The Wakefield Cycle has several works, but none are quite as famous as "The Second Shepherds' Play". The play is a nativity story that retells the shepherds. The text is present with both the original translation and a modern translation. Please note, this story is also included in the collection “Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays In Plain and Simple English.”

The Wakefield Cycle has several works, but none are quite as famous as "The Second Shepherds' Play". The play is a nativity story that retells the shepherds. The text is present with both the original translation and a modern translation. Please note, this story is also included in the collection "Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays In Plain and Simple English."

The past generation has been an extraordinarily active one in medieval drama scholarship; our appreciation of the range of medieval drama has been significantly broadened, and our understanding of certain medieval genres—most notably, biblical drama—has been fundamentally altered. The Broadview Anthology of British Literature has been widely praised for the degree to which it has taken this scholarship into account in its selection of and presentation of medieval plays. Now Broadview launches a new anthology that takes those plays as its base while expanding very substantially beyond them to represent the full range of drama in English (and, where strong connections exist, in French, Latin, Cornish, and Welsh as well) through to 1576. In all, over forty plays are included. Each work has been fully annotated and is prefaced by a substantial introduction. In many cases the language is to some extent modernized in order to make the plays more accessible to readers today.

An important re-theorisation of medieval gender and anti-Semitism, centring biblical drama as a source of evidence for lay attitudes towards scriptural time. Interrogating the Christian preoccupation with a superseded Jewish past, the book asks how this model is subverted by characters who experience time differently.

The Wakefield Mystery Plays from the Towneley cycle are a series of thirty-two mystery plays which were performed in the town of Wakefield, West Yorkshire from the late Middle Ages till as late as 1576. It is one of only four surviving examples of the English mytsery play cycles.The most notable play in the cycle is The Second Shepherds' Play the unkown author of which is commonly known as the Wakefield Master.