The Second Shepherds’ Play is the best known and
most highly regarded of the popular MYSTERY PLAYS
of medieval England. The play is one of several in
the TOWNELEY CYCLE (associated with the town of
Wakefield in Yorkshire) written by an anonymous
artist known as the “Wakefield Master,” whose
plays are identifiable by their use of a 13-line
stanza rhyming ababababcdddc. The Second Shepherds’
Play, so named because it is the second play
in the Towneley Cycle concerning the Nativity, is
unusual among mystery plays in the complexity of
its comic subplot and its development of character.
Particularly notable is the character of the sheepstealing
Mak, one of the great comic characters of
medieval theater.
The play opens on the night of Christ’s birth.
A shepherd enters and complains about the
weather, sounding remarkably like an English
shepherd from the Yorkshire moors. He continues
to complain about injustices in the social
order. He is joined by a second shepherd who also
grumbles about the weather and then moans
about his relationship with his wife. A third shepherd,
an employee of the others, continues the
grousing about the weather, but goes on to complain
about his relationship with his employers.
Ultimately the three shepherds assuage their sorrows
by singing a song in three-part harmony—a
musical resolution of the earlier discord. Thus the
reconciliation of the shepherds to their human relationships
at the beginning of the play prefigures
the reconciliation of the world to God through the
birth of his Son.
At the close of the song, Mak enters. His reputation
as a thief makes the shepherds disinclined to
trust him, but when he tells them he is hungry and
not welcome at home, the shepherds relent and
allow Mak to spend the night with them. Mak
waits until the shepherds fall asleep, then rises,
steals one of their ewes, and takes it home to his
wife, Gill. He returns to the shepherds’ camp before
they awake to avoid suspicion.
In the morning Mak awakes with the shepherds
and takes his leave. At that point they notice the
missing sheep, and visit Mak’s house to look for
the sheep. Gill pretends that she has delivered a
child that night, so that she and Mak can disguise
the ewe as a child and hide it in a cradle. Having
found no sign of their ewe, the shepherds apologize
and leave, but they remember the new baby,
and decide they should present the child with gifts.
When they return and discover the sheep hidden
in the cradle, Mak and Gill try to brazen it out,
swearing that some elf must have altered the
child’s appearance. The shepherds, forgoing any
more severe punishment, decide to let Mak off
with a simple blanket-tossing, and they leave with
their sheep.
It is doubtless that the shepherd’s acts of basic
human charity—their allowing Mak to spend the
night with them, their desire to present the baby
with gifts, and their forgiveness of Mak for his
theft—are what make them worthy recipients of
the angelic message. And that message comes immediately
after the shepherds finish with Mak. An
angel directs them to the Christ child, and when
they arrive in Bethlehem, they find the child with
Mary in the stable. The first shepherd gives the
baby a bob of cherries; the second gives him a
small bird to play with; the third offers a ball, saying
he hopes the baby will grow up to play tennis.
The play ends as the shepherds sing another song.
At first glance it seems that the actual story of
Christ’s nativity is merely an afterthought appended
to the comic “subplot” of Mak and the
sheep, which is four times as long. But it is not difficult
to see the parallel between the stolen sheep in
Mak’s cradle and the Lamb of God in Mary’s
manger. Aside from inviting us to compare the
fallen world of the first part of the play (a world
whose anachronistic shepherds make it very much
like the contemporary world of the audience) with
the restored world of Christ’s nativity, the shepherds’
charity demonstrates the appropriate frame
of mind necessary for human beings to accept
God’s grace.
Bibliography
Gardner, John. The Construction of the Wakefield Cycle.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1971.
Meredith, Peter. “The Towneley Cycle,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited
by Richard Beadle. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994, 134–162.
Stevens, Martin. “Language as Theme in the Wakefield
Plays,” Speculum 52 (1977): 100–117.
Stevens,Martin, and A. C. Cawley, eds. The Towneley
Plays. 2 vols. Oxford: Published for the Early English
Text Society by the Oxford University Press, 1994.