Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/318

 304 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH that forms what I may call the problem of the Doftors' play. To solve it we must turn to the texts themselves, and to begin with let us consider rather closer the relation of the Wakefield play to that of York. So far as W is extant it presents only two passages not parallel to Y. Scene i and part of scene 2 are lost. The remainder of scene 2 is in quatrains, and is much fuller than in Y, which it in no way resembles. The parallelism begins with scene 3 and continues to the end, with the exception of the passage dealing with the Commandments, where again W rewrites the text in quatrains, expanding considerably. Either, therefore, the redactor of W deliberately departed from his copy, or that copy was defective. Anyhow, we may assume that he did not work on our extant manuscript of the York cycle. For one thing, we have previously seen reason to believe that the Wakefield borrowings took place at a time before the latest additions to the York cycle had been made ; for another the Wakefield manuscript may possibly be itself older than that of York. Textual evidence, so far as it goes, supports this view. Lines 209 and 211 of Y both contain small corruptions not found in W, 1 and W occasionally prunes lines which in Y are metrically somewhat redundant. The evidence is not alto- gether conclusive, but the probability is in favour of W having been copied from a close relative of Y, 1 209 : Nowe haue [we] sought in like a stede. . . 221 : Lo, where he sittis, y[e] se hym noght. . . (W is probably right in reading ' se ye.') Also in 1. 89 Y is alone in reading * brandy ng ' for c bourdyng.'