The Wakefield Mystery Plays - also known as the Towneley Cycle from the Towneley Hall manuscript that preserves them - are the masterpiece of medieval English comic theology. The 32 plays of the cycle dramatize salvation history from the Creation to the Last Judgment, but their enduring distinction is the work of the anonymous figure known as the 'Wakefield Master,' whose revised and original plays brought to medieval religious drama a vernacular energy, social satire, and theological wit unmatched elsewhere in the tradition.
The Work
The Towneley manuscript, held at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, preserves 32 plays in a northern English dialect consistent with the West Riding of Yorkshire. The cycle is associated with the town of Wakefield, a cloth-manufacturing center in West Yorkshire, where performances on the Feast of Corpus Christi were recorded from at least the early fifteenth century. The Corpus Christi feast, instituted in 1264 and celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was the annual occasion on which English craft guilds performed their biblical dramatizations on moving wagons (pageants) through the streets of the city.
The plays were composed and revised over many decades. The Wakefield Master - the anonymous poet responsible for the most distinctive plays - is generally thought to have been active in the late fifteenth century. His contributions can be identified by their distinctive nine-line stanza form, their Northern dialect, their satirical edge, and their unusual combination of theological sophistication with raucous popular comedy.
The Second Shepherd's Play
The Secunda Pastorum (Second Shepherd's Play) is the most celebrated medieval English drama and one of the great short works of world literature. Its 754 lines divide into two sections of roughly equal length:
The first section is a situation comedy. Mak, a notorious sheep-stealer, drugs the three shepherds and steals a sheep. He takes it home and his wife Gill swaddles it in a cradle, pretending it is their newborn child. When the shepherds wake and discover a sheep missing, they search Mak's house; Gill insists the 'baby' is her child. The comedy of the disguised sheep in the manger is elaborately prolonged before the trick is discovered.
The second section is the Nativity. An angel announces Christ's birth; the shepherds travel to Bethlehem and worship the infant Jesus, offering him gifts (a bob of cherries, a bird, a tennis ball - humble, childlike gifts that contrast beautifully with the Magi's). The final scene is tender and doctrinally precise: 'He is born of a maid and of the virgin well known; God is with us and so he shall be; no wrong he hath done.'
The stolen lamb swaddled in a manger is a typological device: the false lamb (Mak's theft) precedes and parodies the true Lamb (Christ in the manger). The play draws on the profound tradition of Christ as the Lamb of God (John 1:29, Revelation 5:6-14) and presents the comic misdirection as a preparation for the genuine article. The Wakefield Master's structural sophistication in using secular comedy to heighten the impact of sacred reality has no parallel in medieval drama.
Biblical Engagement
Luke 2:7-20 is the primary biblical source: the shepherds keeping watch by night, the angelic announcement, the Gloria, and the visit to the manger. The Wakefield Master fills in the biblical account's silence about the shepherds' identity, names, personalities, and conversation with vivid invention - cold, hungry, complaining shepherds who nonetheless respond to the angel's message with immediate obedience.
Isaiah 1:17 - 'Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow' - and Amos 5:21-24 - God's rejection of religious ceremony without justice - resonate through the plays' social satire. The Wakefield Master's plays are notable for their complaints against corrupt lords, dishonest landlords, and grasping clergy - complaints that draw explicitly on the prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power. The shepherds' opening complaints about their treatment by the powerful are not merely comic setup but social theology.
Revelation 5:6-14 - the vision of the slain Lamb who is worthy to receive power and honor - provides the eschatological dimension of the nativity plays: the lamb in the manger is the Lamb on the throne; the Corpus Christi performance looks forward to the Last Judgment plays that end the cycle.
The Creator and Context
The Wakefield Master is unidentified; no documentary evidence of authorship survives. Scholars infer his work from internal evidence: the nine-line stanza, the Northern dialect, the satirical energy, and the theological learning that co-exist in the plays most consistently attributed to him. He was clearly educated - the theological precision of his dramatic theology reflects genuine learning - but wrote for a popular audience. The craft guilds that performed the plays included tanners, fishers, shearmen, and other artisans; the Wakefield Master wrote for an audience that worked with their hands and worshiped with their whole bodies.
Legacy
The Wakefield plays were performed until the Reformation, when the Protestant reformers suppressed the mystery play tradition as Catholic idolatry. The Towneley manuscript survived the suppression and attracted scholarly attention from the nineteenth century onward. The Second Shepherd's Play entered the academic canon as a masterpiece of English literature, regularly performed in university drama productions and studied as the summit of medieval vernacular drama. Its influence on later religious drama - including T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and the modern revival of biblical drama - has been substantial. Its combination of earthly comedy and heavenly reality remains the definitive model for how sacred drama can engage without condescending to its audience.