The Anonymous Master and His Nine-Line Stanza

Nobody knows the name of the writer scholars call the Wakefield Master, but his work is unmistakable once identified: five of the cycle's thirty-two plays, Noah, the First Shepherds' Play, the Second Shepherds' Play, Herod the Great and the Buffeting of Christ, share a distinctive nine-line rhymed stanza no other contributor to the cycle uses, a verse fingerprint precise enough that editors have used it to sort the Wakefield Master's own contribution from anonymous surrounding material added by other hands. Of the five, the Second Shepherds' Play has drawn by far the most attention. It tells the Nativity story twice over in one script: three shepherds first encounter Mak, a sheep thief who steals one of their flock and disguises it as a newborn child in a cradle to avoid discovery, a broad comic sequence resolved only when the shepherds see through the ruse, before the same three shepherds travel on to Bethlehem and witness the actual newborn Christ in a second cradle scene that deliberately echoes the first. Scholars read the doubled cradle as the Wakefield Master's own theological joke and argument at once, a comic false nativity built to throw the real one into sharper relief for an audience that had just laughed at its parody. The device has made the play a fixture of medieval drama anthologies well beyond its own cycle.