Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/400

 386 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH composition of the prologue, though it is, of course, natural to suppose so. The ' Visit to Elizabeth/ which completes this group, is, as we have already seen, unrepresented in the Prologue. The next group includes the Nativity and Mis- sionary Life of Christ. The plays comprised in it are independent of one another. The first two have the peculiarity that the stanzas describing them in the Prologue are imperfect. In either case four lines only are written ; these just mention the subject of the play, and a blank is left in the manu- script for the completion of the stanza. That this is not due to accidental damage to the copy the scribe was following is shown, not only by each quatrain being complete in itself, but also by the fact that, as we shall see in a moment, the intro- duction of the second of these plays accounts for a discrepancy between the Prologue and the text in the one that follows. The play numbered xii in the Prologue and 14 in the text is a remarkable composition headed ' Pagentum de purgatione Marie et Joseph.' The subject, unknown elsewhere in English drama, is treated in short octaves with a good deal of rude force. A prologue, not originally contemplated by the scribe, has been prefixed. 1 It is in romance stanzas, topical and comic. As originally written, the play began with the stage direction, Halliwell, p. 132. The scribe provided the following stanza with a three-line initial, and put the play number, 14, in the margin opposite to it. But when he did this he had not yet finished writing play 13. He had got, I think, as far as the line : 'He xal remedy it whan it plesyth his mercy' (p. 128), which was the end of his copy for that play, and he left nearly two and a half