SOURCE: "The Wakefield Cycle: The Playwright as Poet," in Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual, and Critical Interpretations, Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 88-180.

…[The] York cycle developed over the years as a corporate enterprise. As civic pageantry it apparently started in improvisational performance, gradually became recorded in a series of texts by the performing guilds, and eventually was compiled by the city fathers into a register, or a permanent, unified text that functioned both as official source and archival record. The whole play, in process and product, was a municipal enterprise of self-examination and self-celebration, and the York cycle as a whole was the first true "city play" in the history of the English drama.

The Wakefield cycle (if that is, indeed, the proper name for the collection of plays that survive in the Towneley volume of mystery plays now held by the Huntington Library MS HM l) presents a very different case. Here we have a cycle that was quite clearly written and compiled for a much smaller community, which through commercial growth had at a certain point in its history become sufficiently prosperous to sponsor a Corpus Christi play. It was consequently built from scratch. The text, if it did not precede the performance, was at least coeval with it. In the Wakefield cycle then, we preserve more nearly a product than the record of a process, and the product we retain seems to have been the work of a single, guiding intelligence from the very beginning. While it has been customary to regard the well-known "Wakefield Master" in the same light as the "York Realist," or whatever name we wish to bestow upon that particular contributor to the York cycle, a strong case can be made for the Wakefield Master to have been the principal compiler and the guiding intelligence of the Wakefield cycle.

My argument is admittedly circumstantial. It is based on a reinterpretation of the Wakefield stanza, and it depends fundamentally on how authorship—that is, the invention and even the disposition and elocution of a narrative—functioned as creative acts in the Middle Ages. If I am right that in the plays of the Towneley manuscript we have a fully evolved text rather than the gradual compilation of a performance (that is to say, a text like that of York for which the expectation of growth was a built-in condition of its very existence), then the so-called Wakefield cycle is a model of mystery cycles quite different from that of York. While this second generation of English cycles was not exactly cut out of whole cloth—it was more nearly a patchwork of many fabrics—it was, from the beginning, the work of a compiler, and to the extent that he worked with a design of his own choice, the cycle is primarily a literary original and not an anthology edited for a reasonably uniform style and conceptual design. I am convinced that the Wakefield Master wrote his Shepherds play twice precisely because he was a poet, who, like Langland, needed to explore alternative possibilities, not because they were already there (in acting versions) but because they were provocative options. Any text that gives such a choice is, by its very nature, literary. It is addressed to a reader (who might, of course, be a theatrical director), and it invites that reader to choose one play over the other, or, at very least, to allow the one to resonate against the other. (The Second Shepherds' Play is entitled simply alia eorundum, "another of the same.") But whatever the choice, the very fact that there are two shepherds' plays creates a redundancy rich in potential reader response. I believe that of the other extant cycles, N-Town is very much like the plays of the Towneley manuscript, while Chester…is a mixture: It is at once a consciously wrought literary product and the consummation of a developing performance. In the four extant cycles, we have then what may well be perceived in overview as three different models of text and performance.

Without, for the time, differentiating between York and Wakefield as "city drama" and "town" or "manorial drama" respectively, I do want to linger for a moment on the contrast between the two collections as early examples of process and product-directed texts. The point I have made about the performance orientation of York against the literary orientation of Wakefield is nowhere better supported than in their two manuscripts. The York manuscript (British Library MS Additional 35290) is unmistakably a register. It has running titles naming the sponsoring guild throughout the volume at the top of each leaf. The purpose of these titles, as Beadle and Meredith have observed in their excellent facsimile volume [Richard Beadle and Peter Meredith, The York Play: A Facsimile of British Library MS Additional 35290, 1983], was to allow "any user of the manuscript…to find his way quickly and easily around a large compilation of short units." The York manuscript is clearly a collection, and it has an official stamp about it. Most important, …it leaves numerous blank pages at the end of pageants, indicating the compiler's intent to leave space for changes or additions. The York manuscript is truly put together as an open-ended compendium that could serve the city as an ongoing, adaptable record of changes in performance. The numerous marginalia, especially those by John Clerke, give indisputable evidence that in fact changes of performance, while not always integrated with the existing text, were carefully noted. They will indicate, for example, "here wantes a pece newly mayd for saynt John Baptiste" (f. 92v) or "this matter is newly mayd & devysed wherof we haue no coppy regystred" (f. 94) or, more generally, "nota quia non concordat / novo addicio facto" (f. 114). The many notes, in fact, make clear that the copy we have of the York plays, while still a register was unable to keep up with the performance changes that took place in the play.

The Towneley manuscript, in contrast, is a finished book. It contains no running titles, and except for one puzzling blank page (f. 20), its text runs continuously from beginning to end. Plays follow in close succession, one upon the other, so that often handsome titles conjoin explicits and incipits on the same page. The ornamentation of the manuscript, moreover, is more lavish than that of any other extant cycle. The handsome strap-work initials are clearly decorative, they are designed for the admiration of readers and viewers, not surely for the eyes of the practical-minded town clerk whose interest in the manuscript is solely to check it against the performance of the plays. I do not mean to suggest that the Towneley manuscript is a luxury volume; it is too uneven and unimpressive for that designation. But it is also not simply a book designed for ordinary record keeping and maintenance. It contains, above all, a continuous text. There is no apparent hesitation in its execution. It was meant to bring us a finite text, one that moved in steady progression from Creation to Doomsday with very little marginal comment and virtually no recognition that it had any connection with an ongoing, annual performance. Interestingly, the marginalia, unlike that of the York manuscript, is chiefly concerned with regulation or official examination of the text. Most of it must come from the period when the mystery cycles were under scrutiny by the archbishop of York, who had jurisdiction over Wakefield. We find several anti-Marian notations, as in the Second Shepherds' play where "lady" is crossed out and "lord" written above in the phrase "oure lady hym saue" (134/553) or the passage in which Joseph describes how the Son was to have descended from the heavens "in a madyn for to light" (183/59) with the remark "no maters ben as sade [said]" cryptically noted in the margin. There are also obvious passages of censorship, such as the stanza describing the seven sacraments in the play of Johannes Baptista crossed out in red (200-201/193-200) and marked "corected and not playd." But nowhere in the entire manuscript do we find the kind of notations about discrepancies of performance and text that John Clerke and other commentators left in the York volume. All this would suggest that the Towneley manuscript was probably not intended to be a register, as is usually surmised, but rather something like a presentation copy of the play for the safekeeping of the lord of the manor or some other eminent person. All signs are that the compiler set out to produce a book of literary value rather than an official municipal register.

Although I am persuaded that the plays of the Towneley manuscript were performed at Wakefield, that conclusion is not universally accepted. It was, in fact, recently challenged by several commentators at a scholarly symposium. The principal reasons for the challenge are apparently the absence of external records that link the plays with Wakefield and the fact that, although the name Wakefield occurs twice in the titles of the manuscript, there is no absolute and unmistakable attribution of the manuscript to the West Riding city….

I have on several occasions referred to the Wakefield cycle as "second generation." That term is, I believe, an accurate representation of the process by which the mystery plays came to the West Riding in the course of the fifteenth century. My argument will be that the Wakefield cycle is, in effect, built upon already existing plays, borrowed from nearby communities, especially the city of York, when economic and demographic conditions in the western county permitted the development of a cycle and its attendant festivities. It is known, of course, that at least five plays in the Wakefield cycle are nearly identical in content and even phrasing with five in the extant York cycle. All the evidence—internal and external—shows that Wakefield borrowed those plays from York, and not vice versa. External to the plays are the records showing that York clearly did support a cycle performance (even if not yet recorded in a text) as early as the latter quarter of the fourteenth century, which was the time of York's greatest prosperity in the Middle Ages. Wakefield in contrast developed, as I shall show, into a commercial hub, especially in the wool trade after the mid-fifteenth century. Before that time, it could not have supported a cycle of mystery plays. As for the internal evidence, it would be difficult to argue that the more polished, expanded versions of at least some of the Wakefield plays were the earlier of the two. Of special significance is the fact that the Wakefield Judgment play, which is one of the five, was expanded significantly and brilliantly by the Wakefield Master in his characteristic style and meter. If the borrowing had been in the other direction, one would have to explain the anomaly of the play's losing its best parts, including the role of Tutivillus, in the process.

The argument that the Wakefield plays are second generation is at odds with most explanations thus far offered about the development of the cycle. It was fashionable, from the very first, to assume that the Wakefield plays grew much in the same manner and time frame as the plays at York. This argument was, of course, simply inferential, since no records survive from a period earlier than mid-sixteenth century to ascertain the existence, much less the growth, of the Wakefield cycle. It was based partly on analogy, built no doubt on the unvoiced assumption that at a certain time in literary history all major towns or cities in England set out to create cycles. Though details of this putative history have been widely challenged, little has been written to refute the notion that cycles in one form or another arose simultaneously as part of the evolution of the vernacular religious drama. Even such an enlightened scholar as Woolf [in The English Mystery Plays, 1972] speaks of the northern dramatists as if they were indistinguishable:

If there were London plays from about the middle of the fourteenth century onwards, the northern cycles could not have escaped their influence. Because the plays have been lost this influence cannot be investigated; but it is reasonable to suppose that the northern dramatists did not slavishly imitate the drama of the metropolis, that they were aware of the complex traditions that lay behind it, and that working within these traditions they designed their own form of cyclical play.

This view assumes an ineluctable historical progress: The basic germ of the drama was swept northward where so many undifferentiated dramatists allowed it to grow into an indigenous form (everywhere much the same) of what is, by inference, the ubiquitous play.

This view of a general growth of the drama has dominated historical scholarship from the beginning of the modern era. It is true that dates have been slightly adjusted to conform more nearly with the facts; we are now more ready to locate the birth of the cycles as we have them in the fifteenth rather than the fourteenth century. But the notion that cycles grew in relatively similar stages over the years to match the growth and interest of the communities that sponsored them is still very much an unwritten premise of our published scholarship. What is usually envisioned is a period of gestation during which a primitive cycle gradually became complex through a series of comprehensive revisions. The first stage is represented as consisting mostly of couplets and quatrains, and the notorious tail-rhyme stanza of the metrical romances. This stage was marked by simplicity and plain-spoken devotion. It was followed by a reviser who wrote in more complex structures, perhaps in rime couée or the Northern Septenar stanza, and whose outlook was more worldly because he was attentive to contemporary texts from which he might borrow passages or techniques. The last stage burst forth with unbridled realism, in the work of "real" poets who were given names like the York Realist (clearly a compliment!) or the Wakefield Master. This is the scheme essentially proposed by A. W. Pollard in his introduction to The Towneley Plays:

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. Teken together, the three stages probably cover something like half a century, ending about 1410.

Remarkably this scheme looks almost exactly the same as that posited by W. W. Greg for the York cycle. Greg also conjures up three stages (he calls them "layers"—the other favorite word is "strata"), of which the first was "a simple didactic cycle carefully composed in elaborate stanzas and withal rather dull." The second introduced all the humor that we still find in the cycle, and it is the work of "the only great metrist who devoted his talents to the English religious drama as we know it." The last and crowning stage was produced by "a very remarkable though uneven writer…[who] is a real dramatist" and to whom we owe the masterly portrait of Pilate. The date of this writer is "hardly earlier than 1400"; a conclusion that would make him a contemporary of Pollard's poet with "genuine dramatic power." These two sketches sound almost as if they were burlesque accounts of the Darwinian thesis that O. B. Hardison so effectively exposed. They are, unhappily, dead serious, and they show that the conception of literary history that ruled the early scholarship on the cycles was every bit as flawed by the evolutionary analogy as was the treatment addressed by Hardison of the liturgical drama. Even the notion that the cycles were essentially one model, undifferentiated in time and purpose, is similar to the conception that controlled the early historical accounts of the church drama. The whole matter would not be of great relevance to the present day were it not for the fact that the Pollard/Greg perspective still inspires criticism. Here, for example, are the opening sentences of a very recent book, otherwise a valuable study, about the work of the Wakefield Master:

The outstanding playwright of the Middle Ages probably began his work at Wakefield as a play-doctor. His was the last of at least three different hands that composed the cycle.

The passage is, of course, footnoted to Pollard.

The history of Wakefield makes clear that this three-stage concept is manifestly unacceptable. The Pollard/Greg models assume that cycles grew over time in performance and that periodically they were put back in the shop, so to speak, for an overhaul by a reviser who would improve the text for the next run of twenty or thirty years. At York the process did not exactly work that way, though it probably came closer to Greg's layers than Towneley could have to Pollard's stages. To understand why the model could not have worked in Wakefield, we need to look at some demographics. M. G. Frampton has shown [in PMLA 50, 1935] that Wakefield in the fourteenth century was simply too poor and too sparsely populated to support a major cycle, even in stage one. For example, the poll-tax records for 1379 indicate that the adult population of the town of Wakefield numbered a mere 315 (as compared with Beverley, for example, which seemingly did support a cycle, with a figure of 2,663). All signs indicate to Frampton that we must look to the reign of Henry VI (between the years 1422 and 1460) for the beginning of the cycle and the work of the Wakefield Master. Other studies confirm Frampton's conclusion, and if anything, prompt the positing of an even later date. It is, for example, a fact that York reached the depth of its economic depression in the fifteenth century in the decade between 1457 and 1467, due mainly to the disastrous failure of the port of Hull as an export center, and that the distribution of cloth passed "out of the hands of York merchants…[to] that of the merchants and clothiers of Wakefield and Halifax" who transported their wool overland (perhaps on the Watling Street mentioned in the Iudicium?) directly to London for export. By the 1470s, two-thirds of all the cloth made in Yorkshire came from the Aire and Calder valleys (the districts of Leeds and Wakefield respectively), and it was probably not until the turn of the sixteenth century that the new-found prosperity occasioned by the enormous rise in the manufacture and trade of wool manifested itself in Wakefield. It was probably then the latter third of the century during which the town would have had sufficient resources and people as well as occasion for civic pride to begin a Corpus Christi cycle.

The other reason for assigning a late date to the Wakefield cycle has to do with the manuscript. Most scholars are agreed that the Towneley manuscript seems to have been copied with remarkable fidelity and that its "copyist was faithfully reproducing the peculiarities of independent source manuscripts. The general sequence of recording independent pageant manuscripts into a book seems to have been the process at work at York as well. And if that is the right scenario for Wakefield, then there could have been only one reviser / compiler, and that person would have given shape to the material that was copied into the extant Towneley manuscript. If, in fact, there was no intervening manuscript between the individual pageant copies and the scribe's exemplar, then the reviser / compiler (who must have been the Wakefield Master since he clearly added material to already existing plays, as witness the transformation of the York Judgment play to the Wakefield Iudicium) must have done his writing, revising, rewriting, and compiling on the copies that ultimately went to the scribe. This step clearly rules out the Pollard scenario, and it allows us to think of the Wakefield Master as the Wakefield Author.

Given this process of composition, the date of the manuscript becomes a point of some importance, since it records what is the first true compilation of the Wakefield cycle. It serves at the very least as the logical ad quern date for the cycle. Recent paleographic research has shown that the initials of plays 1 and 2 are almost identical with capitals in printed books dated 1499 and 1506, while the strap-work initials of other plays suggest a date not earlier than 1500. It should be observed that at least some of the strap-work initials were made prior to the copying of the text…. It is therefore fair to conclude that the Wakefield cycle came into being some time in the last third of the fifteenth century, and if the process involved the compiling of pageants from other sources, as I believe to have been the case, the likelihood is that the cycle was not compiled until very shortly before it was "fair-written" into the extant manuscript—in other words, very nearly at the turn of the century.

There is, as already noted, no documentary evidence to tell how the Wakefield cycle came into being. Many have speculated on the point but none has ventured as credible a scenario as Arnold Williams, whose book on the characterization of Pilate in the Wakefield plays [The Characterization of Pilate in the Towneley Plays, 1950] still ranks among the most persuasive critical studies done on any of the English cycles to date. Williams argues that the Towneley cycle presents a uniquely conceived and consistently executed "evil" Pilate, one who is an overwhelming presence in the cycle and who meets every requirement of a complexly drawn dramatic character. In this consistency and complexity, he is quite unlike any other Pilate in the English medieval drama, including the York Pilate, who appears in one clearly borrowed pageant, that of the Resurrection, where, however, his role is used by the Wakefield playwright to reinforce his overall interpretation. The unmistakable dramatic continuity of the evil Pilate in Towneley raises inevitably the fundamental question with which we have been grappling: How is it possible for what appears to be a patchwork cycle, with so many apparent strata, to be so unified? Williams shows in detail that the character of Pilate appears in virtually every major metrical form within the cycle: quatrains, octaves, the Wakefield nine-liners, Northern Septenars, seven-line and thirteen-line stanzas, and even rime couée (though in the latter only briefly and in that stanza form Pilate is uncharacteristically tame). He concludes, "The structure of the passion group, the consistency of characterization, the numerous anticipations and motivations—all point to a single author working according to a definite plan." Here is Williams's speculation of how that sort of authorship occurred:

About 1420 the city authorities of Wakefield, which was rapidly becoming a commercial center of importance, decided to inaugurate a cycle of plays. Everything we know about the authorship of medieval drama indicates that a cycle so initiated would be a patchwork, based on some existing cycle or cycles of plays, which would then be more or less edited and interpolated to form a new cycle. This individual, struck with the dramatic validity of one or more plays containing a villainous Pilate, decides that the character of Pilate in the cycle which he is putting together shall be that of a villain. He therefore chooses only plays or parts of plays which present Pilate in this light. Perhaps he removes sections suggesting a kindlier Pilate, revises and edits all into reasonable conformity to his dominating conception.

The date in Williams's speculation is, of course, too early, but the scenario he describes is in all respects quite possible. The single compiler or the group he conjectures might, of course, first have gathered the plays—perhaps each craft guild did its own searching among its counterparts in other cities—and after all potential performing groups and all dramatic subjects had been found, either the newly collected patchwork cycle was performed or it was handed to a "literary man," one would think a monk or perhaps another kind of cleric like a chantry priest, who then composed the book. If that was the scenario, we cannot of course know what influence the book ever had on the performance. All indications, as I have shown, are that the book was not used as an acting text or script, and that, in fact, the marginalia occurred only to show what was being censored after the 1550s, when the cycle was carefully scrutinized by the diocese. I suspect that the performance, however it was done, was guided by the scripts that the compiler used to develop his composite volume, though even if that did happen, we can of course not be sure that what was actually performed was the text that we retain.

The source of a very large part of the Wakefield play must have been individual pageants from the York cycle. However this borrowing took place, we can be certain that it was not from the York Register directly. Internal textual evidence supports that conclusion. One passage, for example, from the Towneley Extraccio Animarum reads as follows:

The York Register renders these lines:

Here, quite apart from the fact that the Towneley version is better metrically, more accurate in rhyme, and more meaningful in sense, the York text, in the hand of John Clerke strikes out the italicized words and replaces them, curiously, with the Towneley readings: i.e. þus þe I telle is replaced by "neyd thowe crave" (242), and the last line is corrected with interlining to "And in sorrowe as a symple knave" (245). It is clear that in this instance Towneley could not have copied from the York Register. The likelihood is that it copied the correct version from the York Saddlers' original copy and that John Clerke, who found the York meaning incomprehensible, corrected it from the same source or from a performance of the play based on that source. It follows, therefore, that the extant versions of the five nearly identical York and Towneley plays are not directly related, a point that should be borne in mind in any cross-analytical study. This fact may also help to explain differences in pairs of plays from the two cycles that are not so close in their verbal and narrative correspondences, as for example the Wakefield Oblacio Magorum and its York counterpart, the Magi play of the Goldsmiths. Here clearly the Towneley version must have originally been taken from the York pageant and then been revised (as the Goldsmiths' regynall itself might have been). The parallels in various portions of the two plays are too close, especially in phraseology, to allow another explanation. Here, for example, is the Angel's speech to the Kings in side-by-side juxtaposition from the two cycles:

Wakefield	York
Syr curtes kyngys, to me to take tent,	Nowe curtayse kynges, me take tent,
And turne by tyme or ye be tenyd;	And turne betyme or ye be tenyd,
From God his self thus am I sent	Fro God hymselfe bus am I sent
To warne you, as youre faythfull freynd,	To warne yow als youre faithfull frende.
How Herode kyng has mamallyce ment,	Herowde the king has malise ment
And shapys with shame you for to sheynd;	And shappis with shame yow for to shende,
And so that ye no harmes hent,	And for pat ye non harmes shulde hent
By othere ways God wyll ye ye weynd	Be othir waies God will ye wende
Into youre awne cuntre;	Euen to youre awne contré.
And if ye ask hym boyn,	And yf ye aske hym bone,
For this dede that ye haue done,	Youre beelde ay will he be,
Youre beyld ay wyll he be	For bis bat ye haue
(159/595-606)	(148/369-380)

What this isolated parallel passage shows, and there are many more from this pageant as well as from others, is that the Wakefield compilation probably borrowed the bulk of its plays from the already thriving mystery cycle at York. In her close study of the parallel passages of the two cycles [The Original Identity of the York and Towneley Plays, 1919], Marie C. Lyle showed that only nine of the thirty-two plays in the Towneley manuscript contained no instances of significant parallel phraseology, and of these nine, one was the late Suspencio Iude, an apparent intruder in the cycle, and another the Processus Talentorum of which an early York play did seem to exist though it was abandoned before the register was copied. The other seven plays may well have been borrowed from other relatively nearby cycles (e.g. Beverley, Hull, King's Lynn, New-castle upon Tyne, or Norwich), or they were changed so radically in revision that they no longer bore any clear traces of their York origin.

As I proceed now to examine the role of the Wakefield Master as contributor and likely the only important reviser and compiler of the Wakefield cycle, it is necessary to remember the nature of authorship in the Middle Ages. I shall argue that the Wakefield Master was, in fact, the author of the Wakefield cycle. For reasons not entirely clear to me, revisers and redactors have persistently been spoken of in the development of the vernacular religious drama, but never authors. This may be the result of the fact that we know none of the playwrights by name. Yet in all respects they were authors, writers, playwrights, or whatever designation properly gives them credit for their creative and, in medieval terms, original work. No one would suggest that Chaucer was a reviser or a redactor because he took works by Boccaccio, Petrarch, Jacobus de Varagine, Dante, Machaut, Froissait, and countless other sources and revised and adapted them to his own purposes. In fact, his literary performance depended on his wide frame of reference in the world of letters, and in The Canter-bury Tales he undertook as a major purpose to test what he had garnered from books against the experience of "modern" life in the late fourteenth century. Robert B. Burlin has written about this Chaucerian process:

Authoritatively, he may cite a proverb or scriptural text, or he may reproduce an entire book—in translation (Melibeus), adaptation (Troilus or in summary abstract (the Somnium in the Parliament of Fowls). But the material comes from the written page and usually from the remote past; it constitutes a vicarious acquaintance with another man's conscious reshaping of his own apprehension of reality, as, for example, when Chanticleer's men of "auctoritee" are defined as transmitters of what they "han wel founden by experience"…. All of Chaucer's major works depend structurally on this opposition: of what the speaker has read against what he experiences in a dream; of the old books that he scrupulously follows against the experience of the narrator in reproducing them.

[Chaucerian Fiction, 1977]

In The Canterbury Tales, for example, Chaucer directly tests the auctoritee of the romance of antiquity by translating and adapting Boccaccio's Teseide as a vehicle for the Knight's storytelling performance against the experience of common folk who lived in contem porary Oxford (contrived as that wonderful story may be). The point is that he allows romance to be read in the framework of contemporary fabliau. I suggest that the Wakefield author does much the same type of thing. He, too, adapts and reshapes his sources—be they the York plays, or The Northern Passion from which in large part the York plays derived their Passion narrative, or even ultimately the Old and New Testaments. He was as much an author as Chaucer or Shakespeare or Dryden or Anouilh in reshaping a literary text into the sphere of his own experience and consciousness. The Wakefield Master is not a mere redactor, he is a playwright-poet of extraordinary genius.

How then did he reshape his auctoritee to his experience? He made a city play into one that fits the setting and the nuances of the manor. It must be remembered that Wakefield was not York, and what the Wakefield Master did was to make his cycle indigenous to his setting and responsive to his image of the people who inhabited that setting. Economically, Wakefield was a manorial seat and the chief town in the riding during the time that the plays were collected and performed. But even as a commercial hub it was always under seigneurial control, and its government in no way resembled the trade oligarchy of York with its mayor, aldermen, and common council. The manor court, whose rolls are still intact, was the chief juridical body, presided over by the steward and empowered to hear every kind of civil and criminal case that touched upon the manor.

No detail of agricultural life was too insignificant to come before the court and be presented to the jurors, such as the keeping of unringed swine, their escape into the lord's woods or into other men's fields, or into the streets of the town, the neglect to scour ditches, or breaches of the pinfold laws.

[Walker, Wakefield History]

True, the town also had a burgess court, but that was a body restricted to suits brought by freemen. Wakefield was very much a county seat, run by landed gentry. W. G. Rimmer sums up the differences with York as follows:

The town did not trail behind York and Beverley on the same path; it took a different course. Whereas the production and marketing of cloth took place mainly within York, the spinners and weavers of the Calder lived in rural hamlets and homesteads. Indeed, the argument that steep tolls repelled traders from Wakefield, thereby sending them to nearby small free-trade towns, is bereft of meaning unless most of the cloth sold at Wakefield was made in outlying villages.

["Evolution of Leeds"]

While Rimmer argues that the tolls were not the cause of Wakefield's commercial downfall in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, there is no doubt that the lord of the manor set burdensome market tolls that impoverished trade by driving away foreigners and merchants from other parts of Yorkshire. All this helps to set the stage for the Wakefield plays.

The Wakefield author was not particularly interested in the commerce of the region, but he did make his cycle a mirror of the mean-spiritedness of both lords and vassals. If any tone dominates in the cycle, and especially in the plays that have traditionally been ascribed to the Wakefield Master, it is one of discor-dance, of the poor crying out about injustices, of farmers bewailing their poverty, of courts tyranizing one and all. Life, as the Wakefield author sees it, is miserable and mean in Yorkshire. If any place needs the return of Jesus, it is that bereft countryside and its churlish, crabbed, lying, and thieving inhabitants. He is as hard on lords (especially in their roles as rulers and judges) as he is on vassals, male and female. The evil Pilate is indigenous to this landscape. While, of course, the playwright is not oblivious to goodness in his "natural men" (the strength of Noah, the generosity of the Shepherds, the compassion of Joseph), mostly that quality is obscured until the force of God directly invigorates it (the Shepherds, Joseph, Noah's wife are basically distrustful people at the start). The vision is not exactly Bosch-like—it is not quite grotesque enough for that—but the distortions that the Wakefield author sees are not unrelated in mood and tone to what Bosch sees in the quasi-human figures that are so prominent in his world view….

If a single play can capture the perspective of the Wakefield cycle, it is probably the Mactacio Abel. It is in this play, after the more or less traditional opening of the now fragmentary Creation play that establishes the "authority" of the Biblical vision, that the Wakefield playwright sets his stage as dictated by his perception of the Wakefield "experience." If as audience we are to perceive the real meaning of the coming of Christ, then we can do no better, in the playwright's view, than to visualize it and understand it in the midst of that stark manorial setting. We are in the field. A loud, cantankerous, foul-mouthed servant, the Garcio named Pikeharnes (the name means thief), comes forward preparing for the entrance of his master, a "good" yeoman but ominously one to avoid engaging in dispute. Yet the audience need not be told all this for, as Garcio says, "Som of you ar his men" (10/20). This broad burlesque entrance of the truly powerful—the conventional swaggering tyrant who comes in with a rant clearing a path for himself—does two things: It establishes that servants are in tone interchangeable with their masters, and it identifies at least a part of the audience with the brotherhood of Cain. The play, as Helterman has pointed out [in Symbolic Action], focuses from the first "on the criminal rather than the victim." It gives us from the start a "field of blood" on which the Crucifixion is the ultimate painful, though necessary, salvific event. Because life is so brutal and mean, the event of the Resurrection will be that much more glorious and inspiring.

I am, of course, suggesting that the Mactatio Abel must be read as a typological forecast, a kind of map for the full dramatic action to unfold before us. While I will save for [another discussion] a more systematic analysis of the function of typology as a dramatic form, we do need that important perspective as a way of understanding the Wakefield author's blueprint for the cycle. The play, after all, is called the Mactacio Abel, not as in York the Sacrificium Cayme et Abell. The emphasis is on murder. Abel is the quintessential good shepherd, who is, of course, both a figurai and a social presence. He reminds Wakefielders of the importance of their agrarian and commercial economy, and he is, in his social role, a precursor of the other Shepherds of the Wakefield plays, with a foreboding of all the hardships that we hear recited in their litanies within the opening passages of the two Shepherds' plays. Yet the play also focuses on another socioeconomic situation of moment in late-fifteenth-century Yorkshire: the festering rivalry between the tenant farmer and the sheep raiser. The anger of Cain reflects a social dislocation: The plowman had become in many ways a symbol of agrarian poverty, and therefore the Wakefield Cain, when he vents his ire at Abel, is surely speaking with an economic resentment that his "men" in the audience shared:

Go grese thi shepe vnder the toute,
For that is the moste lefe.

Or,

How that I tend, rek the neuer a deill,
Bot tend thi skabbid shepe wele;
For if thou to my teynd tent take,
It bese the wars for thi sake.

Cain tells Abel, If I prosper in my sacrifice, it is all the worse for you—and so it is in the fierce agricultural economy of Wakefield.

Not that Cain should be regarded as a sympathetic figure for his deprivation. To the contrary. He functions almost as an icon of the dispossessed man who fails to share his worldly goods and who lacks charity. He is the archetypal "bad" Plowman, the opposite figure to Langland's Piers or to the Parson's brother in The Canterbury Tales. He and his Garcio remind us of the two plowmen in the famous picture from the Luttrell Psalter, except that those two at least work together and Cain is not left to "both hold and drife". The discord in Cain's world is everywhere; even the plow team is disobedient. There is no charity there, and everything is reduced to its lowest and meanest significance, even to the point of Cain's search for a sheaf too small for God to "wipe his ars withall". That sort of scatological profanity occurs only in this play, but it defines for the audience just how much mankind as seen in its localized setting needs salvation.

The Wakefield author depicts mortal sin in the world of his own habitat, in "Gudeboure at the quarell hede" and later, Horbury and Watling Street, extending from the heart of town to the surrounding villages. His characters speak "Yorkshire"; they project an indigenous, homely proverbial wisdom, usually concerned with food and work: "ther is a podyng in the pot"; "cold rost is at my masteres hame"; "ill-spon weft ay comes foule out". This is no place for the outsider, the intruder who speaks with a "Sothren tothe"; it is a down-home drama that insistently asks the audience to bring Jesus into its midst….

…..

It is precisely for the brilliance and originality of its poetic vision that the Wakefield cycle has been singled out as the most "literary" of all the medieval Corpus Christi plays. As a step toward bringing that literary quality into perspective, I propose now to examine one of its significant thematic strands: its self-conscious interest in literary art as a medium, or to put it in other terms, its concern with the uses and abuses of language. I believe that we owe this focus to the Wakefield author as reviser and compiler of the cycle. We can find this theme not only in all the five full plays traditionally assigned to him, the Procesus Noe cum filii (Play 2), the Prima Pastorum (Play 12), the Secunda Pastorum (Play 13), the Magnus Herodes (Play 16), and the Coliphizacio (Play 21), but also in all the plays that bear evidence of his familiar scansion, whether put into the traditional stanza associated with him or others that resemble them in poetic form and substance…. In all, he clearly had a demonstrable role in editing or revising the following additional plays in the cycle: the Mactacio Abel (Play 2), the Conspiracio [et Capcio] (Play 20), the Flagellacio (Play 22), Processus Crucis (Play 23), the Processus Talentorum (Play 24), the Peregrini (Play 27), the Ascencio Domini (Play 29), the Iudicium (Play 30), and the Lazarus (Play 31). And since he clearly reworked the plays borrowed from York—witness his major alteration of the York Judgment play to which he added 378 of his characteristic lines out of a total (in the Wakefield version) of 664—I think we can safely assume that he had a hand in compiling if not adapting all the plays in this category. Indeed, one must conclude that, if he was the principal compiler of the cycle, his editorial hand must be present everywhere, even if merely in what was retained and what was rejected in the final version.

The Wakefield author is pervasively concerned with "vayn carpyng," as Abel accusingly calls it, or to put it more fundamentally, with the abuse of language, especially by those who oppose God. The demonstration of that abuse is, ironically, a central feature of the cycle's rich verbal complexity and depth of meaning. We have already seen that the Wakefield author's most immediate interests are centered on humankind—on "natural man" in the terminology of V. A. Kolve [The Play Called Corpus Christi, 1966]—rather than on God, Christ, the angels, and the saintly. In the five plays ascribed to the Wakefield author, God makes but one speech, in the Noah play, and it is straightforward and distinctly colloquial: God begins by reproving man for his wickedness, announces that he will bring forth a Flood, and appears before Noah to give very practical instructions for building the ark and storing provisions. The Wakefield author is even more sparing in the lines that he gives to Jesus—four in all—and these lines in themselves, as I shall show later, are a ringing testament to the eloquence of silence. What interests the Wakefield author is the common man—such types as tyrants, soldiers, shepherds, shrewish wives—the humble and the unregenerate in all their guises. He prefers to focus on middle earth, straying only once into the world of the demonic when he presents Tutivillus and his cohorts in the Iudicium. But even these characters are seen in worldly shape as if they were tax collectors or summoners rather than gatherers of the damned. As a reviser in his own peculiar format and language, he carefully chooses only those subjects which emphasize his interests, as in his characterization of Pilate in the Processus Talentorum or the Torturers in the Flagellacio. His contributions do not appear in the more solemn and sacred settings in the cycle, such as the Annunciacio or the play about John the Baptist. If indeed he was overall reviser of the cycle, as I argue here, he let such passages stand in their original language. His direct contributions, then, stand in marked contrast to the rest of the cycle; indeed, it is largely from the "counter-language" he provides for his natural man that the rest of the cycle, and particularly the lyrical passages in couplets and rimes couées, take on their eloquence.

The essential premise of the Towneley cycle as a whole about language is that simplicity and artlessness mark the speech of the virtuous. There is a homely eloquence about God's opening in the Creation play:

Ego sum alpha et o,
I am the first, the last also,
Oone god in mageste;
Meruelus, of myght most,
ffader, & son, & holy goost,
On god in trinyte.
(1/1-6)

One is tempted to take literally the opening line in the play from the Apocalypse (1:8). For God and his votaries speak everywhere with alphabetic clarity and concision. Their speeches are made largely in the simplest of stanzaic forms—couplets, quatrains, octaves, and rimes couées—and their diction is plain, direct, and uncomplicated. The rhythm of their language is even and free of the harsh alliterative dissonances that characterize the speech of errant men. E. Catherine Dunn has pointed out [in American Benedictine Re-view 20, No. 4, December, 1969] that there is a basic lyric voice in the Towneley cycle that she calls "the voice of the Church" ("la voix de l'église"), a voice that is highly subjective and that speaks or even chants characteristically in patterned sound structures. This is the voice of which I speak here, though I would expand its scope to extend far beyond its occurrence in the Processus Prophetarum play from which she takes her paradigm illustrations. It is, of course, first and foremost a prophetic voice—even God's speech at the outset is prophetic, drawing for its basic text on the Apocalypse and Isaiah (see especially 41:4 and 48:12)—and its lyricism is often expressed directly in hymns and chants, the only occasions except for straightforward prophecy when the playwright veers from the vernacular approvingly. Music (as part of the quadrivium) was, of course, one of the four highest subjects of learning, and in the form of musica ecclesiastica, it was the essential expression, among the arts, of cosmic harmony. The frequent appearance of hymns in the Towneley cycle, therefore, is by no means an unimportant thematic consideration in its own right, particularly when a pointed contrast is made several times between musica ecclesiastica and musica vulgaris. Even more dramatic is the contrast between the composite voice of the church, as expressed in various harmonic forms throughout the cycle, and the cacophony of demonic voices that rings forth from devils and the unregenerate. At its most extreme, this contrast is expressed throughout the medieval popular religious drama on the one hand by divine music, the language of the spirit, and on the other by obscenity (with emphasis on the excremental), or body language. The Devil who comes on stage "cracking wind," as in The Castle of Perseverance, is thus the perfect antithesis to the angelic choir. The Wakefield plays, while virtually confining their scatological references to one play, the Mactacio Abel, nevertheless make the contrast of music and noise a crucial consideration.

Before looking more specifically into the Wakefield author's concern with language as theme, I want to make a brief observation about stanzaic forms in general as used in the Wakefield cycle. While a good deal of attention was given by the early critics to the various metrical forms as strata within the cycle, little was done, then or later, to discover the function of the various metrical forms in the cycle. It is interesting to note, for example, that the Wakefield Creation play contains what is manifestly a patterned use of stanza forms. Thus, God speaks only in a six-line rime couée stanza, and Lucifer, who parodies God's speech, declaims to the multitude in five- and seven-line corruptions of that stanza demonstrating in the very form of his speech his incapacity to imitate God. Couplets, which may in the context be regarded as the lowest poetic form, are spoken regularly by the Fallen Angels and by man. While I do not wish to claim that this pattern holds in all the plays that follow, it does seem to suggest that stanza forms are not used indiscriminately by the Towneley playwright(s). The Wakefield stanza has its own tonality—one that is best suited to the speech of common men, a quality that comes through even in its most devout and solemn usages, such as God's speech in the passage already noted within the Noah play (Caw. 16-18/73-81) and the "hayll"-lyrics that Dunn so admires in the Secunda Pastorum (Caw. 62/710-736)… [The] Wakefield stanza is [flexible] in its potential for rhythmic variation, for end-stopping and for enjambment. It clearly is a vehicle to reduce the patterned tempo of the more conventional stanzas in the cycle, and the effect it achieves, therefore, is to represent in its rhythm the characteristic tempo of spoken discourse. The remarkable achievement of the Wakefield author is the dual effect that he allows his stanza to create: It simultaneously communicates the disordered and unstructured and reminds the listener or reader to heed its disciplined form.

The Wakefield author's interest in language asserts itself everywhere, as much in the style as in the subject matter of his plays. Given his worldly perspective, he is, of course, responsible for much that is crude and ignoble and profane in the dramatic action of the cycle. But there is also something grandly paradoxical about his work. For it is in the very excess of language—the racy humor, the crackling alliterations, the earthy proverbs, the shrill tyrants' rants, the trumpettongued catalogs, the salty and resourceful dialectalisms—that the Wakefield plays are most dazzling and most engaging to the reader. It seems that the Wakefield author willfully provided a caution against the very fiber of his own art, as if to warn that the voice of poetry in the context of the highest verities can beguile its auditors. There is, in the Wakefield plays, a strong, implicit argument against the enchantment of art, and an equally strong affirmation of the artless. In yielding its most memorable scenes and its most flamboyant verbal art to rustics, scoundrels, miscreants, and demons, the Wakefield cycle is in a class with such works as Henry IV, Part 1 and Paradise Lost. Many great artists have endowed their least hallowed characters with their own versatility and their own highest verbal gifts. It is in this sense that Mak and Herod and Tutivillus are precursors of Falstaff, Satan, Mr. Micawber, and even Humbert Humbert.

The extent to which language occupies a central place in the drama of the Wakefield author can quickly be established by an overview of his work. He is, of course, the foremost linguist among the contributors to the cycle. Two recently completed computer concordances show the extent of the Wakefield author's vocabulary. All told, there are over a thousand words that appear as single citations in the Wakefield stanzas, or slightly fewer than a third of all such words in the Towneley cycle. Moreover, the Wakefield author is not only the most persistent and colorful user of dialectalisms and local references, but he also makes conscious allusion to dialect as a tool of deception when he has Mak address the Shepherds in his "Sothren tothe," which is, after all, the dialect of the ruling class. The same can be said of his use of Latin and French—languages that appear consistently in the rants of tyrants for the purpose of intimidating their listeners. In fact, it is almost exclusively in the Wakefield stanzas that macaronic verse in Latin and English occurs in the Wakefield cycle; for example, the long opening rant in the Processus Talentorum (279-280/1-46) and the Latin proverbs spoken by Caiaphas and Annas in the Flagellacio (Caw. 82/143-144; Caw. 83/214-215). When the Wakefield Herod, perhaps the most torrential ranter in the cycle, ends his play with a winded "I can no more Franch" (Caw. 77/513), the Wakefield author in characteristic fashion looks to the language of the upper class to identify for Yorkshiremen the bombast and fustian of tyrants. The Wakefield author is an adept linguist, but finally he distrusts all foreign languages and dialects. Yorkshire speech in itself may not often serve as a vehicle for the highest truths, but it is at least an authentic medium for the homespun wisdom of the earthy characters who make up the play and, we presume, the audience.

The Wakefield author more than any other writer in the medieval drama is aware of literary terms and traditions. He refers directly to "Vyrgyll" and "Homere," makes allusion, as already mentioned, to the learned languages of Franch (Caw. 77/513) and Laton (Caw. 39/391), knows technical musical language (see especially 384/537-540), and uses a wide variety of literary terms such as pystyls (Caw. 69/205), verse (Caw. 34/386), legende (Caw. 64/203), poetré (Caw. 39/386) poecé-tayllys (Caw. 69/204), glose (Caw. 54/413), gendere (372/161), gospell (376/302), grales (i.e. graduals; Caw. 69/205), and gramere (Caw. 39/387, Caw. 242/242; 375/253). In addition, he directs his scorn especially against the misusers of language. One of his favorite devices, the catalog of agent nouns, names, among other offenders, the following: wryers, bollars, hullars, extorcyonars, carpers, slanderars, kyrkchaterars, swerars, iurars, writars, bakbyttars, quest-dytars, indytars, flytars, lyars, flyars, cryars, byllhagers, bragers, wragers, quest-mangers, bewshers, runkers, and rowners. Like Dante, he regards fraud—at base a verbal offense—as among the most heinous of crimes. His attack on the misuse of language, his strong preference for the vernacular and especially the local, and his open slurs on such masters of verbal manipulation as friars (see Caw. 37/286, Caw. 39/389) suggest that he may have been a parish priest and possibly even a Wycliffite. Most important the Wakefield author chooses to end the cycle by introducing in the Iudicium, which was borrowed in its basic form from York, the devil Tutivillus, whose whole concern was to collect those offenders who had spoken out of turn in church. What emerges from this summary is a playwright who in his subject matter and his very language demonstrated an overriding concern with the falsity of man's word as contrasted with the Word. It is this contrast that constitutes a major theme and an artistic focus for the Wakefield cycle.

Let us now look somewhat more closely at a few of the crucial passages of the Wakefield author's work that concern themselves with this theme. I shall begin with an examination of the Iudicium because it serves as dramatic summary to the cycle and highlights the doom of those who abuse language (the "kyrkchaterars" of their time), among whom, ironically, we also find their oppressors, the devils. Because the abuse of language centrally involves the law (with "parlement" and "debate" as its vehicle), the rantings of tyrants, and the contrast of cacophony and music, I shall move on to a consideration of these topics in the plays of the Doctors in the Temple, Noah, the Buffeting, and the two versions of the Shepherds, all of which are essential for an understanding of this theme in the cycle.

First, then, the Judgment play. Its principal character is the demon Tutivillus. From several allusions to his short stature, one would deduce that he was conceived as a sprite, and it would seem logical that he was played by a boy actor (see the references in 374/232 and 375/245, and his self-representation as one who sits atop the shoulder pads of dandies, 376/290). He is, therefore, not the usual devil figure of the mystery plays, and he certainly does not partake of the scatological humor so characteristic of the type. From the very outset, he announces his interest in language:

Mi name is tutiuillus,
my horne is blawen;
ffragmina verborum / tutiullus colligit horum,
Belzabub algorum / belial belium doliorum.
(375/249-252)

The Latin here is barely coherent, but it does tell us that Tutivillus collects "fragments of words" in contrast to Beelzebub who seemingly collects "the cold" (?) and Belial "the sorrows of war." I suspect that the Latin passage serves as something of a diabolic litany here, reflecting Tutivillus's verbal agility without calling for any particular literal sense (there is an oral gamesmanship in conjoining "belial" with "belium," and that may be the only justification for the line besides the rhyme on -orum). There is even a possibility that the Latin words were chanted, as is commonly the case with lines that are not part of the rhyme scheme. All this comes, of course, in response to the First Demon's saying "with wordes will thou fill vs," a perfectly calibrated rhyme with Tutivillus. Ironically, this loquacious devil is the very agent who traditionally gathers up in sacks the words mumbled or dropped by clergymen and those spoken idly by parishioners during church service ("kyrkchaterars"; 376/296). To the extent that Tutivillus at once practices the abuse that he is designed to guard against—that is, the incoherent and excessive utterance of words—he is a most interesting reflection of the Wakefield author himself.

The two most basic sins against which the energies of Tutivillus and the demons seem to be directed are excessive adornment (especially in apparel) and the frauds practiced by men of the law. Tutivillus reserves some of his best verbal showmanship in cataloging the latest excesses of fashion. With a chorus of approval from the demons who take delight in his "gramory" (learning; 253), Tutivillus describes the extravagant dress of the dandies and the women of fashion, obviously ready subjects for damnation, with a zest matched only by the extravagance of his own words. Indeed, there seems to be, in the mind of the playwright, a correspondence between sartorial and linguistic extravagance. With all the emphasis in the play on misusers of language—from "kyrkchaterars" (296) to "runkers" and "rowners" (298), and with the identification of excessive adornment with pride, the deadliest of sins (305-313), one cannot but recognize in passages like the following a lack of restraint in language, with the flamboyant alliterations, the double rhymes, and the eccentric diction, which resembles the very offense it describes:

Shortly thereafter, Tutivillus describes the drunkards who sit all night imbibing "with hawvell and Iawvell, syngyng of Iawvell" (378/337-338: with wailing and jabbering and singing of lowbell, i.e. of drinking songs; MED, s.v. "lavel") until the bells of the church deafen them in the morning (378/341-345). It is so also with the demons who, in the tour de force language of the Wakefield Master, create their own "hawvell and Iawvell" to be chastened by the straightforward and direct words of Christ (in the version of the source play from York). The point to be remembered is that sinners and demons alike will be climbing "on hell crokkys." The demons betray their lust for power, much like earthly tyrants, in their language. The severest ironies in the play finally lie in linguistic self-condemnations.

Just as important as the issue of excessive adornment is the interest of the Wakefield playwright in the law as metaphor at the Last Judgment. The whole play, as indeed the cycle also, is structured to contrast the true law against the false—which is to say, the true word against the false. The very trumpet of the Judgment, which at the outset of the play gives such a "sturdy…showte" (370/91), is parodied by Tutivillus at his entrance ("my horne is blawen," 375/250). To the extent that the clarion call is to gather sinners from everywhere, it calls as much for the demons as it does for their prey. But the demons do not recognize the true significance of God's call despite the fact that it releases them from the bonds of Hell (370/89-116). While Christ is waiting to render the great Last Judgment, they still use the idiom of the manorial economy:

Bot fast take oure rentals / hy, let vs go hence!
ffor as this fals / the great sentence.
(371/134-135)

They set out to go to "this dome / vp Watlyn strete" (126), but for them it undoubtedly meant the Roman road that actually crossed the parish of Wakefield, rather than the Milky Way, as, in the context, it must have been known to others (OED, s.v. "Watling Street," ¶2). The confusion here as elsewhere is between the civil and divine law. And the spokesmen of the civil law, who are ironically demons, invariably expatiate at length about the evil in the world, which they will expose and punish. Thus, the Second Demon reminds his compeers:

It sittys you to tente / in this mater to mell,
As a pere in a parlamente / what case so befell.
(371/118-119)

The fact is that the demons never cease to talk; they continue their "parlement" all the while that they are on stage. Their frantic catalogs and their extended, colorful descriptions of mostly venial rather than mortal sins are the only aspects of their scene that provide movement, for physically nothing happens through the major portions of the Judgment play. In contrast to the Devil's "parlement" is Christ's straightforward speech. The demons themselves tell us, "ffor wysely / he spekys on trete" (371/129-130). In perfect balance, he addresses the good souls and the bad souls, delivering his judgment fairly and succinctly. When his speech is all over, the good souls go to the right, the bad souls to the left, and the demons remain the only speakers on stage. The Highest Judge has spoken, and the petty civil judges make their way to their eternal doom, leading the whole company of sinners to the tune of their unceasing chatter:

The judges are finally judged, and they all "go…sam" (386/610) to their eternal damnation while the good souls sing the Te Deum Laudamus. At the very last, the divine law triumphs ringingly over the false civil law, and silence triumphs over loquacity and chatter. In the Iudicium, which we know to be a borrowed play from York, we can observe to greatest advantage the skill of the Wakefield author as reviser. He adds those passages which emphasize the abuse of language in his characteristic stanza, diction, and meter. The rest he lets stand as a way of highlighting the contrast between the excess of language in substance and style and the quiet dignity of simple locution.

A word should be said about the frequently cited thematic contrast between the Old Law and the New in the Wakefield cycle. It is, of course, true that a major concern of the cycle as a whole is to show how the retributive justice of the Old Testament gives way to the mercy of the New Testament. This issue is brought into direct enactment in the Doctors' pageant, another of the plays that depend almost entirely for their dramatic interest on debate. The Doctors continuously refer to what they characterize as "oure lawes" (the word in its various forms appears seven times in the pageant) and what specifically at one point the Tercius Magister calls "Moyses lay." But interestingly, when challenged by the Doctors, Christ brings forth a perfect recitation of the Ten Commandments, the kernel of their own law, as living evidence that he has come to fulfill and not to destroy the Old Testament. The body of the divine law itself, whether Old or New, is thus not ever a matter of controversy in the Wakefield cycle, only the way that the laws are carried out. The Doctors are haughty and self-serving men who, in sending Jesus away, fail to honor their God and their neighbor, the very laws they say they espouse:

yei, lett hym furth on his wayes,
for if he dwell, withoutten drede
The pepyll will ful soyn hym prayse
well more then vs, for all oure dede.
(192/185-188)

Jesus, who is the real Magister of the sequence, is, however, the embodiment of his own teaching—mild and generous to all men—and by his example he brings out the best even in the Doctors as he parts from them (see 194/261-268). While the play is, by the canon generally accepted, not the work of the Wakefield author, it does present the background on which he built his major thematic concentration. (And it is of course one of the York plays on which he made major revisions elsewhere.) The divine law, Old and New, is never out of harmony. It is only the faulty perception of its interpreters (and of impostors) that brings with it the resonance of chaos.

The real conflict, then, is between the divine law and the civil, a conflict central to the Wakefield author's dramatic vision. This contrast stands at the core of the dramatic action throughout the cycle; it exists literally from the beginning, with Lucifer proclaiming to all Creation "master ye shall me call" (4/98), to the very end when Jesus calmly presides at the highest doom. The civil law is constantly exposed for its abuses, and primary among these is the tyranny of temporal rulers, the characteristic ranters of the cycle drama in whom the Wakefield author took a special interest. It is usually the arrogant, self-aggrandizing, and loquacious tyrant figure who disturbs God's stillness with his earpiercing harangues. In a sense, the Noah pageant, which by conventional standards is the first of the Wakefield author's full-length plays in the cycle, is a microdrama in which the central issue of the Wakefield cycle is given a humorous first airing. The reason for the Flood is familiar to all; God complains

I repente full sore that euer maide I man;
Bi me he settys no store, and I am his soferan.
(Caw. 16/91-92)

The divine law is therefore entrusted to Noah, who in the familiar form of the figura becomes a type of Christ on stage. Opposed to him, at least in the process of his building the ark (or, as familiarly interpreted, the church) is his uxor, who thus becomes the first, if unlikely, tyrant figure in the Towneley cycle. She has all the attributes: She challenges right order (by opposing her "syre"; Caw. 24/396); she boasts and rants (sometimes addressing the audience directly, as in Caw. 19/208-209); and she freely uses her cudgel in the form of a distaff (see Cawley note to 200). For a time at least she holds sway, much as Herod will later even as the Christ Child is born. What is particularly noteworthy about Noah's wife is her garrulousness. Her husband entreats her over and over again to hold her tongue, and much of his humor is in his characterization of her as a shrew. He describes her perfectly when he tells first her and then the audience:

Thou can both byte and whyne
With a rerd;
For all if she stryke,
Yit fast will she skryke.
(Caw. 20/229-232)

And, at one point, he admonishes men who have wives "whyls thay ar yong" to "chastice thare tong" (Caw. 24/397-398). The whole of the action in the pageant is to bring harmony out of discord, a process for which the silencing of Noah's uxor is the central dramatic metaphor. In effect, Noah tells us as much when, in the beginning of their conflict, he says to her: "We! hold thi tong, ram-skyt, or I shall the still" (Caw. 19/217), or again later, "I shall make þe still as stone" (Caw. 24/406). And of course, he succeeds entirely in stilling her and thus reestablishing order and harmony in the human family. Most significantly, at the very end, even the ark is brought to calmness: "As still as a stone oure ship is stold" (Caw. 28/525). Thus physical and verbal storms abate, and if we bear in mind the figural interpretation of Noah and the ark, then the stillness and stability at the end of the play tell us something about the role of the church in a world too much obsessed with the discord of words.

Stillness, as was observed in the York cycle as well, characterizes the stability of God. The silence of Jesus dominates the Wakefield author's play of the Buffeting. Here as elsewhere in the cycle, notably the Herod pageant, tyrants by contrast virtually expire from their overuse of words. Where in other cycles, such as the N-Town, the tyrants are generally brought to violent deaths, in the Wakefield author's pageants they simply fade out; they seemingly suspire. Herod boasts himself to oblivion with his "I can no more Franch." Caiaphas, Annas, and Pilate, after their virtuoso performances as speechmakers and ranters, disappear from sight in the onset of calmness and harmony. The central issue of the Buffeting is once more the law. Jesus is accused by one of the Torturers, ironically, for teaching the people "a new law" (Caw. 80/66), and Caiaphas and Annas are implored, in turn, to "defende all oure law" (Caw. 81/115). The civil law is thus made the instrument by which the divine law—the whole spirit of the New Testament—is to be measured and judged. All through the accusation scene, Jesus stands in glorious silence while his temporal, ecclesiastical judges, Caiaphas and Annas, let go a stream of oaths and imprecations to make him "speke on oone word" (Caw. 82/145). Never has flamboyant and biting language been undercut more eloquently by silence than the point in the Buffeting at which Caiaphas ends his long tirade literally crying and shouting in frustration for Jesus to speak one syllable "be it hole worde or brokyn" (Caw. 82/174). The more subdued and cunning Annas recognizes that the force of Jesus' stillness is infinitely more potent than all the words he can summon. He asks, almost plaintively, "Why standys thou so styll when men thus accuse the?" (Caw. 84/246). In the end, neither the verbal nor the physical assaults on Jesus break his silence or discredit his law. The play with its emphasis on "vayn carpyng"—a fault for which, ironically, Jesus is directly accused as he proceeds on the Via Crucis in the Flagellacio (243/346)—is a brilliant poetic attack on the limits of rhetoric.

Much as the law is one topic of great thematic concern to the Wakefield author, so music is another. Both serve him to make implicit statements about the uses and misuses of language, and, even more narrowly, about the function of poetry. I have already shown how musica ecclesiastica, usually in the form of hymns, inheres in all those parts of the Wakefield cycle which give direct expression to the voice of God. I now wish to suggest that it is the contrast of musica vulgaris and musica ecclesiastica, and even more pointedly the eventual merging of the two, that becomes the most significant feature in the Wakefield author's revision from the First to the Second Shepherds' plays. I will maintain that, in the view of the Wakefield author, the solemn angelic song, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, is the highest expression that common man can perceive and emulate. The shift from discord to harmony, both in speech and music, can be seen as the fundamental concern of the Wakefield author's masterpiece—the Second Shepherds' play—which in its Adoration scene is the yardstick for the eloquence of simple reverence. (Although the applications differ, it is worth noting the common concern of both York and Towneley with stillness as a state in which the presence of God is manifest.)

The nucleus of all the Shepherds' plays, including the two in the Wakefield cycle, is clearly the appearance of the Angel announcing the Nativity and the angelic choir singing the Gloria in Excelsis Deo. The contrast of the divine messenger and the earthly listeners is the frequent subject of parodic humor, as note the response to the angelic singing in the Chester cycle by the three Shepherds:

The point here, as also in The Holkham Bible Picture Book, is to bring the sacred into the context of the profane and thus to universalize the significance of the Nativity. But whereas the musical burlesque is simply a humorous excursion in the Chester plays, the whole subject of musica vulgaris, in its varying forms, becomes a matter of thematic importance in the Wake-field Shepherds' plays and of central significance in the Secunda Pastorum.

To make this point clear, I must make some observations about the essential differences in subject matter between the two Shepherds' pageants in the Wakefield cycle and about the apparent process of revision to which the Wakefield author subjected the first version. It is, of course, well known that the two plays share many situations. In both, we have three Shepherds who come on stage remarking about the hardships of life; in both a fourth character (Iak Garcio and Mak) joins the Shepherds; in both, there is festive singing first among the Shepherds themselves, then by the angelic choir; in both, the Shepherds depart singing. There is, as well, a hint that the Wakefield author already had at least one of the main ingredients of the Mak plot in mind when he has Iak Garcio respond to the Shepherds' concern over gathering up the imaginary contents of an empty sack with the following remark:

Sagh I neuer none so fare bot the foles of Gotham.
Wo is hir that yow bare! Youre syre and youre dam,
Had she broght furth an hare, a shepe, or a lam,
Had bene well.
(Caw. 34/180-183; and cf. 101/182n)

The similarities of plot in the two Shepherds' plays are perhaps less noticeable than the differences. First among the latter is certainly the inclusion of the Mak episode in the Secunda Pastorum. On quick glance one is, in fact, tempted to say that the Wakefield author simply revised the first play by including this plot and making otherwise minor revisions. But closer examination will not sustain this view and will lead to the conclusion that the revision from the first to the second version was a major one in subject matter as well as theme and approach. The first play is, to begin with, much less obviously unified. The Wakefield author makes no attempt here to link the first half of the play focusing on the discussion and merrymaking of the Shepherds with the second part involving the Nativity. Implicitly, of course, one can view the physical hardships of the world cited in the soliloquies of the First and Second Shepherds as preparation for the advent of Christ and the spiritual balm offered at the end of the pageant. There is even some direct pleading with God that he come to bring "a better way" for the souls of sinners, that he "send theym good mendyng / with a short endyng" (Caw. 31/79-79). In this sense, one can perceive the games of the first part—all concerned with the imaginary—as a statement about the inconsequential nature of the material in contrast with the centrality of the spiritual. It is not the physical presence of sheep but the idea of sheep that causes the territorial dispute between shepherds One and Two. It is not a full sack of meal but rather an empty one, and not a real feast but an imaginary one, which provides the sustenance of the Shepherds and the substance of their games. The emphasis throughout this early scene seems to be deliberately on the unseeable, perhaps to prepare emotionally for the Incarnation that occurs at the end. The play thus deals with a set of intellectual reversals: In the first part substance becomes shadow in a farcical setting, while in the second spirit becomes flesh in a profoundly serious setting. But it must be emphasized that whatever is here as a unifying thought must be supplied by the insight of the reader or performer; the Wakefield author provides neither direct explanation nor an easily discernable coherence.

It is quite different in the Second Shepherds' play. First, as is well known, there is an obvious situational and even verbal coherence between the parodic and the serious nativities. It takes little effort to connect the "credyll" in Mak's cottage (see 334, 432, 538, 600) with the "cryb" of the Holy Family (see 645, 689) or to recognize that both the sheep and the Christ Child are referred to as that "lytyll day-starne" (577, 727). In contrast, the words "cryb" and "mangere" as well as "mangyng" are used in the First Shepherds' play only in the farcical first part and always with reference to "eating" (see 201, 232), thus implying a much subtler unity that may well be meant to suggest the concept of the Eucharist by linking the feast of Part One with the celebration of the Christ Child in Part Two. The revision, therefore, is very much in the direction of the more explicit. This tendency is especially noticeable in what the two plays have to say about the function of music. The Wakefield author seems to make no special effort to integrate the Gloria with what has preceded in the First Shepherds' play. It is true that the Shepherds engage in a singing contest to see who gets the first drink (Caw. 36/265-266). But even though this event occurs shortly before the outburst of angelic song, with which it no doubt contrasted sharply, the Wakefield author fails to draw attention to this interesting juxtaposition. While song is clearly of great significance to the remainder of the play—thus establishing a tone of reverence and peace—no special mention is made of its place in the overall scheme of the play.

In the Second Shepherds' play, the role of music is much more prominent; indeed, the contrast between noise and music (or cacophony and harmony) is of central thematic importance to the outcome of the play. R. W. Ingram has already pointed out [in "The Use of Music in English Miracle Plays," Anglia 75, 1957] that there is a special significance to the uses of music in the play:

The music as a whole not only acquires more meaning in the context of the play but is neatly varied and patterned: The cheerful song of the shepherds leads to the creaking voice of Mak's wife, to the sweet singing of the angel and so back again to the shepherds' singing on their way to the manger.

I would like to propose that there is much more here than random patterning and variation. In the first place, the Second Shepherds' play does much from the outset to associate unrest and noise with the profane, and peace and harmony with the sacred. In this respect, it shares of course with the rest of the Wakefield cycle an interest in volatile and often shrill language as an instrument for the portrayal of the lewd and the secular. It also presents the Wakefield author with the rare opportunity of using his stanza, which so characteristically fits the rhythms of the colloquial, to dramatize the solemn, if simple, dignity of the Nativity scene. It is in the Second Shepherds' play where the versatility of his stanza is most fully realized and where he seems most pointedly concerned with its artistic range. In the second place, the play seems to present a deliberate progression from discord to harmony, suggesting that in their imitation of the Angels's song, the Shepherds learn a new tranquillity of discourse with which to address the sacred. The most profound of the Wakefield pageants always are concerned with bringing awareness of the sacred to the profane. In the larger perspective, such common people as the Shepherds or old Joseph or even Noah's uxor, drawn anachronistically to Yorkshire specifications, become representatives of the audience. Consequently, whatever they learn stands empathetically for what the Corpus Christi spectator must also learn in the course of the dramatic performance. It is thus that the concept of the sacred is made most directly meaningful by the playwright.

The Second Shepherds' play opens, both in its language and its subject matter, on a note of discord that is sustained and even intensified until the Angel makes his appearance some six hundred lines later. At the very outset the First Shepherd speaks of "stormes and tempest" from which no one has rest (Caw. 43/6-9), while the Second Shepherd complains of the woe caused to wedmen by cackling wives who do nothing but "crok" and "groyne" and "clok" (Caw. 45/69-70). Mak enters upon the scene after the three Shepherds have broken out into a song of mirth, which they discuss with some apparent knowledge of the technical parts that constituted polyphonic singing:

1. Pastor: Lett me syng the tenory.
2. Pastor: And I the tryble so hye.
3. Pastor: Then the meyne fallys to me.
(Caw. 48/186-188)

Thereupon Mak interrupts their song with an incantation to God and the exclamation that he is "all vneuen" (Caw. 48/192), and the First Shepherd greets him with the question "Who is that pypys so poore?" (Caw. 48/195). This, from the very first, the language of Mak is associated with bad singing. He is consistently characterized as a noisemaker, one who "makys sich dyn" (Caw. 51/297) or "sich a bere" (i.e. noise; Caw. 54/405) or who "commys with a lote" (another word for "noise"; Caw. 54/409). In turn, he makes the Shepherds break out in "a fowll noyse" and causes them to "cry out apon" him when they discover the loss of their sheep (Caw. 54/429-430). On their arrival at the cottage, they are greeted by Mak singing a "lullay" while Gyll groans and cries "outt by the wall on Mary and Iohn" (Caw. 55/442-443), to which the Shepherds respond as follows:

3. Pastor: Will ye here how they hak? Oure syre lyst croyne.
1. Pastor: Hard I neuer none crak so clear out of toyne.
(Caw. 56/476-477)

There can be little doubt that the farcical plot of the Second Shepherds' play was deliberately meant to emphasize the dissonances of everyday life. The Wakefield author clearly revised the first version of his play to stress disharmony, as is attested alone by the much more diversified onomatopoetic vocabulary for noise. Thus the limited list of such words in the first play (blast, brail, brayde, crak, rafys, and yelp) is expanded to include the following: cry, crok, croyne, grone, mone, bark, blast, blawes, blete, crak, crakyd, ianglyng, kakyls, knakt, pypys, raue, skawde, stamerd, and whystyll, and some of these words are used more than once. Likewise the vocabulary for music is also much expanded in the second play. Where in the first we encounter only such rather common words as syng, song, sang, tonyd, and voce, in the second we find a much richer mix: syng, lullay, note, song, stevyn, pypys, tenory, tryble, meyne, chauntt, brefes, long (note), and whystyll. It is evident that the Wakefield author chose in his second version to emphasize the contrastive languages of noise and music.

With the appearance of the Angel and the singing of the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, a new peaceful tone suggesting solemnity and harmony is struck. The First Shepherd is immediately awed by the beauty of the song: "This was a qwant stevyn that euer yit I hard" (Caw. 60/647). In fact, as JoAnna Dutka has already pointed out [in Music in the English Mystery Plays, Early Drama, Art and Music (EDAM) Reference Series, no. 2, 1980], the Shepherds of the Secunda Pastorum, unlike those of the Prima Pastorum, are impressed especially by the musical complexity of the angelic song; they comment specifically on the division of long notes into notes of smaller value when they observe how the Angel "crakyt it, / Thre brefes to a long" (Caw. 60/656-657), a technical description of a perfect relation between longa and brevis. As I have already observed, the Shepherds in the Secunda Pastorum are themselves musicians capable of rendering polyphonic song. It is thus very much in character for them to try to imitate the Angel and to sing a song likewise "of myrth…withoutt noyse" (Caw. 61/667-669). That they ultimately fail—they can only "bark at the mone" (Caw. 61/662)—is of course simply acknowledgement of their human limitation. But in their act of imitation, they raise to a simple dignity and beauty their own language. The highest secular expression comes at the very end of the play when each of the three Shepherds recites (perhaps even chants) a perfect "hayll"-lyric (710-736). Manfred F. Bukozer reminds us in his chapter, "Popular and Secular Music in England," that there were such things as "popular" sacred compositions [in Ars Nova and the Renaissance, 1300-1540, 1960]. If any verse ever so qualified, it was surely the "hayll"-lyrics of the Secunda Pastorum. What has happened then in the overall progress of the Second Shepherds' play is a wholesale elevation of tone. The most dissonant voices of the secular world have been stilled, and the singers of popular song have been inspired by angelic example to raise their voices in sacred harmony to celebrate the birth of Christ. For the Wakefield author the ultimate interest in the Second Shepherds' play is to elevate the language of his rustics in order that they might find the right tone in which to hail God.

I have attempted to show in this analysis that, largely because of the special slant provided by the Wakefield author as reviser, the Wakefield plays make an important statement about the limits of art. Ironically, when viewed from this angle, the contributions of the Wakefield author must be accepted as deliberately flawed: The very virtuosity of language that gives his stanzas their special flair and distinction hinders communication on the highest level of intercourse. In a sense, the Wakefield stanza is to the simple couplet and quatrain what the Devil is to God: It is at once adversary and servant to the total design. It constantly brings static into the harmony of the cosmos; it cannot refrain from injecting dissonances into the most solemn of occasions. Its liveliness is also its greatest peril. The artist at his best has always been a rival of God; the Wakefield author knows that fact and fights to suppress his awesome challenge. His greatest moment of achievement is to make his stanza subservient to God at the end of the Second Shepherds' play. And yet he comes back again and again in his more accustomed dissident voice, until finally, in the play of the Great Doom he empirically passes judgement upon himself and leaves us to ponder the resonances of eternal salvation and damnation.