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Wakefield Pageants in the Towneley Cycle
1958 Manchester University Press. 187pp. VG, light wear on spine, no DJ.
- GenresDrama
187 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1897
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 7, 2025
fuck this shit
March 30, 2014
Cawley's edition of the Wakefield pageants impresses me with its care and scope. The editor niggles over every word, and the glossary is comprehensive and scholarly (and extraordinarily useful even today).
My greatest quibble with this edition is in the editing of the text itself: the punctuation, stanzification, and in particular Cawley's handling of what he takes to be internal rhyme in the Wakefield Stanza. (In the manuscript, this is actually a full break, generally written on the same line, but with single or double virgules to indicate a discrete line unit.)
This imposes some poetic values on the text that are manifestly drawn from later English traditions, making the text perhaps more accessible to the modern student reader but somewhat less resembling the Wakefield Master that Cawley aims to call attention to. At least, it is difficult to see why, without argument, he sets up the Wakefield stanza not as an octet, but rather a quatrain, with a tail-rhyme or frons. Some will say this is quibbling, but much of the innovation of the Wakefield Master (whatever that may mean) can be seen through comparison with the York Octet, a comparison muted in Cawley's edition here.
Note that his later Early English Text Society edition with Martin Stevens repaired many of these faults, if faults they are.
My greatest quibble with this edition is in the editing of the text itself: the punctuation, stanzification, and in particular Cawley's handling of what he takes to be internal rhyme in the Wakefield Stanza. (In the manuscript, this is actually a full break, generally written on the same line, but with single or double virgules to indicate a discrete line unit.)
This imposes some poetic values on the text that are manifestly drawn from later English traditions, making the text perhaps more accessible to the modern student reader but somewhat less resembling the Wakefield Master that Cawley aims to call attention to. At least, it is difficult to see why, without argument, he sets up the Wakefield stanza not as an octet, but rather a quatrain, with a tail-rhyme or frons. Some will say this is quibbling, but much of the innovation of the Wakefield Master (whatever that may mean) can be seen through comparison with the York Octet, a comparison muted in Cawley's edition here.
Note that his later Early English Text Society edition with Martin Stevens repaired many of these faults, if faults they are.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews