re-editing towneley

Re-editing TowneleyGARRETT P. J. EPP

University of Alberta

Once upon a time, all too long ago, I was asked to produce a new student-oriented edition of the Towneley plays for the TEAMS Medieval English TextsSeries. I promptly agreed, thinking that I knew what I was getting myself into.I had, after all, served as Artistic Director for the 1985 Poculi Ludique Societasproduction in Toronto, as a graduate student, and had later published anarticle on the plays as a ‘pseudocycle’ compiled for reading rather than for, oras a result of, performance. And I had just given an update on that latter topicas part of a well-attended session on ‘The Towneley Plays Revisited’ at the 37thInternational Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo.1 I thought I knewthese plays, and the problems they posed for an editor. I knew I needed tobrush up my palaeographic skills in order to do the best possible job. And Iexpected a little controversy, given that my assumptions regarding the purposeand origin of the manuscript and its contents were at odds with received tradition regarding the plays, and with the standard scholarly edition, preparedby Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley for the Early English Text Society.2However, I did not expect to do battle with myself over issues of form andeditorial policy and assumptions, even in relation to this often problematictext. Nor did I expect to move into fulltime academic administration and effec-tively abandon my varied research projects for close to a decade, but that isanother matter; the edition remains a work in progress, making this a progressreport of a sort.

1 Epp, ‘The Towneley Plays, or, The Hazards of Cycling’, Research Opportunities inRenaissance Drama, 32 (1993), 121–50; and ‘Towneley: Recycled’, 37th International Congresson Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI, May 2002. See also Epp, ‘“Corected & not playd”: AnUnproductive History of the Towneley Plays’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 43(2004), 38–53.

2 The Towneley Plays, EETS S. S. 13, 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). This editionreplaced the earlier EETS volume, The Towneley Plays, ed. by George England and A. W. Pollard,EETS E. S. 71 (London: Oxford University Press, 1897), which was based not on the manuscripttext but on its predecessor, The Towneley Mysteries, ed. by James Gordon and Joseph Hunter(London: Surtees Society, 1836). Cawley and Stevens also edited The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimileof Huntington MS HM (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1976). Unless otherwise noted,reference to the plays in this article is to the Stevens and Cawley edition and given parenthetically.

Yearbook of English Studies, 43 (2013), 87–104© Modern Humanities Research Association 2013

The issues started in a minor way, as I dealt with apparently innocuousmatters such as orthography. METS policy demanded specific minor modifica-tions to the original manuscript spellings, including the addition of an accentover the pronounced final e of words such as ‘charité’ and of an extra final ewhere necessary to distinguish between ‘the’ and ‘thee;’ the verb ‘the’ — ‘tothrive’ — became ‘thé.’ Such matters rarely demanded much if any delibera-tion. Policy also unsurprisingly demanded capitalization of proper names andat the beginning of lines of verse, in accordance with modern convention.Stevens and Cawley had done that much for their fine edition, so I thought Ineed only follow their example; had I used their edition as my base text, Imight well have done just that. However, for my initial base text I had used theearlier EETS edition, simply because that text was available electronically. Thatedition followed the manuscript relatively closely, adding little more thanpunctuation and stanza breaks — an approach with which I was highlycomfortable, if only because it appeared to limit the editorial decision-makingprocess. Querying or complaining about the decisions of others of course tendsto be far easier and more enjoyable than making any. However, in part due tomy questioning all too many previous editorial decisions, I ended up workingextensively with the manuscript itself, at the Huntington Library in SanMarino, California, to establish the text that would form the basis of theeventual METS edition. Such work ultimately forced further decision-making.

In successive graduate and undergraduate classes I had discussed the use ofparticular titles and expressions whose fruitful ambiguity was often masked forreaders (but not theatre audiences) by capitalization. For instance, capitalizingan expression of declaration such as ‘mary’, in the mouth of a shepherd aston-ished at an angel’s song, might usefully demonstrate both the word’s origin asan oath ‘by Mary’ and also the use of anachronism in the plays — this shepherdhas not yet met Mary, the virgin mother — but it also separates that word fromthe relatively familiar, uncapitalized and seemingly secular ‘marry’ of manylater texts, including the plays of Shakespeare. More obviously religious termspose a slightly different problem. Capitalizing ‘God’ when used as a nameseems obvious and uncontroversial, but what of about possessive phrases suchas Jesus’ cry from the cross, ‘My God, my God, wherfor and why | Has thouforsakyn me?’ (23. 637). Stevens and Cawley capitalize this as modern religiousconvention demands (unlike the original scribe, who only capitalizes ‘god’where it is the first word in a line); were the same line put into the mouth of apagan, should it still be capitalized? Villains in Towneley, as in many Englishbiblical plays, refer frequently to ‘Mahowne’ as a god. When Caesar Augustusswears ‘by Mahowne, God all-weldand’ (9. 226), is ‘God’ a name, as Stevensand Cawley imply through capitalization, or merely a descriptor, distinguish-ing the (false) god from the mere human messenger that he addresses?

88 Re-editing Towneley

Another religious title is even more problematic: capitalizing ‘Lord’ whenthe word refers to Jesus but not when it refers to a secular leader erases or atleast obscures a political metaphor of importance both to medieval and tobiblical societies: for most modern readers, ‘Lord’ — capitalized — can meanonly one thing, one ‘God’, although for an increasing number of modernstudents this capitalization is merely another source of confusion in an alreadyobscure text. Nor is it always easy to decide in particular cases whether or notthe modern religious convention applies. In the Herod play, a woman facingthe soldier who is about to kill her child cries out, ‘Mercy, lord’ (16. 506–07);does she here address the soldier, or God? The absence of capitalization in theStevens and Cawley text effectively restricts the reader to the first possibility.Stevens and Cawley are more simply inconsistent when it comes to the thirdperson of the trinity: ‘holy gost’ (in various spellings) is capitalized throughoutthree plays — Noah (3. 234), the Annunciation (10. 126, 353), and theAscension (29. 15, 34, 183, 277) — and in two of four instances in the Thomasplay; Jesus blesses the food ‘In the Fader name and the Son | And the HolyGost’, and within the same long speech refers to ‘The grace of the holy gost’(28193–94, 233; see also 107 and 345). A student edition in particulardemands consistency, but editorial consistency can also obscure interestinginconsistencies in the original.

While some of the requisite marginal glossing and other annotation haveproven relatively easy, a surprising number of passages and individual termsspawned major research projects of their own. This was the case with the ‘goodayll of Hely’ mentioned in the first of Towneley’s two Shepherds plays(12. 352). In the notes to their edition, Stevens and Cawley assert that

Hely (MS hely) is no doubt a place name; cf. ‘ale of Halton’ in the ChesterShepherds’ play, 7/117. It has usually been identified as Ely in Cambridgeshire,but it is more likely to be ‘Healey’ in the West Riding of Yorkshire, possibly thetownship of this name lying between Ossett and Horbury, about four milessouth-west of Wakefield.3

To my surprise, I have found no reference to this particular township prior tothe rise of the mills in the area in the eighteenth century. Other Healeysabound, but none appears to have any apparent association with ‘Good holsomayll’ as in the play. However, the point is moot; as I eventually discovered, afourteenth-century ‘List of English Towns’ published already in 1901 explicitlyassociates Ely, Cambridgeshire, with ‘Ceruyse’ — that is, ale.4 This realizationmade me doubt other annotations, including other apparent place names.

garrett p. j. epp 89

3 Stevens and Cawley, p. 448, n. 352.4 C. Bonnier, ‘List of English Towns in the Fourteenth Century’, English Historical Review, 16

(1901), 501–03 (p. 502), lines 71–73.

A little over halfway through the second and more famous of the Shepherdsplays, one shepherd announces that a sheep is missing: ‘A fat wedir haue welorne’ (13. 651), the primus pastor tells the other two. When asked ‘Who shulddo vs that skorne’ he replies,

Som shrewe.I haue soght with my dogysAll horbery shrogys,And of xv hogysFond I bot oone ewe. (13. 655–59)

I have quoted these lines from the Stevens and Cawley edition but with onesignificant alteration. There, as in other modern editions, ‘Horbery’ is capital-ized. As Stevens and Cawley explain, Horbury is ‘a town some three milessouth-west of Wakefield;’ they also note that ‘In the fifteenth century there wasa chapelry of Wakefield Parish Church at Horbury’ (p. 506, n. 657). They thendirect the reader to other works that explain ‘shrogs’ and its particular connec-tion to Horbury. However, they do not explain why this shepherd would besearching the Horbury area in particular, especially having awakened only afew stanzas earlier from a dream in which, as he says, ‘I thoght that we layd vs| Full nere Yngland’ (pp. 510–11). That is, he is ostensibly not in England, andthus not in or near Horbury.

Nor of course does the shepherd ostensibly occupy the same chronologicalperiod as is his audience, although this does not stop him or his companionsfrom referring to various Christian saints or to ‘Crystys cross’ (p. 170) prior tothe revelation of the birth of Christ that ends the play. Anachronism is acommon and frequently discussed feature of medieval biblical drama, bril-liantly tying together biblical past and medieval present. If this particular playwas written to be performed on its own rather as part of any sequential ‘cycle’performance, as is often argued (if only because its unique, unbiblical subplotmakes this Shepherds play seem more out of place than the other, as furtherdiscussed below), the anachronism would have gone a long way towarddisarming an audience into thinking initially that they were indeed watching acomic representation of shepherds, from somewhere in the contemporaryworld, and a clever couple who attempt to steal and hide a sheep — that samemissing ‘wedir’, which they disguise as a baby — until an angel bursts into songand changes everything. Suddenly, retrospectively, new significance is given tothe thieving Mak’s story of the birth ‘Of a yong lad | For to mend oure flok’(559–60) and to his wife Gyll’s subsequent oath to the shepherds:

I pray to God so mylde,If euer I you begyld,That I ete this chyldeThat lygys in this credyll. (13. 773–76)


The vision of the swaddled sheep in a cradle is soon replaced by one of theLamb of God, whose flesh is consumed whenever mass is said, laid ‘In a crybfull poorely’ (13. 931) — very likely the same crib that the sheep had justoccupied with the Mother of God being played by the same actor just seen asGyll.

This is all critical commonplace, but so are assumptions regarding the placeof origin and performance for this play, and some at least are clearly false.Extensive searching uncovered no other Horbury or Horbery as a place name,but did turn up some interesting lexical items. I now think it possible that‘horbery’ is a variation (or mistranscription, perhaps even by a Wakefieldscribe) of the northern word for shelter, harboury, and that the shrogs or brushwhere sheep take cover are the equivalent of what poet Gavin Douglas in histranslation of the Aeneid called ‘ane tender herbry place’, according to theOED citation. Still, I have doubts, both of that possible gloss and of its purposeand effect. To what extent should an editor, particularly in a student-orientededition, question established views or propose radical possibility? My owntendency as an instructor has long been to promote doubt and criticalthinking, although this is not always a popular or successful strategy withstudents. And I have long argued that the Towneley text is ripe for reinterpre-tation, freed from the assumptions of sequential performance at a particularplace or time.

The Towneley Plays, of course, resemble the Creation to Doomsday cyclesof Chester and York in their basic ordering, and are still thought by many to bea biblical cycle performed in medieval Wakefield. According to the WakefieldCouncil website, for example,

The Wakefield Mystery plays are a cycle of 32 scriptural plays dating from theearly 15th century, which were performed as part of the summertime religiousfestival of Corpus Christi.

The text of the plays has been preserved in the Towneley Manuscript, socalled after the Towneley family from Burnley in Lancashire that once ownedit, and is now in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. The plays are sometimes referred to as the Towneley Cycle.

Originally performed in York these plays were transferred to Wakefield,probably in the later 14th century, and there established as a Corpus ChristiCycle. Each Cycle then developed in its own way although six of the plays ineach are almost identical, and there are similar speeches in others.

The Wakefield plays are considered superior in a literary sense to any othersurviving Cycle due mainly to the work of a talented reviser, known as theWakefield Master, who had a particular skill for language and rhyme, as well aswit and satire.

The Cycle begins with the fall of Lucifer and ends with the Last Judgement. Itis not known how long it took in performance although the Chester Cycle,which is shorter, was given over three days; the York Cycle, which is longer, was


given in one. Two plays about Jacob are peculiar to the Wakefield Cycle, whichomits many narratives from the New Testament that are found in all the other surviving Cycles. The Cycle is also unusual in that there are two shepherds’plays.5

This confident statement is guilty of multiple sins both of commission, includ-ing notable misrepresentation of the York connection, and of omission — notmentioning the highly unusual lack of a Nativity play, for example, or of repre-sentation of the Eucharist, crucial to the very concept of the Corpus Christifeast and play alike. Barbara Palmer long ago demonstrated that, while othertowns in the area and indeed across England could and did produce biblicaldrama through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Wakefield itself ‘did notacquire a civic structure, organized craft guilds, or cultural environment whichwould suggest that Wakefield was the progenitive or even ultimate site for aCorpus Christi cycle performance.’6 Moreover, as Palmer also discovered, thesupposed production records long associated with these plays were largelyforgeries by Wakefield historian John W. Walker.7 Some of the Towneley playshave clear counterparts in York, but others, including those written in thestanza form associated with the putative ‘Wakefield Master’, might well havevery different origins and associations yet undiscovered. The single certainreference to the Wakefield area in the dramatic text itself is to the Goodybowerstone quarry — ‘Gudeboure at the quarell hede’ where Cain asks to be buried(2. 369) — in a play likewise not written in that stanza form. Other referencesoccur in the invocation at the beginning of the Creation play on the first extantpage of the manuscript — ‘Assit principio Sancta Maria meo Wakefeld’ — andagain following the title of the Noah play, but these could well indicate thename or origin of the scribe rather than of the plays themselves, much less thecollection as a whole.

Students and more advanced critics of the plays alike need to be made awareof these issues, precisely because a wealth of easily available resources both inlibraries and online tend to ignore them. References to ‘the Wakefield Cycle’abound, particularly on the internet. Like Walker a century ago, the WakefieldCouncil understandably wants to claim the collection as patrimony; however,scholarship demands doubt, and further investigation into the nature and


5 ‘Wakefield Mystery Plays’, <http://www.wakefield.gov.uk/CultureAndLeisure/HistoricWakefield/MysteryPlays> [accessed 18 July 2012].

6 Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Corpus Christi “Cycles” in Yorkshire: The Surviving Records’,Comparative Drama, 27.2 (1993), 218–31 (p. 228).

7 See Palmer, ‘“Towneley Plays” or “Wakefield Cycle” Revisited’, Comparative Drama, 21(1988), 318–48, and ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle”: The Records’, Research Opportunities inRenaissance Drama, 41 (2002), 88–130, as well as A. C. Cawley, Jean Forrester, and JohnGoodchild, ‘References to the Corpus Christi Play in the Wakefield Burgess Court Rolls: TheOriginals Rediscovered’, Leeds Studies in English, n.s., 19 (1988), 85–104.

origin not just of the collection as a whole but also of its constituent parts. As Iargued two decades ago, ‘As literary critics, we have been trained to see unityand design in some very dubious places, and, if we are determined to see thiscollection as a unified whole, we probably will. Possibilities can then begin toobscure even basic factual evidence.’8 Examined out of presumed sequence andcontext, the plays can look very different. A new edition of the collection needsto point to new critical possibilities, including even some basic rearrangement.

Some of Towneley’s constituent parts are famously disordered. However,the only edition of the plays that does not follow the manuscript order isMartial Rose’s 1962 modern English translation. In his Introduction to this‘acting edition’ of what he calls ‘The Wakefield Mystery Plays’, Rose explainsthese alterations:

The Prophets follows, instead of preceding, Pharaoh; and Lazarus and TheHanging of Judas, instead of following The Judgement, are returned to their usualplaces in the cycle, the former, as the only play representing Christ’s ministry,following John the Baptist, and the latter following The Scourging. In perform-ance The Hanging of Judas, since it is an incomplete, undramatic monologue,written at a much later date than the rest of the cycle, must be omitted, and thecontinuity of playing maintained between The Scourging and The Crucifixion.9

This seems relatively straightforward in terms of the principles expressed; thedevil, as always, is in the details. The Prophets and Lazarus were clearlymisplaced in relation to chronological order, but are not so simply reordered,as I will explain shortly. The Judas fragment is more obviously problematic initself. The piece is actually written in a hand quite similar to that of the mainscribe except in regard to a few letter forms,10 and is likely not ‘written at amuch later date’ as Rose asserts, but it certainly differs from anything else inthis heterogeneous collection. There is no action, no hanging as the fragment’stitle would lead one to expect, but only a first-person narrative from Judasregarding his birth and childhood. As Stevens and Cawley note,

Some doubt exists that the Suspencio Iude is in fact a play. The absence ofspeaker identifications in the margin and the paragraph markers that identifythe beginning of stanzas in the left-hand margin may point to a non-dramaticsource, possibly a metrical romance. The poem is written throughout in the six-line rhyme couée stanza, rhyming aaabab, a favorite form of the popular metricalromance.

They add that the piece resembles such romances ‘in its narrative, recountingthe strange adventures of a mythical personage whose life moves in a


8 Epp, ‘The Towneley Plays, or, The Hazards of Cycling’, p. 135.9 Martial Rose, The Wakefield Mystery Plays (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1963), p. 54.10 See Stevens and Cawley, p. 651.

pre-ordained course’,11 noting, too, that the story as given in the GoldenLegend is exceedingly long. It is entirely possible that the manuscript once hadenough blank pages to allow for the inclusion of the entire narrative, but onlytwo were ever filled; the final page of the manuscript, now papered over, wasapparently left blank.

Rose should perhaps have left the fragment at the end, as a poetic appendixto his ‘acting edition’ of what he considered a coherent play cycle. That is inany case what I expect to do in my own edition, although not without qualms.If, as I would argue, the manuscript is a collection of heterogeneous works,arranged chronologically as a cycle for a reader, this poetic narrative perhapsdeserves its ‘proper’ place as much as anything else. Someone apparentlythought, at least temporarily, that a first-person narrative by Judas was suffi-ciently like the other contents of the manuscript to deserve a place with thecollection; however, that someone was not the original scribe. The manu-script’s marginalia interest me greatly, but I do not read them in the same wayas I read the plays themselves; similarly, as a sometime actor and director, Icannot read the Judas fragment the same way I read the plays. This is not aplay, and should — like the marginalia — be set apart from the main text, andrelegated to an appendix.

The Prophets play certainly belongs with other plays in the collection, and iscertainly misplaced, while the manuscript placement of the Lazarus play makeslittle sense at all. However, Rose’s reference to their being ‘returned to theirusual places in the cycle’ begs important questions. As Rose himself notes, theonly play similar to the Towneley Prophets play comes from the N-Towncollection, with its highly diverse constituent parts, including a two-partPassion play and a Mary play unlike anything else in Middle English.12 N-Town also includes the only other separate Lazarus play. In both York andChester, the only two surviving play cycles that we know to have beenperformed as cycles, sequentially, from beginning to end, the Lazarus episodeis part of a longer pageant concerning the ministry of Jesus. There can be no‘usual’ placement of an unusual play. And while virtually anything wouldconstitute a strange follow-up to the Last Judgement, this particular Lazarusplay specifically has Martha refers to a future resurrection at ‘the dredfull dayof dome’ (31. 47).

But nor does this play fit the existing sequence of New Testament plays, asStevens and Cawley admit:

If the play had been placed in its correct [chronological] position, it would havepresented the narrative episode of Jesus’ journey to Bethany [. . .] without any


11 Ibid.12 See Rose, p. 170.

clear context. In the other cycles, the Raising of Lazarus follows one or moreepisodes in the ministry (the Woman Taken in Adultery, the Man Born Blind)and leads directly into the Passion. In the Towneley cycle, however, there is noreferent for the warning by Thomas (15–18) that Jesus must not go into ‘thatcountry’ again, where earlier he had aroused the anger of the Pharisees, whowere ready to stone him [. . .]. Nor is there any indication at the end of the play— as there is in all other pageants of Lazarus — that the Passion is about tofollow. . .

As they suggest a few paragraphs later, ‘The scribe may have added it at the endsimply because he did not know where, or even whether, it belonged to thecycle’.13 Were this indeed the authoritative copy or regenall of a play cycle onceperformed in medieval Wakefield, perhaps compiled by the putative‘Wakefield Master’ himself, as Stevens and Cawley argue, none of this wouldmake a great deal of sense.

The Lazarus play is best considered and performed on its own, as a sort ofbiblically based morality play, but without the allegorical personifications of aplay such as the Digby Mary Magdalene. Only the first half of the play — all butthe last few lines of which are written in couplets — is based on the biblicalnarrative (John 11. 1–44): Jesus and several disciples travel to Bethany, meetingMartha, who arouses Mary Magdalene from her ‘sorowful bande’ (31. 63)before Lazarus is raised from ‘vnder yonde stone’ (31. 84). The risen Lazarusthen delivers a lengthy sermon-like monologue (in stanzaic verse) on deathand the need for repentance. While biblical (or apocryphal) events are inter-rupted in other plays in order to deliver moral commentary directly to theaudience — Jesus speaks to the audience at length from the cross in both Yorkand Towneley, and the N-Town Death of Herod ends with a (much shorter)memento mori speech by Death himself — Towneley’s Lazarus abandons thebiblical narrative altogether after his first few lines. While the monologue mayhave been added to a previously existing play or fragment at some point, Istrongly suspect that the play as compiled was intended for performance on itsown,14 perhaps during Holy Week or on ‘Lazarus Saturday’ itself, the daybefore Palm Sunday. Moving this anomalous play into chronological orderpotentially makes the collection look even more like a cycle, belying my own


13 Stevens and Cawley, pp. 646, 647.14 It is worth noting that the play does not seem to have been written for production on a

wagon stage, as Jesus and his various followers would have to stand conspicuously but silentlybehind Lazarus (or awkwardly depart) while he preaches to the crowd. For the 1985 PLS produc-tion, a low scaffold served as the tomb (for Lazarus as for Jesus, later); keeping audience andactors at roughly the same level allowed actors who were no longer speaking to fade into thebackground. The place-and-scaffold design for that production was largely determined by therequirements of the Conspiracy play, in which the action travels between Pilate’s palace, theroom for the Last Supper, Mount Olivet, and Heaven. The preceding play of John the Baptist,like most, requires only a single locus, be it a scaffold or a wagon.

basic assumptions regarding the manuscript and its contents. On the otherhand, if the Towneley manuscript is an anthology of biblical plays from varioussources, arranged in chronological order, it does make sense to for a moderneditor such as myself to continue the process of arrangement and, like Rose,put Lazarus where it ‘belongs’ — where students familiar with the biblicalnarrative expect to find it.

The idea of moving Lazarus while relegating the Judas fragment to anappendix, however, makes me think hard and long about the placement of theinfamous second Shepherds play. In the 1985 Toronto production of theTowneley plays, this most studied of Middle English plays was given a specialevening performance, indoors, clearly setting it apart from the rest, performedoutdoors as a place-and-scaffold production. As already suggested, sequential‘cycle’ performance demands just one Shepherds play, and the first of the twois not merely adequate, but better suited to the purpose. The second Shepherdsplay is not, as the manuscript rubrics would have it, merely ‘alia eorundem’ —another of the same — but, despite the closely parallel opening and closingscenes, something different. This play does not play well with others. Read orperformed as part of a biblical sequence, even if the first Shepherds play isomitted, the episode of Mak and Gill and the stolen sheep seems a strange,almost blasphemously parodic (if entertaining) detour toward the shepherds’inevitable encounter with the newborn Jesus. If the play is performed on itsown, as argued above, that cosmic episode is central: the Nativity is a revela-tion, for the audience as it is for the shepherds themselves, which alters themeaning of everything that has just happened. Whereas the Raising of Lazarususes a biblical event as the impetus for an effective dramatic sermon, this play’ssurprising biblical ending turns contemporary social farce into an effectivesermon on the incarnation in relation to social justice and mercy. The first ofthe Shepherds plays, while a fine piece of theatre, is relatively conventional, andcan easily enough be imagined as played in conjunction with a Nativity play, ifsuch existed.

The second Shepherds play has for good reasons attracted a disproportion-ate amount of critical attention. It is usually seen or read or studied quite apartfrom its manuscript context, so much so that students are sometimes confusedas to its usual title, wondering why the play would be named after the SecondShepherd in particular. I was thus highly tempted to relegate this most studiedof Middle English plays to an appendix, not to hide it, but to make its lack ofsequential fit more obvious. However, I ultimately decided that leaving itpaired with the other Shepherds play might best accomplish the same thing. Itsmanuscript placement provided, after all, one of my own first clues as to thisbeing an anthology for readers: the two Shepherds plays would never beperformed in sequence, given their radical similarities, but nor do they serve as


obvious alternatives for sequential performance, given the notable and veryparticular difference between them. The absence of the Nativity itself empha-sizes the lack of sequence that these two plays themselves imply.

What precedes these two plays is, in sharp contrast, a clear sequence, albeitone that has fallen into disorder. According to Stevens and Cawley, ‘It seemslikely that the scribe’s exemplar contained a grouping of four consecutive tail-rhyme plays, the Prophets, Caesar Augustus, the Annunciation, and theSalutation, and that these four plays (possibly also Play 14, The Offering of theMagi) originally came from the same source and constitute a direct narrativesequence’.15 I agree, except in regard to the number of original plays, and thepotential inclusion of the Magi play. Apart from a few extra-metrical Latinquotations in the Prophets and Salutation plays, and God’s long monologue (incouplets) that opens the Annunciation play, the entire sequence is written invariations of the same tail-rhyme stanza form, rhymed aabaab or aabccb; theMagi play is rhymed aaabab with shorter tag lines — the rhyme couée stanza —and so resembles the Judas fragment as well as several of the York plays,16 butnot these others. The plays that I now refer to as the Advent sequence belongtogether as a sequence, unlike most of the Towneley collection, yet most of thecommentary that these plays have attracted relates to their disorder.

Alfred W. Pollard’s Introduction to the first EETS edition stated that theProphets play ‘should of course change places with the Pharaoh’, but neither henor his successors seem to have noticed the misplacement of the Salutationplay; Stevens and Cawley mention the deviation from the biblical sequence ofevents, but treat this particular misplacement as a matter of treating ‘theVisitation as an independent episode’.17 The Annunciation play as it stands inthe manuscript contains two separate episodes. Immediately after Mary’sconference with the angel Gabriel, Joseph appears, having been absent for ‘ixmonethes’ (10. 281), and complains:

Allmyghty God, what may this be?Of Mary, my wife, meruels me;Alas, what has she wroght?A, hyr body is grete and she with childe. (10. 155–58)

The notable time lapse between Mary’s conception and her being visiblypregnant is unproblematic in itself: Mary can simply leave the stage after herdialogue with the angel and return following a minor costume change.However, in the Towneley play, much as in its gospel source, Gabriel tells Marythat her cousin Elizabeth is already in ‘The sext moneth of hyr conceytate’ —


15 Stevens and Cawley, pp. 460–61.16 The York Armourers’ (Expulsion of Adam and Eve), Smiths’ (Temptation), Carpenters’

(Resurrection), and Scriveners’ (Thomas) pageants are all written in this same stanza form.17 Pollard, p. xxiv; Stevens and Cawley, p. 479.

that is, she is already six months pregnant (10. 138; Luke 1. 26, 36). In thecanonical account, as in the apocryphal gospels that inform the Joseph episode(specifically, the second-century infancy gospel attributed to James, and thelater derivative known as pseudo-Matthew), Mary goes to visit Elizabethimmediately after the angelic visit, and stays for about three months (Luke1. 39–56; Infancy James 12. 3–7) — not quite enough time to allow her tobecome visibly ‘grete’ with child. Yet the Towneley Salutation play follows theAnnunciation play and its Joseph episode, notably altering the length ofElizabeth’s pregnancy. If these plays are performed in sequence, Elizabeth hasto be — and in performance appear — more than nine months’ pregnant bythe time of Mary’s visit. As I argued long ago, ‘The casual or devotional readeris not likely to make this sort of calculation, but it becomes crucial in the practical world of the theatre’.18 At least one other Nativity play, that of theCoventry Shearmen and Tailors, likewise moves directly from Annunciation tothe episode with Joseph, but excludes the visit with Elizabeth.

The error in Towneley appears to be scribal. While the Joseph episode ispart of the Annunciation play in the manuscript, beginning in the middle of apage (the verso of folio 29), it was likely originally separate, along with the restof the plays in the Advent sequence. Joseph’s invocation to ‘Allmyghty God’ asquoted above begins a new play within this sequence, rather than a continua-tion of the Annunciation. In this play, Joseph meets an unnamed ‘Angel’(10. 326ff.), whereas Mary, in the Annunciation play proper, explicitly meetswith Gabriel. Duplication of angels (and of actors) for a single play wouldmake little sense, and there is no obvious reason for a change of speech headingas there is in the Creation play, in which an ‘Angelus malus’ falls from heavenand, like his fellow bad angel, is thereafter designated as ‘Demon’ (1. 131SD). Adifference in speech headings between plays is more common and understand-able than within a play, although it does perhaps imply multiple casting ratherthan the continuity of single casting throughout the sequence. On the otherhand, if this was indeed a sequence of separate plays, not all of which need tohave been performed at once, the different character designations seem lessproblematic.

As I have previously argued, the assumption of full sequential performanceof the Towneley plays has misled many into misrepresentation of continuity instaging and casting requirements.19 Martial Rose, arguing for a single cast,place-and-scaffold staging of the ‘cycle’, once asserted that ‘The most weightyevidence [. . .] for the multiple staging of the Wakefield Plays lies in the Passion


18 Epp, ‘The Towneley Plays, or, The Hazards of Cycling’, p. 132.19 Such misrepresentations and misunderstandings are what I termed in my 1993 article ‘the

hazards of cycling’.

sequence, which sweeps on in continuous action from play to play and fromstage to stage’, although the evidence he produced was from a single play, theConspiracy.20 Yet the discontinuities are equally evident, even within thissupposed sequence, and indeed within this same play, which varies notably instyle and stanza form. Much as the collection lacks a Nativity play, it also lacksa trial before Herod — an event referred to as having occurred prior to theScourging (22. 54, 120ff.). Other differences and discontinuities are perhapsless striking, but equally significant. For example, the number of torturersaccompanying Jesus through the Passion sequence changes, and the apostles inthe Thomas play are numbered rather than named as in all other plays.

A more interesting shift in designation occurs in regard to the apostleknown as Judas Thaddeus, called ‘Thadeus’ or ‘Thadee’ at the Last Supper (20.392), as per the list of apostles in Mark 3. 18 and Matthew 10. 3, but referred toas ‘Iude’ at the Ascension (29. 437), as per Acts 1. 13 and Luke 6. 16. He has noapparent speaking role in the incomplete Ascension play. The sole biblicalattribution of a speech to this apostle is in the account of the Passover meal inthe Gospel of John, which like the Towneley version of the Last Supper lacksany institution of the Eucharist, but that account, unlike the play, calls himJudas (John 14. 22). And characters are not alone in changing names inTowneley: the Conspiracy play begins with the rubric ‘Incipit conspiracio[et]c.’ but ends ‘Explicit Capcio Iesu.’ For Stevens and Cawley, as for me (as Iwill outline shortly), this particular ‘discrepancy [. . .] may suggest the confla-tion of at least two originally separate plays’ with different titles.21 In contrast,I suspect that the ‘originally separate plays’ of the Advent sequence lackedtitles. If the individual exemplars in that sequence were untitled, but written inthe same hand and verse form, the scribe could all too easily have copied theAnnunciation and Joseph plays continuously without noticing that the latterwas out of order.

Such a mistake would be especially easy to make if the individual leaveswere loose, rather than gathered and bound — a possibility that could also helpexplain the misplacement and incompleteness of the Pharaoh play. The scribeapparently started copying the Prophets play before noticing the misplace-ment, and then abandoned it temporarily in order to copy the Pharaoh play,leaving the intervening leaf blank;22 the remaining portion of the Prophetscould in the meantime have been lost or forgotten. In order to suggest what


20 Rose, p. 35 and following.21 Stevens and Cawley, p. 544.22 See Stevens and Cawley, p. 464, and their Introduction to the facsimile, pp. viii and xiii. The

first line from fol. 19v has been copied in another hand on the top of fol. 20, which is lined butmostly blank; fol. 20v was apparently once filled with writing — presumably the start of thePharaoh play, the incipit of which remains visible there.

might be missing here, Stevens and Cawley give a play-by-play listing of allu-sions to prophets, as usual treating the whole of the Towneley collection asrelevant to each of the constituent parts, but ultimately drawing attention tothe list in the more obviously relevant Annunciation play itself (10. 47–50),which names Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Habbakuk, along with the four prophets inthe extant Prophets play: Moses, David, Sibyl, and Daniel. While Moses’ speechalone covers nearly two pages, the speeches get successively shorter (goingfrom ninety lines to seventy-two and then fifty-four lines, before Daniel’spossibly incomplete eighteen-line speech), so it seems entirely feasible, evenlikely, that the two blank pages were to have been filled with speeches fromthese three additional prophets. However, while the associated lectio passagesfor the Christmas matins, quoted by the four extant speakers, can be recoveredfor these three other prophets,23 the rest of their speeches are sadly lost, alongwith all of those missing exemplars.

As Stevens and Cawley have noted, the play of Caesar Augustus is alsomisplaced chronologically:

In accordance with tradition one would expect it to appear between theSalutation (Play 11) and, in the absence of a Nativity play, the first of theShepherds plays (Play 12). But in view of the fact that the Towneley playpresents quite a different characterization of Caesar, a case can be made for itscorrect placement where it stands. The Towneley play of Caesar Augustusappears to fulfil two purposes: first, it augments the words of the prophetsregarding the birth of Christ (see 70f.); second, it portrays the typical rantingtyrant who, in this instance, serves as the perfect middle figure between Pharaohand Herod. The whole play is therefore transitional between the Old and theNew Testament.24

This argument might seem moot if the Advent sequence were considered on itsown, rather than as part of a larger cycle of plays that includes the plays ofPharaoh and of Herod. Moreover, the attention-grabbing rant of CaesarAugustus would seem a more obvious opening for a play or sequence of playsthan would a Latin quotation in the mouth of Moses. Conversely, one might betempted to place both Caesar Augustus and the Prophets play at the end of thesequence, rather than at the beginning, and in reverse order: the Adventsequence would thus begin with the Annunciation, and the voice of God,


23 The Latin quotations in the play closely resemble the Salerno dramatization of the lectio forChristmas matins based on the pseudo-Augustinian Sermo . . . de natale Domini, entitled Innativitas nocte post primam missam legitur sermo Sancti Augustini Episcopi (as Stevens andCawley note in regard to two of these speeches; see p. 462 n. 90+, p. 464 n. 216+), as edited byKarl Young in The Drama of the Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933), ii, 133–37.Other speakers included there (all between ‘Abachuc’ and ‘Sibilla Erythræa’) are Simeon,Zaccharias, Elizabeth, John the Baptist, Virgil[0], Nebuchadnezzar and ‘Famulus Regis’, as wellas the Lector whose speeches are interspersed throughout.

24 Stevens and Cawley, p. 472.

closing not with the play of Caesar Augustus, representing all the secularpowers that threaten the promised child, but with the voices of prophesy andpromise of that Nativity. However, in the Annunciation play, God himselfmentions those same voices of prophesy in the perfect tense: ‘As thay hauesaid, it shall befall’ (10. 52); the Prophets must appear before the Annunciation,at least if one accepts God’s speech (in couplets, and with a notable emphasison the fall of Adam) as being part of the original Annunciation play and theAdvent sequence as a whole. Of this I am deeply uncertain. Nevertheless, I dothink that the play of Caesar Augustus is indeed where it belongs dramatically,not only because of the augmentation of prophecy to which Stevens andCawley refer, but because of its dramatic demonstration of the tyrannicalpower that is destined to be overthrown, as prophesied in the Prophets play byKing David in particular — a prophecy later echoed by Mary, in the Magnificatof the Salutation play.

This group of plays might well have originally concluded with a Nativityplay, likewise now missing. Yet even without it, the rearranged Adventsequence does form a coherent unit, all in the same tail-rhymed stanza form: itopens with the now incomplete and misplaced Prophets play, followed by theplay of Caesar Augustus, which similarly contains prophecies of the Nativity;the Annunciation proper is followed by the Salutation play, and then theJoseph episode. The sequence thus closes with Joseph’s loving reunion withMary and, in his brief final prayer, the sense of prophecy already fulfilled:

He that may both lowse and bynde,And euery mys amend,Leyn me grace, powere, and myght,My wyf and hir swete yong wightTo kepe to my lyfys ende. (10. 369–73)

The birth of that ‘swete yong wight’ constitutes the central meaning of thereconstituted Advent sequence, whether or not the birth itself was ever repre-sented onstage in a subsequent play. Indeed, enactment of the birth could wellseem anticlimactic and awkward at this point. Personally, I suspect that it wasnever part of the sequence.

Aside from the Nativity, as already suggested, Towneley’s most notableabsence is the institution of the Eucharist. Unlike the York Bakers’ play, whichlacks the relevant page, Towneley’s representation of the Last Supper, part ofthe sprawling Conspiracy play, appears complete. This intriguing but problem-atic play also appears to be designed for multiple ‘place-and-scaffold’ staging,rather than for a pageant wagon like the plays of Chester or York, as it requiresaction in and travel between various separate loci, including Pilate’s hall (usedat the beginning and again near the end of the play), a room for the LastSupper, and Mount Olivet, as well as unlocalized space in between. Moreover,


at Olivet, Jesus must speak with a character problematically designated as‘Trinitas’ (that is, the Trinity, of which the Son himself is obviously a part),who should likely be seated in a separate but adjacent ‘Heaven’ locus.Presuming that this episode was indeed staged at some point, somewhere, thisTrinity figure was likely staged as a living version of what is usually termed a‘Throne of Grace’, with God the Father seated on a throne, holding a crucifix,obviously signifying the Son, with the Holy Ghost in the form of a dove,perched equidistant from the others’ heads, to signify that, as per the NiceneCreed, the Holy Ghost ‘proceedeth from the Father and the Son [. . .] together’,in equal measure. The bodily representation of Jesus would not appear redun-dant in this configuration (and indeed did not, in the 1985 Toronto productionwhich used this staging). One might argue that the lack of Eucharist mightseem unproblematic as well, given the similar lack in the Gospel of John.However, lack of such representation in the extant text is surely evidence thatthis play (and indeed the Towneley manuscript as a whole) could have little todo with the ‘pagyauntes of Corpus Christi daye’ apparently used in some sortof Easter holiday performance at Wakefield in 1556 ‘as hathe bene hithertoforevsed’, according to one of the few authentic Wakefield dramatic records.25

On the other hand, my own suspicion is that this play is an amalgamation ofseveral prior and poetically very different pageants, one of which did at onepoint include the institution of the Eucharist. The evidence for this is morecomplex than can be dealt with here,26 but the play appears to have at leastthree constituent parts: a Conspiracy play (the conspiracio as per the play’sincipit) written in a mix of twelve- and thirteen-line stanzas (including thesupposed ‘Wakefield Master’ stanza) and variants, a Last Supper play written incouplets, and another Passion play with some overlapping action, written inquatrains (and ending with the capcio Iesu as per the explicit). I stronglysuspect that the institution of the Eucharist was part of the original Last Supperplay, but was removed or otherwise obliterated for doctrinal reasons, much likeits counterpart in York. Some later compiler apparently rearranged that text inorder to splice it together with other plays, possibly also damaged or incom-plete in some way. What we have remains imperfect — it includes for exampletwo versions of Jesus’s prophecy of Peter’s denial, one in couplets (lines 404–05) and another in quatrains (450–53) — but is coherent enough to havefooled generations of scholars into believing that it was a performable whole,much like the Towneley plays more generally.

While religious censorship may have affected both the York and Towneleymanuscripts as we have them, dramatic representation of the Eucharist in


25 See Cawley and Stevens, p. xxi, and Palmer, ‘“Towneley Plays” or “Wakefield Cycle”Revisited’, p. 329ff.

26 See Epp, ‘The Towneley Conspiracy’, ROMARD, 51 (2013), 5–55.

particular was apparently no more or less objectionable than of other elementsof the York or Towneley plays. In May of 1576, the EcclesiasticalCommissioners of York famously

Decred a lettre to be written and sent to the Balyffe Burgesses and other theinhabitantes of the said towne of Wakefeld that in the said playe no Pageant bevsed or set furthe wherin the Maiestye of god the father god the sonne or god theholie ghoste or the administration of either the Sacramentes of Baptisme or ofthe lordes Supper be counterfeyted or represented, or any thinge plaied whichtende to the maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie or which be contrarie tothe lawes of god or of the Realme.27

A play that has Jesus speak with the Trinity offers sufficient reason for doctrinalobjection even without representation of the Eucharist. But the extantConspiracy play was clearly not the object of suppression in 1576 Wakefield;nor, for clarity, was it one of the as yet unidentified ‘pagyauntes of CorpusChristi daye’ performed there in the 1550s. Rather, this play incorporates thesurviving portions of other dramatic work to which reformers might well haveobjected. It thus postdates the Reformation. This is less surprising than itmight once have been: the manuscript itself has recently been dated to themid-sixteenth century, far later than was once thought.28

The most famous evidence of doctrinal controversy in the Towneley manu-script might in itself provide further evidence of a post-Reformation compila-tion for the manuscript as a whole. The Baptism pageant contains what editorsStevens and Cawley deem the ‘one unambiguous reference to a performance’in the manuscript, namely, a marginal assertion that a cancelled stanzacontaining reference to the sacraments was ‘corected & not playd.’ However,the play itself may be Protestant in origin: the partially erased line (19. 197) inthe cancelled stanza may not have referred to ‘vj othere’ sacraments in additionto baptism, as the text reads in all extant editions, but may have read, ‘Ther arij othere [sacraments] and no mo.’ After all, no one on either side of theReform divide asserted that there were more than seven sacraments, but somedid indeed assert that there were but three: whereas the 1576 suppression orderrefers to ‘the Sacramentes of Baptisme [and] of the lordes Supper’ and noothers, the Ten Articles published by Thomas Cranmer under Henry VIII in1536 (‘Articles devised by the Kynges Highnes Maiestie to stablyshe christenquietnes and vnitie amonge vs. . .’) explicitly names penance along withbaptism and ‘the sacrament of the altar’ as sacraments. The rest of the cancelledstanza refers to the chrism or unction — ‘Here I the anoint also | With oyle andcreme’ (19. 193–94) — which was still part of the ritual of baptism according to


27 The Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle, ed. by A. C. Cawley (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1958), p. 125.

28 See Palmer, ‘Recycling “The Wakefield Cycle”: The Records’, p. 96.

the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549, but had disappeared from Englishchurch ritual by 1552 (although it was omitted from the Coronation ceremonyonly for the 1603 translation of the Liber Regalis, and later reinstalled). I havelittle trouble imagining that a recusant scribe, quite possibly in the employ ofthe Towneley family itself, might have attempted after copying to correct theoffending line, erasing the initial i and replacing it with what Stevens andCawley describe as ‘a badly formed v, barely visible under ultraviolet lamp’,29

before cancelling the whole stanza, perhaps realizing that the reference to therebeing ‘no mo’ than seven sacraments in total would appear strange at best, ifnot itself an offence to Catholic orthodoxy. The infamous marginal commentcan be explained as a later reader’s attempted explanation of the cancellationitself, rather than as a comment on the text in relation to actual performance.

The first edition of Towneley, published in 1836 by the Surtees Society, wasgiven the title The Towneley Mysteries. That title now seems descriptive in waysunintended by the editor (and Secretary of the Surtees Society), James Raine.Personally, both as a scholar of early English theatre and more particularly asan editor of this mysterious text, I sincerely wish that the beautifully decoratedTowneley manuscript had been used, like the York Register, as an officialmeans to keep track of discrepancies between official script and dialogue asuttered by actors in a performance; I could have used more information onTowneley’s textual discontinuities and varied staging requirements. Yet therewas no performance of this text as a whole — neither in Wakefield, noranywhere else — until this past century. The production that I oversaw back in1985 was a modern construct, but one that revealed interesting textual, histor-ical and dramatic issues that continue to occupy me, and others. In re-editingTowneley and in articles such as this — both through debate and deconstruc-tion of previous understandings of the manuscript and its varied contents, andthrough the attempted reconstruction of specific portions such as the Adventsequence — I hope to help solve a few more mysteries, while revealing others,for others to solve.


29 Stevens and Cawley, p. xxiv and p. 224; see also p. 543.

re-editing towneley

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