The Digby Candlemas Day and the Killing of the Children of Israel poses quite a few interpretive difficulties for modern critics who seek to find in the play a sense of dramatic, structural, and even moral unity.  The text combines a wide variety of seemingly disparate elements; the first part of the play is a biblical drama of the massacre of the innocents, while the second part encompasses a lengthy liturgical procession of the purification of the Virgin.  As well, the play contains a peculiar dedication to Saint Anne and a smattering of traditional folk-inspired comedy and depictions of the battle between the sexes.  This unique mixture has led to its fair share of critical attention and discussion as to how (and how well) these separate parts relate to one another.  While Theresa Coletti argues that the two main sections of the play (massacre and purification) can be categorized as stressing the profane versus the sacred, this paring of the play into negative and positive examples underestimates the meaning and emotional impact of the massacre scene.  One of the most gruesome, shocking, and troubling spectacles of all of medieval theater, the slaughter of the innocents is portrayed in full plain and bloody view of the audience.  Far from an episode of unruly wives and disorderly social structure that one should reject in favor of the harmony of the holy family, the Massacre section instead seems to depict an instance of righteous, justifiable anger and rebellion against a tyrannical despot whose only concern is in maintaining the throne for himself and his descendents.  It is my contention that these two halves of the play work in conjunction with one another to formulate a critical response to the struggle for power and the social upheaval that resulted from the Wars of the Roses.  More succinctly, the play displays a radical disillusionment with and ultimate rejection of rule by a temporal king.