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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
The high dramatic quality of the Secunda Pastorum raises a recurrent interpretive question: does the play function as a unified religious statement in a traditional craft cycle, or does it function primarily as a secular farce with a Nativity scene added? Critics of this supremely sophisticated medieval play have moved from the early view that the long secular prologue was unrelated to, and detracted from, the Christ Nativity, to the more recent opinion that the stage business involving Mak is an artful parody of the true Nativity and is structurally adapted to the religious end for which the play was designed.
1 Homer Watt, “The Dramatic Unity of the Secunda. Pastorum” Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York, 1940), pp. 158–166. Cf. John Speirs, “The Towneley Shepherds' Plays,” Age of Chaucer (Pelican, 1959), who sees in the archetypal structure of the play a movement from harshness to tenderness through a comic purgation. Though helpful, it seems to me that Speirs presses a point of view too far when he asserts of the sheep-child found in Mak's hut: “He can be none other than the ‘horned god’—the God incarnated as goat or sheep, bull or stag—whose worship continued throughout medieval Britain” (p. 171). See also Francis Thompson, “Unity in the Second Shepherds’ Play,” MLN, LXIV (1949), pp. 302–306.
2 “Beginnings of the Drama,” A Literary History of England (New York, 1948), p. 273.
3 “The Corpus Christi Plays as Drama,” Stud. Phil., xxvii (1930), p. 578.
4 Bibliographical and Textual Problems of the English Miracle Cycles (London, 1914), p. 71.
5 “Lyrical Form and the Prophetic Principle in the Towneley Plays,” Medieval Studies, xxm (1961), p. 83.
6 All quotes from the Secunda Pastorum are taken from the Auden and Pearson edition of Medieval and Renaissance Poets (New York, 1957), pp. 243–275. Further quotation from the play will be documented in the text.
7 The Chester play, like the First and Second Shepherds' Plays, utilizes a lively English pastoral mise en scène. The remaining craft cycle Nativity plays are generally short and rely heavily on the Process prophetarium technique to foreshadow the birth.
8 “The Towneley ‘First Shepherds’ Play',” ed. John Speirs, The Age of Chaucer, 11.46–54. Speirs's comment on this interesting passage is illuminating: “In this crossing of themselves (and in the terms of their prayer) immediately before the Angel's news of the Incarnation we have a conspicuous as well as dramatic example of the medieval view of Time as something other than mere sequence” (p. 450, fn. 1). Speirs leaves ambiguous the question of the Towneley playwright's conscious or unconscious use of this juxtapostion, and seems to treat anachronism more as a medieval oddity than as a dramatic device.
9 Ibid., ll. 289–295.
10 The strong undercurrent of piety in the shepherds' talk continues throughout the rest of the secular scenes. During the mock nativity, Gill prepares for her deceptive role by saying, “for I must grone, / And cry outt by the wall on Mary and John / For sore” (iv. 39–41). One of the few commentators to notice a possible purpose hidden in such language, Watt notes tersely, “Incidentally, Gyll's crying out on Mary and John effects an excellent forward link with the nativity” (p. 164).
11 See especially R. C. Cosbey, “The Mak Story and Its Folklore Analogues,” Speculum, xx (1945), pp. 310–317.
12 Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959), Ch. i et passim.
13 I am aware that Mak has been connected with the “tricky slave” of Latin comedy, the “Vice” of medieval moralities, and, by A. W. Pollard in his English Miracle Plays, with Maugis, the buffoon-conjurer in the romance of The Four Sons of Aymon. Yet such suggested affinities do not preclude the possibility that the Antichrist legend was also a conditioning factor at Mak's creation. If, as is probable, the Wakefield Master was a cleric, it is not unlikely that he would draw his dramatic materials from a source of popular theology rather than literary tradition.
14 From Bousset's Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Antichrist, as quoted in Lucken's Antichrist and the Prophets of Antichrist in the Chester Cycle (Washington, 1940), p. 8.
15 P. 6.
16 Though a reference to Antichrist at Christ's birth is logically out of place, it should be borne in mind that the playwright is appealing to his viewers' religious emotions, not to their reason—a task made easier by an audience that was encouraged to see the Christ-drama more as ritual than as chronological sequence.
17 From “Cursor Mundi,” EETS, O.S., LXVI, section iv (The four ages of the world) (1877), pp. 1258–1300.
