Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/297

 MIRACLE CYCLES. 285 and unless I am mistaken, the resemblance is more extensive than has hitherto been noticed. 1 In the Chester play the speech is in a stanza not only different from that of the rest of the play, but found, I believe, nowhere else in the cycle. And it is not that of the corresponding Wakefield play. This is sufficient proof that neither cycle borrowed the speech from the other. 2 It is an independent poem, or part of one, which has been taken without change into the Chester play, and rewritten for that of Wakefield, 3 and it is not impossible that it may yet be recovered in its original form from one of the unexplored miscellanies of the middle ages. The stanza is that of the c Gospel of Nichodemus,' 1 * Chester Plays,' ii. 89; 'Towneley Plays,' pp. 313, 316. The passage in question extends to 32 lines in Chester, and is sub- stantially the same in all the manuscripts. Chester 11. 1-8 corre- spond to Wakefield, xxvi. 226-31, and 11. 9-16 to xxvi. 332-7. Pollard, who drew attention to these parallels in his introduction, ' Towneley Plays,' p. xix, does not appear to have noticed that in xxvi. 328-33 we have a condensed version of Chester, 11. 17-32. He argued that Chester borrowed from Wakefield, but this is impossible, for in that case the passage in Chester would have been either in the same metre as the rest of the play or in that of Wakefield. Pageant xxvi is one of those which Wakefield borows in part from York. I agree with Pollard that a speech of the risen Christ has dropped out of York (it is implied in the stage direction : 'Tune lesu resurgente '), but it would be rash to assume that it was the speech in question. 2 Formally, indeed, it would not exclude the possibility of Wakefield having borrowed from Chester. Since it is clear, how- ever, that the passage is not original even in Chester, a common original seems more likely. 3 It is quite possible that in Wakefield xxvi. 226-333 we navc a paraphrase of the whole poem of which only four stanzas were borrowed by Chester.