ey are in strong contrast to the pretentious poetry of the
court.[3]

As with the ballads and carols, so with miracle-plays: the fact that
they were handed down from one generation to another, and in each
generation revised, altered, and added to, makes assignment of dates
almost impossible. The play of the Shearmen and Tailors from the
Coventry Gilds cycle,[4] here printed, survived in a transcript dated
1534, and it is probable that it was then copied out for the sake of
combining what must originally have been four or five different plays
into one. Some of these plays in their separate form may have been first
written in the fourteenth century; they appear to have been added to in
the fifteenth, and (as we have seen) assumed their final form in the
sixteenth. The whole of the pseudo-Coventry cycle,[5] in like manner,
seems to have been revised and largely written when it was last
transcribed in 1468. But the supreme example of fifteenth-century
addition to an older cycle is that of the Wakefield Plays, which early
in the century were taken in hand by a dramatist of extraordinary
ability, whose traceable contributions amount to over three thousand
lines, distributed among at least six, or quite probably as many as nine
different plays, of which five are homogeneous and entirely from his
hand. Among these five are the well-known _Prima_ and _Secunda
Pastorum_, the two Shepherds' Plays with which the history of English
comedy begins. The humours of the two shepherds who meet on the moor and
come to blows over the grazing of an imaginary flock of sheep are good;
the humours of the Secunda Pastorum, of Mak the sheep-stealer, his
clever wife Gyll, the sheep that was passed off as a baby, and Mak's
well-deserved blanketing,--these surely are not only good, but as good,
of their kind, as they well can be. That I have not printed this second
Shepherds' Play here is due partly to its being easily accessible in the
Early English Text Society's edition, but chiefly to the serious
obstacles its northern dialect presents to any attempt at transcribing
it in modern English. The play of the Shearmen and Tailors of Coventry,
on the other hand, as I have noted in my preface, cries aloud for such
transcription. The fact, moreover, that in its present conglomerate
condition, it gives the whole history of the Divine Infancy from the
Annunciation to the Flight into Egypt makes it very representative, even
the humour of the Miracle Plays b