SOURCE: "York-Wakefield Plays," in English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1955, pp. 199-238.

In the excerpt below, Craig contends that the York and Wakefield cycles were once identical. In his estimation, the York plays were earlier and provided the initial molds for Wakefield.

There is only one theory that accounts completely for the likenesses and differences of the two cycles. Many alterations and developments had occurred during the fourteenth century and, as Burton's list of 1415 shows, the York plays had become a great and extensive cycle. At some time, probably before the year 1390, the York cycle was borrowed outright and set up at Wakefield, a city not far from York in the West Riding of Yorkshire. We know nothing of the circumstances, but one would think that such a thing must have been with the consent of the city council of York. After...