The Towneley Cycle: Unity And Diversity

By Author: Shirley Green
Total Articles: 129
Comment this article

'There is nothing scholars love more than a giant, contradictory codex in which nothing adds up' Happe prefaces his volume with Alfred Bidding's comment on a new edition of Sherlock Holmes. The contradictions of the Towneley manuscript, and of the collection of mystery plays which it preserves, present scholarly difficulties: date, provenance, circumstances of performance all continue undeterminable. A number of Tbwneley plays are borrowed from the York Cycle, but whereas York's plays are Links Of London Charms preserved in a manuscript of the 1460s or 70s, the Towneley manuscript was copied possibly as late as the reign of Mary I.

The York pageants are known to have been performed as a unified cycle in the form in which they survive; by contrast, while it is certain that there was a Corpus Christi sequence of plays performed at Wakefield in the sixteenth century, it is not certain that the Towneley manuscript preserves that same Wakefield cycle. There is, furthermore, no certain evidence that the Towneley plays were ever performed together, or indeed at ...
... all, and the elegant Towneley manuscript looks more like a book for private reading than a practical manuscript compiled for performers' use. The consistency of Towneley's one scribal hand is complemented by the consistent Yorkshire dialect of the plays, but the varied styles and verse forms of the plays have led scholars to trace multiple authors; Gayley's 1903 claim that certain plays, egregious because of their thirteen-line stanzas and their literary quality, may be picked Links Of London Bracelets out and grouped together as the work of the 'Wakefield Master', continues to shape criticism of the Towneley plays. More recent scholarship has indicated possible points of origin for different parts of the cycle in Beverly, Doncaster, and Whalley Abbey.

It would thus be a brave scholar who sought to write definitively on the 'Unity and Diversity'of the Towneley Cycle: Happe is wisely cautious. His sensible starting point is that, since one scribe copied the manuscript as it now stands with great uniformity of presentation, at some point someone the scribe or an earlier compiler envisaged the material contained in the codex as some sort of unified whole. On this basis he can proceed to discuss the 'Towneley Cycle' in spite of unresolved questions about its design, arranging his discussion under the four headings 'The Text', 'Performing the Cycle' 'Ideologies and Interpretative Strategies', and 'Negotiating the Text.' Happe's discussion in each section of the book is admirable for its scrupulousness and for the comprehensive nature of the research on which it is built. This, the first book-length study of the Towneley Cycle for many years, is an impressively complete portrait of the present state of Towneley scholarship.