Page "Mystery play" Paragraph 10

The most famous plays of the Towneley collection are attributed to the Wakefield Master, an anonymous playwright who wrote in the fifteenth century.

The epithet " Wakefield Master " was first applied to this individual by the literary historian Gayley.

The Wakefield Master gets his name from the geographic location where he lived, the market-town of Wakefield in Yorkshire.

He may have been a highly educated cleric there, or possibly a friar from a nearby monastery at Woodkirk, four miles north of Wakefield.

It was once thought that this anonymous author wrote a series of 32 plays ( each averaging about 384 lines ) called the Towneley Cycle.

The Master's contributions to this collection are still much debated, and some scholars believe he may have written fewer than ten of them.

These works appear in a single manuscript, currently found in the Huntington Library of California.

It shows signs of Protestant editing — references to the Pope and the sacraments are crossed out, for instance.

Likewise, twelve manuscript leaves were ripped out between the two final plays because of Catholic references.

This evidence strongly suggests the play was still being read and performed as late as 1520, perhaps as late in Renaissance as the final years of King Henry VIII's reign.