Wakefield Master

• Born: c. 1420
• Birthplace: Wakefield, England
• Died: c. 1450
• Place of death: Unknown

Other Literary Forms

A few scholars have perceived a relationship between the style of verse used in the plays of the Wakefield Master and the fifteenth century poems The Northern Passion and The Turnament of Totenhamm. The relationship is tenuous, however, and most scholars believe it to be specious.

Achievements

The mystery pageants of medieval Europe did not follow classical dramatic form. They were indigenous Western European plays that evolved out of religious ritual. The plays of the Wakefield Master are the finest surviving examples of this genre. His work is notable for its humor, its structural sophistication, its unusually fine use of dialect, and its finely developed character. In the mystery pageants of the Wakefield Master, one can find the elements of a uniquely English drama that blossomed in the works of the great Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. The dramatic force of his plays, the exuberance of his language, and the insight of his characterizations make the Wakefield Master a significant contributor to the development of Western drama.

Biography

The Wakefield Master is a mysterious figure, and the high literary value of his work has enticed many scholars into speculating about who he may have been. The dialects used by the Wakefield Master are from the general area of Wakefield, England, and the Master’s plays also refer to places in and around Wakefield. Therefore, he probably wrote while living in or near the town. Evidence that the town staged mystery pageants indicates that the Master’s work was composed specifically for Wakefield. The signs of his style in revisions of various portions of the cycle as well as the neatness with which his plays fit into the cycle have led some scholars to conclude that all the plays in the Towneley manuscripts were performed in Wakefield. Such a conclusion is reasonable and accounts for many scholars calling the cycle the “Wakefield Mystery Plays.”

Drawing on what is known of the York and Chester cycles, scholars have speculated that the Wakefield Master was a cleric, perhaps a monk. He was probably a man, although not necessarily so. Custom and known practice indicate that women were excluded from participation in the writing of such works as the Wakefield pageants. He almost certainly had an occupation other than writing; his plays were probably commissioned, as was his editing of other plays in the Towneley Cycle Learned members of the clergy were often expected to be able to contribute writings to public religious activities. The variety of dialects in his plays indicates that the Wakefield Master may have traveled in the Midlands area of England; the dominant dialect indicates that he was native to the Wakefield area.

Analysis

The Wakefield Master was an unusually talented playwright. He used tradition and the Bible to create plays that make insightful comments on humanity. Although he was very much a medieval Christian, his authorial techniques presaged the outburst of English Humanism that occurred only two or three generations after he wrote. Notable for his wit and skill with language, he was also a highly skilled dramatist who took best advantage of what the form of the mystery pageant offered him. Characterization, format, theme, and staging—in these and the other major facets of drama he was superbly accomplished. He was therefore not only a good writer of mystery plays, nor only a good medieval dramatist, but also a great dramatist for any age. Perhaps the strongest impression retained after reading his plays is that of a writer who knew people and knew how to show them truthfully onstage, one who understood the problems that afflict every generation.

To appreciate the Wakefield Master’s work, one needs to understand the nature of the mystery pageants, which were specialized religious dramas with staging and format requirements different from those of modern drama. Part of what elevates the Wakefield Master’s plays above the ordinary is his manipulation of the limitations of his dramatic form to obtain sophisticated dramatic effects. His actors were shopkeepers and laborers, his employers undoubtedly expected him to follow carefully the well-known biblical stories, and his stage was limited in the props and scenery it could contain. The Wakefield Master made these limitations into assets, using them to heighten the effect on his audience of the characters and events in his plays.

Mystery Plays

A medieval mystery pageant is a play that deals with the Christian concept of the universe. The creation of the world, the sacrifice of Christ, and the Judgment are parts of the mystery, with the life of Christ being central to all the events. Thus, in a mystery cycle, the creation of the world is related to the life of Jesus, as are the biblical events that precede his birth; events that follow his ascension to heaven are shaped by his life, with the end of the world coming as a logical consequence of Christ’s life. The word “cycle” has a double meaning: It refers to the medieval Christian concept of God’s creation as a unified whole, which the mystery cycle portrays with plays depicting Christian history beginning with God before the act of creation and ending with the final judgment. “Cycle” also refers to the medieval tradition of viewing life as cyclical. Therefore, a mystery cycle is a dramatic representation of the medieval Christian’s view of the universe. The mystery cycle presents the beginning and end of the world, unified and given their meanings by Jesus Christ.

Mystery plays are sometimes called Corpus Christi pageants because of their association with the spring Corpus Christi festival. The mystery cycles seem to have evolved as part of the public celebrations held after Easter, but their performances were held not only during Corpus Christi celebrations but also at other times, notably during Whit week. Regardless of whether they coincided with the Corpus Christi observances, these plays were springtime events and were profoundly religious in purpose. Their origins were both religious and secular, a blend that resulted in the mysteries of God’s work becoming powerfully accessible to lay audiences. Liturgical drama began in the early Middle Ages as a way to teach biblical ideas to illiterate audiences who could neither read their vernacular languages nor understand Latin. Such early plays probably were staged inside churches and were part of significant religious holidays. Late medieval performances of the Lincoln Corpus Christi plays were probably still staged at the Lincoln cathedral—although outside—long after liturgical drama had evolved into the complex mystery cycles and miracle plays (the miracle plays focused on the lives of saints, not on Christ). By the time the Wakefield Master wrote his plays, mystery cycles were well-established religious celebrations, with rules and audience expectations that he had to fulfill. The rules involved inclusion of important aspects of Christian faith, and the expectations were based not only on the biblical accounts themselves but also on Christian tradition. For example, tradition had it that the wife of Noah was a shrew: She was anticipated comic relief in the mystery cycle.

Indeed, extrabiblical tradition played a large role in the development of the mystery cycles and was an important influence on the Wakefield Master. The medieval audience rarely read the Bible; it developed embellishments and twists for biblical stories. Some of the embellishments linger in modern tradition: Satan with horns, hooves, and a tail; the Apostle John as Jesus’s closest friend; the apple as the forbidden fruit of which Adam and Eve eat in the Garden of Eden. The satire and ribald humor in the Wakefield Master’s plays reflect the influence of folk dramas such as the Feast of Fools, in which Church ritual was mocked. In addition to popular biblical traditions and folk dramas, the mystery cycles reflected some of Western Europe’s most significant secular—sometimes even pagan—myths. The death and rebirth of Christ is informed by old myths of hero-gods of the pre-Christian era; the legends of King Arthur and Roland reflect the old myths of heroes rising from their graves to help their people in times of peril. Christ was thus a secular hero-figure as well as a messianic one.

The Wakefield Master had to fulfill the basic purposes of the mystery plays, the foremost of which was to teach the audience about fundamental Christian doctrines. In Noah, Noah must communicate the idea of the Great Flood as God’s response to the sins of humanity and must be sure to tell his audience how animals and the human race were preserved. In the shepherds’ plays, he must convey the importance of the birth of Christ. In The Buffeting, the belief that Christ suffered as a surrogate for all people, past and future, is important.

Staging and Presentation

In addition to meeting such expectations, the Wakefield Master had to work within the peculiar stage conventions of the mystery pageant. No one knows exactly how the Towneley Cycle was staged in the era in which the Wakefield Master flourished, although many scholars assume that the Wakefield plays were staged in a manner similar to the staging of the York Cycle about which more is known. There were crucial differences between York and Wakefield that make some of the York practices unlikely for Wakefield, but York represents the broad pageant tradition in which the Wakefield Master worked. York was a relatively large and prosperous medieval city, with a large mercantile class. The mercantile class was divided into trades, and each trade was represented by a guild. Each guild was responsible for the performance of a particular play in the York Cycle. The effect of this is a fragmentation in the cycle; each play had to suit the available players in a given guild and would be altered to suit changes in the membership of the guild. Therefore the continuity found in the Towneley Cycle is not found in the York Cycle. Further, the cycles were associated with a processional tradition that was part of the Corpus Christi celebrations. The procession, a kind of parade, would involve an entire community; the guild actors would participate in their roles. Eventually the procession and the performances split because the cycles became too complex to be performed on the same day as the procession. In York, twelve to sixteen stations were designated along a processional route; at each station, a single audience could see all the plays. The stages were on large carts that were pulled by horses or oxen, and each stage belonged to a particular guild that was responsible for a particular play. Thus, Jesus, who would appear in several plays, would be performed by a different actor in each play; there was no continuity of actors from one play to the next. The York Cycle grew so long that it probably had to be performed on two or three consecutive days because of the time needed to move the stages from one station to the next.

The manner of the York Cycle’s presentation is generally believed by literary historians to be the standard one for mystery cycles, but Wakefield differed from York in ways that might have made the presentation of the Towneley Cycle significantly changed from that of the York Cycle. Wakefield was relatively small; it probably did not have the large number of guilds that York had. The Towneley Cycle is believed to have included at least thirty-two known plays; missing numbered leaves from its manuscript indicate that it consisted of even more plays in the Wakefield Master’s day. The city of Wakefield may have been too small to have the necessary number of guilds; it might even have had trouble finding enough actors for the multitude of roles if its plays were to have separate companies as in the York performances. In The Wakefield Mystery Plays, published in 1961, Martial Rose suggests that the Towneley Cycle was performed on one stage with the same actors playing the major roles throughout.

There is much to recommend the theory that the Wakefield plays were performed in a single location, probably in a theater-in-the-round. The Towneley Cycle was edited, perhaps by the Wakefield Master himself, to give it a continuity in structure and theme not found in the York Cycle. A continuity of actors and a minimum of guild plays would allow for such consistency. Also, the few records that exist indicate that the plays began and ended in one day; if they were performed in one place, they could have fit into the dawn-to-dusk schedule required by daylight performances (dusk was customarily the legal curfew). The Church, as with the Corpus Christi procession, could have had principal responsibility for staging the cycle, instead of the guilds, although there is evidence that, after the Wakefield Master’s day, at least a few guilds were given specific plays. This would explain the consistent editing that is evident throughout the cycle; the plays could have been the responsibility of a central group rather than many.

The theater-in-the-round was used by traveling companies. The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1440), one of the great medieval morality dramas, was roughly contemporaneous with the Towneley Cycle and was performed in an outdoor theater. The use of such a theater by traveling troupes indicates that this kind of stage could be quickly set up in a field. An easily set up outdoor theater would have been well suited to the needs of Wakefield and the annual nature of the performances of its cycle. The stage would enable the Wakefield Master to use multiple exits and entrances, to and from which his actors would pass through their audience. The stage’s limitations would resemble those of the York Cycle’s processional arrangement. There would be no curtains and thus no changes of scenery during a given play, the actors would be surrounded on all sides by their audience, and the actors would be local people, not professionals. The Wakefield Master may have solved some of his problems by designating different areas of his stage as different dramatic locales; when an actor moved from one area of the stage to another, he moved from one imagined locale to another. The Wakefield Master also handled his staging problem by implying much of the action. Unable to build an ark onstage in Noah, he has the action take place in Noah’s home with references to the work on the ark.

Time in the Cycles

Like many medieval writers, the Wakefield Master did not view time as linear. It was, instead, eternal; in the Christian universe of his day, God was everywhere in time as well as space. Therefore, it was reasonable that the shepherds should be like local ones and that Cain should speak of being buried locally; the Wakefield Master would have perceived little incongruity in having English tradesmen portray biblical figures. Part of the message of the cycles, indeed, was that Christ’s sacrifice involved people from all eras. This treatment of time based on the universality of human experience enhances the appeal of the Wakefield Master’s plays to modern readers.

The Killing of Abel

The Killing of Abel was probably edited and rewritten by the Wakefield Master. His typical nine-line stanza—found in his other plays—is possibly uniquely his; elements of the stanza have been detected by some researchers among the couplets of The Killing of Abel. The play also shares themes of human and divine relationships and a distinctive comic style with his other plays. The Wakefield Master has in common with other great playwrights the ability to mix pathos and humor; as in William Shakespeare’s plays, tragedy is leavened with humor, and comedy with the tragic.

The plot of The Killing of Abel is that of the familiar biblical story: A jealous Cain commits the first murder by slaying his brother Abel. After lying to God about his deed, he is exiled by God. In this story, the Wakefield Master incorporates themes of the relationships between masters and servants, the nature of good and evil, and the universality of sin. Some critics assert that the themes of the play are too complex for its intended audience of farmers, tradespeople, and the general citizenry of Wakefield; others note that the play is loose and disorganized. Neither negative criticism is fair to the play. The first one underestimates the audience; the middle and lower classes of medieval England were deeply inculcated with religious doctrine. Nearly everything they did could have religious significance. One critic points out that the intended audience of The Killing of Abel would have been able to recognize in Cain, the plowman, the symbol of “the assiduous Christian.” The audience would have understood the Christian symbolism and much of the basic theology. Medieval England of the Wakefield Master’s day was not untouched by the Humanist revolution—as the secular themes of the Master’s plays indicate—but religion still gave life and its events their meanings for the Towneley Cycle’s audience. Such an audience would have perceived, for example, in the relationship between Garcio and his master Cain the relationship between God and Christian, and Satan and sinner. If Garcio is understood to be a demon, then The Killing of Abel’s seemingly confused structure may make sense. Simply put, if Garcio is a demon and servant of Cain, then Cain is the servant of Satan, although he may not know whom he serves. The role of Garcio need not be demoniac, though, to serve its purpose. He remarks early in the play that “Som of you ar his [Garcio’s master’s] men.” If Garcio’s master is taken to be not only Cain but also Satan, it would make members of the audience servants of Satan. Although this is a good reading, it is not one that would be readily picked up by an audience during the rush of the play’s events. Cain’s entrance is enough to lend meaning to Garcio’s assertion; he enters while driving a plow team before him. The comparison of men with animals was common in medieval literature, and like the animals, some of the audience would be servants of sin—of the first murderer, Cain. Such an image is consistent with the Wakefield Master’s work; its wit is biting. Cain is the focus of the play, the representative of the universality of sin. The sophistication of imagery and theme in The Killing of Abel is typical of the Wakefield Master’s work. That he should turn the story of Cain and Abel into one that involves his audience typifies his efforts to stretch the subjects of his plays to encompass universal truths.

Noah

Noah continues the themes of master-and-servant relationships, with the relationship between God and Noah opposed to that between Noah and Uxor. Noah is a near-perfect servant: God commands, and he obeys. In his role as servant of God, Noah is Christlike—a notion that would have been immediately comprehended by a medieval audience because Noah was commonly used as a Christ figure in religious teachings. The serious theme of Noah as a type of Christ is wonderfully blended with Noah’s comic relationship with Uxor, his wife. Like Christ, Noah gathers his flock from the world. The ark was often treated as a symbol of the body of Christ by medieval biblical commentators, and thus Noah gathers the world to the symbol of the body of Christ, much as the Word of Christ is supposed to do. When Noah deals with Uxor, he is sometimes confounded by her cantankerous refusals to cooperate with him. When the great storm comes, she sits at her spinning wheel and ignores all entreaties to board the ark until the water rises near her. Her behavior at home and in the ark is amusing; it also represents the cantankerous, mulish, and foolish behavior with which Christ must contend in his Christian servants. The Wakefield Master blends biblical story, Christian tradition, and earthy humor into a play that tells Noah’s story, shows the relationship between human beings and God, and presages the coming of Christ later in the cycle.

The First Shepherds’ Play

The Wakefield Master contributed two plays about the coming of Christ to the Towneley Cycle, The First Shepherds’ Play and The Second Shepherds’ Play. Some scholars suggest that The First Shepherds’ Play was meant to end a day’s series of performances and that The Second Shepherds’ Play was meant to begin the next day’s performances. Another possible explanation for two shepherds’ plays is that the first one gave the Wakefield Master inspiration for the second, better play, and he chose to preserve both. The First Shepherds’ Play focuses on three pastors or shepherds who begin as comic figures incapable of understanding the spiritual world and who end with enough wisdom to perceive the divine nature of the Christ child. One critic sets forth a persuasive argument that the play’s farcical elements represent Old Jerusalem, body, and earth, and that the coming of understanding represents New Jerusalem, spirit, and heaven. A less traditional view is taken by another critic, who asserts that the play portrays the growth of imagination—that the shepherds begin by perceiving their world only in literal terms and that, as their imaginations grow, they come to perceive the greater reality of the spirit. The First Shepherds’ Play is impressive in the sophistication of the readings it allows; the Wakefield Master grapples with difficult and important questions about the human spirit and humanity’s ability to comprehend the divine. The play also is good entertainment. One critic compares the shepherds to the twentieth century’s Marx Brothers, and when one reads the shepherds’ argument over nonexistent sheep, the comparison seems apt.

The Second Shepherds’ Play

The Second Shepherds’ Play is the Wakefield Master’s best play and is one of the masterpieces of world drama. It exhibits the Wakefield Master’s control of form and is carefully structured to reflect the Holy Trinity, containing three shepherds, three gifts to the Christ child, and three dramatic movements, among other sets of three. The characters of the shepherds—Coll, Gyb, and Daw—are well defined and realistic. In fact, the realism of the characters, combined with the realistic earthiness of their humor, has encouraged some critics to discuss The Second Shepherds’ Play as if it were a modern play instead of the medieval pageant it is. The Wakefield Master’s genius is revealed in the combination of realistic characterization and tone with medieval Christian traditions. He anticipates the sophistication of later English drama but remains rooted in the concerns natural to the subject of the play.

The three shepherds are oppressed by misbehaving gentry and a cold and almost barren world. Their joking and singing are intended to fend off despair. When Mak enters the stage, the shepherds have shown their spiritual unreadiness to know of the birth of Christ. The subsequent farcical scenes with Mak prepare them for seeing the Christ child. Mak, dressed as if one of the gentry, dupes the shepherds and steals one of their sheep. In order to hide his crime, he and his wife, Gyll, hide the sheep in a cradle. When the shepherds come to look for their sheep, Mak claims that the cradle holds his new child. The shepherd Daw’s anger changes to friendly interest; he likes children. Coll and Gyb are similarly moved. They are willing to set aside their suspicions. The discovery of the sheep and the tossing up and down of Mak are moments of boisterous comedy that might distract from the significance of what has happened. The shepherds have matured from complainers to doers—from uncharitable people to ones who wanted to visit kindnesses on Mak’s putative son. The parallel between the sheep in the cradle and Christ, the Lamb of God, is obvious, and the three shepherds’ readiness to offer gifts to the sheep-child represents their preparedness to give to Christ. Less obvious is the notion put forward by some scholars that Mak is an anti-God figure. Perhaps the Wakefield Master intended Mak and the stolen sheep to be antitheses of God and Christ, but their roles make good sense without heavily allegorical interpretations: Mak, Gyll, and the sheep provide a rehearsal for the three shepherds.

The play lends itself to allegorical interpretations that enhance its literary sophistication, but its dramatic success is the growth of the shepherds, and the careful development of events and form is wonderful. The play is not, as some might contend, two plays: one of Mak and the shepherds and another one attached, like a coda, of the shepherds visiting Christ. It is a careful rendering of three steps in the lives of Coll, Gyb, and Daw. They begin as lost souls in a universe whose order they do not understand. They move into the world of disorder, in which sheep are babies, in which the wife, Gyll, rules the man, Mak, and good and evil are confused. Then they mature to an understanding of the importance of the birth of Christ, to whom they bring with open hearts gifts they can happily give. Christ is the restoration of God’s order and the negation of oppression, disorder, evil, and despair. The Second Shepherds’ Play is a blend of comedy and pathos worthy of a great playwright; it is a dramatic gem that speaks of hope.

Herod the Great

Herod the Great is possibly the Wakefield Master’s best allegory. Herod, the slaughterer of the Innocents, was traditionally a satanic figure. Some critics view the Wakefield Master’s Herod as a satanic parody of God; Herod is called “kyng of kyngys” and is ruler over all the world. He and his court are ostentatious and loud; he is prone to claiming powers for himself that are God’s alone. He represents the old order—the world before the new age Christ brings to Earth. As such, he represents satanic perversion of order and virtue: Bragging substitutes for deeds, the master rules by fear instead of love, and courage is manifested by the butchering of infants. The Wakefield Master’s comedy, open and earthy in the shepherds’ plays, is dark and terrible in Herod the Great. The strutting Herod and his moronic sycophants are ridiculous and their absurdity laughable, yet the results of their hellish views of the world are awful. The absurd Herod becomes a monster when, onstage, his troops pull babies from their mothers and stab the infants: “His hart-blood shall thou se,” declares a soldier to a mother. The language indicates that the audience is shown stage blood; swords are reddened and babies are then displayed to their mothers. Rarely in literature is humor so turned in on itself; the silly king arrogates to himself the prerogatives of God in a contest between himself and the Lord. Thematically, Herod is Satan lashing out at the newborn Christ.

The Wakefield Master is admired by many critics for his comedy rather than for his other dramatic traits, perhaps because his comedy presages modern dramatic techniques and was innovative for his era. His comedy can provide a modern reader with an exciting sense of seeing postmedieval drama being invented. Often, however, critics ignore his other achievements because of their interest in his comedy, missing the pathos in The Killing of Abel and the shepherds’ plays. His skill encompassed the major elements of good drama, and in Herod the Great he actually turned his comic skills into evocations of horror and palpable evil.

The Buffeting

In The Buffeting, he used his talent for creating lively, bantering dialogue to convey not comedy but brutal insensitivity. Christ is tried by Cayphas and Anna in a mockery of a trial. One of His torturers says “wychcraft he mase” (he makes witchcraft), accusing Christ of witchery. The Buffeting features another of the Wakefield Master’s reversals: The evildoers accuse Christ of evil. They derogate his teachings and subject him to an insane trial and to torture. The play seems peopled by madmen, with Christ like a rock of serenity in the middle of a world gone crazy. Some critics interpret Jesus’s silence as a sign of the Wakefield Master’s genius, suggesting that the Wakefield Master turns Christ’s silence into words, that in the context of the cycle as a whole, the play’s audience would speak Christ’s words for him as they helplessly watched lying witnesses try to degrade him. The easy conversation of the torturers, Cayphas, and Anna, with their smiles and jokes and their almost serene confidence in merciless law, is disquieting, not amusing. Christ’s silence provides answers to their gibes and accusations; these are people who are out of touch with the new world Christ has brought with him. Christ is sanity amid the insane; the lies of his accusers attest his truth. They answer themselves by revealing the emptiness of their beliefs. Herod the Great is disquietingly horrific; The Buffeting is disquieting through the contrast between worldly values and heavenly ones. Christ need not even speak. His presence alone answers his enemies.

Bibliography

Beadle, Richard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. This reference guide covers English theater from around 500 to 1500, including discussion of the Wakefield pageants and mystery plays. Bibliography and index.

Helterman, Jeffrey. Symbolic Action in the Plays of the Wakefield Master. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981. In this full-length study of the playwright, Helterman states his belief that the Wakefield Master rewrote existing plays in the final third (the “passion group”) of the cycle and that the success led to the composition of six new plays (including Mactacio Abel), each of which is discussed in a substantial chapter. Bibliography.

Robinson, J. W. Studies in Fifteenth Century Stagecraft. Early Art, Drama, and Music Monograph series. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1991. Among the topics covered in this volume are the Wakefield Master, the Towneley plays, the York plays, and the Wakefield pageants. Bibliography and index.

Stevens, Martin. Four Middle English Mystery Cycles. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. Stevens considers the Wakefield Cycle to have been constructed as a unit and asserts that the Wakefield Master was the guiding mind in the creation of this unit. Evidence for this interpretation is found in the “Wakefield Stanza.” Illustrations.