Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/314

 3 02 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH general it may be said that the compiler of the Chester text, or we may fairly say the author of the Chester play, while he treats the original far more freely than his rival of Coventry, is at the same time far less given to rewriting what he borrows. This, no doubt, is partly due to the fact that the simple quatrains in which he wrote made dire<5l borrowing from the York stanza easy. I must explain exaftly what I mean by parallel passages, and ask you to bear it in mind in what follows. I call sections of text parallel when not only is the subject treated the same, but it is pos- sible to trace with some certainty a common under- lying original. I still call passages parallel although single lines, or even several lines together, may have been so altered as to present no resemblance. And I do not call passages parallel merely because they contain verbal similarities, even though these may point to an undoubted connexion. On a separate leaf I give in parallel columns a typical passage as it appears in each of the four plays, thus illustrating the nature of the variants between the texts. When we come to place the texts of these plays side by side, and to compare them in detail, certain very curious facts become apparent. In the first place, where Y and W differ neither C nor x is parallel with either. C and x ar e indeed both parallel with Y where W is defective, but there is nothing to suggest that the missing portion of W was not in part at least parallel with Y. In the second place, just as C is nowhere parallel to Y,