SOURCE: "The Passion," in The English Mystery Plays, University of California Press, 1972, pp. 238-68.

In the excerpt below, Woolf remarks on the characterization of Judas and Pilate in the York plays. Judas's dialogue with the porter is a rare and effective dramatic device, she notes, while the role of Pilate is unusually elaborate and—by modern standards—inconsistent.

The characterisation of Judas in the [English mystery] plays is exceptional: though so pre-eminently a collaborator with the devil in his betrayal of Christ, and placed by Dante in the mouth of Satan himself in the deepest circle of hell, yet in the plays he is not modelled upon the devil, and is unique amongst the villains in being neither arrogantly boastful nor coarse-tongued. All the other villains are conceived as reflections of the devil, and therefore, though often lively, they are always stereotyped figures of evil; but Judas is...