ABSTRACT
The preceding chapters provide examples of how objects of critical attention are both supported and created: because there was a need for a popular morality play, a mathematical model was brought into service to prove its existence; because a revising Chaucer was more interesting than revising scribes, manuscript evidence was invoked in his favor. The present chapter deals with a more extreme example of authorial fiction; evidence from the Towneley manuscript is allegorized into a figure who in a happy coincidence embodies many of the virtues defined by early twentieth-century literary history and criticism-the Wakefield Master.
