Page:The Library, volume 5, series 3.djvu/410

396 PROBLEMS OF THE ENGLISH and short oftave plays have been modified by the addition of matter in romance stanzas. Now the task of the first reviser of the Prologue was, we saw, precisely the combination of thirteener and short oclave sources ; and the Prologue takes account of romance passages. The conclusion seems inevitable that the combiner of the two sources, the first reviser of the Prologue, and the romance author are one and the same. Of the quatrain and couplet portions I do not propose to speak. They seem to point most likely to an independent source, but the whole problem of the Entry and Passion sections is too complicated and obscure to be treated on this occasion. The insertions in the Joseph play in a ten-line stanza, and the whole of the 'Purification ' in that metre, are almost certainly borrowings from an independent source subsequent to the first revision of the Prologue. They are remarkable for their more lyrical tone. There remain the thirteener and short octave portions only. In the 'Annunciation ' we found a clear case of a play in short octaves being substi- tuted for an earlier one presumably in thirteeners, and a similar process was traceable in the Nativity group. It is clear, therefore, that the short oftave plays are intruders. Did they come from an inde- pendent source, or were they written expressly for insertion in the present cycle ? If we are right in regarding the curious speech of the Baptist in the Entry section as a fragment of a short octave Baptism play, the former is the correct alternative. And, in any case, the absence of any work of a