Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/398

 384 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH temple, whereas the present play, like the Prologue, makes her parents bring her to the temple, in response to the priest's summons, in her twelfth year. Again, the Prologue explicitly states that at her departure the priest provides her with three maiden companions, whom the text duly intro- duces by name, Susanne, Rebecca, and Sephor. The play has been interpolated. Two passages in oftaves have been inserted after the present manu- script was written, a third towards the end of the play belongs to an earlier date. In this the lines are fairly short, though it can hardly be assigned to the short o<5lave group. As we have seen in the previous play, the long odtave writer could compose quite short lines when he pleased, and I have no hesitation in regarding this passage, which deals with the Psalter, as an insertion by the hand that wrote the Fifteen Degrees above. There is no mention of it in the very full description in the Prologue. The Annunciation play, in short oftaves, is one of the most remarkable in the cycle. It begins with what Contemplatio (in the link between plays 9 and 10) calls the ' parlement of hefne,' the well-known contention of the four daughters of God, and then proceeds to a Salutation simple in design, but elaborate and distinftly ecclesiastical in composition. Now the stanza in the Prologue describes a quite simple Annunciation play of the usual type, and cannot by any possibility have been written for the play we have in the text. Observe in particular that the Prologue expressly states that Mary's three maidens hear the Angel's voice,