Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/296

 284 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH of being rather more than accidental resemblances. The curious point is that these phrases all occur in portions of plays borrowed by the Wakefield from the York cycle, while the passage of several lines occurs in what .is usually regarded as an insertion by a late Wakefield editor. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. Parallels between different miracle plays are, of course, also common. For instance, in the scene of the Betrayal, Peter's speech to the unlucky Malchus : Go pleyn thee to Sir Cayphas And bid him do thee right, recurs almost verbally in the Chester and Wakefield plays. 1 Among certain Shrewsbury fragments we actually have part of a liturgical play, not only composed in the same metre as the corresponding play of the York cycle, but having one stanza practically identical with it, a facl which has not, I think, received quite the attention it deserves. 2 Quite the most instructive, however, of these parallels is one which has been pointed out between the Resurreftion plays of the Wakefield and Chester cycles. This is in the striking speech of the risen Christ beginning : Earthly man that I have wrought, 1 'Chester Plays,' ed. Wright, Shakespeare Soc., 1843-7, " 3 1 (but the first line is corrupt in MS. W) ; ' Towneley Plays, 1 ed. England and Pollard, p. 225 (xx. 682). 2 The Shrewsbury fragments have been most recently printed by Osborn Waterhouse in 'The Non-Cycle Mystery Plays,' E.E.T.S., 1909, p. i (see 11. 39-48); cf. 'York Plays,' ed. L. T. Smith, 1885, p. 122 (xv. 120-9).