Towneley Plays | Peter Meredith (essay date 1994)
Peter Meredith (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "The Towneley Cycle," in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited by Richard Beadle, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 134-62.
[In the following excerpt, Meredith discusses the general background of the Towneley plays, the style of the Wakefield Master, and the plays as part of a dramatic cycle.]
Almost certainly the most anthologised of all medieval English dramatic pieces is the so-called Second Shepherds' Play, containing the double story of Mak the sheep-stealer and the visit of the shepherds to Bethlehem. Through this public exposure, not only the play but the 'name' of the author also has become familiar—'The Wakefield Master'. Not everyone who knows of the Second Shepherds', however, will automatically connect it with the thirty-two short plays (better called 'pageants') that together make up the Towneley cycle, or realise that it is not so much the...
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