Date
The date "1468" appears in the hand of the major scribe at the end of the Purification play (f 100v). This, then, is the earliest possible date for the copying of the text. Spector has concluded on the basis of dialectal evidence that the plays cannot predate 1425 and on the basis of the watermarks on the paper that the paper used by the main scribe comes from the period 1460-77. It is possible, again on the basis of the paper, that the Assumption play, written separately by a different scribe and bound into the main MS., was copied slightly earlier. We are safe to assume that the MS. dates from the second half of the third quarter (ca. 1463-75) of the 15th century. This makes it the oldest MS. to contain a large number of Biblical plays. Although we know there were plays performed elsewhere from the late 14th century, the York manuscript was written down in the 1470s, the Towneley MS. after the turn of the 16th century and all the versions of the Chester plays after 1596.
Read more about this topic: N-Town Plays
Famous quotes containing the word date:
“In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September.... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents—or at least their staffs—never stop making mischief.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)