This video is about the First Shepherd’s Play, conventionally attributed to the Wakefield Master. While this play is substantially less well known that the Second Shepherd’s Play, I actually like this a lot.
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hello so in this video we’re going to talk about the Wake field Master’s first Shepherd’s play um now this is much less well-known much less popular than the second Shepherd’s play which I’ve already done a video about uh but I think maybe partially because I’m a contrarian by inclination I actually quite like the first Shepherd’s play uh I think it’s interesting and bizarre in different ways than the second Shepherd’s play is interesting and bizarre because that’s the thing that people like about the second Shepherd’s play is it’s so weird you’ve got this opening portion where these shepherds are talking about how difficult life is then you’ve got this extended scene where Max steals a sheep and pretends it’s a baby and it’s just Bonkers and then they go and see the baby Jesus the first Shepherd’s play is not as Bonkers but it also is really interesting it does things so first off it covers the same basic material uh you have the Shepherds who get uh the announcement of Jesus’s birth from an angel and then they go and see the baby Jesus at the end so the same material is covered and that’s interesting actually um and I’ll tell you why in just a second but it’s not as sort of insane and nonsensical as the second Shepherd’s play but it does have its own peculiar charms so uh I want to start with the reason that it’s interesting that the same subject matter is covered in the first and second Shepherd’s play and that’s because uh this is some good evidence that the townly manuscript what had been known for a long time as the Wakefield cycle is actually not a cycle at all so what I mean by a cycle is in the medieval period in towns like York and Chester there were Corpus Christie cycles serieses of plays which would be performed in a row and they were created to be performed sequentially right and they told the story of Biblical history um basically for an audience who could not read the Bible but whom the sort of sociocultural uh theological political political world of the medieval period required that they understood at least basic theological Doctrine so this was uh what Lou aler would call an ideological State apparatus right these plays served a specific pedagogical function a teaching function um it was thought for a long time that the the 32 plays of the Town Le manuscript named that because the family who owned them was uh who owned the manuscript was was the townly family uh it was thought that they were a cycle that came from the town of Wakefield in West Yorkshire um now according to the editors of the Broadview anthology of medieval drama out of which I’m reading the first Shepherd’s play uh that’s not that’s not what people think anymore what Scholars think anymore um it’s it it’s more likely according to contemporary scholarly opinion that the townly manuscript consists of a bunch of individual plays that were collected up five of which are thought to be by someone conventionally called the Wakefield master um including the first Shepherd’s play the second Shepherd’s play um Herod the Great um the the buffeting of Christ and Noah so those are the five plays conventionally attributed to the wake Field Master because they have stylistic similarities anyway so that’s enough background let’s talk about the first Shepherd’s play so again the content itself is pretty much exactly the same as the second she Shepherds play uh which again is the much more well-known one so that’s why I’m going to sort of set a lot of this discussion up in terms of comparison and contrast so we start with Shepherds we got three Shepherds uh we’ve got in in the manuscript themselves they’re called first Shepherd second Shepherd third Shepherd but we actually get their names the first Shepherd is named Gibb the second Shepherd is named uh John Horn the third Shepherd is named slow paace so Gibbs starts us out and again this is very similar to what we get in the second Shepherd’s play um Gibb is basically complaining about how difficult life is for Shepherds for Rural people um and and specifically his issue is that his sheep have all died because of um a particular disease called liver rot um so he he doesn’t know that he’s going to be able to pay his taxes so he has to go and get go to the market and get more sheep so this is a bad business for him because rather than going to the market and selling wool selling fleece to make money he has to go and spend money to get more heat so he’s in a bad situation um and then John Horton comes on the second Shepherd and he’s talking about how there’s like robbers and and thieves and and people who might um Ste steal from you and threaten your life etc etc so what we get in this first portion is basic is twofold it serves two purposes one is a theological purpose right because it illustrates the characters suffering in the Fallen World right so this is the world this is post Adam and Eve um this is this is uh post expulsion from Paradise but Jesus has not yet come he has not yet been sacrificed on the cross to redeem Humanity so this is one Element here is the suffering of humanity in the Fallen World um but then the other thing is we have these specific discussions of shepherds suffering so there’s this one part um John Horn said John Horn has has just sort of come up on Gibb and he recognizes him based on his clothing right he’s wearing Shepherd’s clothing um and so he says I thought by your gown this was your array Gib uh Gibb sorry Gibb says I am ever alike what I W what I never um I am ever alike what I never what iars is none in this Reich a Shepherd fares worse um Reich being Kingdom or realm so he he’s basically saying nobody in this realm nobody in this Kingdom nobody in this life fair is worse than Shepherds Shepherds suffer more than anybody else and um and uh John replies to him poor men are in the Dyke and off time time Mars the world is SL and also helpers is none here so he’s basically saying yeah poor people always suffer this is the nature of um being impoverished right um and and so we get those elements um the other so so we’ve got that that that theological purpose right but the other purpose of this is that the audience for this play especially if it was performed in Wakefield um but anywhere in northern England really you would have had a of shepherds you would have kind a lot of rural people in the audience and so by aligning these Shepherds these character Shepherds with the actual experiences and sufferings of the audience they would be encouraged to see themselves as the Shepherds uh of the plague the the Shepherds of the biblical story to whom um the the angel comes to announce Jesus’s birth and so they the moral lessons of the story they they s come to identify with because they see themselves in the place of these Shepherds the other big thing with the second Shepherds play and this does differ but there’s a similarity here as we get this again just insane interlude where Mac who’s another character in the second Shepherd’s play steals a sheep and then he and his wife pretend it’s their baby it’s just Bonkers as I said but we don’t have that in the first Shepherd’s play we do have a more focused carnivalesque element that I think is really really interesting we got we got a sort of double carnivalesque element here and the carnivalesque was a really important component of medieval culture because for the most part medieval people’s lives were dull um if you were a peasant especially your life would be would be very very dull um most of your time would be spent working there was very little uh Leisure Time very little sort of um Freedom entertainment stuff like this but there were certain days of the year where you had festivals or um sort of carnivals you had these days where the normal social or could be inverted where uh peasants were peasants took on the role of the nobility or whatever it was and you could mock the church um you could mock the nobility Etc it was licensed to misbehave and there it was these sort of Delightful Days for for people um a lot of it was make believe a lot of it was was sort of like count Town fairs county fairs things like this um as we get two major elements of this one is that Gibb who remember all of his sheep have died um he does this sort of pantomime where he’s going to lead his sheep to Market his sheep that he doesn’t have so he’s he’s like leading these imaginary sheep and John Horn is like no I’m not going to let you I’m not going to let you in your sheep pass and it’s this sort of weird game that they play but the thing that’s really striking about it is at the end of this of this little stick um John Horn says uh wilt thou but so Nave hence I bid flit as good that thou do or I shall or shall I Thee hit on thy Pate low shallal thou reel I say give the Sheep space so basically I mean this is a threat but I’m imagining this and this may be my uh sort of there may be something I’m somewhat imposing on it but I think this makes a lot of sense I’m envisioning this as a kind of Punch and Judy type scenario right um The Punch and Judy shows which were major elements of of British culture really up into the the 20th century when it was puppets and you had punch who was a the husband of Judy and he would often just beat her with a stick or something and it was regarded as great fun even though actually horrific domestic abuse but um that sort of playfulness of like a a fun beating I guess there’s there’s that again that sort of carnivalesque element of um of of sort of joy in that that playfulness um but then there’s this second bit where they have this long imaginary Feast um slow pace the third Shepherd shows up and they talk for a little bit and then um the boy who’s who’s a really minor character basically comes along is like yeah all your sheep are in the pasture you could go see them if you want to and there and um Gibb says sit we down all three and drink shall we then um and and slow paace basically says if we’re going to drink then I’ve got to eat but none of like they don’t have anything there’s no food here but they’re imagining these like really rich meats and sauces and condiments and uh nice wines and alses and all this stuff like they would never in their lives have had this and the the people in the audience would never in their lives have had this sort of decadent food but there’s such joy in their imagination of it that again I think on the one hand it would have been a an incredibly funny scene to have seen acted out but I think there’s this sort of mix of of joy and sadness in that they’re imagining all of this and it’s a good time they’re having fun but that also kind of highlights that they’ll never actually get this kind of feast but what is Promised here is the idea of heaven right because this is one of the things there’s a there’s a medieval present conception of Heaven which is rooted in um like basically freely available ale food props always ripe um cows that milk themselves things like this like basically a world of abundance without Labor uh is this sort of peasant conception of heaven so this this imagination of what is Promised through salvation I think is actually again theologically important but then the thing that I think is really really interesting um about the the first Shepherd’s play that we absolutely don’t get in the second Shepherd’s play is this really extended period in which the shepherds are talking about all of these Jewish and Greco Roman prophecies and so there was a thing in the medieval period done by Scholars and theologians um it was a version of what’s called biblical exegesis and exegesis is basically a form of interpretation medieval biblical exegesis one of the big things that was involved was so everything for medieval Christian theologians had to be conceptualized in terms of Christ right so they went back to the Old Testament none of which in its original context is about Jesus at all because it’s all written well before Jesus um and Jesus does not fit the traditional Jewish conception of the Messiah um that that’s a the way that Jesus is Messianic is a reconceptualization under Christian theology in order to make Jesus the Messiah in a way that he would not be according to Jewish Trad tradition but um what these uh Scholars do these medieval Scholars and theologians do is they come back and they reinterpret Jewish scripture and a certain amount of Greco Roman um prophecy poetry things like this as being about Jesus prefiguring Jesus and so one of the big elements of this for instance is that the Jewish Patriarchs of the Old Testament become types of Christ and what that means is basically they are read as embodying some of some important characteristic or characteristics of Jesus imperfectly so you think Moses I’ll give you a quick example Moses for instance becomes seen as a type of Christ um he redeems the Israelites from Egypt in the Bible and so he is a redeemer figure the same way that Jesus is but he does not save their souls he does not save um save them in a sort of grand cosmological sense he gets them out of Egypt and to the promised land but we have so we have um Moses directly addressed by God which is of course paralleled by direct addresses uh to to uh to Christ um we have Moses exiled Into the Wilderness before he can come back and redeem the Israelites which is paralleled to uh Christ’s Temptation in the wilderness and so on and so on um but then we have a Divergence right because Moses is not permitted to enter the promised land he suffers he dies and he’s not permitted to enter the promised land of Canaan um on the other hand Jesus suffers and dies but because he is the proper messiah in Christian theology he’s allowed to enter Heaven so we’ve got again the this is a lot of effort is spent on this by medieval thinkers is figuring out okay how do these Old Testament Patriarchs prophets whatever it is align with Jesus and point to Jesus coming the same thing is done with some greo Roman prophecy philosophy um stuff like this and this would not have been a thing that most medieval people especially peasants Shepherds uh rural people would have been conversant in but we’ve got this long section uh from about line 334 through to about 406 that’s a long chunk where the shepherds are going through this list of Prophecy and Prophets and Old Testament figures and GRE Roman figures and things like this um Adam is mentioned King David is mentioned um fibble the the ancient Greek oracle um Nebuchadnezzar uh who puts Daniel in a furnace with a couple of other guys in the Bible um Jeremiah Moses um habakuk who I don’t know who that is um Elijah Elizabeth I don’t know who that is in the Biblical context Zachariah uh King David again gets another mention John the Baptist Daniel uh the Roman poet Virgil um yeah so it it’s a weird it’s a long interlude right it’s a long interlude to spend on here’s an exhaustive list of all of the people who have prophesied the coming of Christ but again if you think about this inter and I’m sure it’s dramaturgically very boring it’s go to it it can’t be fun to watch on stage three Shepherds who realistically would not have had access to this kind of information just being like oh also did you know that Zachariah prophesied the coming of a a redeemer born of a virgin it’s got to be boring as hell to watch but again if you think about it in terms of what this play is supposed to do pedagogically that it is a teaching tool that’s meant to get um a certain degree of theological information to an audience who can’t themselves read the bible let alone read uh Latin poetry Latin prophecy things like this um it it serves a very clear pedagogical purpose and I think that’s a much more developed element in the first Shepherd’s play than in the second Shepherd’s play the Sheep stealing incident of the she second Shepherd’s play takes up I’d say seems like a little over half of the actual lines it serves very little direct theological purpose whereas here we have much more clear theological implication for the play