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Musical Structure in the Second Shepherds9 Pfay Regula Meyer Evitt Each of the five shepherds' plays in the four major Corpus Christi cycles1 offers us its own distinctive elaboration on the biblical version of the Nativity. The shepherds in at least three of the cycles (York, Chester, and Towneley) are clearly, at the simplest level, English "hyrdes" who fill out the narrative framework provided by the second chapter of Luke with a variety of amusing antics and sometimes raucous behavior. Despite differences in plot and character, all five of these plays share in one particularly curious divergence from the biblical narrative. As they do in Luke, the shepherds in each pageant listen intently when the Herald Angel appears, singing Gloria in excelsis Deo, But after the angel gives them the good news of Christ's birth and vanishes, a lively and entirely unbiblical discussion about the nature of this divine music follows, during which the shepherds argue good-naturedly with each other about who can most accurately imitate the angel's song.2 Although this fascination with music permeates all of the shepherds' plays in the Corpus Christi cycles, its importance as a tonal and structural element in the Towneley Second Shepherds ' Play in particular can hardly be underestimated. The Wakefield Master3 underscores his tonal shifts throughout this play widi his shepherds' music making. At the outset of the play the shepherds, at their emotional nadir, sing to solace themselves in a world full of hardship and "brekyll as glas" (1. 121). They also express their great joy at the tidings of their Messiah's birth through song (11. 656-69). And as the REGULA MEYER EVITT is a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia, where she is writing her dissertation on "Anti-Judaism and the Medieval Prophet Plays." She is also currently teaching at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University. 304 Regula Meyer Evitt305 play ends, we watch them leave the manger with voices raised once more (1. 753). These musical interludes serve not only to emphasize the change in mood from beginning to end in the play, but provide us with a significant key to the structure of the Wakefield Master's finest work. While the structural unity of the Second Shepherds' Play has by now generally been accepted,4 there still seems to be some confusion about the precise nature of that structure. In Some Versions of Pastoral, William Empson notes that this play is one of the earliest examples of double plot in the English language. Double plot, however, does not necessarily indicate double structure, and many recent critics have misapplied Empson's important observation.5 There clearly are two parallel lines of action in the Second Shepherds' Play—secular and sacred, farce and Nativity. But a closer examination of the play reveals that the narrative is divided into three distinct sections by the musical interludes mentioned above:6 a brief introduction, a longer middle section, and the final Nativity scene. The introduction consists primarily of three soliloquies presented by the shepherds and comes to a close when they sing in three-part harmony "to myrth vs emong" (1. 184). The middle and longest section, the sheep-stealing episode, begins with Mak's entrance at line 190; its end is signalled by the music of the Herald Angel, who calls the shepherds to the Nativity. At this point, the shepherds set out for Bethlehem together, trying to imitate the angel's song (11. 656-73). The play closes when the shepherds leave the manger, singing once again. The relatively lengthy comic middle, then, is balanced by shorter opening and closing sections of approximately equal length. Oddly enough, most critics ignore the significance of these musical divisions7 and, focusing instead on the middle and final sections of the play, subsume the introduction within a discussion of the sheep-stealing farce. In doing so, they pass over the finely crafted expository section as well as the subtle textualization of musical form throughout the play. The tripartite division which we see working at large in the play is set forth by the Wakefield Master in the introduction. He relies on music, then, to inform his audience...
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