SOURCE: "The York Schools of Humour and Realism," in Plays of Our Forefathers, 1904. Reprint by Duffield and Company, 1907, pp. 153-60.

In the following excerpt, Gayley identifies a core of six plays that, he suggests, are probably the work of a single author—to whom he refers as "the York real ist." Gayley discusses the versification, style, and dramatic techniques of these plays, and postulates three distinct composition periods for the cycle.

The York cycle affords very few situations ministering to the humour of the incidental. Such as are of that character must be assigned to more than one period of composition; none, however, is to be found in the plays which, according to philological tests, belong to the formative stage of the cycle. This is but usual, for while the pageants were illustrating only the more important events of the church calendar, and were still reminiscent of their...