Long before the publication of the York Plays, the composite character of the Towneley was recognized by its first editor, though the reasons he assigned were less happy than his surmise itself [In a footnote, the critic adds: "He says that there are no Yorkshireisms in the Pharao, which we now know to be mainly borrowed from the York cycle, and remarks Cœsar Augustus is plainly by the same hand as Pharao. The heroes in both swear by "Mahowne"—a habit shared by most potentates in miracle plays."], and later writers have not failed to enlarge on the point. It thus becomes interesting to see how much of the cycle we can claim on sure evidence as composed especially for it. It is no bad beginning to be able to say at once, at least one-fourth, and this the fourth which contains the finest and most original work. The evidence for this is irresistible. We find the Wakefield or Woodkirk editor interpolating two broadly humorous scenes, the one containing 297 lines, the other 81, on the impressive York play of the Judgment. These scenes are written in a complex metre, a 9-line stanza riming aaaa bcccb, with central rimes in the first four lines (I should prefer to write it aaaa bbbb cdddc), and we find this same metre used with admirable regularity throughout five long plays, viz.—

—or, including the two passages in the Judicium, in no less than 3155 lines, occupying in this edition almost exactly 100 pages out of 396. If any one will read these plays together, I think he cannot fail to feel that they are all the work of the same writer, and that this writer deserves to be ranked—if only we knew his name!—at least as high as Langland, and as an exponent of a rather boisterous kind of humour had no equal in his own day. We may also be sure that the two other plays, Flagellacio (No. XXII.) and Processus Talentorum (No. XXIV.), contain about the same proportion of his work as does the Judicium. They are closely akin to the Coliphizacio, and contain the one 24, the other 8 of his favourite stanzas.

For one other play which it is very tempting to assign to the same hand, the Mactacio Abel (No. II.), we lack the evidence of identity of metre; in fact, the frequent changes from one metrical form to another would make us suspect that we had here an instance of editing, if it were not quite impossible to isolate from the present text any underlying original. But the extraordinary boldness of the play, and the character of its humour, make it difficult to dissociate it from the work of the author of the Shepherds' Plays, and I cannot doubt that this also, at least in part, must be added to his credit.

When the work of this man of real genius has been eliminated, the search for another Wakefield, or Woodkirk, author becomes distinctly less interesting….

As to the two fragments [Isaac and Jacob] the late Professor Ten-Brink wrote [in History of English Literature]—

About a generation—but hardly much more—separates this oldest extant English drams [i.e. the Harrowing of Hell, 'composed shortly after the middle of the thirteenth century'] from the next. The play of Jacob and Esau, as we take the liberty of calling it, appears to have been composed not far from the mouth of the Humber, and probably to the north of the dialect line. The influence of the East Midlands is seen in the choice of subject, which was not popular on the earlier stage elsewhere, and the manner of treatment also reminds us of the districts and the century which produced the poems of Genesis and Exodus.

In Jacob and Esau the dramatic art is still of a low standard; the situations are not made much use of; the characteristics show little depth or originality. The poet is full of reverence for his subject, and dramatizes faithfully what seems to him its most important traits, without putting to it much of his own originality, etc.

In his Appendix, Prof. Ten-Brink supported this view of the play with the following note—

This play has been handed down in the Towneley Collection: unfortunately it is mutilated at the beginning, and also divided into two parts: Isaac and Jacob. However, it originally formed, and, in fact, still forms, one drama, which was produced independently without regard to any cycle of mysteries, and indeed earlier than most of the others, probably than all the other parts of the cycle in which it was subsequently incorporated. All this can easily be proved by means now at the disposal of philology, but this is not the place for entering into the subject. Less certain is the local origin of the piece. The assumption that few of the rhyming words have been altered in their transmission could, for instance, allow of the supposition that the drama might have been produced in the north of the East-Midland territory, rather than in the southern districts of Northumbria, a supposition which would coincide very well with many other peculiarities of the work.

I have quoted these passages from Prof. Ten-Brink in full, because the opinion of the writer who has produced the only really good history of our early literature, is a thousand times more important than my own. But my difficulties in accepting his theory in its entirety are both numerous and great. The Harrowing of Hell itself seems to me—as it has seemed to my betters before me—rather a dramatic poem than a Miracle Play properly so called, and I cannot conceive on what occasion, or by whom, an isolated play on Jacob and Esau could come to be acted in the vernacular. In a cycle, the presence of a play on Abraham might easily suggest a continuation dealing with his immediate descendants, and its simpler and more archaic form might be partly accounted for by the nature of its subject. I should prefer, also, to attribute differences of dialect to the removal from one district to another of a play-writing monk, rather than to the acceptance in one district of a play which had been composed for another many years before. It is obvious, however, that these two fragments do belong to a period, whether prae-cyclic or cyclic, at which the narrative and didactic interest of the representation was uppermost, and before the constantly increasing importation of external attractions had produced a distaste for the simpler and more exclusively religious form of drama. We know from Chaucer's allusions, as well as from the evidence of the York plays, that by the last quarter of the fourteenth century Noah and his quarrelsome wife and the ranting Herods and Pilates were already stock characters, and we may thus well believe that the cycle 'of matter from the beginning of the world' in its simplest form, must have been in existence during the first half of that century. The fact that this play has only come to us in fragments, is probably good evidence that it was considered antiquated at the time our manuscript was written, and that only a few speeches from it were used.

I must confess, however, that I cannot find anything either in the style or the language of these fragments which need compel us to separate them from the couplets in the play of the Creation and the Annunciation; and I incline strongly to believe that in these plays, and the others which I have mentioned as written wholly or partly in the aa⁴b³cc⁴b³ stanza, we possess part of an original didactic cycle, of much the same tone as the Chester Plays, on to which other plays, mostly written in a more popular style, have been tacked from time to time. In any case I do not think it can be doubted that the four plays, VII., IX., X., and XI., are the work of the same writer, and the rest seem to me to go with them.

The plays of the Magi (XIV.) and of the Flight into Egypt (XV.) are marked off from this group by their much greater use of alliteration, and seem to me—though my opinion on questions of dialect is worth very little—to have been written by an author of some-what different speech. The Abraham and John the Baptist again are in a totally different metre, and may belong to the period when the York plays were being incorporated into the cycle. As regards these York plays, …it is worth noting that the predominant metre of the Conspiracio (XX^a.) is the same as that of three out of the five plays connected with York (the Pharaoh, Doctor, and Extraccio Animarum), may possibly be based on a lost alternative to the extant York play on this subject. A similar guess may be

hazarded as to the play of the Peregrini (XXVII.), the metre of which is the same as that of the Resurrectio (XXVI., York XXXVIII.), while the obvious corruptions and interpolations of the text may well lead us to doubt its being indigenous. The fragment of the Suspencio Iude, printed at the end of the cycle, but which would naturally come immediately before the Resurrectio, is in the same metre, and subject to the same hypothesis.

As regards the work of the one real genius of the Towneley cycle, the author of the two plays of the Shepherds, and of the others written in the same metre, the converse of the arguments of which we admitted the force as regards the Isaac and the Jacob, will naturally lead us to assign to them as late a date as possible.

As noted…, the allusion in the Judicium to the head-gear which could make a woman look 'horned like a cow,' enables us to be sure that this play-wright was a younger contemporary of Chaucer. We must not, indeed, like the cataloguer of the auction-room, argue

that because Stow writes that in the days of Anne of Bohemia 'noble women used high attire on their heads, piked like hornes,' therefore these plays may be assigned approximately to the date of her arrival in England. I imagine that in those days as in these the fashions in the Yorkshire countryside were apt to be a little behind those of London; the piked head-gear is found in manuscripts as late as about 1420…, and the other allusions of these plays, e.g., the reference to tennis, the frequent and rather learned talk about music, and the general talk of Shepherds and Devils about the state of the country—all agree very well with the early years of the fifteenth century. In a writer so full of allusions, the absence of any reference to fighting tends, I think, to show that the plays were not written during the war with France, and thus everything seems to point to the reign of Henry IV as the most likely date of their composition. The date of our text is probably about half a century later, but the example of the York Plays shows us that in its own habitat the text of a play could be preserved in tolerable purity for a longer period than this. In the direction of popular treatment it was impossible for any editor, however much disposed towards tinkering, to think he could improve on the play-wright of the 9-line stanzas, while it is reasonable to presume that the hold of these plays on the Yorkshire audience was sufficiently strong to resist the intrusion of didactics.

As regards the only plays not mentioned…, the Capcio (XX^b.), Processus Talentorum (XXIV.), Ascension (XXIX^b.) and Lazarus, there has been so much editing and interpolating, and the consequent mixture of metres is so great, that it is difficult to arrive at any clear conclusion about them. But, subject to such corrections as the survey of the dialect now being undertaken by Dr. Matthews may suggest, I think we may fairly regard this Towneley cycle as built up in at least three distinct stages. In the first of these we find the simple religious tone which we naturally assign to the beginning of the cyclical religious drama, the majority of them being written in one of the favourite metres of the fourteenth-century romances which were already going out of fashion in Chaucer's day. In the second stage we have the introduction by some playwright, who brought the knowledge of them from elsewhere, of at least five—possibly seven or eight—of the plays which were acted at York, and the composition of some others in the same style. In the third stage a writer of genuine dramatic power, whose humour was unchecked by any respect for conventionality, wrote, especially for this cycle, the plays in the 9-line stanza which form its backbone, and added here and there to others. Taken together, the three stages probably cover something like half a century, ending about 1410, though subsequent editors may have tinkered here and there, as editors will, and much allowance must be made for continual corruption by the actors.

It may be as well to note here that whatever weight we may be disposed to attach to the tradition that the cycle belonged to the Woodkirk monks and was acted at Woodkirk Fair, it is impossible to believe that the plays noted in the MS as connected with Wakefield form in any way a group by themselves. The Barkers' play of the Creation, however much edited, belongs in its origin to our first stage; the Pharoh, played by the Wakefield Litsters, but based on York XI., to our second, to which also I should assign the Peregrini played by the Fishers, written in the metre of the York Resurrectio. Lastly, the Noah, against which Wakefield is written, is in the 9-line stanza of the Shepherds' Plays, and the Glovers' play of Abel, whether re-written by the same author or not, is, in its present form, certainly late work. With the exception of the Fishers, we might say, without much exaggeration, that all the three crafts named, Dyers, Tanners, and Glovers, had some connection with the sheep, their hides and wool, which were probably the chief commodities sold at the Woodkirk fair, and so might have taken a special interest in any pageant likely to bring customers to it. But we are bound to remember that the connection with Woodkirk is a mere tradition, and that it is quite possible that the whole cycle belongs to Wakefield, which is the only place with which it is authoritatively connected.

To bring literary criticism to bear on a cycle built up, even approximately, in the manner which I have suggested, is no easy task. The plays were not written for our reading, but for the edification and amusement of the uncritical audience of their own day; and we can certainly say of them that, whatever effect the play-wright aimed at, he almost always attained. Of the simply devotional plays the Annunciation seems to me the finest. The whole of this play, indeed, is full of tenderness; and there are touches in it in which Rossetti, if he knew it, must have delighted. The reconciliation between Joseph and the Blessed Virgin is delightful; and the passage in which Joseph describes his enforced marriage is really poetically written. One verse is especially quotable:

If this touch had been entirely of the dramatist's own invention he must, indeed, have been Rossetti's spiritual forbear; but it is needless to say that it comes from the apocryphal gospel of Mary, though he deserves all credit for bringing together two widely separated verses.

The plays which I have put into my second group are on the whole very dull. The dramatist of the Abraham could not fail to attain to some pathos in the treatment of the scene between Isaac and his father; but though he avoids the mistake of the York playwright who represented Isaac as a man of thirty, his handling of the scene is distinctly inferior to that of the Brome Play and the Chester cycle. The general characteristic, indeed, of the group is, that the playwright plods perseveringly through his subject, but never rises above the level of the honest journeyman.

Between the dull work and the abounding humour and constant allusiveness of the author of the plays in the 9-line stanza, the distance can only be measured by the two words respectability and genius. It is all the more pleasant to use the first to denote the dull level from which he keeps aloof, in that I have a strong suspicion that during his life the author of our 9-line stanza plays may have been censured for the lack of this very quality. His sympathy with poor folk, and his dislike of the "gentlery men" who oppressed them, seem something more than conventional; and his satire is sometimes as grim as it is free. From his frequent allusions to music, his scraps of Latin and allusions to Latin authors, his dislike of Lollards, and the daring of some of his phrases, which seems to surpass what would have been permitted to a layman, it is probable that he was in orders; and the vision of the Friar Tuck of Peacock's Maid Marian rises up before me as I read his plays. As a dramatist it is difficult to praise him too highly, if we remember the limitations under which he worked, and the feeble efforts of his contemporaries and successors.

The Secunda Pastorum…is really perfect as a work of art; and if in the Prima Pastorum our author was only feelings his way, and in the Noah, Herod, etc., was cramped by the natural limitation of his subject, we have the more reason to regret that a writer of such real power had no other scope for his abilities than that offered by the cyclical miracle play. Even within these limits, however, he had room to display other gifts besides those of dramatic construction and humour. The three speeches of the Shepherds to the little Jesus are exquisite in their rustic tenderness, and even if we may not attribute to him the really terrific picture of corruption in the Lazarus, there is contrast enough between these and the denunciation of the usurers and extortioners in the Judicium. Without his aid, the Towneley cycle would have been interesting, but not more interesting than any of its three competitors. His additions entitle it to be ranked among the great works of our earlier literature.