Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/196

 1 84 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH just as it is in H. We have here, I think, proof as absolute as the circumstances admit that the process has been one of severance and not of coalescence, and that it is consequently the youngest manuscript, H, which preserves the earlier tradition. The occasion of the division was the appearance of two fresh guilds in the group already responsible for the performance of the play. In H the adlors are the Bowyers, Fletchers, and Ironmongers. To these B adds the names of the allied guilds of Coopers and Stringers, but repeats the name of the Ironmongers at the head of the Crucifixion play. The remaining manuscripts, D W K, also give this pageant to the Ironmongers, whose name, however, they corre<5lly omit at the head of the preceding Trial play. How then are we to explain the contradiction between the internal and external evidence ? The fact of the Passion appearing as a single play in the younger banns need not, I think, disturb us. How- ever late they may be, there is, nothing improbable in supposing that their author had before him as he wrote a manuscript of the earlier type, such as H, in which the play was not divided. Or else he may have been misled by the erroneous numbering which persists in all the divided texts. The real difficulty in the way of regarding the undivided text of H as original, is that the pre-reformation banns represent the play ,as already divided at a date when the Assumption play, which has dis- appeared from all extant manuscripts, was still performed as part of the cycle.