Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/38

26 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH each guild was the owner of its particular play this is precisely what we should expecT:, for it did what it liked with its own in the absence of central control, and there is no evidence of any c register ' being compiled before about 1475.' The character of the Chester plays is quite different. They form a whole far more homogenous than any of the other known cycles. Not but what there has been plenty of alteration. Plays have been amalgamated and divided, inserted, and perhaps omitted, as well as interpolated and revised. But the alterations are throughout of a kind that may quite well have been made in an official copy and incorporated in the transcripts which must have been periodically needed. The cycles were elastic in another way. Not only did the contents vary from time to time, but at no time possibly was it quite certain what a given cycle included. We know that the extant manu- scripts of the Chester plays do not contain all the pageants that were sometimes performed as part of the cycle, and it is doubtful whether any manu- script ever did. For instance, we miss the c As- sumption of the Virgin,' a play of which we have record, and the theory that it was omitted from our manuscripts out of Protestant prejudice can, I think, be disproved. It was presented, which such a manuscript may have survived into later times; but if it survived, it did so as an antiquarian monument, not as an authorized standard for the text. 1 The editor of the York Plays assigned the extant MS. to 1430-40, but this is certainly too early. I do not think that any competent critic to-day would place it much before the middle of the second half of the century.