To accommodate this fresh material, individual chapters from the first edition have been revised, some more extensively than others. These include "The Theatricality of Medieval English Plays" (Meg Twycross), "The York Corpus Christi Play" (Richard Beadle), "The Chester Cycle" (David Mills), "The Towneley Pageants" (Peter Meredith), "The N-Town Plays" (Alan Fletcher), "The Non-Cycle Plays and the East Anglian Tradition" (John Coldewey), "Morality Plays" (Pamela King), "Saints and Miracles" (Darryll Grantley), and "A Guide to Criticism...

Remembering Doomsday: memoria in late medieval English drama and iconography*

Much critical attention has been devoted in recent years to the analysis of the medieval artes memorativae. The concern with the arts of memory, as exemplified by the recently collected translation...

The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity. Peter Happé

<i>The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity</i>. Peter Happé

Peter Happé, The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity.

AMONG the greatest of Middle English texts, and one that still resonates with a twenty-first-century audience, the Second Shepherd's Play stands unique, with its easy and attractive mixture of the comic and the sacred, sin and pretentiousness, resolution and adoration. The play appears, perhaps as a later addition, in one of the best known medieval English drama cycles—or perhaps collections of plays, or perhaps both—one that has long engaged critics and scholars, their discussions often turning around a concern for unity, itself a central theme in Peter Happé's considered, careful, and often insightful study. The Towneley Cycle is organized into four parts, the first treating ‘The Text’, including the manuscript and author of the plays, and containing remarks on their relationship to the York cycle; a particularly interesting second section ‘Performing the Towneley Cycle’, that treats issues of dramaturgy, modern revivals, and such special features as music, comedy, spectacle, groups of characters, and dialogue; a third section, ‘Ideologies and Interpretative Strategies’, a somewhat amorphous section involving issues as varied as gender, religion, popular culture, social context, and (broadly speaking) the interrelationship between good and evil (the remarks about Mak and popular culture in the Second Shepherd's Play are particularly acute); and finally an engaging fourth section ‘Negotiating the Text’, which concerns itself with the implications of what has been said already, returning inter alia to the York cycle, and alluding to religious, dramaturgical, structural, and other considerations, ending with a perhaps too brief a section in which some of Happé's own thinking and conclusions are expeditiously revealed.

PETER HAPPE. The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity.

‘There is nothing scholars love more than a giant, contradictory codex in which nothing adds up’—Happé prefaces his volume with Alfred Hickling's comment on a new edition of Sherlock Holmes. The contradictions of the Towneley manuscript, and of the collection of mystery plays which it preserves, present scholarly difficulties: date, provenance, circumstances of performance all continue undeterminable. A number of Towneley plays are borrowed from the York Cycle, but whereas York's plays are preserved in a manuscript of the 1460s or 70s, the Towneley manuscript was copied possibly as late as the reign of Mary I. The York pageants are known to have been performed as a unified cycle in the form in which they survive; by contrast, while it is certain that there was a Corpus Christi sequence of plays performed at Wakefield in the sixteenth century, it is not certain that the Towneley manuscript preserves that same Wakefield cycle. There is, furthermore, no certain evidence that the Towneley plays were ever performed together, or indeed at all, and the elegant Towneley manuscript looks more like a book for private reading than a practical manuscript compiled for performers’ use. The consistency of Towneley's one scribal hand is complemented by the consistent Yorkshire dialect of the plays, but the varied styles and verse forms of the plays have led scholars to trace multiple authors; Gayley's 1903 claim that certain plays, egregious because of their thirteen-line stanzas and their literary quality, may be picked out and grouped together as the work of the ‘Wakefield Master’, continues to shape criticism of the Towneley plays. More recent scholarship has indicated possible points of origin for different parts of the cycle in Beverly, Doncaster, and Whalley Abbey.

The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity

The Towneley Cycle cannot be overlooked in any study of medieval drama. Undergraduate and graduate courses which focus on medieval literature usually include a strand on medieval drama, and the Second Shepherd’s Play usually features prominently. This book therefore is likely to be recommended to students on such courses as a secondary text, and will be bought by most good University libraries. This volume provides a detailed overview of and critical introduction to the Towneley cycle of plays, a 32-play cycle written in c.1500, which begins with the fall of Lucifer and ends with the Last Judgment, and was performed as part of the festival of Corpus Christi in Wakefield. Peter Happe examines the cycle's textual and manuscript history, and discusses issues of language and style, the structure of the cycle, and its possible sources and analogues. In the second half of the book, he addresses the historical and religious context of the cycle and evidence of its performance history, and offers an analysis of the work of the Wakefield Master.

The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity by Peter Happé

MLR, I03.3, 2oo8 823 a new socio-political significance in an open society. People were sick of ideology [. . .]' (p. i89) and the form 'would never again be permitted [. . .] to kowtow to respectability' (p. I9I). But if the defence of reputation is no longer an issue, why do publishers, editors, and film-makers employ lawyers?What about ghost-written autobiography? And if 'ideology' was dead, how do we explain theCold War? The new subjectivism ofmodernism and postmodernism isapparently embraced yetwith no acknowledgement of the epistemological collapse, the sense ofmultiple selves, essential to the deconstruction ofVictorian realism. Hamilton's book is, in effect,a defence of realism, his chapter on thedeath of theauthor a lightweight snook-cocking at Barthes and Bakhtin asmembers of 'a group of intellectuals' (p. 206) resentful of the power of authors to control their texts. 'Barthes and Derrida', he asserts, 'were exposed and derided' (p. 2I3). Of course theyweren't: and yetHamilton wishes to defend feminism, gay liberation, cultural multiplicity, and the study of ordinary lives, strangely ignoring theways inwhich postmodern notions of the self have enabled such liberal thinking.The biography he admires is 'history without theory' (p. I90). Yet his own history isdeeply ideological. What is lacking here isany serious engage ment with the ethics of biography. Only one side of this ispresented: the rightof free speech. The other, the colonization and prostitution of a lifeforprofit, is largelyneg lected.He cites Janet Malcolm's The Silent Woman (I 994) as 'by farthemost brilliant expose of theworkings ofmodern biography' (p. 276), yet the object of her assault is the object ofHamilton's defence. The moral question she examines-who owns a life?-is effectively answered by him as 'The biographer'. And the big question, 'Where does factend and interpretation begin?' (p. I5), is sidestepped. UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER MARTIN STANNARD The Towneley Cycle: Unity and Diversity. By PETER HAPPE. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2007. xiv+290 pp. ?6o. ISBN 978-o-7083-2048-8. The Towneley plays, one of the four cycles ofmedieval English drama, are linked with Wakefield and have contributions by an unknown 'WakefieldMaster'. His dra mas (which include local shepherds with a firmgrip on reality)have long been praised fordepictions of lifeboth sacred and profane. Some think that if Bruegel had not been a Flemish painter but aYorkshire playwright, his work would have been much like thatof the Wakefield Master. To thewriting of thatunknown genius, as also the rest of the cycle, Peter Happe isan expert guide. During fourdecades he has enlightened readers on themodes and contexts of early English drama, and sowrites with the experience of a lifetime.The result is a carefully structured and disciplined book in fourparts. It begins with the textof the cycle; goes on to performance, and then ideology and interpretation; and closes with a brief account of textual negotiation. The firstsection hence discusses the unique sixteenth-century manuscript, once in thekeeping of theTowneley familyofLancashire, but now inCalifornia. Subjects to the forehere are the adaptation of the cycle from theYork one, theprovenance and authorship of thematerial, and what we can gather of the Wakefield Master himself. The second section, on performance, contains much novel material, since itdiscusses productions not just of the fifteenthcentury but of the twentieth and twenty-first. This is refreshing.Happe assembles a mass of experience from recent actors and directors of theplays.We hear of theirproblems and rewards as regards performance out of doors, waggons vs. a fixed stage, communication with audiences of bystanders, and so on. Happe thus takes his dramas out of the stale air of a library to their rightful place below the skies of an English high street. 824 Reviews The third section engages with questions of gender, religion, popular culture,mu sic, class, and social justice (with the Wakefield Master's known eye for theunderdog, like amedieval Mayhew), as also theoverarching dimension of theplays as a comedy human and divine. This includes (p. 226) the special interestof the Wakefield Master (forwhom heaven and hell were not vague concepts but present realities) in human evil. The final section rounds things up onmatters of interpretation and reception. This is a clear, sober, and absorbing study,quietly original and full of good...

The Wakefield Master's Dramatic Art: A Drama of Spiritual Understanding by Liam O. Purdon (review)

104ARTHURIANA and action, seems excessively facile (94-5). Holding the volume together are suggestions that 'the legendary figure of Arthur was remarkably consistent' and that there is a single Arthurian tradition (1). Yet only without complication can the diverse span of literary Arthurs treated in this volume be considered 'remarkably consistent.' Essential to this book's force is its broad, comparative approach to material much more frequently treated in isolation, its introduction to and elucidation ofa cross-cultural and cross-generic exchange on the character and nature of literary insular kingship. Yet perhaps misleading to a student audience is the underlying assumption ofa steady, regular, 'local' British folklore version ofArthur— the 'intrinsically comic character,' the humorous, 'slow-witted' yet 'essentially goodnatured ' giant ('comparable with Obélix in the Astérix cartoons')—that defies the remarkably inconsistent figure ofearly Welsh and Latin written tradition (122-3). KRISTEN LEE OVER Northeastern Illinois University LiAM 0. purdon, The Wakefield Master's Dramatic Art: A Drama ofSpiritual Understanding. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Pp. xii, 321. isbn: 0-8130—2603-2. $55. Whether we teach it in a survey ofMedieval literature or English drama, the [Secunda] Pagina Pastorum, or Second Shepherds'Play, is a marvelous piece ofdrama. Its vivid language, characterization, and plot make it a favorite of students and helps them to see the possibilities of Medieval dramatization. If we are using an anthology of early British literature, however, this is likely to be the only play we read by the Wakefield Master, which, as Liam Purdon points out, is a shame. His goal here is 'to place the Wakefield Master in the correct literary pantheon—that is, among the great dramatic geniuses leading up to Marlowe, Jonson, and Shakespeare...' (xi). He further adds that he wants to demonstrate 'the Master's uniqueness, which makes this playwright an artistic rival, not of Shakespeare, but of his medieval nearcontemporary Geoffrey Chaucer' (252). The book thus offers six chapters, each exploring a contribution of the Master to theTowneley collection ofplays written some time in the second halfofthe fifteenth century. As part ofthe Corpus Christi pageants, these plays comprise nearly half of the Towneley cycle, taking as their subjects familiar biblical stories: Cain and Abel, Noah and the ark, the birth of Christ and adoration of the Magi (the modusproferandi of the shepherds), Herod, and Christ's buffeting on the cross. In addition, Purdon considers two Passion Group revisions concerning Pilate and Tutivillus. What Purdon wants to argue in his readings of these dramas is spirituality's centraliry to the technological mastery of nature's temporal and spatial dimensions, to theorientation ofthe mind itselfthat both speculativelyand empirically engages nature and artifice in the world about it, and even to the understanding and proper use, as opposed to abuse, of any practical art or techne. As the Master invites Corpus Christi audiences to recognize the expression or denial oftheir own spirituality in and through dramatized moments ofbiblical history anachronistically modified by the things and kinesis of everyday late-medieval life, we and they are afforded REVIEWS105 the singular opporrunity to observe—and, to a limited extent, participate in—what might be called an iconic material anthropology of spirituality, (ix) In each play, we are asked to see the effort by the Master to insert local practice and its attendant technologies into the biblical story being narrated. The placing on stage ofa heavy, team-drawn plow, a technological innovation enabling communal farming through its being shared and operated by a number ofpeople, is meant in the Mactatio Abel to draw attention to Cain's impenitence and sinfulness as related directly to his poor stewardship, misuse of family relations, and so on. In other words, Cain's symptoms, demonstrated to an audience with a sophisticated understanding of proper communal farming practice, prefigure and bear some relation to his fratricide. Purdon's point here is that there is a direct allegorical relationship between the way in which local practice is performed—Cain's bad plowmanship and thusbad fellowship/stewardship—and the individual's relationship with God. Misunderstanding and misuse of nature, including technological innovation, is sinful, and such a correction or reminder is, for Purdon, the Master's purpose...

:The Anatomy of Tudor Literature: Proceedings of the First International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (1998)

Introduction - Tudor literature, drab or tarnished? Part 1 Earlier Tudor literature: subversion in The Towneley Cycle - strategies for evil sceptical historiography - Thomas More's History of Richard III To seek the place where I myself had lost - acts of memory in the poetry of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey William Turner's religious polemic as a polyvalent cultural intervention As a shadow to a - heresy, treason and the law in the 16th century the earliest Tudor witch in print - the examination of John Walsh. Part 2 Elizabethan poetry and prose: revenge of the angel Gabriel - Harvey's A Nobleman's Suit to a Country Maid late Tudor narrative voice(s) - Philip Sidney and Barnaby rich remapping Elizabethan court poetry Philip's Phoenix? - Mary Sidney Herbert and the identity of author veiling Medusa - Arthur's shield in The Fairy Queen fashioning a Tudor body - civility and state-formation in The Fairy Queen and A View of the Present State of Ireland. Part 3 Shakespeare and the drama: the British myth in Tudor drama of clothing and coinage Shakespeare's Henry V - Tudor or Jacobean? the role of body images in the Tudor myth and its subversion in Shakespeare's history plays since forged invention former time defaced - representing Tudor history in the 1590s.

The Towneley and Chester Plays of the Shepherds: The Dynamic Interweaving of Power, Conflict, and Destiny

The Towneley and Chester Plays of the Shepherds:The Dynamic Interweaving of Power, Conflict, and Destiny Norma Kroll The two Wakefield Shepherds' plays in the Towneley cycle and the Shepherds' play in the Chester cycle offer far more complex and subtle representations of human nature, power, and destiny than scholars of medieval drama have yet recognized.1 These versions of the rustics' exploits differ notably from each other, but, like the brief York and N-Town equivalents, they all end in scenes of the shepherds' adoration of the infant Jesus. Scholars tend to regard these encounters between the divine and the human as the point of the actions and to treat the characters' antics as typological prefigurations of Christ's birth.2 [End Page 315] While this critical approach highlights the ways that the plays' parodic elements parallel Jesus's incarnation, it locates the Godhead at the center of power and marginalizes the human characters' potency.3 Yet the playwrights expand the brief Gospel accounts into works of drama, not just dramatized spectacles, by giving the shepherds enough power to struggle against each other and against the limiting forces in their worlds. These cycle plays do not simply repeat or reinforce theological points of view based on Scripture, scriptural interpretations, or the liturgy; rather, they subordinate such perspectives' emphasis on divine might in the universe to human potency on earth by representing the rustics' deeds as vital contributions to God's plan. To this end, the Wakefield and Chester dramatists transform an episode from Christian history into drama by interposing patterns of destiny between the human and the divine. In general, destiny refers to fated events or inevitable outcomes, whether providential or not; in drama, it signifies the sets of forces operating (however ambiguously) within the characters' natures as well as in their larger social and political contexts. In the cycle plays, as in dramas of other eras, these earthly [End Page 316] forces and the characters who embody and struggle with them have a substantial impact on the course of events. The overlay of patterns of destiny on those of divine Providence became possible in the cycle plays because of earlier shifts in philosophical views of free will, in poetic uses of Christian material, and in the status of the peasant and middle classes. As John Coldeway argues, the "prosperity in countryside and town usually translated into a redistribution of power and wealth from the relatively few to the relatively many."4 This power is reflected in the Towneley and Chester portrayals of shepherds who have enough freedom to make their own imaginative, emotional, or physical choices as well as to struggle with each other and with the forces of destiny shaping their existence.5 The rustics' conflicts also accommodate or advance humans' relationships with God as well as the plays' intersections of earthly and cosmic events.6 Thus the three Towneley and Chester versions of destiny function as the organizing principles of the works, reflected not only in consistent patterns of characterization and action but also in coherent systems of language and imagery. I. The Generic Necessity of Human Power in Drama Before considering the medieval context of the three Shepherds' plays, we might usefully look at the interdependence of destiny and genre in classical Greek drama.7 In the tragedies, destiny is fate, with the [End Page 317] action an inevitable design either imposed on or emerging from particular human natures and satisfying larger social and cosmic purposes. The comedies are shaped by fortune, a series of events occurring by chance and comprising a character's earthly luck. In Greek drama, as in the English cycles, the power or presence of the gods or of other extrahuman forces resonates in the background and intervenes in the actions, and, in some plays, the gods themselves become the main actors. Yet, as in the Iliad where the gods' wishes give way to the scales of destiny, the Greek plays give the operations of fate and fortune power over the major and minor gods as well as over the human characters.8 In Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, for example, the Titan has the power to foreknow what is destined and...

Enacting the Sacrament: Counter-Lollardy in the Towneley Cycle by Lauren Lepow

Enacting the Sacrament: Counter-Lollardy in the Towneley Cycle by Lauren Lepow

Enacting the Sacrament: Counter-Lollardy in the Towneley Cycle by Lauren Lepow

Enacting the Sacrament: Counter-Lollardy in the Towneley Cycle by Lauren Lepow

Majesty and Comedy in the Towneley Iudicium : The Contribution of Property to Spectacle

The Towneley ludicium is incomplete in its extant manuscript, Huntington MS HM 1. The pageant is missing about one hundred lines at its beginning.' Despite this gap in the manuscript, Martial Rose maintains that Iudicium can be effectively produced as it exists: after an angel sounds the trumpet of Doomsday, the souls could gather in their places to begin the pageant, and this would be an appropriate opening for the grand finale of the Towneley Cycle (551).2 Even though Rose suggests a workable production of Iudicium, he, like other critics, overlooks the required properties of the pageant. This inattention to the property requirements of the play is a serious critical oversight, because the surviving text of Iudicium emphasizes its physical objects.3 A thorough understanding of the property requirements for ludicium will enable us to produce this important pageant with more emotional intensity and more symbolic effectiveness than Rose admits.

Ritual in the Toronto Towneley Cycle of Mystery Plays

Ritual in the Toronto Towneley Cycle of Mystery Plays

Formalizing English Farce: Johan Johan and Its French Connection

Although Noah's wife and Mak with his sothren tothe may possibly provide earlier examples of farcical action in the Towneley cycle, Johan Johan, published by William Rastell in 1533, is the first play printed in England to represent farce as dramatic form. Attributed to John Heywood by the bookseller Francis Kirkman in 1671, Johan Johan long been recognized as vastly different in form and style from Heywooďs known plays or those of his contemporaries. Karl Young in 1904 sought to explain these differences by suggesting that Heywood was influenced by French farce in several of his plays and that Johan Johan was drawn from the Farce de Pernet qui au vin.l Later scholars elaborated this argument, and in 1946 Ian Maxwell published what was thought to be the definitive work on this matter: French Farce and John Heywoodl However, with the appearance of Gustave Cohen's Recueil de Farces francaises inedites du XVe siede in 1949,3 William Elton and T. W. Craik almost simultaneously noted that Johan Johan was in fact translation of Farce nouvelle tres bonne et fort joyeuse du Paste (XIX in Cohen's Recueil de Farces). Elton describes Johan Johan as a fairly literal translation, with some minor differences,'^ and Craik, claiming that the translator has taken very few liberties with his real source, says that i( Johan Johan is close (though none the less spirited) translation.5 Both accept the traditional view that the translator is Heywood, though neither supplies evidence on this point. Craik discusses some variations in the French and English versions, most notably the priest's accounts of the three miracles and the endings of the

Did the Wakefield Master Write a Nine-Line Stanza?

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...

'The Riddle Song' and the Shepherds' Gifts in 'Secunda Pastorum': With a Note on the 'Tre callyd Persidis'

In the second Shepherds' Play, or Secunda Pastorum, No. xIII in the Towneley Cycle of Mystery plays, there is in the closing scene a hymn, 'Hayll, comly and clene! Hayll, yong child!', in which the three shepherds offer gifts to the Child in the manger. The first shepherd says, 'Have a bob of cherys'; the second, 'a byrd have I broght I To my barne'; the third, 'I bryng the bot a ball; I Have and play the withall I And go to the tenys'. These three gifts, in kind and in sequence, are similar to the first three gifts in 'The Riddle Song', made popular in modern times by its inclusion in the collection English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians.l The first verse of the song is: I gave my love a cherry that has no stones, I gave my love a chicken that has no bones, I gave my love a ring that has no end, I gave my love a baby that's no cryen.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access The Towneley Cycle. A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM 1.. With an Introduction by A. C. CAWLEY and MARTIN STEVENS. Pp. xx+ ff. 1–132 and frontispiece (Leeds Texts and Monographs. Medieval Drama Facsimiles 2). Leeds: University of Leeds, School of English, 1976. NORMAN DAVIS NORMAN DAVIS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XXIX, Issue 113, February 1978, Pages 83–84, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XXIX.113.83 Published: 01 February 1978

&lt;italic&gt;The Towneley Cycle. A Facsimile of Huntington MS. HM 1&lt;/italic&gt;, with an introduction by A. C. Cawley and M. Stevens. Leeds Texts and Monographs. Medieval Drama Facsimiles, II. Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1976; pp. xix, 263 pp. of facsimile, one colour plate; price not given, paper

&lt;italic&gt;The Towneley Cycle. A Facsimile of Huntington MS. HM 1&lt;/italic&gt;, with an introduction by A. C. Cawley and M. Stevens. Leeds Texts and Monographs. Medieval Drama Facsimiles, II. Leeds: University of Leeds School of English, 1976; pp. xix, 263 pp. of facsimile, one colour plate; price not given, paper