Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/192

 i8o PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH at least two presumably official recensions. Which of these is to be considered the more authoritative is a nice point which depends, not only upon the textual evidence of the manuscripts, but also to some extent at least upon the kind of authority we look for. After what I said last time, you will have little difficulty in recognizing in the Peniarth manu- script one of the prompt copies in the hands of the various a6Hng guilds. The collective manu- scripts and the records assign the Antichrist pageant to the Dyers, and though both are later than P, there is no reason to suppose that any change of guild had taken place. You will also remember that we came to the conclusion that the present manuscript was not, like the York Scriveners' play-book, itself an ' original,' but was a copy, either direft or indirect, from an official manuscript of the whole cycle. The absence of any evidence of compilation in the collective manuscripts, together with the fac5l that P bears the heading, ' Incipit pagina xx ma ,' seems to me to place this beyond doubt. But if this is so, it follows that P cannot be the parent of any portion of any of the later manuscripts, but must be ultimately descended from some collective manuscript which is likewise an ancestor of the younger group. It will be well to consider for a moment what light the general history of the cycle, as traced in the records, may throw on the problem of the manuscript tradition. Our information as to the pageants and the guilds performing them comes, apart from the texts themselves, chiefly from certain