r

A Provoked Precocity

The Image of Adolescence in Late Medieval EnglishDrama and Pedagogy

Robert Dawson

Rereading Philippe Aries is like revisiting a hometown after years abroad: the grandest

mansions have gotten quaint, shabby, and small. Since the publication in 1960 of L’Enfant et la

vie familiale sous l’ancien regime known in English as “Centuries of Childhood,” Aries has been

lambasted by scholar after scholar for his retrospective suppositions, his disingenuous selection

of evidence, and his failure to consider important sources.4° Yet this amateur, this “Sunday

historian” in his own words,41 was responsible for an explosion of interest in family and

childhood history, enunciating a thesis which nearly every writer since has felt obliged to support

or refute: “that there was no concept of ‘childhood’ in premodem Europe and that parent-child

relations in previous ages were . . . categorically different from those in the modem West.”42

“In medieval society,’ Aries declares, “the idea of childhood did not exist.”43 It is no

surprise, therefore, when he asserts that “people had no idea of what we call adolescence, and the

idea was a long time taking shape.”44 But Aries is guilty of ignoring his own evidence. In the

pedagogical writings of Roger Ascham and other schoolmasters of the late Middle Ages, and

among the dramatis personae of the English Corpus Christi dramas, an image of the adolescent

male does take shape. Furthermore, this medieval notion of “adolescence” is comparable to the

conceptual models of adolescence developed by modern psychologists rather than to the Lockeanmodel which prevailed through most of the intervening centuries.

Aries himself acknowledged the currency throughout the Middle Ages of the concept ofthe “ages of life,” and quoted extensively from Le Grand Proprietaire de toutes choses, a thirteenth-

century text:

40Linda A. Pollock, forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (London, 1983), 1-67.

4’Frances and Joseph Gies, Marriage and famili in the Middle Ages (New York, 1987), 5.

42John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Lete Antiquityto the Renaissance (New York, 1988), 36.

43Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood (New York, 1962), 128.

441b1d., 29.

t

18 ex post facto

The first age is childhood when the teeth are planted, and this age begins when the

child is born and lasts until seven. . . . After infancy comes the second age . . . andthis age lasts till fourteen. Afterwards follows the third age, which is called

adolescence, which ends. . . in the twenty-first year, but according to Isidore it lasts

till twenty-eight. . . . This age is called adolescence because the person is big enough

to beget children . . . and because the person grows in this age to the size allotted

to him by Nature.45

Aries brushes his own example aside as mere jargon, having “a meaning for those who read it,

a meaning akin to astrology” since the ages corresponded in number to the seven known

planets.46 “No modern awareness of adolescence then,” disciples of Aries might argue. But a

chorus of researchers, notably Adrian Wilson, Linda Potlock, and Barbara Hanawalt, respond that

medieval authors articulated a consistent concept of adolescence as a phase of life during which

a person could be expected to face certain experiences and to react in predictable ways. Indeed,

persons “growing up in the medieval household went through developmental stages closely

compatible with those described by Erikson.”47

Adolescents appear as characters in the Corpus Christi plays and miracle dramas of

fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, though they are not usually identified as such. lak and

Daw in the Towneley First and Second Shepherds’ Pageants can be recognized as adolescents by

the terms with which the other shepherds address them (“knave,” “boy”), by references to slighter

stature, by the name Garcio (which is also assigned to Cain’s serving lad in the Towneley Killing

of Abel’), and particularly by their status as servants subject to the physical discipline of older men.

Serving lads also appear in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament and the Digby Mary Magdalene. The

Juvenis in the N Town Woman Taken in Adultery is an adolescent, as is the Filius in the York

Dream of Pilate’s Wife. Jesus is one, or nearly one, in the Chester Christ zuith the Doctors. None of

these nine identifiable adolescents is a fully developed principal character. The traits they share,

however, and the roles they play in the dramaturgy, add up to a representation of the “typical

adolescent” which would ring true to a medieval audience and which was consistent with ideas

about adolescence propounded by medieval thinkers from Isidore of Seville to Roger Ascham and

Johan Comenius. In the character of the student Wit, the hero of humanist John Redford’s Wit

and Science (Ca. 1540), we have a full-scale adolescent protagonist, caught in the throes of that most

typical adolescent act, the “identity crisis.” We will examine each of these characters in turn, after

45Ibid., 21.

46Ibid., 22.

47Barbara Hanawalt, “Childrearing Among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval England,” Journal ofinterdisciplinary History 8 (1977): 19.

Provoked Precocity 19

exploring some of the medieval social conditions which determined, and the theories whichexplained, their actions.

Submission to the authority of an adult male other than one’s father was the normal lot ofmost medieval adolescents. Among all classes, noble, artisan, and peasant especially were sentaway from home to be educated, to learn a trade, or to become servants or oblates.48 MostEnglish guilds did not even permit boys to be apprenticed to their own fathers, while the childrenof lords were commonly ‘sent to other aristocratic households, often those of relatives, the sonsto train as knights, the daughters to learn social graces.”49 Squires, clerical novices and students,apprentices, and serving boys all shared the terms of their servitude to a “foster-parent.”5° In theEnglish drama, the shepherds’, the captain’s, the doctor’s, and the presbyter’s boys all display thesame attitude of defiant subservience—passive-aggressiveness in modem jargon—to their masters.Of those dramatic adolescents listed above, only two, Jesus and Pilate’s son, are not in servitude.The foster parent was expected in turn to assume personal responsibility for the moral as well asthe vocational development of his charge.51 Even the vocabularies used to designate youths andslaves were interchangeable in Greek, Latin, and the medieval vernaculars, including OldEnglish.52 Likewise, the Latin of the period aligns students and servants: both are alumni. “Theywere often of the same age and gave similar grounds for fearing their high spirits and lack of self-control.”53

Thus servitude was not a result of adolescence but a natural attribute thereof, a definingcharacteristic. Adolescents not bound to a master were perceived as expositi, abandoned, “withno claim on the support or help of any persons or groups in the community,” and hence both tobe pitied and feared.54 Lacking a proper niche, their fate was to become beggars, street-singers,or pickpockets.55 As such, they appear in medieval illustrations and as such they emerge in thelater picaresque archetype: Lazarillo, Simplicius, and Tom Jones. Garcio, Abel’s boy in Towneley,is surnamed Pikehames—pickpocket—and indeed, his submission to his master’s authority is lessthan perfect.

48Gies, 209.49Ibid.50Boswell, 25L51Tbid., 421.52Tbid., 27; Aries, 26.53Aries, 88.5Boswell, 421.55Aries, 324.

r20 ex post facto

Rather than a condition of disgrace and exploitation, servitude was perceived as a

temporary stage in the normal development of every individual, one of the seven ‘ages

” of life.

It was a period of role-learning and of comparative freedom from responsibility. One could

become fully adult “only by leaving the state of dependence, or at least the lower d

egrees of

dependence.”56 Hence, servitude in the Middle Ages represented the kind of “sanctioned period

between childhood and adulthood .. . of prolonged immaturity and provoked precocity” which

psychologist Erik Erikson describes as a “moratorium”:

A moratorium is a period of delay granted to somebody who is not ready to meet

an obligation or forced on somebody who should give himself time. By psychosocial

moratorium, then, we mean a delay of adult commitments . . . characterized by a

selective permissiveness on the part of society and of provocative playfulness on the

part of youth, and yet it also often leadsto deep . . . commitment on the part of

youth, and ends in a more or less ceremonial confirmation of commitment on the

part of society. . . . for the most part, these moratoria coincide with apprenticeships

and adventures that are in line with the society’s values.57

Keep the notion of “ceremonial confirmation” in mind. We shall need it when we consider the

theme of initiation in Redford’s Wit and Science.

Roger Ascham (1515-1568) recognized the adolescent’s need for a moratorium. In The

Scholemaster, he wrote of “their too much liberty to live as they list; of their letting loose to

o soon

to overmuch experience.” Ascharn and the better-known Johan Comenius (1592-1670)were

advocates of a “new” pedagogy which substituted shame and persuasion for whipping as a

method of discipline in schools. That medieval adolescents of all classes were likely to be

whipped is a frequent theme of writers then and now. “Apprentices were liable to corporal

punishment, with the master’s chastisementset out .. . as if it was a duty rather than a right.”59

The rules of monasteries provided that novices be beaten with a cane if they “commi

tted an

offense in chanting the psalms.”6° Of the ten adolescents from the English drama listed above,

only Jesus is not threatened with beating, while three of them are whipped on stage. The student

Wit is sentenced by his preceptor Reason to be whipped for his idle folly, but when he volu

ntarily

submits to Shame, his punishment is remitted. Schoolmaster Redford, who wrote Wit and Sc

ience

56thid., 26.

57Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis(New York: Norton, 1968), 157.

Lawrence V. Ryan, Roger Ascham (Stanford, 1963), 253.

59Gies, 210.

60Boswell, 305.

r

Provoked Precocity 21

for production by his own students at St. Paul’s, was perhaps a man ahead of his time. For most

of his contemporaries, the mere appearance of a serving lad on stage or on page conjured up

expectations of a whipping. The adolescent was perceived as innately deserving of punishment

and the mock execution thereof must have gratified that perception.61 Such scenes are routinely

comic rather than pathetic.

Ascham and Comenius were also advocates of a curriculum based on recognition of the

student’s natural developmental stages.62 Cornenius theorized that individuaL development

unfolds in “seven schools for the gradual perfection of man,” each of about six years.63 The first

school is with the mother; the second, third, and fourth are public; while the latter three are

personalP4 Adolescence corresponds to the the third school, during which phase critical

reasoning and the perception of causality emerge.65 In this analysis, Comenius agrees with both

Plato and Jean Piaget, who in fact credits Comenius for being ‘closer to us’ than philosophers of

the intervening centuries like John Locke. In a preface to his selection of Comenius’s works,

Piaget writes:

Comenius may be undoubtedly considered as one of the precursors of the geneticidea in developmental psychology, and as the founder of a system of progressiveinstruction adjusted to the stage of development the pupil has reached [andJ aproponent of the theory of innate faculties—mental development being attributed toa mere maturation of preformed structures...

Piaget errs only in crediting Comenius with too much originality. The medieval notion of the

ages of life, instead of being mere numerology, was a tropological recognition of preformed (by

God, of course) and innate stages of character growth, roughly compatible with both Piaget’s

theories of four sensorirnotor and operational stages and Erikson’s eight steps in the epigenesis

of identity.

Postulating innate qualities of human character held no terror for medieval theorists, whose

insights were conditioned by the doctrine of original sin. Adolescence in particular, when

according to Aristotle the faculty of choice was beginning to develop, could be a dangerous time

‘1Rolf E. Muuss, Theories of Adolescence (New York: Random House, 1975), 20; Potlock, 23.

b2Muuss, 23.

3John Amos Comenius, The School of Infancy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1956), 147.

tEmest M. Eller, translator’s introduction to Comenius, 23.

o5Muuss 24.

Jean Piaget, editor’s introduction in John Amos Comenius: Selections (Paris: Unesco, 1957), 8-9.

22 ex post facto

of ‘willfulness,” “wanton pursuits,” and “juvenile rowdiness.”7 Hence the need for constant

surveillance by a master, a preceptor, or an older peer, and the preference for placing the

adolescent under supervision outside the home, away from dangers of indulgence and even

incestP After all, had not Saint Augustine portrayed the typical adolescent, himself, as

wallowing in “the depths of vice,” burning to get his “fill of hellish things,” and running wild in

the different darksome ways of love?”69 The endocrinological changes which initiate adolescence,

or at least the resultant “increase in sex interest and awareness, combined with increased sexual

desires that crave gratification,” were hardly unnoticed by medieval folk.7° Neither was the

propensity of youth toward rash acts and rapid mood changes; Ascham describes them as

apt to take, unapt to keep; soon hot, and desirous of this and that, as cold and soonweary of the same again; more quick to enter speedily, than able to pierce farvery ready of disposition to be carried over quickly, by any light company, to anyriot and unthriftiness.71

Ascham goes on to blame the moral faults of the young on the unnatural conduct of parents, so

that “all these misorders be God’s just plagues . . . brought justly upon us for our sins.”72

Medieval adolescents were expected to be lusty, hasty, insolent, prone to violence, sensitive

to slights from elders, fickle, incapable of reasoned choices, and absurd in their overestimation

of self. All of our dramatized adolescents, except the perhaps untypical boy Jesus, display most

of these traits. Pilate’s Filius is sent to monitor his mother’s behavior, a task he is “prowde and

preste” (DPW 115) to undertake. But where the mother orders him to return to his father, F ilius

declares “lirste will I nappe” (DPW 195). The Captain’s Boy, ordered to fetch his master a drink,

retorts, “I may natt for slep, I make God a vow! Thou shall abide itte, and thou were my siere”

(MM 1400). Surprised, the Captain asks lithe Boy intends to shirk dinner service also:

BOY. Natt for me be of good chyr,Thouwgh ye be sor hongord till ye rave,I tell yow pleyn beforn!For swiche a cramp on me sett is,I am a point to fare the worse;I lie and wring till I pisse,

b7Gies, 216.

Boswell, 305; Aries, 256-69; Pollock, 27.

69Augustine of Hippo, Confessions (New York: Image, 1960), 65.

70Muuss, 265.

71Ryan, 255.

72Ibid., 257.

Provoked Precocity 23

And am a point to be forlorn!MASTER. Now, boy, whatt woll thee this seyll?BOY. Nothing but a layer damsell. (MM 1404-11)

The Captain finds the boy’s lust ludicrous and offers him a “damsel! to wed” (MM 1417) in theform of a whipping. The Presbyter’s Boy (very likely the same actor in the same play) goads hismaster for being a fat old lecher

BOY. Whan women comme to here thy sermon,Pratily with them I can houkkyn-With Kinhon and layer Marion.They love me better than ye....

PRESBYTER. A, thou lyist, boy, by the divil of hell!I pray god Mahound mott thee quell!I shall whip thee till thy ars shal belle.On thy ars corn mych wondire.BOY. A fartt, master, and kiss my grenne! (MM 11 59-71)

The rascal’s well-earned whipping is interrupted by the arrival at the temple of the king, uponwhich he instantly assumes his rule as choir boy, helping the priest with his vestments andsinging the treble in the offise of this day” (MM 1225). Apparently, his singing is none toopracticed, for the priest chides him: “Hold up! the divll mote thee afray, For all owt of rule thoudost me bring” (MM 1228-29).

lak Garcio and Daw, the serving knaves in the first and Second Shepherds’ Pageants, aremore refined singers than the Presbyter’s Boy, but equally foul-mouthed and fresh with theirmasters. Daw in particular is a precocious lad, quick with a wisecrack, quick to perceive theworst in anyone. It is Daw who sounds the warning when the sheep-thief Mak arrives, and Dawwho remains consistently suspicious of Mak, to the point of dreaming of him dressed in awolf-skin (SSP 368). finally, it is Daw who uncovers Mak’s deception, the hiding of the sheepin a cradle, and who suggests the apt punishment of tossing him in a blanket. Daw’spredisposition to suppose rascality of everyone is a mark of his adolescent insecurity with his ownand others’ identities. He has reached the stage of development at which he distinguishes goodand evil, so that he fears a foolish, all too trusting commitment, and will, paradoxically, expresshis need for faith in loud and cynical mistrust.”73 Another such is Coil, the Physician’s Boy inThe Play of the Sacrament, who denounces his master’s lewdness and quackery while connivingwith that master to defraud the Jews (PS 642-49). Garcio Pikeharnes, servant of Cain in the killing

73Erikson, 131.

24 expost facto

of Abel, struts onstage simultaneously bragging of his master’s prowess and insinuating his

villainy. Throughout the play, servant matches master in obscenity, truculence, and cynicism.

By the final scene, he is predicting “mekill mischaunce” (KA 404) for his fratricidal role-model, yet

threatening the audience with Cain’s own curse (KA 445-50). All of these serving lads share the

curse of subservience to wicked, unworthy masters, and thus all exhibit “the store of wrath

accumulated in those totally deprived in their need to develop any faith.”74

Violence and bluster mark the adolescent on the medieval stage. Pikeharnes announces his

arrival by ordering the audience to be quiet or else “blaw my blak hoill bore, / Both behind and

before, / Till his tethe bled (KA 7-9). Later, he trades blows with Cain and swears to requite any

punishment “with the same mesure and weght” (KA 51). But by the end of the play he has to

scamper up the scaffold to escape his master’s more desperate rage. The Juvenis, caught with his

pants in manu tenens in The Woman Taken in Adultenj, bluffs his way past the Accusator with a

threat: “If any man my way doth stoppe. . . / I shal this daggare putt in his croppe” (WTA 129,

131), then confesses to the audience that he was “sore affraid” (WTA 137) and offers them “Goddys

curse . . . everychon” (WTA 144). Students and youths in general, according to Aries, went armed

in the Middle Ages and were prone to brawling. “This spirit of violence went with considerable

licence with regard to wine and women . . . schoolboys drank heavily and college statutes

recognized the mug of wine. . . as a symbol of initiation and brotherhood.Th

The adolescent’s overestimation of his prowess, physical and mental, must have been as

amusing to a medieval as to a modem audience. Even the twelve-year-old Jesus is chided for

presumption:

DOCTOR: Harkes this chitde in his bourding!He wenes he kennes more tha he knowes;Certes, sonne, thou art over-yongBy clergy deane to know our lawes. (CD 240-43)

“By the same token,” Erikson writes of the adolescent in any culture, “he objects violently to all

pedantic limitations on his self-image and wilt be ready to settle by loud accusations all his

guiltiness over the excessiveness of his ambition.”76

The student Wit, though clearly of better breeding, displays the same traits of lust,

braggadocio, and impatience as the serving lads. He, too, as Erikson says of the universal

74Ibid., 256.

Aries, 321.

76Erikson, 129.

Provoked Precocity 25

adolescent, perceives every delay to be “a deceit, every wait an experience of impotence, every

hope a danger.”7 Like the sixteen-year-old Augustine, he is “ashamed to be remiss in vice in

the midst of [his] comrades.”78He would rather act shamelessly in the eyes of his elders [i.e., his foster fatherReason], out of free choice, than be forced into activities which would be shamefulin his own eyes or in those of his peers.79

Thus he relies on his pals, Study and Diligence, to support him in his duel with Tediousness. He

is fickle in his devotion to his lady Science, attempting to seduce honest Recreation and allowing

himself to be seduced by Idleness, but he is fiercely offended when Science seems inconstant in

her esteem for him. He even menaces her with “a blow or twaine” (WS 751).Except the boy Jesus, all the adolescents discussed above are comic characters. Their threats

and oaths, complaints of ill-treatment, sighs of lust, and especially their precocious cynicism wereas predictably funny to a medieval audience as they are to us. A certain formulaic humor, likethat of an old joke told and retold, attaches to every adolescent male in medieval drama. Andwell it might, since the formula was indeed antique, derived from the comedies of Plautus andTerence, in which adulescens (the word meant either boy or slave) were often depicted as comicrogues.8° Whether the influence of classical theater on the English dramas was direct or via someintermediary stagecraft is the subject of another essay, but the repetitiveness of details in thescenes featuring adolescents suggests a common model. Compare, for instance, the mockproclamations by Garcio Pikeharnes (KA 418-37) in the Towneley pageant, the Presbyter’s Boy(MM 1185-1201) in the Digby Magdalene, and the Physician’s Boy (PS 565-72, 608-21) in theCroxton miracle play. All three depend for their humor on the sight of the pompous masterstomping upstage, unaware of what his mischievous servant is communicating directly to theaudience.

Modern critics have paid scant attention to the allegorical drama of Wit and Science. DavidBevington declares that “the essential metaphor is one of chivalric quest.”81 T. R. Watsonproposes that the lady Science be recognized as a tropological figure of Christ. Edgar Schellargues that Redford’s schoolboy skit represents a step from the sermonizing morality play to the

7’Jbid., 181.

78Augustine, 68.

129.

8°Boswell, 30.

81David Bevington, The Medieval Drama (Boston, 1975), 1029.

26 ex post facto

“more complex ... more imaginatively precise” stagecraft of the Elizabethans.82 In light of

psychological and anthropological theories, however, another interpretation is possible: one which

reads the play as an initiation, a rite of passage through adotescenee to adulthood.

Rites of initiation, i.e., baptism, ordination, and knighthood, played a large role in medieval

culture. Since the fourth Council of Toledo in 633 A.D., ordination was supposed to be delayed

until the end of adolescence.83 In the fifth chapter of Centuries of Childhood, Aries describes the

“initiation of a novice, or of what we would now call a freshman,” into the University of Aix. The

process began with the appointment of a preceptor and two promoters. The candidate had to face

a purgation, much like a fraternity pledge. At times, purges became brutal and licentious, with

the novice running a gauntlet of blows from his peers; “the ladies present could obtain a

mitigation of the penalty.” Afterwards, the initiate would be washed and dressed in a scholar’s

gown, and a feast would follow at his or his sponsor’s expense. “Speaking more generally,’ Aries

continues,

to enter a society one had to undergo a sort of operation of a religious character,

sometimes magical and always ritualistic, which changed the very being of the

novice. . . . This was the case with the student-bodies and probably also with the

trade guilds, and . . . dated back to the Middle Ages. This operation consisted of a

drinking bout.. . and then of violent ragging... . This fraternity would be renewed

by periodic communion rites, by collective meals and drinking bouts.

The script of Wit and Science reads like an outline of such a rite. First, Wit’s sponsor, Reason, is

identified, and Wit is charged with his task (lines 1-62). Wit’s peer promoters, Study, Diligence,

and Instruction, join him and the preparations continue (63-140). Then Wit faces his trial

(141-210), the battle with Tediousness, which he cannot win, being as yet uninstructed in the

mysteries. Wit is knocked unconscious; “Here Wit fallith downe and dieth” (211). Of course, he

must die for the rebirth of the new man to be possible. Now follows an elaborate ceremony (lines

212-872), during which Wit is revived by Honest Recreation, purged and stripped of his old self

by Idleness, subjected to ragging by Science and Experience, forced to confront his identity in

Reason’s mirror, and punished by Shame until he admits his dependence on instruction. He is

now properly ready for a new trial of maturity against the monster Tediousness (873-963), which

he wins easily. He is dressed in a new gown (964-81). He meets his reward, the embrace of Lady

82Edgar Scheti, Strangers and Pilgrims: Prom the Castle of Perseverance to King Lear (Chicago, 1983),

76.

83Boswell, 252.

84Aries 241, 244.

Provoked Precocity 27

Science, in a scene (982-1092) which mixes congratulations with stern admonishments not to abuse

his newly-won stature as an adult man of science. The play ends with his preceptor Reason’s

blessing (1094-1101) and general revelry.

Piaget would find much to admire in Redford’s allegory. Wit’s over-confidence, which

leads to his first defeat, matches the developmental

burst of egocentrism . . . which occurs at the transition from the concrete to theformal stage [i.e., childhood to adolescence]. This high-level egocentrism takes theform of a naive but exuberant idealism with unrealistic proposals for educational,political, and social reforms, attempts at reshaping reality, and disregard for actualobstacles.85

A rewriting of the play a generation later, which probably reflects the content of the lost original

first scene, has Wit’s mother, Nature, tell him that his disposition is implanted in him, directly by

her but immanently by God. It is as clear a position in the nurture/nature debate as any

cognitive psychologist could ask.

The evidence of Wit and Science and the mystery plays is plain: medieval Englishmen did

have an idea of adolescence, at least for males. A period of emotional turbulence, rapid learning,

role-testing, and grave moral peril, it coincided with the third “age of life,” beginning with puberty

and continuing through years of apprenticeship, squirehood, study, or servitude to a foster parent.

Reason and choice, and innate faculties like consciousness of sin, emerged during these years,

making adolescence the most critical age in the formation of the mature man’s ultimate identity.

Robert Dawson entered $FSU as a graduate student in U.S. history in 1974, earned 33 units,and then withdrew to study music in Europe. He performs medieval, Renaissance, and avant-garde music with various ensembles, and directs the Medieval Music Workshop at DominicanCollege. He is also a published poet, ,wvetist, and photographer. In 1991, he decided tocomplete his M.A. in History, only to discover that less than half of his earlier credits could berecycled. Now he hopes to finish all requirements during the Fall 1992 semester. He aspiresto teach at a rural college in the southwest, somewhere where he can watch a million-year-oldbluff erode from his bedroom window.

85Muuss, 188.

28 ex post facto

Plays Cited:

Wit and Science (WS), John RedfordThe Killing of Abel (KA), Wakefield Master, Towneley Cycle Second Shepherd’s Pageant

(SSP), Wakefield Master, Towneley CycleThe Woman Taken in Adultery (WTA), N Town CycleMary Magdalene (MM), Digby MSThe Play of the Sacrament (PS), Croxton MSTexts from:Bevington, David, ed. The Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton, 1975.

first Shepherd’s Play (5?), Wakefield Master, Towneley CycleChrist with the Doctors (CD), Chester CycleThe Dream of Pilate’s Wife (DPW), York CycleTexts from:Happe, Peter, ed. English Mystery Plays. New York: Penguin, 1975.