Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/181

 MIRACLE CYCLES. 169 probably from Clement VI, by Henry Francis, who was senior monk of the abbey in the third quarter of the fourteenth century. 1 The traditional date is what on general grounds, historical and literary, we might expec"t, but the plays themselves have come down to us in a late and much modified form. In support of the authorship it has been argued that one of the plays makes use of unusual authorities which are followed and named in connexion with the same incidents in the c Polychronicon.' 2 On the other hand, the use of these authorities by the dramatist has been disputed, and a fundamentally composite authorship of the cycle has also, though with less reason, been postulated. 3 There the matter rests. 4 Our concern lies with the manuscripts in which these plays have come down to us, and with the textual relations subsisting among those manu- scripts. The problems they present are many, and the most obvious is raised by the curious faft that of this cycle, probably dating from the first half of the fourteenth century, all the manuscripts that survive were written between 1591 and 1607. It is the only cycle of which more than a single 1 < The Mediaeval Stage,' ii. 348. 2 S. B. Hemingway, 'English Nativity Plays' (Yale Studies in English, xxxvm), New York, 1909, p. xxi. 3 Hans Utesch, ' Die Quellen der Chester-Plays,' Inaugural- Dissertation, Kiel, 1909, p. 91. 4 An ingenious and very attractive line of metrical argument, which would go far to prove substantial unity of authorship, was suggested by Alex. Hohlfeld in his essay on ' Die Altenglischen Kollektivmisterien ' ('Anglia,' 1889, xi. 251). Unfortunately the facts are not as he states them, and his inference is therefore invalid.