Scriptural dramas, composed by the ecclesiastics, furnished the nations
of Europe with the only drama they possessed during many centuries.
Voltaire ingeniously suggested, that GREGORY of Nazianzen, to wean the
Christians of Constantinople from the dramas of Greece and Rome,
composed sacred dramas; _The Passion of Christ_ afforded one of the
deepest interest. This remarkable transition might have occurred to this
father of the Church, from the circumstance that the ancient Greek
tragedy had originally formed a religious spectacle; and the choruses
were turned into Christian hymns. Warton considered this fact as a new
discovery in the obscure annals of the earliest drama.[1] The temples of
the idols were for ever to be closed, for true religion and triumphant
faith could show the miraculous Being who, blending the celestial with
the human nature, was no longer the empty fable of the poet. The gross
simplicity of the inventors, and the undisturbed faith of the people,
perceived nothing profane in the representation of an awful mystery by a
familiar play. Christian or Pagan, the populace remains the same, and
must be amused; the invention of scriptural plays would keep alive their
religious faith, and sacred dramas would be a happy substitute for those
of which they were denied evermore to be spectators.
This attempt to christianise the drama did not produce an immediate
effect; but the Roman dramatic art could not fail to degenerate with the
Roman empire; and the actors themselves were but the descendants of the
mimi, a race of infamous buffoons, objects of the horror and the
excommunication of the primitive fathers.[2]
In the obscurity of the medieval period, the origin of these sacred
dramas in Europe is lost. They are only incidentally noticed by those
who had yet no notions of the drama. But though in England their remains
are found at a much earlier period than in any other country, this seems
to have been a mere accident from the utter neglect, or rather
ignorance, of other nations of the origin of their own early drama; for
these scriptural plays, judging by those which we possess, seem struck
in the same mint, and are worked out of a common stock, and their
appearance we can hardly doubt was coeval. Monks were the writers or
inventors, and a general communication was kept up with Rome throughout
every European realm. The subjects and the personages of these biblical
dramas are treated with the same inartificial arrangement, and when
translated it would be difficult to distinguish between a French, a
Flemish, or an English mystery; and in their progressive state,
branching out into three distinct classes, they passed in all countries
through the same mutations.
It has been conjectured that they were first introduced into Italy, from
its intercourse with the metropolis of the Greek Empire; but when we
have recourse to its literary recorder, we gather nothing but ambiguity.
Tiraboschi is dubious whether the early Italian mysteries exhibited in
the year 1264 were anything more than a dumb show, or the processional
display of a religious pageant. Decided, on system, not to approve of
such familiar exhibitions of sacred themes, the Jesuit has cautiously
noticed two companies who evidently had performed a mystery, or
miracle-play. In that piece there is a direction that "An angel and the
virgin _sing_;" but our learned Jesuit will not venture even to surmise
that "the virgin and the angel" _acted_ their parts, but merely chanted
a poem.[3] The literary antiquary Signorelli inclines to fix the
uncertain date of the first sacred drama so late as in 1445.[4] In
France these early scriptural exhibitions were so little comprehended,
that Le Grand D'Aussy, in his pretension that his nation possessed the
drama in the thirteenth century, derives the origin of their mysteries
from such pieces as the three fabliaux which he has given, as the
earliest dramas.[5] So little conversant in his day--not a distant
one--were the French antiquaries with a subject which has of late become
familiar to their tastes. We learn nothing positive of their "Mysteries"
till their "Confraerie de la Passion" was incorporated in 1402.
The earliest of these representations necessarily would be in Latin,[6]
and performed in monasteries by the ecclesiastics themselves, on
festival days; in this state, how could they have been designed for the
people? Aware of this difficulty, and convinced that these holy plays
were in their origin intended for popular instruction and recreation, it
has been conjectured that the Latin mystery was accompanied by a
pantomimic show, for the benefit of the people; but an impatient
concourse could be little affected by the action of the performers,
almost as incomprehensible as the language was unintelligible. The
people, a great animal only to be fondled in one way, as usual, worked
out their own wants; they taught learned clerks the only method by which
they were to be amused, by having the same thing after their own
fashion, and to be comprehended in their own language; and the day at
last arrived when even the people themselves would be actors. In the
obscurity of the medieval period, the literary antiquary has often to
feel his way in the darkness, till among uncertain things he fancies
that he grasps the palpable. We are not furnished with precise dates,
but some natural circumstances may account for the introduction of the
mysteries in the _vernacular idiom_. About the eighth century, merchants
carried on their trades in the great fairs, and to attract the people
together, jugglers, minstrels, and buffoons were well paid, and the
populace flocked. Such a multitudinous concourse appears to have created
alarm among their great lords; and the ecclesiastics in vain proscribed
these licentious revelries. It would be nothing more than a stroke of
their accustomed policy if we imagine that, seeing the people were eager
after such public entertainments, the monks should take them into their
own hands; and offering a far more imposing exhibition than even the
tricks of jugglers, combining piety with merriment, at once awe and
delight the people by their scriptural histories and the legends of
saints, in the language common to them all, thus enticing them from
profane mummeries. It was a revolution in the history of the people,
who, without education, seemed to grow learned in the mysteries and to
be witnesses of miracles!
This account is not incongruous with another probably not less true, and
which indeed has been received as indisputable among the more ancient
literary historians of France, and is well known by the verses of
Boileau in his "Art of Poetry." Palmers and Pilgrims--the one returning
from the East, bearing in their caps the hallowed palm-branch of
Palestine, and the other from some distant shrine, their chaplets and
cloaks covered with the many-coloured scallops--taking their stand in
thoroughfares, and leaning on their staffs, while their pendent relics
and images attracted the gazer, would win an audience from among the
people. These venerable itinerants or semi-saints recited their sacred
narratives in verse or even in prose; they had sojourned amid "the holy
places," which they described; they had their adventures to tell,
serious or comic; and that many of these have entered into the great
body of ROMANCE, and were caught up by the Trouveres, we can easily
imagine. These strollers excited the piety and contributed to the
amusement of their simple auditors, who, in the course of time,
occasionally provided for these actors a stage on a green in the
vicinage of their town; thus an audience of burghers and clowns, and no
critics, was first formed. The ecclesiastics adopted performances so
certain of popular attraction, and became the sole authors of these
inartificial dramas, as they were of romances and chronicles. They had
but one object, and knew to treat it only in one way. They imagined that
they were instructing the people by initiating them into scriptural
history, the only history then known, and by keeping the sources of
popular recreation in their own hands, they looked for their success in
the degree they excited their terror or their piety, and not less their
ribald merriment; and for the people the profane drollery and the
familiar dialogue were as consistent with their feelings as the articles
of their creed, for which they would have died, as well as laughed at.
These primeval dramas are not inconsiderable objects in the philosophy
of literary history. In England,[7] and probably throughout Europe, they
long kept their standing; they linger in Italy, and still possess devout
Spain. Not long since at Seville they had their mysteries adapted to the
seasons--the Crucifixion for Good Friday, and the Nativity for
Christmas, and the Creation whenever they chose; and a recent editor of
the plays of Cervantes assures us, that these _Autos Sacramentales_
still form a source of amusement and edification to the pilgrims at the
Shrine of St. Jago de Compostella, which it seems still receives such
visitors.[8]
These scriptural plays were known in England before 1119; they formed
public performances in the metropolis in 1180. They were then confined
to the monasteries, and when the audience required the space, they were
exhibited in churches, and sometimes even in cemeteries. So true it is
that the first theatres were churches and the first actors churchmen.
Some reprobated the sight of the priestly character, or the "fols
clers," "mad clerks," in their grotesque disguisings; if they were
sanctioned by one pope, they were condemned by another. The clergy,
except on some rare occasion, when exhibiting before royalty or
nobility,[9] were at length not reluctant to yield their places to a new
race of performers. In the metropolis they never lost their control over
these representations, for they consigned them to the care of their
inferior brethren, the parish clerks; but in provincial towns it was not
long ere the people themselves discovered that they, with some little
assistance from the neighbouring monasteries, were competent to take
them into their own hands. The honest members of guilds or corporations,
of mechanics and tradesmen, formed themselves into brotherhoods of
actors, ambitious of displaying their mimetic faculty to their
townsfolk. The play had now become the people's play, and the scale of
the representation widened at every point; it was to be acted in an open
plain, and it was to extend sometimes through eight days.[10] Such was
the concourse of spectators, and indeed the performers were themselves
a crowd. All were anxious to show themselves in some part, and such a
play might require nearly a hundred personages. In a miracle-play, the
whole life of a saint, from the cradle to martyrdom, was displayed in
the same piece; the youth, the middle-age, and the caducity of the
eminent personage required to be enacted by three different actors, so
that there were the first, the second, and the third Jacob, to emulate
one another, and provoke bickerings; townsfolk when acting, it appears,
being querulously jealous. Something of scenical illusion was contrived,
and what in the style of the green-room is termed "properties"[11] was
attempted, by the description we find in the directions to the actors,
and by the mischances which occurred to the unpractised performers by
their clumsy machinery. Their mode of representation was so much alike,
that the same sort of ludicrous accidents have come down to us relative
to our native mysteries, as occurred in those of France. Bishop Percy
has quoted a malicious trick played by the Flemish Owl-glass, the
buffoon of the times, among his neighbours in one of these
mysteries;[12] a Judas had nearly hanged himself, and the cross had
nearly realised a crucifixion. Among these unlucky attempts they gilded
over the face to represent the Eternal Father; the honest burgher,
nearly suffocated, never appeared again; and the next day it was
announced that for the future the Deity should lie "covered by a cloud."
A scaffold was built up of three or more divisions for "the stage-play:"
Paradise opened at the top, the world moved in the centre, and the
yawning throat of an immeasurable dragon, as the devils run in and out,
showed the bottomless pit; and whenever the protruding wings of that
infernal monster approached, "and fanned" the near spectators, the
terror was real.
These mysteries abound with a licentiousness to which the rude
simplicity of the age was innocently insensible; a ludicrous turn is
often given to the solemn incidents of holy writ; and the legend of a
saint opened an unbounded scope to their mother-wit. The usual remark of
the people when they had been pleased with a performance was, "To-day
the mystery was very fine and devout; and the devils played most
pleasantly."[13] The devils were the buffoons, and compliment one
another with the most atrocious titles. The spectators, who shed tears
at the torturous crucifixion, would listen with delight to the volume of
reciprocal abuse voided by Satan and the Satanic, whose very names, at
any other time or place, would have paralysed the intellect. This
strange mixture of religious and ludicrous emotions attests that the
authors and the spectators were in the childhood of society, satisfied
that they were good Christians. Such were the earliest attempts of our
dramatic representations; but men must tread with naked feet before they
put on the sock and buskin.
Several of these annual exhibitions in provincial towns have descended
to us, as those of the Chester Whitsun-plays, and others in great towns.
Originally, doubtless, written in Latin, they soon submitted to the
Norman rule, vigilant to practise every means to diffuse the _French_
language; but in this state they could not deeply delight the great body
of the Saxon people.[14] The monk, Ralph Higden, under the influence of
that national spirit which had been evinced by some former native
monks, directed his efforts to the relief of his countrymen. Thrice he
journeyed to Rome to obtain the permission of his holiness to translate
these holy plays into the vernacular _English_ for the people.[15] Three
journeys to Rome indicate some difficulty about the propriety of this
mode of edifying the populace, of which indeed there were conflicting
opinions. But the time was favourable; the youthful monarch on the
throne, our third Edward, was beginning to encourage the use of the
vernacular idiom, and in 1338, Higden put forth mysteries in the native
tongue, and thus accomplished what, in the great volume of the
Polychronicon, he has so energetically exhorted should be done, for the
maintenance of what he termed "the birth-tongue."
The day could not fail to arrive in the gradations of the public
intellect, even such as it then was, that society would feel the want of
something more directly operating on their sympathies, or their daily
experience, than the unvaried scriptural tale. Mysteries however devout,
by such familiar repetition, would lose something of their awfulness, as
miracle-plays would satiate their tastes, as they became deficient in
the freshness of invention. The first approaches of this change in their
feelings are observable in the later miracle-plays, where, as a novel
attraction to the old plays, abstract personations are partially
introduced; but this novelty was to be carried much higher, and to
include a whole set of new dramatic personages. A more intellectual
faculty was now exercised in the plan of the MORALITY, or moral
play.[16] This was no inconsiderable advancement in the progress of
society; it was deepening the recesses of the human understanding,
awakening and separating the passions; it was one of those attempts
which appear in the infancy of imagination, consisting not of human
beings, but of their shadowy reflections, in the personification of
their passions,--in a word, it was allegory! To relieve the gravity of
this ethical play, which was in some danger of calling on the audience
for deeper attention than their amusement could afford, the morality not
only retained their old favourite, the Devil, but introduced a more
natural buffoon in the Vice, who performed the part of the domestic fool
of our ancestors, or the clown of our pantomime.
These unsubstantial personages of allegory--these apparitions of human
nature--were to assume a more bodily shape, when not only the passions,
but the individual characters whom they agitated, were exhibited in
every-day life, not however yet venturing into a wide field of society,
but peeping from a corner,--it was nothing more than a single act,
satirical and comic, in a dialogue sustained by three or four
professional characters of the times. It was called the INTERLUDE, or
"_a play between_," to zest by its pleasantry the intervals of a
luxurious, and sometimes a wearisome, banquet. The most dramatic
interludes were the invention of JOHN HEYWOOD, the jester of Henry the
Eighth. The Scottish Bard, Douglas, the Bishop of Dunkeld, alludes to
these interludes, in his "Paleys of Honour."
Grete was the preis the feast royal to sene,
At ease they eat, with INTERLUDES between.[17]
Such was the march of events, the steppings which were conducting the
national genius to the verge of tragedy and comedy; a vast interval of
time and labour separates the writers of these primitive plays from the
fathers of dramatic art; yet however ludicrous to us the simplicity of
the age, often these singular productions betray shrewd humour and
natural emotions. To condemn them as barbarous and absurd would be
forming a very inadequate notion of the influence of these earliest of
our European dramas on their contemporaries. An enlightened lover of the
arts has said, perhaps with great truth, that Raphael never received
from his age such flattering applause, and excited such universal
approbation, as did Cimabue, the rude father of his art. The first
essays strike more deeply than even the masterpieces of a subsequent age
after all its successful labour; for its more finished excellence
depends partly on reflection, as well as on sensation.
The mystery and the morality lingered among us; but in the improved
taste and literature of the court of Henry the Eighth, the facetious
INTERLUDE, while it was facetious, won the royal smile. The successive
agitations of the age, however, could not fail to reflect its tempers in
these public exhibitions. In the reforming government of Edward the
Sixth, the miracle-plays were looked on as Romish spectacles, and were
fast sinking into neglect, when the clergy of the papistic queen
retrograded into this whole fabulous mythology; adepts not only in the
craft of miracles, but desirous, by these shows or "plays of miracles,"
to revive the taste in the imaginations of the people. The public
authorities patronised what recently they had laughed at or had scorned.
On Corpus Christi day, the Lord Mayor and the Privy Council were
spectators of _The Passion of Christ_, always an affecting drama; and it
was again represented before this select audience: and on St. Olave's
day, the truly "miracle-play" of that legendary saint was enacted in the
church dedicated to the saint.[18]
The history of the INTERLUDE more particularly marks an epoch, for it
enters into our political history. Mysteries and moralities were purely
religious or ethical themes, but the comic interludes took a more
adventurous course; and their writers, accommodating themselves to the
fashions of the day, were the organs of the prevalent factions then
dividing the unquiet realm.
From the earliest moment of the projected reformation or emancipation
from the Papal dominion by Henry, we discover the players of interludes
at their insidious work; but affairs were floating in that uncertain
state when the new had by no means displaced the old. In 1527, Henry the
Eighth was greatly diverted at an interlude where the heretic Luther and
his wife were brought on the stage, and the Reformers were
ridiculed.[19] The king in the Creed and the ceremonies remained a
Romanist; and in 1533, a proclamation inhibits "the playing of
enterludes concerning doctrines now in question and controversy."[20]
"The Defender of the Faith" was still irresolute to defend or to attack.
In 1543, an act of parliament was passed for the control of dramatic
representations; and at this later date, this reforming monarch decreed,
that "no person should play in interludes any matter contrary to the
doctrines of the Church of Rome!" Chronology in history is not only
useful to date events, but to date the passions of sovereigns. It was
absolutely necessary for Edward the Sixth on his ascension immediately
to repeal this express act of parliament of his father;[21] and then the
emancipated interluders now, openly, with grave logic or laughing
ridicule, struck at all "the Roman superstitions." Hence we had Catholic
and Protestant dramas. The Romanists had made very free strictures on
Cromwell, Cranmer, and their followers; and on the side of the reformed
we have no deficiency of oppugners of the Romish Church. Under Henry the
Eighth, we have the sacred drama of _Every-man_, a single personage, by
whom the writer not unaptly personifies human nature. This drama came
from the Romanists to recall the auditors back to the forsaken
ceremonies and shaken creed of their fathers. Under Edward the Sixth, we
have _Lusty Juventus_, whom Satan and his old son Hypocrisy, with an
extraordinary nomenclature of "holy things," would inveigle back to that
seductive harlot, "Abominable Living," which the Reformer imagined was
the favourite Dulcinea of "the false priests."[22] On the accession of
Mary, this queen hastened a proclamation against the interludes of the
Reformers. The term used in the proclamation looks like an ironical
allusion to a word which now had long been bandied on the lips of the
populace. It specifies to be for "the _reformation_ of busy meddlers in
matters of religion." A strict watch was kept on the players, some of
whom suffered for enacting a reformed interlude. Such plays seem to have
been patronised in domestic secrecy. The interference of the Star
Chamber was called forth in 1556 for the total suppression of dramatic
entertainments. In many places some magistrates had slackened their
pursuit after "players," and reluctantly obeyed the public authorities.
The first act of Elizabeth resembled in its character those of her
brother Edward and her sister Mary, however opposite were the systems of
their governments. The queen put a sudden stop to the enacting of all
interludes which opposed the progress of the Reformation; there seemed
to be no objection to any of a different cast; but Elizabeth lived to be
an auditor of more passionate dramas than these theological logomachies
performed on the stage, where the dull poet had sometimes quoted chapter
and verse in Genesis or St. Matthew.
It is not generally known that, while these Catholic and Protestant
dramas were opposed to each other in England, at the same period the
Huguenots in France had also entertained the derisory muse of the more
comic interludes. There was, however, this difference in the fortunes of
the writers; as in France the government had never reformed nor changed
their position, there could have been no period which admitted of the
public representation of these satirical dramas. In their dramatic
history, it was long considered that the subjects of these Hugonistic
dramas were too tender to bear the handling; and the brothers Parfait,
in their copious "History of the French Theatre," only afford a slight
indication of "the turbulent Calvinists," who had spread "pieces of
dangerous heresy and fanaticism against the Pope, the cardinals, and the
bishops; works which could not be noticed without profaning the
page!"--and therefore they refrain from giving even their titles! It is
in this spirit, and with such apologies, that historians have often
castrated their own history. The existence of these dramas might have
escaped our knowledge, had not the more enlightened judgment of the Duke
de la Valliere supplied what the more stubborn Romanists had suppressed.
This lover of literature has favoured the curious with the interesting
analysis of two rare French Protestant plays, _Le Marchand Converti_, in
1558; and _Le Pape Malade et tirant a sa Fin_, in 1561. Allowing largely
for the gross invectives of the Calvinist--"_les impietes_"--they
display an original comic invention, and sparkle with the most lively
sallies.[23] It is remarkable that _Le Marchand Converti_, at such an
early period of modern literature, is a regular comedy of five acts,
introduced by a prologue in verse; odes are interspersed, and each act
concludes with a chorus, whom the author calls "the company." The
classical form of this unacted play, instinct with the spirit of the new
reform, betrays the work of a learned hand.