Another example of native pastoral, earlier and far more genuine in character, is to be found in the religious drama.  The romantic possibilities of peasant life were to some extent reflected in the ballads; it is the burlesque aspect that is preserved to us in the ‘shepherd’ plays of the mystery cycles.  We possess the plays on the adoration of the shepherds belonging to the four extant series, a duplicate in the Towneley plays, and one odd specimen, making six in all.  The rustic element varies in each case, but it assumed the form of burlesque comedy in all except the purely didactic ‘Coventry’ cycle of the Cotton manuscript.  Here, indeed, the treatment of the situation is decorously dull, but in the others we can trace a gradual advance in humorous treatment leading up to the genuine comedy of the alternative Towneley plays.  Thus, like Noah and his wife, the shepherds of the adoration early became recognized comic characters, and there can be little doubt of the influence exercised by these scenes upon the later interludes.  With the general evolution of the drama we are of course in no wise here concerned:  what it imports us to notice is that just as it was the picture of the young gallant riding along on the mirk evening by the fail dyke of the ‘bought i’ the lirk o’ the hill’ that caught the imagination of the north-country milkmaids, so it was the rough representation of rustic manners, with which they must have been familiar in actual life, that appealed to the villagers flocking to York, Leicester, Beverley, or Wakefield to witness the annual representation of the guild cycle.[75]

It will be worth while to give some account of the form taken by this genuine pastoral comedy, as we find it in its highest development in the two Towneley plays.  These belong to the latest additions to the cycle, and were probably first incorporated when the repertory underwent revision in the early years of the fifteenth century.[76] Each play falls into three portions:  first, a rustic farce; secondly, the apparition and announcement of the angels; and thirdly, the adoration.  The two latter do not particularly concern us.  Though in the Chester cycle the shepherds show themselves amusingly ignorant of the meaning of the Gloria, in the Towneley plays they are apt to fall out of character, and certainly display a singular knowledge of the prophets,[77] for

    Abacuc and ely prophesyde so,
    Elezabeth and zachare and many other mo,
    And david as veraly is witnes thereto,
    Iohn Bapyste sewrly and daniel also.

More remarkable still is one shepherd’s familiarity with the classics: 

    Virgill in his poetre sayde in his verse,
    Even thus by gramere as I shall reherse;
    ’Iam nova progenies celo demittitur alto,
    Iam rediet virgo, redeunt saturnia regna.’[78]

It is perhaps no matter for surprise that one of his less learned fellows should break out with more force than delicacy: