Wakefield Mystery Plays

The Wakefield or Towneley Mystery Plays are a series of thirty-two mystery plays based on the Bible most likely performed around Corpus Christi day in (again, most likely) the town of Wakefield, England during the late Middle Ages until 1576. It is one of only four surviving English mystery play cycles.

The unique manuscript, now housed at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California, originated in the mid-fifteenth century. The manuscript came into the possession of the Towneley family in 1814, who lent their name it. Although almost the entire manuscript is in a fifteenth-century hand, the cycle was performed as early as the fourteenth century in an earlier form.

The Wakefield Cycle is most renowned for the inclusion of "The Second Shepherds' Play," one of the jewels of medieval theatre.

Authorship

The cycle is the work of undoubtedly multiple authors over the course of approximately two centuries. In fact, some plays are shared with nearby York Cycle. However, the most notable plays (including) "The Second Shepherd's Play" were written by an anonymous author dubbed the Wakefield Master, who also wrote "Noah," "The First Shepherds' Play," "Herod the Great," and "The Buffeting," and may have revised "The Killing of Abel."

The term "Wakefield Master" emerged from a need to distinguish certain brilliant material in Towneley from a great mass of unexceptional material, and was first coined by Charles Mills Gayley. In 1903, Gayley and Alwin Thaler published an anthology of criticism and dramatic selections entitled "Representative English Comedies". It had long been believed that the Towneley Play was a mediocre work that showed extensive borrowing from other sources but containing vibrant and exciting material, apparently by one author, who was responsible for four or five complete pageants and extensive revisions. Gayley refers to this person as the "master" (with a lowercase "m") in the book. Then in a 1907 article, Gayley emended this to "The Wakefield Master," the name which is still frequently used.

Literary critics found several features of Towneley worthy of interest. These features seemed to suggest an author of original poetic gifts, and came to be regarded as the marks of the Wakefield Master's hand.

The most obvious of these characteristics is that several of the pageants use a distinctive stanza, sometimes called the Wakefield Stanza, of which more information is found below. The same pageants that manifest the Wakefield Stanza are often noted for their comedy, social satire, and intense psychological realism. These qualities also show up throughout the Towneley Cycle, most often where it seems to depart from its presumed sources.

Some question the existence of one "Wakefield Master," and propose that multiple authors could have written in the Wakefield Stanza. However, scholars and literary critics find it useful to hypothesize a single talent behind them, due to the unique poetic qualities of the works ascribed to him.

taging

There is widespread disagreement among scholars concerning the staging of the Wakefield Cycle, and of mystery plays in general. It is known that the cycle at York was staged on mobile wagons that moved from place to place in the city, with multiple plays being staged simultaneously in different locales in the city. However, there is disagreement as to whether the Wakefield plays were performed in a similar manner.

One problem is that the population of Wakefield in 1377 (approximately the date of the first performance of the cycle) consisted of 567 people aged sixteen or older. Assuming that half of these were male, that leaves only about 280 men to play the 243 roles in the plays. This leaves many to believe that multiple plays were performed by the same cast during most of the lifetime of the cycle.

Another way in which the Wakefield cycle differed in its staging from other cycles is that lack of association with the guilds. In other towns (such as York and Coventry) certain plays were staged by various guilds, according to their specialty (such as the shipwrights staging the Noah play). Although the names of four guilds are found on the manuscript (the barkers, glovers, litsters, and fishers), they are found in a later hand than most of the manuscript. This has led some to believe that for its entire lifetime, the Wakefield Cycle was sponsored and produced by other associations, either governmental or religious. Either way, it was surely performed by non-professional actors found in the community, as were all the cycles.

Wakefield Stanza

The most notable poetic innovation in the manuscript is called the Wakefield Stanza, which is found in the Noah play, two shepherds play, the Herod play, and the Buffeting of Christ pageant. This unique characteristic may be described as:

-- A nine-line stanza containing one quatrain with internal rhyme and a tail-rhymed cauda, rhyming AAAABCCCB; or

-- A thirteen-line stanza containing a cross-rhymed octet frons, a tercet cauda with tail-rhymes, the whole rhyming ABABABABCDDDC.

The former description was based upon the earliest editions of the play that, following the space-saving habits of the medieval scribe, often wrote two verse-lines on a single manuscript line. Thus, depending upon how one interprets the manuscript, a stanza (from the Noah pageant) might appear in either of the following forms:

The thryd tyme wille I prufe what depnes we bere Now long shalle thou hufe, lay in thy lyne there. I may towch with my hufe the grownd evyn here. Then begynnys to grufe to us mery chere; Bot, husband, What grownd may this be? The hyllys of Armonye. Now blissid be he That thus for us can ordand.

The thryd tyme wille I prufe what depnes we bere Now long shalle thou hufe, lay in thy lyne there. I may towch with my hufe the grownd evyn here. Then begynnys to grufe to us mery chere; Bot, husband, What grownd may this be? The hyllys of Armonye. Now blissid be he That thus for us can ordand.(It should be noted that all the punctuation and indentations are editorial and not part of the original manuscript.)

In the first case above, the first four lines contain internal rhyme (i.e., "prufe," "hufe," "hufe," and "grufe"); but the second example arranges the same verses in shorter lines, which in the manuscript are separated from one another by apparently random use of the obelus (÷), virgules [/] , double-virgules [//] , and line-breaks. In the second example, it is readily seen that the poet uses a cross-rhymed octet frons with a five-line tail-rhymed cauda. It is this innovative use of the cauda that is most distinctive in the stanza.

There is some disagreement over whether the Wakefield Stanza is a 9 line or a 13 line. Owing largely to A. C. Cawley's 1957 edition of five of the pageants, and to others' arrangement of the manuscript lines, this is sometimes thought to be a nine-line stanza, with the quatrain containing internal rhyme. This view predominated in the critical literature until the late twentieth century, and has fallen out of favor. When Cawley himself edited the entire cycle with Martin Stevens for publication in 1994, the two opted to present the lines as a thirteen-line stanza. In any case, the number of syllables in the lines is variable, and the number of stressed syllables can usually be counted at two or three per line in the thirteen-line version.

Since the Towneley Play was a drama and therefore spoken rather than read silently, to some degree this presentation of the poetic units in graphical form is somewhat arbitrary and inconsequential. But it does provide insights into the poetic influences and innovations of the Wakefield Master.

Protestant Censorship

In its later performances, the cycle was subject to censorship by the Protestant authorities before being discontinued completely. The play about John the Baptist had been "corrected" to conform to Protestant doctrines about the sacraments. The word "pope" was excised from "Herod the Great," and twelve leaves are completely missing, which scholars suspect contained plays about the death, assumption, and coronation of the Virgin Mary.

ources of the plays

The majority of the plays that make up the Wakefield Cycle are based (some rather tenuously) on the Bible, while the others are taken from either Roman Catholic or folk tradition.

#The Creation myth
#The Killing of Abel
#Noah
#Abraham
#Isaac
#Jacob
#Pharaoh (the Exodus)
#The Procession of the Prophets
#Caesar Augustus
#The Annunciation
#The Salutation of Elizabeth
#The First Shepherds' Play
#The Second Shepherds' Play
#The Offering of the Magi
#The Flight into Egypt
#Herod the Great
#The Purification of Mary
#The Play of the Doctors
#John the Baptist
#Lazarus
#The Conspiracy
#The Buffeting
#The Scourging
#The Hanging of Judas
#The Crucifixion
#The Talents
#The Deliverance of Souls
#The Resurrection
#The Pilgrims
#Thomas of India
#The Ascension of the Lord
#The Judgement

ources

Rose, Martial. (1963). "An Introduction to the Wakefield Plays," in "The Wakefield Mystery Plays," Anchor Books.

External links