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The Second Shepherds' Play: A Reconsideration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Maynard Mack Jr.
Maynard Mack Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
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Abstract

Unlike some other plays of the Wakefield cycle, the Second Shepherds’ Play reveals a subtle exploitation of dramatic techniques to minimize the distance between secular and sacred experience. Introduction of the shepherds one at a time; Mak’s play-acting, magic spell, dream prophecy, and sheep stealing; the parallel between Mak and the Angel are all arranged to give the audience a sense in theatrical terms of the meaning of the shift through the farce-drama from the opening lyrics of static despair to a new mode of celebration. Although symbolically presented as the devil or Antichrist, Mak functions dramatically as the bridge to the birth of Jesus.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 78 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 For discussions of the play in three parts with very different emphases of division, see John Gardner, The Construction of the Wakefield Cycle (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1974), p. 85, and Nan Cooke Carpenter, “Music in the Secunda Pastorum,” Speculum, 26 (1961), 696–700.

2 Not only in the liturgy itself but in “poetic sermons” as well. On these see Susan Gallick, “A Look at Chaucer and His Preachers,” Speculum, 50 (1975), 456–76, and references cited there.

3 All quotations are from The Wakefield Pageants, ed. A. C. Cawley (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1958).

4 It is possible, of course, that Coll moves off to “a balk” (1. 49), thereby removing himself from the area of action. His outburst at line 109, however, when he catches Gyb's attention (see Cawley, n. to 1. 109) would seem to imply that Gyb might have spotted Coll earlier, but did not. Since the meaning of “raw” (1. 109) is unclear, speculation about a visual barrier between the shepherds is fruitless.

5 For varying views on how much or how little these shepherds are individualized, see Millicent Carey, The Wakefield Group in the Towneley Cycle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1930), p. 192; David Jeffrey, “Pastoral Care in the Wakefield Shepherd Plays,” American Benedictine Review, 22 (1971), 215; Hans-Jurgen Diller, “The Craftsmanship of the Wakefield Master,” in Medieval English Drama, ed. Jerome Taylor and Alan Nelson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 257; William Manly, “Shepherds and Prophets,” PMLA, 78 (1963), 153–54. My own view is that like most other dramatic characters, though in a less developed way, Coll is at once symbolic, typical, and individualized. All three shepherds seem strikingly alike, however, when compared with Mak.

6 The author has prepared us for Mak's entrance through Daw. Coll and Gyb see Daw as a liar who like Mak “wyll make vs both a ly” (1. 116), and Daw drops his game of pretending not to recognize the others as quickly as Mak abandons his disguise. Later the Daw-Mak parallel develops further when Daw dreams what Mak has done (11. 370–71), while Mak creates a dream unconsciously prophetic of what the Virgin has done.

7 Logical plotting was not a hobgoblin of the medieval cycles, and Mak will later automatically assume that, despite his spell and his return to the shepherds, “howso the gam gose, / To me thay wyll suppose … And cry outt apon me” (II. 427–30). This very breach of consistency, however, lends inevitability to the movement toward the cradle: no matter what the shepherds or Mak does, it seems, the lamb will be discovered.

8 The playwright has already explicitly reminded the audience of the usual penalty at two places: 11. 308, 315. Claude Chidamian, “Mak and the Tossing in the Blanket,” Speculum, 22 (1947), 186–90, suggests that the blanket tossing was symbolic as well, being a traditional way of hastening childbirth, but this seems hardly relevant since it is Mak, not Gyll, who is so punished.

9 “Men of good will” is the Vulgate version of this Gospel passage.

10 Margery Morgan, “ ‘High Fraud’: Paradox and Double Plot in the English Shepherds' Plays,” Speculum, 39 (1964), 677, shows that all the English shepherds' plays except N-town move from a contemporary England to a historical Bethlehem.

11 Lawrence Ross, “Symbolic Structure in the Secunda Pastorum,” Comparative Drama, 1 (1967), 122–49, talks of “an immediately resonant response to Mak's various prophetic gestures,” and calls the Angel “the character obviously parallel to Mak” (p. 138). I am here concerned with the peculiarly theatrical and dynamic structure the playwright used to dramatize the meanings that Ross considers primarily in static, symbolic terms.

12 I have found no contemporary evidence concerning doubling except for the ambiguous rule at York “that he or thay so plaing plaie not ouere twise the saide day” (see Lucy Toulman Smith, ed., The York Plays [1885; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1963], p. xxxvii). On parallel characterization, but not doubling, see Ross, “Symbolic Structure,” and Leah Senanoglou, “The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays,” Speculum, 48 (1973), 491–509.

13 Gyll would be transformed from real mother of many and pretended mother of a lamb into the Virgin Mother of the Lamb and symbolic mother of all the saved.

14 I am happy to acknowledge a grant from the General Research Board, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, which assisted my work on this essay.