Towneley Plays | Walter E. Meyers (essay date 1969)
Walter E. Meyers (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: An introduction to A Figure Given: Typology in the Wakefield Plays, Duquesne University Press, 1969, pp. 7-20.
[In the following excerpt, Meyers describes his approach toward studying the Wakefield plays and his particular focus on typology in order to demonstrate the plays' unity and sophistication as literary works.]
The traditional view of the Middle English cycle plays has been unenthusiastic: it has claimed that the cycles cannot be judged as works of dramatic art since each cycle as a whole lacks an overall unifying structure, and that the individual plays are formless and hopelessly mixed in style. This is the traditional view, and probably the most common one even today. But a recent movement in criticism, focusing attention on particular plays of the Wakefield Cycle, has demonstrated that some of the plays are well-structured, in fact, intricately woven. This movement began with Homer A....
[The entire page is 5354 words long]
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