Abstract
The precise location for the complete cycle of Mystery plays known generally as the Towneley Cycle is not certain. Unlike the nonlocalised N-Town Cycle, however, there is every indication that the Towneley Cycle was fixed in one town rather than being a touring cycle. The dialect of the plays is quite clearly that of the north-east of England and headings on two of the plays in the cycle, as well as references to local Wakefield places in three others, suggest very strongly indeed that this cycle belonged to the north Yorkshire town of Wakefield.1 That Wakefield was the home of a complete cycle of Corpus Christi plays is evident from a letter from the Church Commissioners in 1576 which, in response to news that ‘in the towne of Wakefeld in Whitsun weke next or therabouts’ there was the intention to play ‘a plaie commonlie called Corpus Christi plaie which hath been heretofore used there’, sets out a firm warning that any material which ‘tende to the maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie or which be contrarie to the lawes of god or of the realme’, in other words to the tenets of the new Protestant state religion, will not be countenanced.
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Notes
Cf. A. C. Cawley, The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle (Manchester, 1958), pp. xiv-xv for precise details of the references to Wakefield contained in the plays.
Cf. ibid., Appendix 1 and Jean Forrester and A. C. Cawley, ‘The Corpus Christi Play of Wakefield: a New Look at the Wakefield Burgess Court Records’, Leeds Studies in English, NS, 7 (1974), 108–16.
Martial Rose in his The Wakefield Mystery Plays (London, 1961), argues for a fixed-stage method of representation. The Wakefield Festival production of the Cycle in 1980, directed by Jane Oakshott, adapted a combination of the two methods by using a series of fixed scaffolds and letting the actors for each individual play ‘process’ from one scaffold to the next.
Cf. Hans-Jürgen Diller, ‘The Craftsmanship of the Wakefield Master’, Anglia Lxxxiii (1965), 271–88, repr. in
Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson (eds), Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual (Chicago and London, 1972), pp. 245–59, for an analysis of the Wakefield Master’s style.
For a full list of the folk-tale analogues to the Mak story cf. Robert C. Cosbey, ‘The Mak Story and its Folklore Analogues’, Speculum, xx (1945), 310–17.
A. C. Cawley, The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, Prima Pastorum 11. 60–3; Cawley, Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays, Secunda Pastorum 11. 15–18, 37–45.
Cf. V. J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1971), p. 360. Cf. also
R.H. Robbins, Historical Poems of the XIVth and XVth Centuries (New York, 1959), p. 147 for a fifteenth-century poem which is very similar to the Prima Pastorum Shepherd’s complaint.
Cf. John Speirs, ‘The Mystery Cycle (I) Some Towneley Cycle Plays’, Scrutiny xviii (1951–2), 86–117.
The first quotation is from the Chester Shepherds Play (11. 250–1) and the second from the Netley Abbey Mummers’ Play, printed in Alan Brody, The English Mummers and their Plays (London, 1970), pp. 131–6, esp. p. 132. For other instances of folk drama borrowings in the Mystery plays, cf.
Richard Axton, European Drama of the Early Middle Ages (London, 1974), pp. 38–9,175–82.
Interludium de Clerico et Puella printed in J. A. W. Bennett and G. V. Smithers (eds), Early Middle English Verse and Prose (Oxford, 1966/1974), pp. 196–200. Cf. also Axton, European Drama p. 21.
Cf. Homer A. Watt, ‘The Dramatic Unity of theSecunda Pastorum’, in Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York, 1940), pp. 158–66 and
F. J. Thompson, ‘Unity in The Second Shepherds’ Tale’, Modern Language Notes LXIV (1949), 302–6 for further discussion of the parallels in the two sections of the play.
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© 1991 Christine Richardson and Jackie Johnston
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Richardson, C., Johnston, J. (1991). Towneley-Wakefield ‘Secunda Pastorum’. In: Medieval Drama. English Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21180-7_4
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