The Wakefield Master's Dramatic Art: A Drama of Spiritual Understanding. By Liam O. Purdon. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Pp. xii + 321. $55.

Professor Purdon reads the works of the Wakefield Master within the Towneley plays as a dramatized allegoria of the mind, which underscores the important distinction of his subtitle: not so much a drama leading toward or provoking spiritual understanding in the audience as a dramatization of the processes of spiritual understanding itself. Thus, for example, the two shepherds plays are distinct not exclusively for the presence in the second of the pioneering interlude or subplot of Mak and Gyll but, rather, because the first play dramatizes the "‘inventive' speculative creaturely triune mind," whereas the second dramatizes the "‘inventive'empirical creaturely triune mind," or sapientia and scientia, respectively.


Shearle Furnish
West Texas A&M University