In 1903, Gayley and Alwin Thaler published an anthology of criticism and dramatic selections entitled Representative English Comedies.
Within the Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama, Christina M. Fitzgerald and John T. Sebastian find it important to note, "the quotation marks placed around the name 'Wakefield Master' are thus to be taken to indicate that the ascription of authorship is the product of convention, rather than proven fact.
However, scholars and literary critics find it useful to hypothesize a single talent behind them, due to the unique poetic qualities of the works ascribed to him.
The former description was based upon the earliest editions of the play that reflected the space-saving habits of the medieval scribe, who often wrote two verse-lines on a single manuscript line.
Thus, depending upon how one interprets the manuscript, a stanza (from the Noah pageant) might appear in either of the following forms: The thryd tyme wille I prufe what depnes we bere Now long shalle thou hufe, lay in thy lyne there.
The thryd tyme wille I prufe what depnes we bere Now long shalle thou hufe, lay in thy lyne there.
Owing largely to A. C.Cawley's 1957 edition of five of the pageants, and to others' arrangement of the manuscript lines, this is sometimes thought to be a nine-line stanza, with the quatrain containing internal rhyme.
When Cawley himself edited the entire cycle with Martin Stevens for publication in 1994, the two opted to present the lines as a thirteen-line stanza.
Since the Towneley Play was a drama and therefore spoken rather than read silently, to some degree this presentation of the poetic units in graphical form is somewhat arbitrary and inconsequential.
"In that year, the Diocesan Court of High Commission at York revealed their attitude to the citizens of Wakefield in no uncertain terms.
(Kyng Johan, Lines 413-15)[7] Such strictures are a Protestant form of the aniconism in Judaism, the forbidding of any depiction of God or other supernatural beings, such as angels or demons.
The word "pope" was excised from "Herod the Great," and twelve leaves are completely missing, which scholars suspect contained plays about the death, Assumption, and coronation as Queen of Heaven of the Virgin Mary.
The majority of the plays that make up the Wakefield Cycle are based (some rather tenuously) on the Bible, while the others are taken from either Roman Catholic or folk tradition.
When the Andrew Lloyd Webber–Tim Rice musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was in its infancy in 1972, it was so short that productions needed an added preamble to create a valid showpiece.
Frank Dunlop, in the first British theatrical performances of the musical on stage, preceded his Young Vic productions of Joseph with his own adaptation of the first six Wakefield Mystery Plays, which were credited in the programme.
[9] An adaptation of the plays was performed at London's National Theatre under the title of 'The Mysteries' first in 1977. in 1985, it was filmed and broadcast for Channel 4.