Introduction

§ 1 The York Cycle of Mystery Plays is a set of 50 extant Medieval plays (or pageants) that retell the Biblical history of the world, from Creation to the Last Judgement. These plays were performed annually during the Corpus Christi holiday in the city of York starting sometime after the year 1376 and until the late 1560s (Beadle and King 1984). Each pageant was assigned to one of the craft-guilds of the city, which was in charge of its performance, including selecting and training actors and building a wagon-stage and costumes. A manuscript containing the text of 47 of the pageants and written between 1463 and 1477 for the official York city records survives to this day. Additionally, an alternate version of the text of the Creation of Adam and Eve pageant and a fragment of an alternate Coronation of the Virgin pageant both survive in this manuscript, and an alternate Incredulity of Thomas pageant survives in the Sykes manuscript (York City Archive number ACC.104/G.1; Beadle 2009).

§ 2 Today, almost all aspects of the York Plays are subjects of academic study and debate (Beadle and King 1984). For example, knowledge of the costumes worn by the actors and the props used on-stage is limited to a few surviving enumerations of pieces, and their exact appearances are unknown. The process and requirements for selecting the actors is described only in cryptic terms. Stage directions are rare in the manuscript, leaving a lot of questions unanswered about the physical performance of the Plays. The manuscript also includes cues for songs, but the extent to which the actors had to sing and the use or lack of musical instruments is unknown. The nature and appearance of the pageant wagons themselves are also an area of debate, as only scarce and ambiguous accounts of their construction survives (Beadle and King 1984).

§ 3 However, it is on the language used in the York Cycle that this paper will focus, and specifically on its use of alliteration. Alliteration is an audible repetition of a sound at the beginning of multiple words of a line. For example, it is clearly illustrated in these lines, from the beginning of York play 26:

Vndir the ryallest roye of rente and renowne

Now am I regent of rewle this region in reste,

Obeye vnto bidding bud busshoppis me bowne

And bolde men that in batayll makis brestis to breste.

To me betaught is the tent this towre-begon towne,

For traytoures tyte will I taynte the trewthe for to triste.

The dubbyng of my dingnité may noyot be done downe,

Nowdir with duke nor dugeperes, my dedis are so dreste.

§ 4 The first two lines alliterate on the sound R, then the next two on the sound B, followed by two lines of T and two lines of D. Unsurprisingly, like most other aspects of the York Plays, the meaning and purpose behind the use of alliteration by some characters is a point of debate, and this debate will be the topic of Section 2. Section 3 will then present our algorithm for measuring alliteration and Section 4 will present the results that we obtain with this algorithm on the York Plays. Section 5 will discuss the meaning of these results and the possible significance of alliteration that can be inferred from them, before ending with some concluding remarks in Section 6.

Related research

§ 5 The significance of the use of alliteration in the York Cycle has long been a subject of debate. For some readers, alliteration, along with meter and verse, can be used to differentiate between two or three distinct authors or composition stages of the Plays. This idea has been studied and debated among Medievalists since it was first proposed over a century ago, when Hohlfeld pointed out meter irregularities in five of the plays that he suggested represented an earlier stage of composition (Holfled 1889). Davidson added three more plays to this irregular list (Davidson 1892), and Gayley distinguished an entire third category to Hohlfeld’s two (Gayley 1907). Greg then took the idea in a new direction (Greg 1914); he pointed out a fundamental mistake in the metrical assumptions of Hohlfeld, Davidson, and Gaylay, and created instead three new divisions of the plays of the Cycle based on his theory of meter. Chambers (1949) continued the work of Greg and reclassified three plays that Greg had misclassified. This branch of research finally led to the work of Jesse Byers Reese (1951), who introduces observations about alliteration in the classification scheme. To be sure, Hohlfeld’s original work had noted that some of the plays used alliteration, but he made no case of it when studying the plays; Reese points out that, in fact, the lines with irregular meter on which Hohlfeld based his theory are simply lines written as alliterative verses. Likewise, Reese points out that plays that Greg considered completely different and separated into distinct categories also used very similar alliterative verse forms. Alliterative verses, Reese shows, transcend the divisions of authors and composition periods neatly separated in the five landmark studies mentioned previously. The result is a very strong argument that a study of alliterative verse is needed to fully understand the composition of the York Cycle. Reese conducts such a study, and concludes that there are thirteen plays written in purely alliterative verse (Reese 1951, 649), namely 1, 16, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 40, 44, and 45, as well as alliterating portions in plays 34, 17, 25, and 41 (for play titles see Table 1). Reese does not go as far as assigning these 13 plays to a separate author or stage of development in the Cycle, but he does set them apart from the other 34 plays of the Cycle as belonging to a different school of dramatic writing.

§ 6 An alternate interpretation of the use of alliteration in the Plays is that it is used to mark the roles of different characters in the Plays. Smith first suggested this when she noted that good characters such as God and Jesus spoke in verse while evil characters like Herod, Pilate and Caiaphas used alliteration heavily (Smith 1963). This noted role differentiation lines up with the Augustinian influences that are believed to have shaped the Plays (Johnston 1993). Indeed, Augustine associates different attributes to good and evil, with good represented by stasis and evil represented by chaos (De doctrina christiana I.8 [Martin 1962, 11]); similarly, it has been argued that alliteration gives more energy and movement, and therefore chaos and evil, to the speeches of the characters (Hayes 2013). However, not everyone agrees; even before the Augustinian connection was made, Epp (1989, 153) noted observations contradictory to those of Smith, pointing out for instance that Jesus and God do use alliteration in some of their speeches. Epp advocates instead that alliteration is used for a variety of reasons, including to represent a passionate speech, to signal important moments in the plays, or to elevate certain characters. He proceeds to give examples of multiple characters, good and evil, who used alliteration at various moments in the Cycle.

§ 7 In this paper, we propose a study of alliteration that will differ sharply from the others done so far over the past century: a purely statistical study. To this end, we developed an algorithm to read and count the number of alliterating lines of each character in the Cycle, which we present in the next section.

Alliteration statistical algorithm

Experimental results

Significance of the alliteration

§ 27 Now let us revisit the theories on the significance of the use of alliteration in the York Cycle. Having computed the number of alliterating lines for each character in each play, it is easy to sum them to get the number of alliterating lines per play and to compare that to the values in Table 1 to get the proportion of alliterating lines in each play. That information is given in Table 5, with the plays sorted in order of their proportion of alliteration. We find that this global statistical view of the Cycle plays fits perfectly with the study of Reese (1951). Indeed, his 13 plays written in “purely alliterative verse” are exactly the top 13 plays obtained by our algorithm. This lends a lot of credence to our statistical method to study the plays.

§ 28 However, the results also call into question the line Reese drew at 13 plays. After all, play 37 shows alliteration statistics almost identical to those of play 32 while play 35 is not far below them, but neither of them are considered by Reese to be “purely alliterative” plays while play 32 is. Moreover, if one were to try to break the plays into two sets based on the use of alliteration as Reese did, logic would dictate that we should find a set with a lot of alliteration and a set with sparse alliteration and a large gap between them. In fact, the largest gap in alliteration use, representing a drop of 9% in alliterating lines between two plays, exists between plays 44 and 31. That gap also happens to neatly divide the Cycle into the set of plays with more than half their lines alliterating and those with less than half their lines alliterating. Unfortunately, that gap is exactly in the middle of Reese’s set of 13 alliterating plays. To sum up, our numbers support Reese’s observations on which plays use more alliteration than others, but they simply do not seem to support his conclusion that variations in alliteration use mark the change between two different theatrical traditions.

Table 5: Alliteration use in each play

§ 29 On the other hand, Smith (1963) suggested that alliteration is a trait of the evil characters in the Cycle, such as Herod, Pilate, and Caiaphas, while good characters such as God and Jesus avoid this verbal feature. Epp (1989) has already indicated that this is not the case, and our results fully support him: alliteration appears to be used by good and evil characters alike. For example, Figures 1 to 3 show that Jesus-22 has a level of alliteration that matches Pilate-32 and Herod-16. Moreover, one of the most powerfully alliterating characters in the entire Cycle turns out to be Thomas-45. Far from being an evil character, this is the Thomas who alone is chosen to witness the Assumption of Mary, who receives her garter, and who convinces the other Apostles that Mary is alive when they believe she has died in a poetic reversal of the Doubting Thomas story (Brawer 1972). Finally, we should note that, while Pilate is indeed a character who uses a lot of alliteration, it has been argued that he is not presented as an evil character in the York Plays (Christen 2006).

§ 30 The last theory we presented in Section 2 is Epp’s, which suggests that alliterations are used to represent passionate speech, to signal important moments, to mark certain characters, and for a variety of reasons (Epp 1989). We would disagree with his assertion that these represent a variety of reasons; they are rather a variety of examples of one reason, namely to mark the most important character of a play. Recall that the York Cycle was what Beadle calls an audiate literary experience meant to be listened to, at a time when one went out to hear a play, rather than an experience meant to be read or even seen (Beadle 2000, 169-170). Moreover, this was not one play but a set of plays, performed on several different wagon-stages by different casts of actors. As Johnston (1993) pointed out , spectators would have needed a way to identify characters easily from play to play, since recognizing them visually was not possible. She suggested that characters were recognized instead by what they said and by the use of the same words from play to play. This idea agrees completely with Beadle’s insistence that the Plays were a primarily auditory art medium (Beadle 2000). Joining her idea and Epp’s, we posit that alliteration served the purpose of helping with character identification: the repeated sounds would have immediately caught the ear of the audience and focused their attention on the character speaking them in addition to making the character’s speech easier to remember. We posit, then, that one or two characters in each play used alliteration more heavily and that character or pair of characters would be the main characters of that play, specifically the characters that spectators should pay more attention to. To verify this, we present in Figures 4 and 5 the alliteration statistics for each individual play (i.e. the same statistics as in Figures 1 and 3, but in an individual graph for each play). As before, the most significant character would be the outlier of each play who uses alliteration in a way that is strikingly different than and superior to any other character in the same play. Visually, in Figures 4 and 5, that would be the character whose data point is isolated from the other characters and closer to the upper-right corner of the graph. Table 6 lists each play and the character or characters that are most significant in it. For each one, we also offer our observations on the role of the alliterating character in the play, or in the case where there are two or three alliterating characters on their relationship. Note that while Figures 3 and 5 plotted the Cycle average line of 32% alliteration, the individual play figures that are presented in Table 6 instead plot each play’s average line, which will be different for each individual play. This will illustrate the behaviour of characters compared only to the others on stage at the same time. We feel this makes more sense for a study of individual plays.

Figure 4: Alliteration statistics of characters in each individual play, using data from Figure 1.

Figure 5: Alliteration statistics of characters in each individual play, using data from Figure 3.

Table 6: Most alliterating character(s) in each play.

§ 31 Overall, the results seem to confirm our hypothesis. It is possible to identify a single most strongly alliterating character in 27 of the 47 plays, and in all these cases that character is the single most important one in the play. Moreover, in another 12 plays the alliterations reveal a duet between two major characters, either as allies as was the case for Joseph-14 and Mary-14 or God-8 and Noah-8, or in direct confrontation to each other, as for Jesus-22 and the tempting Diabolus-22, or Moses-11 and Pharaoh-11. One play even shows a triplet of major characters, as Satan-5 tempts Adam-5 and Eve-5. This leaves only 6 plays that violate our hypothesis and one that has only one character and cannot be analyzed.

§ 32 Since the most important character in play will often also be the one that will get the most dialogue, it should not be surprising to find in Table 6 that the most vocal character is often the one that also gets the most noteworthy alliteration use. However, Table 6 notes several interesting cases where this connection does not hold. Play 44 is a perfect example where one character, Mary-44, speaks as many lines as the next three most talkative characters combined, yet she uses the least amount of alliteration of these four individuals. On the other hand, the fact that in many cases the central character both speaks the most lines and uses more than the average number of alliterating lines in a play does not contradict our thesis; quite the opposite, it indicates that those two techniques were consciously used together to create a striking auditory effect.

§ 33 Moreover, the analysis of Table 6 highlights what appear to be patterns in the statistical distribution of characters in the Plays. The most striking one was described in our discussion of play 27; it is the pattern of a play with at least 8 speaking characters on stage and with a single major character that dominates the spoken dialogue and who uses a proportion of alliteration equal or greater to the play’s average. This is the case for plays 9, 19, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 42, and 45, and also somewhat ambiguously for play 32 (if we ignore the large number of lines given to Judas) and play 25 (if we assume that Citizen 2 is a statistical anomaly). Some plays have a similar pattern of having a single major character that dominates the dialogue and alliterates a lot, but in front of a much smaller cast of secondary characters: they are plays 3, 4, 12, 13, 17, and 35. Finally, some plays have a related pattern of having a single major character, but one that only establishes a weak dominance on the other, by alliterating either more lines but a proportion less than the play’s average, or vice versa, by alliterating a great proportion of lines in only a short speech. These are plays 6, 7, 10, 15, 16, 38, 40, 41, 44, and 46. There are also patterns for duets. The first is the duets of equals, or of two characters with very similar statistics. These occur in plays 8, 14, and 39, the three plays of the Cycle that have only two characters, and in play 11, in front of a large cast of 8 background characters. Then there is the duet of a dominating character that has the greatest number of alliterating lines and a greater-than-average proportion of alliteration, and an anti-hero character that also speaks a great number of lines but alliterates much less than average for the play. This pattern occurs in play 26 and ambiguously in play 32; interestingly, both of the plays are about Judas’ betrayal, and both of them feature Pilate as the dominating character and Judas as the anti-hero. Finally, there is the uneven duet where one character dominates in the number of alliterating lines and the other dominates the proportion of alliterating lines. These occur in plays 1, 18, 22, 37, 47, and ambiguously in play 25. However, if there is an underlying logic to the choice of which character dominates in alliterating lines or proportion, we cannot determine it at this point. Graphical examples of at least one of each of these patterns are included in Table 6 and in Figures 6 to 14.

Conclusion

§ 34 This paper makes two important contributions. The first is a novel algorithm to define and measure alliteration in Medieval English documents. Our second contribution has been to use this algorithm on the York Cycle of plays in order to gain new insights on the use and significance of alliteration in those plays. Indeed, we have proposed and demonstrated with experimental results that alliteration seems to be used as a tool to attract the attention of medieval viewers to the most significant character in each individual play. To be sure, more work remains to be done to expand on our study. Most notably, six plays clearly did not fit our model, as we pointed out in our analysis in Table 6 and as can be seen from the results in Figures 4 and 5. The reason for these exceptions is unknown at this time and clearly calls for further research. Likewise, studies could be done on the possible patterns of alliteration that seem to emerge from our results and on their possible significance or relationship to the themes of the plays they appear in. Finally, this work could be the first step in a thorough algorithmic and statistical study of the features of the York Plays, which could help shed new light on this important Cycle.