Wakefield Mystery Plays

Nobody knows the name of the writer scholars call the Wakefield Master, but his work is unmistakable once identified: five of the cycle's thirty-two plays, Noah, the First Shepherds' Play, the Second Shepherds' Play, Herod the Great and the Buffeting of Christ, share a distinctive nine-line rhymed stanza no other contributor to the cycle uses, a verse fingerprint precise enough that editors have used it to sort the Wakefield Master's own contribution from anonymous surrounding material added by other hands. Of the five, the Second Shepherds' Play has drawn by far the most attention. It tells the Nativity story twice over in one script: three shepherds first encounter Mak, a sheep thief who steals one of their flock and disguises it as a newborn child in a cradle to avoid discovery, a broad comic sequence resolved only when the shepherds see through the ruse, before the same three shepherds travel on to Bethlehem and witness the actual newborn Christ in a second cradle scene that deliberately echoes the first. Scholars read the doubled cradle as the Wakefield Master's own theological joke and argument at once, a comic false nativity built to throw the real one into sharper relief for an audience that had just laughed at its parody. The device has made the play a fixture of medieval drama anthologies well beyond its own cycle.

York's plays survive because the city itself kept an official Register; Wakefield's survive by a different and less institutional route. The single manuscript that preserves the cycle takes its more common name, the Towneley Plays, from the Towneley family of Lancashire, into whose private library it had passed by an uncertain date, well before the family sold it at auction in 1814. That accident of ownership means far less is documented about Wakefield's own production history than survives for York or Chester: no equivalent civic register naming which guild staged which pageant, or recording specific performance dates across the cycle's working life, has come down to us, only the play texts themselves and the general knowledge that performance continued until 1576, when Protestant religious authorities effectively ended it along with the other English cycles. The manuscript itself, physically, now rests far from Yorkshire entirely: sold out of the Towneley family's hands, it eventually reached the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, where it remains the primary surviving witness to the plays scholars variously call the Wakefield Cycle, after the city the plays were written for, and the Towneley Plays, after the family that happened to preserve them.