One of four surviving manuscripts containing collections
of MYSTERY PLAYS—short plays or “pageants”
relating the salvation history of humankind
from the Creation of the world through Doomsday—
is the late 15th-century Huntington MS.HM
1, better known as the Towneley manuscript. The
manuscript is named for the Towneley family who
owned it from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and
its history prior to that is unknown. The collection
was once called the Wakefield Cycle in the belief
that it comprised a cycle of plays performed for
the CORPUS CHRISTI festival in the West Riding
town of Wakefield in Yorkshire, but there are serious
questions that make that connection unlikely:
Wakefield was too small to have had a guild structure
that would have supported a full-scale Corpus
Christi pageant like the nearby YORK CYCLE—a festival
in which individual craft guilds supported the
production of specific plays each year.
One area of scholarly discussion concerning
these plays is where and under what circumstances
they were performed. There are a few references in
the town records of Wakefield from the late 16th
century suggesting that plays were regularly performed
in Wakefield that were associated with Corpus
Christi, but it is not clear that these were the
plays in question, or that an entire cycle was performed
there. Some scholars completely reject the
idea that the Towneley plays were performed as a
complete cycle by local townspeople at the feast of
Corpus Christi. Others say that there is really not
enough evidence to say for sure one way or another.
It seems clear that the Towneley plays could not
have been performed on pageant wagons of the
sort used to stage the plays in the streets of York.Although
the manuscript lacks stage directions, some
of the plays obviously would have needed a larger
acting space, or two or three playing areas, in order
to be performed. The Cain and Abel play, for instance,
would need a plow and a team to pull it. The
SECOND SHEPHERDS’ PLAY would have needed three
separate acting areas—the heath for the shepherds,
Mak’s house, and the stable of the nativity.
Certainly some plays may be associated with
Wakefield: The name Wakefield is written at the beginning
of two plays in the manuscript, which may
in fact indicate that they originated or were intended
for an acting troupe from Wakefield. The
dialect of the plays indicates specifically that they
were performed in West Riding in Yorkshire. But
the manuscript lacks the kind of thematic and stylistic
unity characteristic of the York Cycle or the
CHESTER CYCLE. Five of the plays are direct borrowings
from the York Cycle: the play of the Exodus
from Egypt, Jesus and the Doctors in the Temple,
the Harrowing of Hell, the Resurrection, and the
fragmentary Last Judgment play. Two other Towneley
plays are revised versions of York pageants. Thus
it appears that the plays were collected from various
sources rather than composed as a single unit, in a
manner more reminiscent of the N-TOWN PLAYS. It
has been suggested that the Towneley manuscript is
a compilation of “clerks’ plays” from which a troupe
might choose individual plays or pageants for production,
a practice that is known to have occurred
in the Netherlands (Davidson 1994, 433).
The chief genius behind the most admired plays
in the collection is still generally called the Wakefield
Master. Of the 32 pageants contained in the
extant manuscript, the Wakefield Master is the author
of six, and seems to have had a hand in revising
two of the borrowed York pageants, as well as
four other plays. The Wakefield Master is known to
have been a clergyman because of his in-depth
knowledge of religious matters, and he may have
written specifically for a skillful troupe of amateur
Wakefield actors. He can be identified by his characteristic
use of a nine-line stanza rhyming
aaaabcccb, in which the first four long lines rhyme,
and the fifth line is a “bob” or short three-syllable
line leading to a “wheel” of shorter lines at the end.
The fact that the long opening lines contain internal
rhyme as well leads some modern editors to
print the verses as 13-line stanzas, rhyming
ababababcdddc. Other characteristics of the Wakefield
Master’s style include an extensive and varied
vocabulary, an interest in characters as individuals
rather than as types, a bent for social criticism, and
a sense of comedy that appears particularly in his
most famous composition, the Second Shepherds’
Play. This comic tale of the sheep-stealing Mak and
the three disgruntled shepherds on the eve of
Christ’s nativity is the most popular and anthologized of all medieval mystery plays, and deservedly
so. But the Wakefield Master’s other plays are also
of interest: He also wrote the Towneley versions of
the Mactatio Abel (the Cain and Abel play), Prcessus
Noe cum Filiis (the play of Noah and the flood),
Prima Pastorum (the first shepherds’ play),Magnus
Herodes (Herod the Great and the Slaughter of the
Innocents), and Coliphizacio (the buffeting).
It may be that the Wakefield Master’s plays
formed a core around which a later compiler assembled
the group of pageants from a variety of
sources. However, since none of the Wakefield
Master’s plays have been revised or altered in any
way, it may be that he himself made the last revision
of the entire cycle. However, the manuscript
was definitely marred later by Protestant reformers
determined to eradicate aspects of the pageants
that most clearly reflected their Roman Catholic
origins. Thus a number of leaves are missing from
the manuscript, including sections both before and
after the Doomsday pageant that it is believed contained
plays of the Assumption and the Coronation
of the Virgin.Whether those kinds of changes
were made in the manuscript after the English Reformation
to allow the continued performance of
the plays (as certain “corrective” marginal notes
suggest), or were made later by a zealot trying to
cleanse the manuscript of its doctrinal impurities,
is difficult to say. In either case, mystery plays in
general disappeared from English town life during
Elizabeth’s reign, relics of England’s Catholic past.
Bibliography
Davidson, Clifford. “Jest and Earnest: Comedy in the
Work of the Wakefield Master,” Annuale Mediaevale
22 (1982): 65–83.
Helterman, Jeffrey. Symbolic Action in the Plays of the
Wakefield Master. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1981.
Johnston, Alexandra F. “Evil in the Towneley Cycle.”
In Evil on the Medieval Stage, edited by Meg
Twycross, 94–103. Lancaster, U.K.: Medieval English
Theatre, 1992.
Meredith, Peter. “The Towneley Cycle.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Medieval English Theatre, edited
by Richard Beadle, 134–162. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Meyers, Walter E. A Figure Given: Typology in the
Wakefield Plays. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1968.
Palmer, Barbara D. “ ‘Towneley Plays’ or ‘Wakefield
Cycle’ Revisited,” Comparative Drama 21 (1988):
318–348.
Rose, Martial, trans. The Wakefield Mystery Plays.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962.
Stevens, Martin. “The Missing Parts of the Towneley
Cycle,” Speculum 45 (1970): 254–265.
The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle. Edited
by A.C. Cawley. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester
University Press, 1958.