A transcription of a letter from Professor Malcolm Parkes of Keble College concerning the Towneley Plays: Huntington Library MS HM 1, dated March 17, 2002, by Alexandra F. Johnston
Until the 1970s, much of the speculation about the nature of MS HM 1 in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, was based on the assumption that it dated from the fifteenth century or earlier and that it was a coherent series of plays produced by a responsible municipal government in Wakefield and performed by local craft guilds as the plays were performed in York. However, since then, eleven items and a ‘Summa’ line that, together, described the processional performance of a play remarkably like the York play in the Wakefield Burgess Court Roll for 1556 published by J.W. Walker in The Times Literary Supplement in 19291 have been proved fraudulent2 and the productions of the plays as a series of related episodes in both Leeds and Toronto have found the individual plays uneven in prosodic and dramatic quality and written for various staging configurations – wagons, booth stages, and wide-ranging ‘place and scaffold’ settings with action in the central platea.3 Furthermore, twelve episodes in the manuscript have close connections with the York Plays4 and research for Records of Early English Drama in the West Riding of Yorkshire has found several references to plays being performed in other towns.5 By 2000, many in the field had come to believe that this manuscript contained a collection of plays originally performed as ‘stand alone’ plays or short sequences of episodes at various locations in the West Riding from some time in the mid-fifteenth century.6 This was in contrast to the firm belief held by the editors of both the facsimile edition of the manuscript in 19767 and the new EETS edition in 1994,8 Arthur Cawley and Martin Stevens, who wrote that it was Wakefield ‘where the plays were almost certainly presented.’9 Stevens was particularly convinced that the plays were those of Wakefield and had written detailed analyses of the manuscript.10
In 2002, the argument was fully re-engaged at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in 2002 in a panel that I organized called ‘The Towneley Plays Reconsidered.’ Garrett Epp presented a paper on the inconsistencies of the text and Barbara Palmer a paper on its possible provenance and its ownership by the Towneley family of Burnley, Lancashire.11 The third member of the panel was to be the late distinguished palaeographer and codicologist Malcolm Parkes of Keble College, Oxford, who was to present new palaeographical and dating information. Parkes was unable to come to Kalamazoo but, in a private letter to me, he presented several important points and asked me to share them at the Congress. I did so in a paper that also included the work on the manuscript by Louis Wann, Martin Stevens, and myself.
For complex reasons, when I wrote this article, I felt unable to publish the full transcript of the letter. However, recently I have been in touch with the literary executors of Professor Parkes’ estate, Rivkah Zim and Pamela Robinson, who have agreed that it would be good to have a transcription published and accessible to the readers of an article in Laura Estill and Tamara Atkin, eds., British Drama in Manuscript (Brepols: Turnhout, Belgium, forthcoming), as well as to others. I particularly want to thank Malcolm’s executors for their corrections of my transcription of the handwritten letter.
I have posted it here on the website of Records of Early English Drama temporarily while I find some other way to make it available. Readers of the article who have reached this site from a footnote will realize that the opening paragraphs explaining the circumstances of the letter are the opening paragraphs of the article.
1J. W. Walker, ‘The Burgess Court, Wakefield: 1553, 1554, 1556 and 1579,’ Yorkshire Archeological Society Records Serieslxxiv (1929), pp.16-32.
2Forrester Jean and Arthur Cawley, ‘The Corpus Christi Play of Wakefield: a New Look at the Wakefield Burgess Court Records,’ Leeds Studies in English n.s, VII, 1974, pp. 108-20.
3Two productions were directed by Jane Oakshot in Wakefield in 1977 and 1980 (29 out of the 31 pageants) and the entire cycle directed by Garrett Epp in Toronto in 1985.
4Peter Meredith, ‘The Towneley pageants’ in Richard Beadle and Alan Fletcher, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 161.
5Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Corpus Christi ‘‘Cycles’’ in Yorkshire: The Surviving Records,’ Comparative Drama 27 (1993), pp. 218-31.
6Garrett P.J. Epp, ‘The Towneley Plays and the Hazards of Cycling,’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, XXXII (1993), pp. 121-50; Barbara D. Palmer, ‘The “Towneley Plays” or “Wakefield Cycle” Revisited,’ Comparative Drama, 21 (1988), pp. 318-48.
7A.C. Cawley and Martin Stevens, eds., The Towneley Cycle: A Facsimile of Huntington MS HM 1 (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library,1976).
8Martin Stevens and Arthur Cawley, eds., The Towneley Plays, EETS s.s 13 and 14 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
9Stevens and Cawley, E.E.T.S., p. xv.
10See especially Martin Stevens, ‘The Missing Parts of the Towneley Cycle,’ Speculum, 45, 1970, pp. 254-65.
11Both subsequently published articles based on their presentations: Garrett P.J. Epp, “‘Corectyd & not playd”: an Unproductive History of the Towneley Plays,’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, 43 (2004), pp. 38-53, and Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Recycling the “Wakefield Cycle”: the Records,’ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 41 (2002) pp. 88-130.
Transcription of Malcolm Parkes’ Letter
KEBLE COLLEGE OXFORD OX1 3PG
17.iii.02
From Professor M B Parkes, FBA
Dear Sandy,
Herewith a few hasty comments on the Towneley manuscript as requested.
1. I agree with Ian Doyle (cited in the facsimile edn., p.xvii, n.19) that the handwriting of the text resembles that in Jenkinson’s Later Court Hands pl XIII (iii) (dated 1553). Unfortunately there are very few illustrations published from this period (most are autograph letters in a different script), but this one fits quite well. This would provide a presumed date for the manuscript of s. xvi med.
2. I would add that the Cadellae (or ‘Cadeaux i.e. the ‘strapwork’ initials) and the Bastard Secretary script used to display the first two lines of the texts of plays 12 [Prima Pastorum] and 23-29 [Crucifixion – Ascension], also belong to the same period. The w forms are not s. xv or s. xvi in, although other letter shapes could be. The display script seems to fall between that is two plates in my English Cursive Book Hands: pl. 15 (ii) (after 1519) and 20 (ii) between 1553 and 1558 – the latter by, I suspect, a younger scribe than our man.)
3. I suspect that the most obvious context for the production of this manuscript would be the beginning of the reign of Queen Mary (1553-1558). I would have thought the incorporation of the passage on the seven sacraments in the text on fol. 66r (play 19 [John the Baptist]) from an earlier exemplar would have been admissible during her reign, and the cancellation of the passage with the note ‘corrected and not played’ took place during the reign of Elizabeth I (See what is said about the sacraments in the preface to the Prayer Book of 1549). However, this historical approach is your cabbage patch, and I yield to your judgment. Nevertheless the palaeography would support it, but without such precise dating.
4. The main manuscript (text etc) was copied by a single scribe, although he copied the Suspensio Iude in a hurry. The scribe was responsible for the cadellae, the display script and the headings. He traced the cadella at the beginning of each play followed by the display script and then the heading and colophon. This sequence is especially obvious in the tryouts at the beginning of plays 23, 26, 27. The calligraphic nature of the cadellae is a scribal skill, not that of a flourisher.
5. There is evidence that the scribe copied in stages. This may be seen (a) in the variations in the layouts of the first pages of 3, 9, 17 and 19 when compared with the others, (b) in the treatment of the first two lines of text in each play. In plays 1-11 and 31-32 the scribe does not use display script for these lines. In plays 13-22 the first word (or words) of the first line are in a good Textura quadrata script. In plays 12, 23-29 the first two lines are Bastard Secretary. It is not entirely clear to me at this stage whether these stages represent a chronological sequence at intervals (for example they do not always correspond with quire boundaries, and play 32 was copied in a hurry; a situation which could arise at any time in the chronological sequence); but the evidence is sufficient to suggest a process of experimentation (with time for digestion) during the course of copying the book. It must have taken some time. The treatment of the cadellae also suggests a process of development (or, perhaps, an increase in confidence). In the first few plays the scribe exploited for decorative purposes the ascenders on the top lines of the pages, but abandoned this sporadic decoration as the cadellae became more elaborate.
6. There is more room for interpretation and speculation. (the editors of the facs[imile] were very puritanical).
a) The handwriting of the Jenkinson plate (see above) reproduces <…> of entries by new members in the admission register of the London Company of Scriveners. Cadellae and Bastard Secretary appear in important charters and Bastard Secretary was used for headings in documents and registers. The obvious explanation is that the scribe of Towneley was familiar with and had experience of legal work.
b) The copy possibly represents a revision – and was intended as an official copy for reference purposes (note on fol. 66r – see 3 above suggests both of these activities). The record was by or for someone in authority (?Town clerk, or clerk to an ecclesiastical committee??) if so, somebody should have identified him by now – You would know.
c) Sequence of plays. If the editors of the facs[imile] are to be taken seriously then this copy was based on a collection of exemplars some containing individual plays, others containing short sequences. The ‘absence’ of plays, and ‘disrupted sequences’ suggest to me that this manuscript was meant to record an ‘approved text’ in which the ipsissima verba were more important than the right order. It is not impossible that some plays were deliberately removed from the record because they were not ‘approved’.
The more I look at the facsimile the more it looks like a ‘legal document,’ or a record with judicial significance. However, this status did not last for very long, since it passed into private ownership at a fairly early stage in its career.
Hope this helps.1
Best wishes, Malcolm
P.S. I cannot remember the context in which I referred to ‘pin-holes’. I suspect that it may refer to the discussion of the binding – see intro to Facs[imile] of Oxford Bodleian Library, Digby 86, EETS (SS 16) (1996) pp liii-lvi with fig.2
1The rest of the paragraph was personal information of how I could reach him if I had questions.