The York cycle affords very few situations ministering to the humour of the incidental. Such as are of that character must be assigned to more than one period of composition; none, however, is to be found in the plays which, according to philological tests, belong to the formative stage of the cycle. This is but usual, for while the pageants were illustrating only the more important events of the church calendar, and were still reminiscent of their ecclesiastical origin, opportunity for ludicrous situations was limited: we find a touch of nature here and there perhaps; but not more.

All approaches to the comic in the plays of York—the abusive behaviour of Cain, the quarrel between Noah and his wife, the attempt of the shepherds to mimic the angelic choir, the beadle's intrusion upon the loves of Pilate and Percula, the effort of Herod and his sons "to have gaudis full goode and games or we go" with the prisoner brought to trial, and the failure of their bluster, threats, and shouting, to "gete one worde" out of him—may be safely attributed to schools, or periods, of composition which we shall style the middle and the later. A comparative study of the versification, phraseology, and occasion of these passages leads me, moreover, to the conclusion that the original comic parts of the Sacrificium of Cayme and Abell, of the Noe and His Wife, and of the Shepherds, are of a humorous master of what we may call the middle period.

The Beadle and Herod episodes are of the later school and are realistic. They occur in the Dream of Pilate's Wife and the Trial before Herod—plays which themselves form the core of a group of six that in literary style, conversational method, dramatic action and technique, might very well be the work of one individual. These six are XXVI, The Conspiracy to Take Jesus; XXVIII, The Agony and Betrayal; XXIX, Peter's Denial; Jesus before Caiaphas; XXX, Pilate's Wife, etc; XXXI, Herod; XXXIII, Second Trial before Pilate Continued, and probably XXXII, Purchase of the Field of Blood. The subjects are such as might reasonably have been used for an expansion of the cycle to accommodate the increasing number of guilds in York, at a time after the more important and obvious religious events had been dramatised. The materials are practically the same for these six plays, and are subjected in each case to the same free handling. The somewhat alliterative, experimental tendency of versification marks them all. Not only are the experimental or transitional stanzaic forms of this group of plays, the excessive alliteration, the substitution of anapasstic ease and rapidity for the regular beat and stiffer movement, indications of a later date, but the style itself is that of a different author, or school, retaining the facile idiom of the earlier days, but substituting for the old-fashioned humour an attempt at realistic portrayal of life, and for the homespun wit a bombast and abuse which, though idiomatic, are sometimes wearisome. The bombast is chiefly from the mouths of Pilate and Herod. The realism and other such advance in dramatic technique leap to the eye in the conduct of Caiaphas and Annas, their cunning, their virulence, their knowledge of the shady side of contract law; in the careful portraiture of Judas, who "wolde make a merchaundyse with the high priests their myscheffe to marre"; of his shifts for gain, his remorse when the triumph gutters; in the grim humour of the Janitor (the precursor of Shakespeare's Porter of hell-gate),—his reply to the arch-conspirator applying for admission, "Thy glyfftyng is so grimly thou gars my harte growe," … "thou lokist like a lurdane his liffelod hadde lost," and his description of him to the "Dukes":

A hyne helte-full of ire, for hasty he is…
I kenne hym noght, but he is cladde in a cope
He cares with a kene face uncomely to kys;—

in the common sense of the beadle in the Dream who, knowing literally the laws, would send the lady home, ere "the day waxe ought dymme,"

For scho may stakir in the strete,
But scho stalworthely stande;
Late hir take hir leve while that light is;

in the curtain side of Pilate and his lady; in the discriminate drawing of women from Percula and her maid down to the Mulier who detects Peter and taunts him with falsehood:

Itt were grete skorne that he schulde skape, …
Wayte nowe, he lokis like a brokke,
Were he in a bande for to bayte;
Or ellis like a nowele in a stok,
Full prevaly his pray for to wayte,

and Peter's plea that her accusation be rejected,—

For women are crabbed, that comes them of kynde;

in the vivid brutality of the soldiers, the minute and horrible detail of their conversation, the quick retort and apt, the picturesque phrase, the elaborate dramatic dialogue, sometimes long-winded, to be sure; in the unconscious but skilful distinction between characters somewhat similar, Caiaphas, Annas, Pilate, Herod, and the control of supernumeraries; in the interplay of the pathetic, the wonderful, and the fearful; in the accumulation of scenes within the act, and the frequent use of dramatic surprise. These and other features of the kind characterise the York school of realism. So peculiar and at the same time uniform is the technique that its interpolation may be detected in plays not characterised by the transitional and elaborate verse structure of the group, but written in an earlier ecclesiastical stanza; and even at times in plays marked by the typical twelve-line septenar stanza of the parent cycle. Wherever the York realist has inserted, elaborated, revised, or recast, he has left his unquestionable mark, though side by side with passages just as undoubtedly of earlier date.

But if these six or seven Pilate and Herod plays are to be attributed to one author, then that author is more or less responsible also for three other plays, XXXVI-XXXVIII, the Mortificacio, the Harrowing, and the Resurrection. For in two of the former group, Pilate's Wife and the Second Trial, he has quoted from memory and adapted to the stanzaic form portions of a northern middle English Gospel of Nicodemus. Other passages from this metrical Gospel are in like fashion incorporated in the Mortificacio, Harrowing, and Resurrection. No other plays in this or other cycles utilise the metrical version of the Nicodemus; and the adaptations here are of such a kind as to preclude the possibility of their insertion by ordinary copyists from the original text. The Mortificacio (XXXVI) with its elaborate and unique stanza is an original production substituted by our playwright for some older play. The Harrowing and the Resurrection (XXXVII, XXXVIII) are survivals, in earlier stanzaic form, which he has remodelled. If we assume, and not without reason, that he also retouched the Christ Led up' to Calvary (XXXIV) and the Crucifixion (XXXV), we may regard him as the Passion Playwright of York. For only one play of the series beginning with the Conspiracy (XXVI) and ending with the Resurrection (XXXVIII) evidently lacks his influence; and that is the Last Supper (XXVII),—one of the pageants of the original didactic stage of the cycle.

The longer one studies these York plays, the more is one persuaded that not only were there three York periods or schools, but that there was at least one playwright in each of the latter two who distinctly contributed to the development of English drama. A playwright of the middle period, to which belong Caym, Noe and His Wife, and The Angels and Shepherds, is characterised by an unsophisticated humour; the distinctive playwright of the later or realistic period is marked by his observation of life, his reproduction of manners, his dialogue, and the plasticity of his technique: whether in presentation of the comic, or of the tragic and horrible, aspect of his narrative.

That the later school or period was influenced by the manner of its predecessor is further indicated by the fact that of its two most efficient stanzaic forms, one, namely, that used in the Conspiracy, is anticipated (though in simpler iambic beat) by that of Noe, the typical play of the middle period, the school of humours, while the other, the stanzaic form, of which variants are found in The Mortiflcacio and The Second Trial, has its germ probably in The Cayme of that same middle period.

The rhyme-scheme of the Noe is a b a b a b a b₄ c₃ d₃ c₄ c₄ c₄ d₃ in iambs varied with anapæsts, thus:

The rhyme-scheme of the Conspiracy of the Realistic school is the same; but the octave is in septenars, and the triplet c c c is in trimeters.

The rhyme-scheme of the other perfected stanza of the realistic York school, as seen in the Mortiflcacio, a b a b b c b c₃ d₁ e e e₂ d₃, is merely an expansion of that of the Caym of the earlier school, which runs thus, in iambics, a b a b b c₄ d₁ b c c₄ d₂:

The Mortiflcacio makes a quatrain out of the first b c, rhymes the triplet, and slides into anapæsts; and so doing prepares not only the best stanzaic instrument of the York realistic school, but at the same time the prototype of the brightest, wittiest, and most effective verse-form of the finest plays of the neighbouring town of Wakefield.

With these two stanzaic forms the realistic school, so far as we may conclude from the mutilated condition of surviving plays, seems to experiment; and the second of them, that of the Mortificacio, may be regarded as the final and distinctive outcome of York versification. To the leading playwrights of each of these schools, the former the best humourist, the latter the best realist of the York drama,—to these anonymous composers of the most facile and vivid portions of the York cycle, our comedy owes a still further debt; for from them it would appear that a poet of undoubted genius derived something of his inspiration and much of his method and technique,—our first great comic dramatist, the anonymous Player-Clerk of Wakefield.