The new Early English Text Society edition of The Towneley Plays will serve as a definitive edition for many years to come. It replaces the edition by George England and Alfred W. Pollard, published nearly one hundred years ago by the Early English Text Society. Apart from the corrections of errors in the transcription of the text, the new edition offers a comprehensive introduction, body of notes, and glossary. It also presents the text in a new format, based on an examination of the manuscript, by expanding stanzas attributed to the so-called `Wakefield Master' from nine lines (with some internal rhyme) to thirteen lines. The Townley Plays manuscript dates approximately to the year 1500. The plays is contains are often considered the most interesting and stylistically intricate among all those surviving in extant cycles. By both internal and external evidence they are traceable to the city of Wakefield, where they were apparently performed over much of the sixteenth century. Most notable among the contents of the manuscript is `The Second Shepherds Play', which is widely known apart from the cycle and is included in many literary and dramatic anthologies. The cycle itself contains 32 plays on the subject of salvation history from the Creation to the Last Judgement.
