Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/388

 374 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH that his aftual manuscript appears in parts to have been cut about and re-arranged like the pieces of a puzzle. I pass now to what I called our second main source of information, and as briefly as I can I will give a general outline of the text as the scribe has written and divided it. He has split up the cycle into a number of separate plays by means of large red arabic numerals placed in the margins of the leaves. Doomsday is numbered 42, but the number 17 has accidentally been omitted, so that the number of plays into which the scribe saw fit to divide the cycle is actually 41. Halliwell makes 42, Chambers 43 ; the Prologue records 40. But while in parts the a<5lion falls naturally into separate scenes, which are written as individual plays or pageants, in others the composition and writing are alike continuous, and all division and numeration purely arbitrary. For instance, the second play is made to begin in the middle of a stanza. In referring to the plays I use throughout the numbering of the scribe. 1 The first three plays i, the first day of Creation and the fall of Lucifer ; 2, from the second day to the Expulsion; 3, 'Cain and Abel' are written quite continuously. It would appear to have been the original intention of the scribe to make play 4, ' Noah/ continuous likewise, for he has placed the 1 Readers must be so good as to bear in mind that neither the numbering nor the division of the plays as I give them necessarily agrees with Halliweirs edition. As a rule, the relation will be obvious to anyone who follows the printed text, but in cases where difficulties arise I add footnotes giving the exadl reference to Halliweirs text. The second play begins with the speech of Deus near the foot of p. 21.