Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/303

 MIRACLE CYCLES. 291 second-period play worked over by him, the whole of the Passion series from the 'Conspiracy' to the 'Condemnation' is his original work. He also prefixed a single stanza to the 'Way to Calvary': nowhere else does his hand appear. 1 He is a very remarkable though uneven writer. A metrist he certainly is not : he writes in powerful but loose and rugged alliterative verse. He also writes at great length and with much rhetoric and rant. But he is a real dramatist, and his portrait of Pilate is masterly. It is he who is responsible for the ' trauerspielele- mente ' which Hohlfeld finds characteristic of the cycle. 2 His additions can hardly be earlier than 1400. The problems connefted with the growth of the Wakefield cycle, if not more difficult, are at any rate more varied and complicated than those which centre round the York plays. Again it is customary to suppose three main layers of composition : an original simply didactic cycle, which may or may not have included fragments of yet earlier work ; a period of borrowing from, or composition under 1 Gayley considers not only that he also remodelled the ' Harrowing of Hell ' and the * Resurrection,' but that the ' Death of Christ,' 'with its elaborate and unique stanza, is an original produdlion ' of his. This I cannot for a moment admit. Even supposing that the ' Death ' did quote from the < Gospel of Nicodemus,' which it probably does not, that would not prove it to be by the author of the Passion series, for there is no evidence that that writer knew the 'Gospel' at first hand, and even if there were it would not follow that all the plays in which it was used must be by him. The ' Death of Christ ' is as fine a work metrically as the c Accusation before Pilate ' is dramatically, but in style the two pieces are as different as possible. 2 ' Anglia,' xi. 283.