THE MIDDLE ENGLISH RELIGIOUS LYRIC 97 
souls, recounting their sins and tormenting them. This may be due 
to the influence of the Towneley Judgment, in which this becomes the 
chief incident of the play, Tutivillus there becoming the dominant figure 
and taking the center of the stage most of the time. An old fragment of a 
poem in Reliquiae Antiquae* shows that this conception of Tutivillus 
was current in the literature of the day. 
It is in the Towneley Judgment, however, that we have the farthest 
departure from the simple structure of York,? and it is in this play that 
we have the best example of how the plays sometimes drew largely on 
the other forms of literature of the day. Excepting ll. 434-531, which 
seem to be the germ portion of the play,3 almost the entire play is made 
up of portions of verse gathered from various sources, echoing various 
independent forms and types, and withal blended together in a remark- 
ably effective and dramatic fashion. The writer of this play and pre- 
sumably of the Towneley Noah, Herod the Great, and the Shepherd’s 
Play, I and II, was familiar with a very considerable portion of the 
great body of homiletic and satirical poetry of his times, and it is mainly 
due to his adaptation of it to his dramatic needs that the Corpus Christi 
play in England is brought to its highest literary development. 
The opening lines of the play+ may be compared with passages in 
The Pricke of Conscience dealing with the same scene.’ Lines 143-51, 
179-87, 282-86, 296-304, 332-67, 576-88 are alliterative lists of sinners 
who are to be found in hell, which have been current in Middle English 
homiletic verse from the Moral Ode® poems on. Lines 394 ff. are exceed- 
ingly similar to the lines in other poems which describe judgment day,’ 
t Vol. I, p. 257. 
2 See the York Judgment Day text for parallel passages in York and Town. 
3 See above, p. 06. 
4 Town., pp. 367 ff.; see also York, pp. 500 ff.; Cov., p. 402. 
s Pp. 135 ff., 190 ff., 199; see also Rich. Rolle of Hamp., Vol. Il, p. 446. 
6 Anglia, Vol. I, pp. 6 ff. (for other editions, see A Middle English Reader, ed. O. F. Emerson, p. 297). 
For other passages of the kind, see York, p. 340; Cov., p. 404; An Old Eng. Misc., pp. 64, 67, 76, 150 ff., 
187, 212, 225; Minor Poems of V. MS (EETS), Vol. I, pp. 253 ff.; Altenglische Sprachproben, pp. 330 ff.; 
The Poems of Dunbar (Scot. T. Soc.), pp. 70, 81, 221; The Poetical Works of Skelton (Dyce), Vol. I, pp. 98, 
149, 360; Religious Songs (Percy Soc., Vol. XI) pp. 80 ff.; Eng. Stud., Vol. I, p. 99; Pricke of Cons., pp. 92, 
164 ff.; Rich. Rolle of Hamp., Vol. I, p. 153; Chaucerian and Other Poems (Skeat), p. 172; Herrigs Archiv, 
Vol. LXXXVI, pp. 387 ff. See also Piers Plowman (ed. Skeat) for many passages of the kind. See Appen- 
dix, p. 31, for parallel passages. 
7 See The Pricke of Cons., pp. 71, 165; Rich. Rolle of Hamp., Vol. 1, p. 129; Twenty-six Polit. and Other 
Poems, pp. 118, 142. For the Latin form see Hymni Latini (Mone), Vol. I, pp. 402, 4153; see further Latin 
Hymns (March), pp. 154 ff., 292 f. See Appendix for parallels. 
