at least one
hundred and twenty-five places in England. The cycle which has been
most completely preserved is that of York, forty-eight plays of which
still exist. It originally included fifty-seven plays, while the
number of Biblical incidents known to have been treated in plays
belonging to one cycle or another includes twenty-one based on the Old
Testament or on legends, and sixty-eight based on the New Testament.

Even while the religious plays were still a part of the Church
services, they contained humorous elements, such as the realistically
comic figure of the merchant who sold spices and ointment to the Maries
on their way to the tomb of Christ. In the later plays these
interpolations developed into scenes of roaring farce. When Herod
learned of the escape of the Wise Men, he would rage violently about
the stage and even among {25} the spectators. Noah's wife, in the
Chester play of _The Deluge_, refuses point-blank to go into the Ark,
and has to be put in by main force. The _Second Shepherds' Play_ of
the Towneley cycle contains an episode of sheep stealing which is a
complete and perfect little farce. Nor were the scenes of pathos less
effective. The scene in the Brome play of _Abraham and Isaac_ where
the little lad pleads for his life has not lost its pathetic appeal
with the passage of centuries. While many of the miracle plays seem to
us stiff and perfunctory, the best of them possess literary merit of a
very high order.

As the development of the plays called for an increasing number of
actors, the clergy had to call upon the laity for help, so that the
acting fell more and more into the hands of the latter, until finally
the whole work of presenting the plays was taken over, in most cases,
by the guilds, organizations of the various trades which corresponded
roughly to our modern trades unions. Each guild had its own play of
which it bore the expense and for which it furnished the actors. Thus
the shipwrights would present _The Building of the Ark_, the
goldsmiths, _The Adoration of the Wise Men_. Sometimes the plays would
be presented on a number of tiny stages or scaffolds grouped in a
rectangle or a circle; more often they were acted on floats, called
pageants, which were dragged through the streets and stopped for
performances at several of the larger squares. These pageants were
usually of two stories, the lower used for a dressing-room, the upper
for a stage. The localities represe