SOURCE: "The Dramatic Unity of the Secunda Pastorum" in Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown, New York University Press, 1940, pp. 158-66.

Considered as effective drama many of the English miracle plays are, it must be admitted, pretty sorry stuff. Indeed, they could hardly be otherwise. The essential story was dictated by biblical material that did not always offer a dramatic conflict. In transferring this material from Bible to play the anonymous authors were concerned primarily with the task of putting brief episodes into dialogue form and not with that of developing action, conflict, characters. Where they tried to season the playlet with contemporary elements, they found themselves cramped by the necessity of sticking essentially to the biblical episodes. As a result there is often a lack of unity and economy in the plays, and the added bits of contemporary realism are foreign to story and mood. The entire effect, in brief, is agglutinative, as though the authors were torn between a responsibility to reproduce the biblical originals and a desire to entertain the audience by odd items of bickering among characters, monologue acts, and occasional slapstick stuff wedged into the play to provide entertainment but totally unrelated to the main biblical action. So Cain's boy in the Towneley play of The Killing of Abel is an obvious intruder, as is also Iak Garcio of the first shepherds' play of the same cycle. When, therefore, one of the miracle plays appears on analysis to be an exception, it is a pleasure to demonstrate the extent to which it anticipates those dramatic techniques that emerge in the best work of the Tudor dramatists. Not all of the Tudor playwrights, as a matter of fact, in spite of their acquaintance with classical models, have displayed the technical ability of the 'Wakefield Master,' anonymous author of the justly praised Secunda Pastorum of the Towneley cycle.

Like his dramatic descendants, the Tudor playwrights, the Wakefield Master was under the pressure of tradition, but, like the best of them, he succeeded in subduing the tradition to his dramatic needs. What, in a nativity play, was his dramatic problem? He was committed, certainly, to a dramatic representation of the shepherd story from the second chapter of Luke, and this commitment he fulfilled as charmingly as has been done in any nativity play. But the Bible story occupies only a climax of one hundred and seventeen lines of a total of seven hundred and fifty-four, and the rest of the play seems to be, at first sight, an unrelated comic interlude. Actually, as will be shown, it is far from being only this. Another traditional pressure upon the Wakefield playwright was that of using not Palestinian shepherds but English contemporary types. But here too he succeeds in merging these diverse elements so as to secure essential dramatic unity. The Secunda Pastorum, indeed, will stand up under the strictest structural analysis.

The play has a traditional beginning in which each shepherd comes in grumbling. In these "complaints" there is little that is new. Coll, Gyb, and Daw all complain about the weather; Coll, the old shepherd, sighs about hard times and about the oppression of the poor by the rich; Gyb, the second shepherd, is henpecked, and advises the young men in the audience against marrying in haste lest they repent at leisure; Daw, the boy, has in him the seeds of youthful rebellion, and believes that apprentices are exploited by their masters. The grumblings of the three herdsmen are more effusive and detailed than are those of the shepherds in the Prima Pastorum but are not different in kind. In the first nativity play of the cycle the second shepherd complains that "poore men ar in the dyke' (l. 93) and that in the conflict between master and apprentice he wots not 'wheder is gretter, the lad or the master' (ll. 70-71); and the first shepherd, henpecked like Gyb in the second play, quotes with approval the proverb that

A man may not wyfe
And also thryfee,
And all in a yere.
(ll. 97-99)

This differs little from Gyb's advice to young men in the Secunda Pastorum:

These men that ar wed / haue not all thare wyll;
When they ar full hard sted, / thay sygh full styll;
(ll. 73-74)

…..

Bot, yong men, of wowyng, / for God that you boght,
Be well war of wedyng….
(ll. 91-92)

Such plaints, and especially those against social and economic conditions, are probably the expressions in drama of the same verbal rebellion of those who swink which may be found in other contemporary literary forms, such as the debates and the dream allegories. It is just possible, however, that the author of the Secunda Pastorum was aware of the foil which they provided for expressions of joy over the golden age that came with the birth of Jesus. His play, certainly, begins on a note of sorrow but ends on a contrasting note of joy.

It is not as I wold, / for I am al lappyd
In sorow,
(ll. 4-5)

mourns Primus Pastor when he first appears. And the exploited shepherd boy expresses at the end of the play the thought of all three that the nativity of Jesus brings better days,

Lord, well were me / for ones and for ay,
Myght I knele on my kne / som word for to say
To that chylde.
(ll. 685-687)

Such a formula has the flavor of the typical Elizabethan comedy—sad, unstable beginning and happy ending.

But the dramatic unity of the play is determined by elements even more marked. Of these the most striking appears in the skill with which the author has bound together in a single theme episodes that seem superficially to be unrelated. He does not show, of course, all of Shakespeare's genius in using the dream motif as the flux for diverse elements in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but he possessed very evidently some sense of the dramatic value of a single theme to give unity to a play. In the Secunda Pastorum his unifying theme is, of course, that of the birth of a child. When the play is so considered, it becomes at once apparent that the Mak-Gyll episode is no unrelated part but is very definitely connected in theme with the conventional nativity scene that follows it. Indeed, Mak's special complaint, upon his first appearance, is that he is like the old woman in the shoe:

Now wold God I were in heuen, / for there wepe no barnes
So styll.
(ll. 193-194)

Moreover, his conversation with the shepherds in his first encounter with them contains frequent allusions to his wife's unhappy and inconvenient power of reproduction, which keeps him poor in body and in pocket:

The mind of Gyll, too, runs in the same direction. Indeed, in her plot for hiding the stolen sheep she makes capital of her known reputation for reproduction:

Vxor. A good bowrde haue I spied, / syn thou can none;
Here shall we hym hyde / to thay be gone,—
In my credyll abyde,— / lett me alone,
And I shall lyg besyde / in chyldbed, and grone.
(ll. 332-335)

Later the entire stage business of the pseudonativity shows on the part of both Mak and Gyll considerable practice in playing childbed and nursing roles. After Mak first enters, in short, the theme of a childbirth dominates the play to the very conclusion.

The unity of the play that arises out of the nativity theme is enhanced still further by a most remarkable foreshadowing of that contrast of burlesque and serious which is so frequent a device in Elizabethan comedies. It is not to be supposed, of course, that the Wakefield Master knew anything about that juxtaposition of masque and antimasque which created such unity and contrast in the English comedies of two centuries later. It would seem certain, however, that he would have understood and appreciated this device fully, for in the Mak interlude and the conventional nativity scene which follows, the contrast is as well marked as in many of the best of the Elizabethan comedies. In the Mak episode, in fact, it is not the sheep-stealing but the sheep-hiding details which are the more essential to the play, for in these latter appears a perfect burlesque of the charming Christ-child scene that concludes the play. Between the burlesque and the religious episodes the three shepherds provide the character links. Twice a birth is announced to them, and twice they go seeking—once to unearth a fraud, and a second time to worship the newborn Lord. The comparative details are so obvious, once the key is apparent, that pointing them out should hardly be necessary. However, such a comparison reveals the amazing extent to which the Wakefield Master kept in mind throughout his composition of the play the dual episodes of the burlesque and the conventional nativity.

It has been said already that Mak's complaint of his wife's perennial fertility prepares the minds of the three shepherds for his more specific announcement of her latest gift to him. This preparation is not entirely unlike their foreknowledge of the coming of the Christ child:

But no prophets foretell the coming of Mak's heir, and no angel announces his arrival. Mak had planned with his rascally wife to say that she

…was lyght
Of a knaue childe this nyght
(ll. 337-338),

and he tell the shepherds that the news has come to him in a dream—or rather in a nightmare, for it makes him quite unhappy—:

In both the burlesque and the conventional nativity scenes the news of the child's birth comes to the shepherds just after they have slept. In this respect the two scenes are identical; but the arrival of the sheep-baby is absurdly reported by his putative father, whereas the announcement in the Bethlehem scene is in the simple biblical tradition:

Angelus cantat 'Gloria in exelsis'; postea dicat:
Angelus. Ryse, hyrd-men heynd! / for now is he borne
That shall take fro the feynd / that Adam had lorne:
(ll. 638-639)

In the two sleep episodes, incidentally, one is irresistibly reminded of the burlesque dream of Bottom and the romantic ones of the lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and of the similarly contrasting sleep scenes in Lyly's Endymion. The sleeping shepherds of Bethlehem the Wakefield Master did not have to invent; his cleverness is apparent in his creation for his Yorkshire trio of a burlesque parallel nap.

The succeeding parallel detail comes with the journeying from the plain where the herdsmen slept to the birthplace. The Yorkshire shepherds are not, to be sure, drawn to Mak's hut by his announcement that his wife has given birth to a man-child, although on their arrival they are at once plunged into a nativity situation. It is to be supposed that the journey to the manager of Jesus at the end of the play is a serious duplication of the burlesque journey to the hut of Mak. Says Daw, after the loss of the sheep has been discovered, and Mak has been suspected of having stolen it:

Go we theder, I rede, / and ryn on oure feete.
Shall I neuer ete brede / the sothe to I wytt.
(ll. 467-468)

And his master, after the angel's announcement, begs for similar haste:

To Bedlem he bad / that we shuld gang;
I am full fard / that we tary to lang.
(ll. 665-666)

Thus twice the three shepherds make a journey to the crib of a newly-born child, probably measuring the distance to their goal in both instances by parading around the pageant-wagon.

There is no indication in the Towneley manuscript that the Bethlehem shepherds were drawn to the stable where the Christchild lay by a song of the Virgin to her child. But since songs were often sung at a production but not subsequently written in the manuscripts, there is, on the other hand, no certainty that, as the herdsmen approached the holy site, the boy who played Mary did not sing one of the lullabies of Our Lady of the kind that Carleton Brown has put into his volumes of medieval religious lyrics. The Wakefield Master was evidently a trained musician, for not only in the Secunda Pastorum but in the Prima Pastorum as well (ll. 656-659 and 413-414, respectively), he has put into the mouths of the shepherds technical comments on the singing of the angels. It is doubtful if he would have overlooked an opportunity to include a sacred lullaby, especially since it would have provided an excellent foil for Mak's fearful cradle song in the sheep-hiding scene. For in their Yorkshire phase, as it may be called, the music-loving shepherds are almost repelled from Mak's hut by a lullaby that no longer exists, unfortunately, but that was very evidently a hideous and unmelodious burlesque. The gloss of the Early English Text Society edition of the play alludes to this effusion as a 'noise,' but it was without doubt a song by Mak with his wife groaning a stiff burden from her childbed. For so they had planned it:

Vxor. Harken ay when thay call; / thay will com onone.
Com and make redy all / and syng by thyn oone;
Syng lullay thou shall, / for I must grone
And cry outt by the wall / on Mary and Iohn, ffor sore.
(ll. 440-444)

But the shepherds are quick to recognize Mak's deficiencies as a singer:

III. Pastor. Will ye here how thay hak? / Oure syre lyst croyne.
I. Pastor. Hard I neuer none crak / so clere out of toyne;
(ll. 476-477)

With so many contrasts in the play it is difficult to think that the author would fail to use this harsh lullaby as a burlesque opposite a sweet song by the Virgin. Incidentally, Gyll's crying out on Mary and John effects an excellent forward link with the conventional nativity.

The Yorkshire shepherds, like the Bethlehem shepherds, find the babe in swaddling clothes (ll. 433, 598-599), but warned away by the 'parents' they hesitate to approach the cradle. The scene in Mak's hut is divided between the comic business of hunting for the stolen sheep and the fencing with Mak and Gyll over

…this chylde
That lygys in this credyll.
(ll. 537-538)

Failing to find their sheep the herdsmen actually leave the hut but return at the suggestion of the aged Coll:

It is the boy Daw's attempt to press 'bot sex pence' into the hand of the 'lytyll day-starne' that leads to the discovery of the fraud and the punishment of the rascally Mak. The link with the nativity episode here is, of course, the gift-giving, in the Mak scene burlesque, in the later episode simple and touching. Daw's term of endearment to Mak's swaddled 'infant'—'lytyll day-starne'—is applied, incidentally, by Gyb, the second shepherd, to the Christ-child (1. 727).

One final device employed by the Wakefield Master to give structural unity to the play and also to divide the little drama into definite scenes is the introduction of song. Reference has already been made to the possible contrast of Mak's lullaby and the song of the Virgin, and the biblical original forces the introduction of the 'Gloria in exelsis ' of the Angelus. The three other songs are sung by the shepherds. Of these the second is their attempt to imitate the angel's 'gloria'—a device employed also in the Prima Pastorum (ll. 413 ff.). The first is a three-part song—'tenory,' 'tryble,' and 'meyne' (ll. 182-189)—used to mark the conclusion of the first scene and the coming of Mak. Finally, the play closes with a 'going-out' song by the shepherds, a device exactly similar to that used frequently by the Elizabethan playwrights to mark the ending of a comedy and to clear the stage. The song that the shepherds sang as they left the stable of the Christ-child and brought both burlesque and conventional nativity episodes to an end does not appear in the Towneley manuscript. But Mary's command to the shepherds—'Tell, furth as ye go' (1. 744)—and their own feeling—'To syng ar we bun' (1. 753)—indicate clearly that it was no jolly shepherd song that they sang but one of an angel, a star, three simple shepherds, and a babe in a manger. It may have been not unlike the song which the shepherds of the Coventry Corpus Christi nativity play sang as they left Joseph and Mary and the Christ-child:

And thus 'Explicit pagina Pastorum. '