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Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England by Walter W. Greg
page 84 of 656 (12%)
burlesque comedy in all except the purely didactic 'Coventry' cycle of the
Cotton manuscript. Here, indeed, the treatment of the situation is
decorously dull, but in the others we can trace a gradual advance in
humorous treatment leading up to the genuine comedy of the alternative
Towneley plays. Thus, like Noah and his wife, the shepherds of the
adoration early became recognized comic characters, and there can be
little doubt of the influence exercised by these scenes upon the later
interludes. With the general evolution of the drama we are of course in no
wise here concerned: what it imports us to notice is that just as it was
the picture of the young gallant riding along on the mirk evening by the
fail dyke of the 'bought i' the lirk o' the hill' that caught the
imagination of the north-country milkmaids, so it was the rough
representation of rustic manners, with which they must have been familiar
in actual life, that appealed to the villagers flocking to York,
Leicester, Beverley, or Wakefield to witness the annual representation of
the guild cycle.[75]

It will be worth while to give some account of the form taken by this
genuine pastoral comedy, as we find it in its highest development in the
two Towneley plays. These belong to the latest additions to the cycle, and
were probably first incorporated when the repertory underwent revision in
the early years of the fifteenth century.[76] Each play falls into three
portions: first, a rustic farce; secondly, the apparition and announcement
of the angels; and thirdly, the adoration. The two latter do not
particularly concern us. Though in the Chester cycle the shepherds show
themselves amusingly ignorant of the meaning of the _Gloria_, in the
Towneley plays they are apt to fall out of character, and certainly
display a singular knowledge of the prophets,[77] for

Abacuc and ely prophesyde so,
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