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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
“It is good to love the unknown,” wrote Charles Lamb, and we should perhaps hesitate to try to pierce the obscurity which surrounds the bright genius who, in the Secunda Pastorum, gave to the English drama its first native characters and its first true plot. But such obscurity ill becomes genius, and this man was not only our first dramatist, but also—as I shall try to demonstrate—one of our first literary rebels, holding more definite theories of poetic art than many a free-verse poet of the present day.
1 James Raine (?), The Towneley Plays, Surtees Soc., lntrod., p. ix. Local allusions in the plays themselves, and the name "Wakefield" attached to two of them, indicate that the MS. was written for that place; see Pollard's Introduction (The Towneley Plays, ed. by George England, E.E.T.S. Ext. Ser., p. x.fl.). For proof that mystery plays were given in Wakefield, see the communication to the London Times Lit. Sup., March 5, 1925, by Matthew H. Peacock, former Headmaster of Wakefield Grammar Sebool.