=I. Liturgical Fragments, Early Saints' Plays and Parodies=
The earliest evidence of dramatic effort in England is to be found in
Latin tropes of the Easter service, composed for use in churches at
different periods between 967 and the middle of the eleventh century.
While these are, of course, serious in nature and function, they
interest the historian of comedy because they show that the dramatic
spirit was at work among our ancestors before the Anglo-Saxons had
passed under the yoke of the Normans. Likewise naturally devoid
of comic interest, but of vital importance in the development of
a dramatic technique, are certain fragments of liturgical plays,
belonging to the library of Shrewsbury School, which were published in
1890 by Professor Skeat.[1] Each of these deals, as an integer, with a
crisis in the career of our Lord; and, except for occasional choruses
and passages from the liturgy in Latin, the plays are English--the
English, in fact, translating and enlarging upon the Latin of the
service. Though the manuscript is probably not older than 1400, it
is a fragment, as Professor Manly has said, of a series of plays of
much earlier date, which were "performed in a church on the days and
in the service celebrating events of which the plays treat."[2] These
fragments are of great importance as constituting a link between the
dramatic tropes of the tenth and eleventh centuries and the scriptural
pageants presented at a later period outside the church: first by the
clergy, with the assistance, perhaps, of townspeople (as may have been
the case when a Resurrection play was given in the churchyard of St.
John's, Beverley, about 1220); afterward by the civic authorities and
the several gilds when church plays had come to be acted commonly in
the streets, that is, after the reinstitution of the feast of Corpus
Christi in 1311.
The existence of tropes at a period earlier than that in which mention
is made of plays based upon the miracles of the saints appears to me
to negative Professor Ten Brink's conjecture that in the development
of our sacred drama legendary subjects preceded the biblical. Indeed,
the fact that dramas on subjects both biblical and legendary, and of a
technique even more highly developed than that of the Shrewsbury, were,
as early as 1160, produced for liturgical functions in France, not only
by Frenchmen, but by one Hilarius, who was presumably an Englishman,
favours the opinion that the earliest saints' plays in England, also,
were as frequently derived from scriptural as from legendary sources.
It is, moreover, likely that the first saints' plays on legendary
subjects in England of which we have record were neither the first
of their kind in the period attributed to their presentation, nor a
notable advance in dramatic art when they were presented. There is
nothing in the earliest record of a legendary saint's play, the miracle
of St. Katharine, presented by Geoffrey, afterwards Abbot of St.
Albans, at Dunstable about 1100, to warrant the inference that it was
a novelty, even at that date. Since Geoffrey was at the time awaiting
a position as schoolmaster, he was probably within his function, _de
consuetudine magistrorum et scholarum_,[3] when he produced the play;
and it is to be noticed that when Matthew of Paris writes concerning
the matter, about 1240, he appears to be much more interested in an
accident which attended the performance than in the mere composition
and presentation of what he calls "some play or other of St. Katharine,
of the kind that we _commonly_ call Miracles."[4] Indeed, William
Fitzstephen, writing some seventy years before Matthew, speaks of such
plays of the saints as in his time quite customary. The probabilities
are, then, that this first legendary saint's play recorded as acted in
England had been preceded by others of its kind, and they in turn by
miracles of biblical heroes and by liturgical plays and dramatic tropes
of the services of the church.
It is not unreasonable to surmise that this legendary kind of miracle,
although sometimes used as part of the church service on the saint's
day, and originally possessed of serious features, speedily developed
characteristics helpful in the progress of the comic drama. All we
know of the St. Katharine play is that it was written for secular
presentation at a date when no mention is yet made of the public acting
of scriptural plays. The dramatist would, however, be more likely to
adorn the useful with the amusing in the preparation of a play not
necessarily to be performed within the sacred precincts; and while the
technique of the legendary miracle was presumably akin from the first
to that of the biblical, it is natural to suppose that the plot was
handled with larger imaginative freedom.
But our knowledge of these early saints' plays need not be entirely
a matter of surmise. We may form a fair idea of their character
from contemporary testimony, from the style of the Latin or French
saints' plays of the time that have survived, from the nature of the
legends dramatized, and from the analogy of contemporary biblical
plays. To the _locus classicus_ of contemporary testimony in William
Fitzstephen's _Life of Thomas à Becket_ (1170-82) I have already made
reference. Speaking of the theatrical shows and spectacular plays of
Rome, the biographer says that "London has plays of a more sacred
character--representations of the miracles which saintly confessors
have wrought, or of the sufferings whereby the fortitude of martyrs has
been displayed." According to this, the _ludi sanctiores_, or marvels,
as they seem later to be called,[5] are of two classes: the marvel of
the faith that removes mountains, the marvel of the fortitude that
endures martyrdom. In either case the saint's play is of the stuff
that produces comedy; for, whether the miracles are active or passive,
the Christian saint and soldier always proceeds victorious, and with
increasing merit abides as ensample and intercessor in the church
invisible.
This relation of the saint's play to comedy appears the more evident
when we read in the _Golden Legend_ and elsewhere the histories of
the saints who became favourites in English or foreign drama or
pageant,--St. Katharine, St. George, St. Susanna, St. Botulf, and the
like. In most cases the triumph of the marvel naturally outweighed
the terror; and in the one of the few English plays of the purely
legendary kind that survives, the _St. George_--degenerate in form
and now merely a folk drama--the self-glorification of the saint and
the amusing discomfiture and recovery of himself and his foes are
the only elements that have outlived the stress of centuries. _The
Miracle of St. Nicholas_, written in the middle of the twelfth century,
affords still better opportunity of studying the dramatic quality of
the kind in question. For the author, Hilarius, wrote also in a like
mixture--Latin with French refrains--a scriptural play of Lazarus; and
in collaboration with others, but entirely in Latin, a magnificent
dramatic history called _Daniel_. These, like the _St. Nicholas_, were
adapted to performance in church at the appropriate season in the
holy year, and no better illustration can be found of the essential
difference between the scriptural or so-called 'mystery' play, on the
one hand, and the saint's play, on the other, than is offered by them.
The two scriptural plays, stately, reverent, adapted to the solemn and
regular ritual of which they are an illustration in the concrete betray
not a gleam of humour; the play of the other kind, written as it is for
the festival of a jovial saint, leaps _in medias res_ with bustle and
surprise; and from the speech with which Barbarus entrusts his treasure
to the saint even to the last French refrain, after Nicholas has forced
the robbers to restitution, we are well over the brink of the comic.
By the concluding scene, serious and in Latin of the church, setting
forth the conversion of the pagan, the feelings of the congregation are
restored to the level of the divine service, momentarily interrupted by
the comedy but now resumed.
These, and all saints' plays not, like the St. Anne's play, of a cyclic
character, were, from the first, dramatic units; they represented
a single general plot, generally of a single hero; the action was
focussed on the critical period of his life; and a considerable
incitement was consequently offered to invention of incident and
development of character. A comparative study of the plays concerning
St. Nicholas will justify the statement that the dramatist was by way
of taking liberties with, or varying, his selection from legend. The
Einsiedeln Nicholas play of the twelfth century deals with a different
miracle from that dramatized by Hilarius; and of the four Fleury plays
of St. Nicholas, probably composed in the same century, the two that
deal with these miracles vary the treatment; the other two are on
different themes, but all would appear, from the editions which we have
of them, to be promising little comedies. The possibilities of this
kind of drama are best displayed in still another play of St. Nicholas,
written in the vernacular by a Frenchman of Arras, Jean Bodel, about
the year 1205. Throwing the traditional legends entirely overboard,
he gives his imagination free course with favouring winds of knightly
adventure, but over the waters of everyday life. He produces a play
at once comic, fanciful, and realistic, the first of its kind--of so
excellent a quality that Creizenach says that it would appear as if
dramatic poetry were even then well on the way of development from the
ecclesiastical model to a romantic kind of art in the style of the
later English and Spanish drama: chivalric, fantastic, and realistic.[6]
Unfortunately, other plays of this kind, like the _Theophilus_ of
Rutebeuf, do not always avail themselves of their chances; but we may
in general surmise that such plays in English--and we have evidence of
many--contributed as much as the biblical miracle to the cultivation of
a popular taste for comedy and the encouragement of inventive power in
the handling of dramatic fable. I believe that they contributed more
than the pre-Reformation morals, and from an earlier period.
I have said that in all probability there was nothing unusual in the
presentation of saints' plays by Hilarius and Geoffrey. Latin plays
were not a novelty in the twelfth century, at any rate to men of
culture and the church. When we consider the history of the Terentian
and Plautine manuscripts, how carefully the former were cherished, and
with what appreciation a portion at least of the latter, during the
Middle Ages, we cannot but apprehend the extent of their influence,
even when unapparent, upon taste, style, and thought. Plautus (in
whose comedies, with those of Terence, St. Jerome was wont to seek
consolation after seasons of strenuous fasting and prayer) was imitated
in a _Querolus_ and probably a _Geta_, as early as the fourth century;
and Terence was adapted by Hrosvitha in the tenth. We are, therefore,
not at all surprised when we find Latin comedy during the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries clothing itself through France and Italy in the
verdure of another spring. To be sure the new style of production--a
declamation by way of dialogue or conversational narrative, in elegiac
verse--was not intended for histrionic presentation; but it was
nevertheless of the dramatic _genus_; little by little the narrative
outline dwindled and the mimetic opportunities of the speaker were
emphasized. His success was measured by his skill in representing
diverse characters merely by changes of voice, countenance, and
gesture. He is the impersonator in transition to the actor. These
elegiac comedies indicate the continuing influence of Latin comedy upon
the literary creativity of the day; they furnish, besides, both the
material for the regular drama that was coming, and the taste by which
it should be controlled. I am, indeed, of the opinion that from this
source the farce interludes of England, France, and Italy drew much of
their content during the next three centuries, and that the saint's
plays of that period, at least those in Latin, derived therefrom their
dramatic technique. The revival of Latin comedy during the twelfth
century was partly by way of adaptations, as in the dramatic poems of
Vitalis of Blois; partly of independent productions, fashioned upon
classical models but dealing with _contes_, _fabliaux_ or _novelle_ of
contemporary quality. Of the latter kind the more interesting examples
upon the continent were the _Alda_ of William of Blois, and two
elegiac poems, perhaps Italian, of lovers and go-betweens,--a graceful
and passionate comedy of _Pamphilus_ and a dramatic version by one
Jacobus of the intrigue, so dear to mediæval satirists, between priest
and labourer's wife. The subject and treatment of the last of these
suggest, at once, a kinship with an _Interludium de Clerico et Puella_
in English of the end of the thirteenth century, and with an earlier
English story from which that is derived; also with Heywood's much
later play of _Johan_. That there was a Latin elegiac comedy in England
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,--comedy of domestic
romance with all or some of the characters common to the kind--youth
and maid, wife and paramour, enamoured cleric, faithless husband,
cuckold, enraged father, parasite, slave, go-between, and double,--is
rendered probable by the survival of two such poems, one of which bears
internal evidence of its origin in England, while the only manuscripts
extant of the other were found in that country. The first lacks a
title, but has been called the _Baucis_ after the manipulator of the
intrigue, a procuress; the second is named _Babio_ for the unhappy hero
who is at one and the same time fooled by his wife whom he doesn't
love, and his step-daughter whom he does. Both comedies display the
influence of classical Latin, but the latter sparkles with the humour
and spontaneity of the comedy of contemporary life.[7]
I agree, therefore, with Dr. Ward that the burden of proof is with
those who assert that the Latin comedy of the Middle Ages made no
impression upon the earlier drama of England. That the former was one
of the tributaries of the farce interlude and the principal source
of the romantic play of domestic intrigue I have no doubt whatever.
And, considering the influx of French clerics and culture during
the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and the French
affiliations of Geoffrey of St. Albans and Hilarius, our earliest
recorded writers of saints' plays, not to speak of the latinity of our
Maps, Wirekers, and other scholars of Henry II.'s reign, and their
familiarity with the literature of the Continent, which was Latin,--it
would be unreasonable to assume that the authors of our saints' plays,
whether in Latin or not, did not derive something of their technique
from the elegiac comedies of their contemporary latinists in France
and England, or indeed from the adaptations of Plautus and Terence in
previous centuries, or from the originals themselves.
When the religious drama passed into the hands of the crafts, it
carried with it such individual plays, of both scriptural and legendary
kinds, as were suitable to the collective character which it was
assuming. The Corpus Christi, Whitsuntide, Easter, or Christmas cycle,
though it aimed to illustrate sacred history and so justify God's
ways to man, drew its materials, not only from the scriptures of
the canon, but from the Apocrypha, the pseudo-Gospels, and mediæval
legends of scriptural and sometimes non-scriptural saints. There was
no real ground for distinction, and there is none now, dramatic or
didactic, between the non-scriptural stories of scriptural characters,
St. Joseph, and St. Thomas, stories of the Death, Assumption, and
Coronation of the Virgin, stories of St. Paul and St. Mary Magdalene,
which happened to be absorbed into this or the other miracle cycle,
and the non-scriptural stories of extra-biblical saints in plays which
have retained their independence: that of Nicholas, for instance, or
of Katharine or Laurence or Christina, except that these and their
heroes are concerned with events later than those which conclude the
earthly career of our Lord and of the Virgin Mary. All religious
historical plays, biblical or legendary, cyclic or independent, of
events contemporaneous with, or subsequent to, the scriptural, were
miracles, properly so called by our forefathers; and as the didactic
intent of the species waned, one was as likely as another to develop
material for amusement. Indeed, the authors of the _Manuel des Pechiez_
and _The Handlynge Synne_,--the preacher of that fourteenth-century
attack upon miracle plays which has been preserved in the _Reliquiæ
Antiquæ_,--these, and Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif make no distinction
between miracles of the central mystery from the Old and New Testaments
and miracles worked and suffered by saints, whether legendary or
biblical. The distinction, if any, made by them, is between miracles
acted to further belief by priests and clerks in orders in the church,
and those acted for amusement by these or by laymen in the streets and
on the greens. And it is safe to say that as soon as a play became more
amusing than edifying, it fell under the censure of the church. This
happened as early as 1210, when a decretal of Innocent III. forbade
the acting of _ludi theatrales_ in churches. Indeed much earlier,
for Tertullian and St. Augustine and the Councils had consistently
condemned the performances of _histriones_, _mimi_, _lusores_, and
others who perpetuated the traditions of the pagan Roman stage. In 1227
the Council of Treves took such action. Gregory IX. attempted to put
a stop to the growing participation of the clergy, "lest the honour
of the church should be defiled by these shameful practices."[8] And
during the succeeding decades more than one Synod issued orders of
the same tenor. Now, even though it is practically certain that these
fulminations were directed against perversions of divine worship,
mock festivals and profane plays with the monstrous disguisings or
mummings involved,[9] there is also no doubt that the prohibition came
speedily to apply to the use of masks and other disguises in sacred
plays, and then to the presentation of plays in church for any other
than devotional purposes. Such for instance was the _animus_ with
which William of Wadington, in the _Manuel des Pechiez_, about 1235,
called attention to the scandal of the foolish clergy who, in disguise,
acted miracles '_ky est defendu en decré_.' To play the Resurrection
in church, _pur plus aver devociun_, was permissible; but to gather
assemblies in the streets of the cities after dinner, when fools more
readily congregate, that was a sacrilege. At this early date, we may
be sure that the kind of drama which was extruded from the church had
already invested such of its subjects as were biblical or legendary
with the realistic and comic qualities which made for popularity, and
so was fitting itself for adoption by the crafts. Indeed, we are told
by a thirteenth-century historian of the Church of York,[10] that, at a
date which must be set near 1220, there was a representation _as usual_
of the Lord's Ascension by masked performers, in words and acting; and
that a large crowd of both sexes was assembled, led there by different
impulses, _some by mere pleasure and wonder_, others for a religious
purpose. This was the play in the churchyard of St. John's, Beverley,
to which I have referred before. The _miracula_ of the story cited by
Wright[11] and conjecturally assigned to the thirteenth century, had
also passed beyond the sheer didactic stage, for the auditors, who
resorted to the spectacle in the "meadow above the stream," expressed
their appreciation _nunc silentes nunc cachinnantes_. When, after
the reinstitution of the festival of Corpus Christi, in 1311, these
plays began to be a function of the gilds, their secularization, even
though the clerks still participated in the acting, was but a question
of time; and the occasional injection of crude comedy was a natural
response to the civic demand. It would be erroneous, however, to
imagine that the church abandoned the drama when the town took it up:
the church maintained a liturgical drama, in some places, until well
into the sixteenth century; and as late as 1572 individual clergymen
are condemned for playing interludes in churches.[12]
If the writers of saints' plays, with their attempt to satisfy the
yearning for ideal freedom which is natural in all times and places,
took, in their fictions of the religious-marvellous, a step towards
what may be called romantic comedy,--a step no less important, though
nowadays often unnoticed, was taken toward the comedy of ridicule,
satire, and burlesque, at a date quite as remote, by the contrivers of
religious parodies. It is curious, though not at all unnatural, that
some of the earliest efforts at comic entertainment should proceed
from the revolt against ecclesiastical formality and constraint. I
cannot in this place do more than remind the reader of the antiquity
of three of the most notable of these dramatic travesties: the Feast
of Fools, the election of the Boy Bishop, and the Feast of the Ass.
The first of these was celebrated on the Continent as early as 1182,
one may say with reasonable certainty, 990. It is indeed more than
a conjecture that the Feasts of Fools and the Ass inherited the
license of the Roman Saturnalia, the season and spirit of which were
assimilated by the Christian Feast of the Nativity. Whether adopted
by the church in its effort to conciliate paganism, or tolerated for
reasons of secular policy, these mock-religious festivals were soon the
Frankenstein of Christianity; and it was doubtless against them rather
than the seductions of the sacred drama that most of the ecclesiastical
prohibitions of the Middle Ages were aimed. With its necessary comic
accessories, the Feast of Fools was well established in England before
1226, and it was still flourishing in 1390 when Courtney forbade its
performance in London. "The vicars," he said, "and clerks dressed
like laymen, laughed, shouted, and acted plays which they commonly
and fitly called the Feast of Fools." They travestied the dignitaries
of the church, they turned the service inside out, put obscenity for
sanctity and blasphemy for prayer. While it does not appear that in
England, as on the Continent,[13] the procession of the Boy Bishop
was attended with frivolity or profanity, it was certainly celebrated
with mummings and plays of suitable kind, not altogether serious.
This ceremony dates as far back as St. Nicholas day, 1229, and was
still to the fore in 1556. The Feast of the Ass appears to have been
recognized by the church as early as the Feast of Fools. I do not
know when it was introduced into England, but it was played upon Palm
Sunday as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. In France it had
been notoriously wanton since the beginning of the thirteenth; and it
could not exist anywhere without promoting the spirit of burlesque and
farce. Although the initial purpose of these festivals was to satirize
the hierarchy and ecclesiastical convention, they applied themselves
after they had been repudiated by the church to the ridicule of social
folly in general; and, according to the descriptions of Warton, Douce,
Hone, Klein, Petit de Julleville, and others, they came to be a vivid
interpreter of the popular consciousness, a most potent educator of
critical insight and dramatic instinct, an incitement to artistic even
though naïve productivity. In France, indeed, the Fraternities of Fools
produced national satirists and dramatic professionals in one. In
England, if they did nothing else, they helped to stimulate a taste for
realistic and satiric drama.
=2. The Miracle Cycles in their Relation to Comedy=
Miracle plays and 'marvels,' morals too as we soon shall see, were
a propædeutic to comedy rather than tragedy. For the theme of these
dramas is, in a word, Christian: the career of the individual as an
integral part of the social organism, of the religious whole. So also,
their aim: the welfare of the social individual. They do not exist for
the purpose of portraying immoderate self-assertion and the vengeance
that rides after, but rather the beauty of holiness or the comfort of
contrition. Herod, Judas, and Antichrist are foils, not heroes. The
hero of the miracle seals his salvation by accepting the spiritual
ideal of the community. These plays contribute in a positive manner
to the maintenance of the social organism. The tragedies of life
and literature, on the other hand, proceed from secular histories,
histories of personages liable to disaster because of excessive
peculiarity,--of person or position. Whether the rank of the tragic
hero be elevated or mean, he is unique: his desire is overweening,
his frailty irremediable, or his passion unrestrained,--his peril
unavoidable; and in his ruin not the principal only, but seconds and
bystanders, are involved. Tragedy, then, is the drama of Cain, of the
individual in opposition to the social, political, divine; its occasion
is an upheaval of the social organism.
While the dramatic tone of the miracle cycle is determined by the
conservative character of Christianity in general, the nature of the
several plays is modified by the relation of each to one or other of
the supreme crises in the career of our Lord. The plays leading up
to, and revolving about, the Nativity, are of happy ending, and were
doubtless regarded, by authors and spectators, as we regard comedy.
The murder of Abel, at first sombre, gradually passes into the comedy
of the grotesque. The massacre of the innocents emphasizes, not the
weeping of a Rachel, but the joyous escape of the Virgin and the Child.
In all such stories the horrible is kept in the background or used by
way of suspense before the happy outcome, or frequently as material
for mirth. Upon the sweet and joyous character of the pageants of
Joseph and Mary and the Child it is unnecessary to dwell. They are of
the very essence of comedy. The plays surrounding the Crucifixion and
Resurrection are, on the other hand, specimens of the serious drama,
the tragedy averted. It would hardly be correct to say tragedy; for
the drama of the cross is a triumph. In no cycle does the _consummatum
est_ close the pageant of the Crucifixion; the actors announce, and
the spectators believe, that this is "goddis Sone," whom within three
days they shall again behold, though he has been "nayled on a tree
unworthilye to die." By this consideration, without doubt, the horror
of the buffeting and the scourging, the solemnity of the passion, the
inhuman cruelty--but not the awe--of the Crucifixion, were mitigated
for the spectators. Otherwise, mediæval as they were, they could have
taken but little pleasure in the realism with which their fellows
presented the history of the Sacrifice.
To indulge in a comprehensive discussion of the beginnings of comedy
in England would be pleasant, but I find that I cannot compel the
materials into the limits at my command. Accordingly, since the miracle
cycles (to which Dodsley, following the French, gave the convenient,
but un-English and somewhat misleading, name of 'mysteries') have been
more frequently and generously treated by historians than those other
miracles, non-scriptural, which I would call 'marvels,' and the no less
important popular festival plays and early farces, and 'morals' or
moral and 'mery' interludes, it seems that, in favour of the latter,
I should defer much that might be said about the cycles until a more
spacious occasion.
The manuscript of the York plays appears to have been made about
1430-40; that of the Wakefield, or so-called Towneley, toward the
end of the same century; the larger part of the N-town, or so-called
Coventry, in 1468; and the manuscripts of the Chester between 1591
and 1607. The last are, however, based upon a text of the beginning
of the fifteenth or the end of the fourteenth century; and there is
good reason to believe that some of the plays were in existence during
the first half of the fourteenth. A tradition, suspicious but not yet
wholly discredited, assigns their composition to the period 1267-76.
The York cycle, according to Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith, was composed
between 1340 and 1350. As to the Towneley plays, Mr. Pollard decides
that they were built in at least three distinct stages, covering a
period of which the limits were perhaps 1360 and 1410. While the
composition of the so-called Coventry (apparently acted by strolling
players) may in general be assigned to the first half of the fifteenth
century, some parts give evidence of earlier date. The authenticated
dates of the representation of miracles in Coventry, 1392-1591, I
prefer to attribute not to this N-town cycle, but to the Coventry Gild
plays, two of which still exist.[14] They possess no special importance
for our present purpose. The Newcastle Shipwrights' Play is the much
battered survivor of a cycle that was in existence in 1426. The Ms. of
the three Digby plays of interest to us is assigned by Dr. Furnivall to
the latter half of the fifteenth century. The subject of the first of
them, the _Killing of the Children_, is of early dramatic use, and the
treatment of the poltroon knight corresponds suggestively with Warton's
account of the Christmas play given by the English bishops at the
Council of Constance in 1417. The two Norwich pageants which survive
are by no means naïve: they were touched up, if not written, during the
second third of the sixteenth century.
Other cycle plays which might be enumerated must be omitted, with the
exception of the Cornish. These were written in Cymric, apparently
somewhat before 1300. They are suggestive to the historian of comedy
particularly because they yield no faintest glimmer of a smile, save at
their exquisite credulity and unconsciousness of art. They are a noble
instance of the sustained seriousness of the scriptural cycle in its
early, if not its original, popular stage, and, also, of that familiar
handling of the sacred that prepares the way for the liberty of the
comic.
In approaching the English miracle plays we notice that, as in the
Cornish, the earliest secular form of the older cycles was principally,
if not entirely, serious. Reasons which I cannot stay to enumerate
prove that comic plays in the older cycles are not of the original
series, and that humorous passages in plays of the older series are of
later interpolation. Now, so far as the direct effect upon the comedy
of Heywood, Greene, and Shakespeare is concerned, it may appear to
some of no particular importance in what order the cycles in general
were composed or the plays within the cycles. But the Tudor dramatists
did not make their art, they worked with what they found, and they
found a dramatic medium of expression to which centuries and countless
influences had contributed. An extended study of the beginnings of
English comedy should determine, so far as possible, the relative
priority, not only of cycles, but of the comic passages within the
cycles: what each composition has contributed to the enfranchisement
of the comic spirit and the development of the technical factors of
the art; to what extent each has expressed or modified the realistic,
satirical, romantic, or humorous view of life, and in what ways each
has reflected the temper of its time, the manners and the mind of
the people that wrote, acted, and witnessed. If I arrange the plays
that bear upon the development of comedy according to my conclusions
regarding priority of composition, the order, broadly stated for our
present rapid survey, is as follows: first, the Cornish and the Old
Testament portions of the Chester and Coventry; then the productions of
the second and third periods of the York, and, closely following these,
the crowning efforts of the Towneley; then the New Testament plays of
the Chester and Coventry; and, finally, the surviving portions of the
cycles of Digby and Newcastle. This order, which is roughly historical,
has the advantage, as I perceive after testing it, of presenting a
not unnatural sequence of the æsthetic values or interests essential
to comedy: first, as a full discussion would reveal, the humour of
the incidental; then of the essential or real, and, gradually, of
the satirical in something like their order of appearance within the
cycles; afterwards, the accession of the romantic, the wonderful,
the allegorical, the mock-ideal; and, finally, of the scenic and
sensational.
Of the significant lack of humour in the Cornish plays I have already
spoken. I find, though I may not stay to illustrate, a livelier
observation and a superior faculty of characterization and construction
in the early comic art of Chester than in that of Coventry, but in
both a cruder sense of the humour of incident than in the other
English cycles. In the York cycle there are fewer situations that may
be called purely comic than in the Chester, and none of these occurs
in the oldest plays of the series; but for its other contributions to
dramatic art and its relation to the remarkable productions of the
Wakefield or Towneley school of comedy it deserves special attention.
A comparative study of its versification, phraseology and dramatic
technique, leads me to the conclusion that the original didactic kernel
of the York cycle was enlarged and enriched during two well-defined
periods, which may be termed the middle and the later, and that there
was at least one playwright in each of these periods or schools who
distinctly made for the development of English comedy. Of the middle
period, to which belong _Cain_, _Noah_, and the _Shepherds' Plays_,
the playwright or playwrights are characterized by an unsophisticated
humour; the distinctive playwright of the later or realistic period is
marked by his observation of life, his reproduction of manners, his
dialogue, and the plasticity of his technique. That the later school or
period, to which belongs a group of half a dozen plays[15] gathering
about _The Dream of Pilate's Wife_, and _The Trial before Herod_, was,
moreover, influenced by the manner of its predecessor is indicated by
the fact that of its two most efficient stanzaic forms one, namely that
used in _The Conspiracy_, is anticipated (though in simpler iambic
beat) by that of _Noah_, the typical play of the middle, that is the
first comic, school,[16] while the other, of which the variants are
found in _The Mortificacio_ and _The Second Trial_, has its germ more
probably in _The Cayme_ of that same school than in any other of the
middle or of the earlier plays.[17] With these two stanzaic forms the
later group, so far as we may conclude from the mutilated condition of
the surviving plays, seems to experiment; and the second of them, that
of the _Mortificacio_, may be regarded as the final and distinctive
outcome of York versification. To the leading playwrights of each of
these schools,--the former the best humorist, the latter the best
realist, of the York drama,--to these anonymous composers of the most
facile and vivid portions of the York cycle our comedy owes a still
further debt; for from them it would appear that a poet of undoubted
genius derived something of his inspiration and much of his method and
technique--our first great comic dramatist, the Playwright of Wakefield.
We know that Wakefield actors sometimes played in the Corpus Christi
plays of York, and it was only natural that the smaller town should
borrow from the dramatic riches of its metropolitan neighbour. We
are, therefore, not surprised to find in the Wakefield cycle a number
of plays which have been taken bodily from the York cycle.[18] None
of these is in the distinctive stanzaic form of which we have just
spoken; but imbedded in certain other Wakefield plays[19] that in
other respects show marks of derivation from earlier and discarded
portions of the York cycle, we find occasional affiliated forms of the
distinctive later York strophe evidently in a transitional period of
its development. We find, furthermore, passages in this transitional
York strophe side by side with Wakefield stanzas which display the
strophe in a more highly artistic technique than anything found in
the York.[20] The writer of the perfected York-Wakefield stanza,
such as appears in the Towneley plays, must have, consciously or
unconsciously, been influenced by the middle and later York schools of
dramatic composition. This fully developed outcome of the distinctive
York stanza of the later school is found in the guise of a nine-line
stanza in certain Towneley plays which we see reason for attributing
to a Wakefield genius, and which we shall presently consider. Suffice
it in this place to say that of the Wakefield stanza the first four
lines, when resolved, according to their internal rhymes, into separate
verses, run thus: abababab². If to this we add the _cauda_, our stanza
runs abababab²c¹ddd²c². Sometimes, indeed, a three-accented line occurs
among the first eight, showing the more plainly that this thirteen-line
stanza of Wakefield (though set down in nine lines) is a variant or
derivative of the thirteen-line York XXXVI.,--ababbcbc³d¹eee²d³. And
that in itself is, as I have already said, a refinement upon the
fourteen-line stanza of the earlier comic school of York, as used in
the _Noah_. Whether the rapid beat and frequently recurring rhyme
of the Wakefield are a conscious elaboration of the York or a happy
find or accident, the stanzaic result is an accurate index to the
superiority in spirit and style achieved over their congeners of York
by these comedies of Wakefield.
Now, the contiguity of what is undoubtedly borrowed from the York with
what is imitated from it and what is elaborated upon it, is strong
proof of a conscious relation between these Wakefield productions
and those of York; and since the work of the poet, especially the
provincial poet, was in those days (though verse forms, like air,
are free to all) likely to be cast in a fixed mould--his favourite
metrical and strophaic medium, there is at any rate a possibility that
the plays and portions of plays in the Wakefield cycle, written in
this fully developed and distinctive stanza, were the work of one man.
When we examine the contents of the plays and their style, we find
that the possibility becomes more than a probability, practically a
certainty; and that being so, I can hardly deem it an accident that
the most dramatic portions of the Wakefield cycle show so close an
external resemblance to the best comic and realistic portions of the
York. It is, then, with something of the interest in an individual, not
a theory, that one may segregate the plays and bits of plays bearing
this metrical stamp, look for the personality behind them, and attempt
to discover the relation of the Wakefield group of comedies to its
forerunners of York.
The Wakefield cycle is still in flux when its distinctive poet-humorist
takes it in hand. Insertions in his nine-line stanza are found in
one[21] of the five plays derived from the York cycle. Of the two plays
which show a general resemblance to a corresponding York, one[22] is in
this stanza, and to the other[23] a dozen of the stanzas are prefixed.
The _Fflagellacio_ (XXII.), the second half of which is an imitation,
sometimes loose, sometimes literal, of York XXXIV. (_Christ Led up to
Calvary_), opens with twenty-three of these stanzas,--nearly the whole
of the original part. One of them, No. 25, is, by the way, based upon
stanza 2 of that part of York XXXIV. which is _not_ taken over by the
Wakefield play. In the Wakefield _Ascension_ (XXIX.), which adapts, but
in no slavish manner, a few passages from the York (XLIII.), we find
two of this playwright's nine-line stanzas;[24] and in the Wakefield
_Crucifixion_ (XXIII.), which has some slight reminiscence of York
XXXV. and XXXVI., we find one. In that part of the Wakefield less
directly, or not at all, connected with the York cycle, four whole
plays,[25] the _Processus Noe_, the two _Shepherds' Plays_, and the
_Buffeting_, and occasional portions of other plays[26] are written
in this stanza. This contribution in the nine-line stanza amounts to
approximately one-fourth of the cycle; and, allowing for modifications
due to oral and scribal transmission, is of one language and
phraseology. Not merely the identity of stanza and diction, however,
leads one to suspect an identity of authorship; but the prevalence in
all these passages, and not in others, of spiritual characteristics in
approximately the same combination,--realistic and humorous qualities
singularly suitable to the development of a vigorous national comedy.
"If any one," says Mr. Pollard, "will read these plays together, I
think he cannot fail to feel that they are all the work of the same
writer, and that this writer deserves to be ranked--if only we knew his
name!--at least as high as Langland, and as an exponent of a rather
boisterous kind of humour had no equal in his own day." And, speaking
of the _Mactacio Abel_, where we lack the evidence of identity of
metre, this authority continues, "The extraordinary youthfulness of the
play and the character of its humour make it difficult to dissociate
it from the work of the author of the _Shepherds' Plays_, and I
cannot doubt that this, also, at least in part, must be added to his
credit."[27]
To this conclusion I had come before reading Mr. Pollard's significant
introduction to the _Towneley Plays_; and I may say that I had
suspected the Wakefield master in the _Processus Talentorum_ as well;
for though, with the exception of some insertions, the stanzaic form
of that pageant is not his favourite, the humour, dramatic method,
and phraseology of the whole are distinctly reminiscent of him. In
the revising and editing of the Wakefield cycle as he found it this
playwright was brought into touch with the York schools of comic and
realistic composition. What he derived from them and what he added may
be gathered from a comparative view of the related portions of these
cycles. That, however, I must defer until another time. The best of his
plays are of course the _Noe_ and the _Secunda Pastorum_; the latter
a product of dramatic genius. It stands out English and alone, with
its homespun philosophy and indigenous figures,--Mak and Gyll and the
Shepherds,--its comic business, its glow, its sometimes subtle irony,
its ludicrous colloquies, its rural life and manners, its naïve and
wholesome reverence: with these qualities it stands apart from other
plays of cycles foreign or native, and in its dramatic anticipations,
postponements, and surprises is our earliest masterpiece of comic
drama. A similar dramatic excellence characterizes all this poet's
plays, as well as the insertions made by him in other plays. But he
is no more remarkable for his dramatic power than for his sensitive
observation and his satire.
Of the realism of his art much might be said. To be sure, we cannot
accredit to him the grim photography of certain plays--the preparations
for the crucifixion, for instance, which are the counterpart of scenes
in the York. But the _Buffeting_ proves his power in this direction,
and parts of the _Scourging_--each a _genre_ picture on a background
of horrors. Of conversations caught from the lip those in the second
and fourth scenes of the _Processus Noe_ are his, and those between the
shepherds in _Prima_ and _Secunda Pastorum_,--all of them unique. So
also the description of the dinners in these _Shepherds' Plays_: the
boar's brawn, cow's foot, sow's shank, blood puddings, ox-tail, swine's
jaw, the good pie, "all a hare but the loins," goose's leg, pork,
partridge, tart for a lord, calf's liver "scored with the verjuice,"
and good ale of Ely to wash things down. What more seasonable than
the afterthought of collecting the broken meats for the poor? what
more naïve than the night-spell in the name of the Crucified just
preceding the angelic announcement of his birth? what more typical of
unquestioning faith than the reverence of these "Sely Shepherds" before
the Saviour Child, the simplicity and acceptability of their rustic
gifts? This is the fresh and sympathetic handling of a well-worn theme.
But the Wakefield poet is no sentimentalist: his anger burns as sudden
as his pity. Otherwhere genially ironical, it is in his revision of
the _Judicium_ that he displays his full power as a satirist. Here his
hatred of oppression, his scorn of vice and self-love, his contempt of
sharp and shady practice in kirk or court, upon the bench, behind the
counter, or by the hearth are welded into one and brought to edge and
point. He strikes hard when he will, but he has the comic sense and
spares to slay. We may hear him chuckling, this Chaucerian "professor
of holy pageantry," as he pricks the bubble of fashion, lampoons
Lollard and "kyrkchaterar" alike, and parodies the latinity of his age.
When his demons speak the syllables leap in rhythmic haste, the rhymes
beat a tattoo, and the stanzas hurtle by. Manners, morals, folly, and
loose living are writ large and pinned to the caitiff. But the poet
behind the satire is ever the same, sound in his domestic, social,
political philosophy, constant in his sympathy with the poor and in
godly fear.
Though there are comic scenes of some excellence in the later
Chester and so-called Coventry plays, they add little to the variety
of the Wakefield. I would, however, call attention to a few other
comparatively modern, but, generally speaking, contemporaneous,
characteristics of these and the remaining cycles: the foreshadowing
of the chivalrous-romantic in the Joseph and Mary plays of York,
Wakefield, and especially Coventry; of the melodramatic in the
wonder and mediæval magic of the York and Chester cycles, and again
especially in the Coventry; of the allegorical in the Coventry, and of
the burlesque in all cycles when Pride rides for a fall or Cunning is
caught in his own snare.
In respect of the sensational, the older cycles are surpassed by the
surviving plays of Newcastle and Digby; so also in the increasing
complexity of motive and interest. These Digby plays were acted,
probably one by one in some midland village from year to year during
the latter half of the fifteenth century, and maybe somewhat earlier.
They are of interest, not only because they emphasize the sensational
element, but because they stand half-way, if not in time, at any
rate in spirit and method, between the miracles that we have so far
discussed and the moral plays of which we shall presently treat. The
Digby _Killing of the Children of Israel_ lends a decided impetus to
the progress of the comic and secular tendencies of the drama. The
Herod brags as usual, but he is artistically surpassed in his _metier_
by a certain _miles gloriosus_, the descendant of Bumbommachides
and Sir Launscler Depe, and himself the forerunner of Thersites and
Roister Doister, and countless aspirants for knighthood, whose valour
"begynnes to fayle and waxeth feynt" under the distaff of an angry
wife. Such is the Watkyn of this Digby play. Both here and in the
_Conversion of St. Paul_, the joyous element has been enhanced, as Dr.
Furnivall points out, by the introduction of dancing and music. In the
_Conversion_ the charm supplied by the ammoniac Billingsgate of Saul's
servant and the ostler adds thrills galore. Saul, "goodly besene in
the best wyse, like an aunterous knyth," the thunder and lightning,
the persecutor felled to earth, "godhed speking from hevyn," the Holy
Ghost, the "dyvel with thunder and fyre" sitting cool upon a "chayre in
hell, another devyll with a fyeryng, cryeng and roryng,"--the warning
angel, Saul's escape,--there is sign enough of invention here. To be
sure, these seductions are counterbalanced by a didactic on the Seven
Deadly Sins, worthy of a preceding or contemporary moral drama; but
that was part of the bargain. The spectacular plays of this group,
especially the _Mary Magdalene_, comic and didactic by turns, denote a
further advance in a still different direction. They portray character
in process of formation: the rejection of former habits and motives,
and the adoption of new, the resulting change of conduct, and the
growth of personality. From this point of view Mary Magdalene is a
figure of as rare distinction in the history of romantic comedy as
the Virgin Mary,--perhaps even of greater importance. Interesting as
the sensational elements of the play may have been, and novel--the
vital novelty here is that of character growing from within. Wonderful
as the career of the virgin mother was,--an essential propædeutic to
that woman worship which characterizes a broad realm of Christian
romance,--her career could never have awakened the peculiar interest,
dramatic and humane, that was stirred by the legend so often dramatized
of the wayward, tempted, falling, but finally redeemed and sainted Mary
of Magdala.
With regard to the transitional character of the Digby plays, it has
been maintained that this particular play, combining materials of the
biblical miracle and the saint's play or marvel, approaches more nearly
than any other of the group to the morals and moral interludes, because
of the prominence of the Sensual Sins in the dramatic career of the
Magdalene. Professor Cushman, in his excellent thesis on _The Devil and
the Vice_, even asserts that the downfall of the heroine, as the result
of sensual temptation which is the office of seven personified deadly
sins "arayyd lyke vij dylf," is a special 'development' of this play. I
can hardly go so far: the church of the Middle Ages, Caxton's _Golden
Legend_ of 1483, and Voragine's of 1270-90 had already amalgamated the
biblical narratives of the Mary of seven devils, Mary of Bethany, and
the woman who was a sinner. In fact, the suggestion of the 'device,' if
such was necessary, is contained in seven consecutive lines of Caxton's
_Life of the Magdalene_. This biblical and legendary play is, however,
undoubtedly well on the way toward the drama of the conflict of good
and evil for possession of the human soul. And this appears, as the
author just cited has pointed out, when we consider a later work on
the same subject, called a Moral Interlude, by Lewis Wager. Although
the Seven Deadly Sins no longer figure as such, their place is here
supplied by four characters,--Infidelitie the Vice, and his associates,
Pride of Life, Cupiditie, and Carnal Concupiscence,--who, arrayed like
gallants, instruct the Magdalene in their several follies, and are
themselves all "children of Sathan." These later Vices are nothing
other than selected Deadly Sins,--the Pride, the Covetyse, and the
Lechery of the earlier miracle play.
=3. The Dramatic Value of the English Miracle Plays=
Taken as a whole, the craft cycle possesses the significance,
continuity, and finality requisite to dramatic art; taken in its parts
or pageants, however, it presents to the modern reader the appearance
of a mosaic, an historical panel picture, or stereopticon show. I set
down these words, "the modern reader," because I do not believe that
the audience of contemporaries was aware of any break in the sequence
of the collective spectacle. This histrionic presentment of the
biblical narrative lacked neither motive nor method to the generations
of the ages of belief. For them the history of the world was thus
unrolled in episodes the opposite of disconnected,--each a hint or sign
or sample, a type or antitype of the scheme of salvation, which was
itself import and impulse of all history. No serious scene, but was
confirmation or prophecy. Characters, institutions, and events of the
Old-Testament drama had their _raison d'être_ not only in themselves
but in the New Testament antitype which each in turn prefigured. No
profound theological training was needed to comprehend each symbol and
its significance, to esteem all as centring in the Person of history,
in the sacrifice and atonement. And still it is largely because
historians have failed to appreciate the scriptural training of our
ancestors that they have unfairly emphasized the episodic nature of the
miracle cycles, at any rate of the English.
The integral quality of the English cycle is infinitely superior to
that of the French; and the separate plays are more frequently artistic
units. This is due, among other things, to facts long ago pointed out
by Ebert.[28] The smaller stage in England, which in turn restricted
the scope of the play, made it impossible to split up the action into
two or more parallel movements, such as frequently occupied the stage
in France. The scene, moreover, was in England limited to earth, save
when the plot expressly required the presentation of heaven or hell. It
very rarely required all three at once. The conduct of the English play
is therefore less dependent upon the supernatural, and the persons bear
a closer resemblance to actual human beings. Neither plot nor character
is distracted by the irresponsible intrusion of devils, whereas these,
idling about the French stage, frequently turned the action into
horse-play,--if the fool (likewise absent from the English miracle) had
not already turned it into a farce out of all relation to the fable.
The comic element in the English play had to exist by virtue of its
relation to the main action or not at all. It was therefore compelled
to conquer its position within the artistic bounds of the drama. The
comic scenes of the English miracle should accordingly be regarded,
not as interruptions, nor independent episodes, but as harmonious
counterpoint or dramatic relief. Those who have witnessed in recent
times the reproduction of the _Secunda Pastorum_ at one of the American
universities bear testimony to the propriety and charm, as well as the
dramatic effect, with which the foreground of the sheep-stealing fades
into the radiant picture of the nativity. The pastoral atmosphere is
already shot with a prophetic gleam, the fulfilment is, therefore,
no shock or contrast, but a transfiguration--an epiphany. I do not
forget that a less humorous analogue of the _Shepherds' Play_ exists
in such French mysteries as that of the _Conception_, but I call
attention to the fact that by devices, technical sometimes, sometimes
naïve, elaborated through the centuries in response to the demands
of a popular æsthetic consciousness, the cycles, preëminently in
England, acquired a delicacy and variety of colour, an horizon, and an
atmosphere, not only as wholes, but in the parts contributing to the
whole.
It is, therefore, only with reservation that I can concur with what one
of our most scientific and suggestive historians has said concerning
the dramatic qualities of the English miracle play:[29] "In the
mystery, not only were the subject and the idea unalterable, but the
way in which the subject and idea affected each other was equally
unchangeable. The power of expression was exceedingly defective. The
idea in the finished work still seemed to be something strange and
external--conception and execution did not correspond. It is only by
a whole cycle that the subject could be exhausted, and this cycle was
composed of the most heterogeneous elements, and is, in fact, a work
of accident. The cycle play very seldom formed a unit or whole; it
seldom contained anything that could be called a dramatic action. The
spectators were therefore interested only in the matter. Only a few
details made any æsthetic effect--such as character, situation, scenes;
the whole was rarely or never dramatic." I will grant that, since the
subject of the individual pageant was prescribed by tradition, and the
solution of the dramatic problem already fixed, the author did not
always penetrate the shell of his story and assimilate the conception.
Consequently the execution has frequently the faults of the ready-made
suit of clothes: it creases where it should fall free and breaks
where it should embrace. As the writer is not expected to exercise
his invention, the onlooker estimates the conduct of the fable as a
spectacle, not as a revelation. Many of the miracles, therefore, lack
the element of dramatic surprise, and almost none attempts anything in
the way of character development. This is, in part, because, severally,
the plays are squares of an historical chessboard, upon which the
individual--king or pawn--is merely a piece; and even if the board be
not historic, the squares are over strait for the gradual deploy of
motive; many of these plays are scenes, consequently, and limited to
single crises of an individual life. In other words, the character,
if familiar, is regarded as an instrument toward a well-known end; if
unfamiliar, as an apparition momentarily vivid. Slight opportunity
exists for interplay of incident and character, for the production of
conduct, in short, which is the resultant of character and a crisis.
It must also be conceded that, since each play was the dear delight of
its proprietary gild--and each rare performance thereof the chance that
should grace these craftsmen ever or disgrace them quite--the effort of
actor, if not always of playwright, was towards a speedy and startling
effect, such as might be procured by the extraneous quality of the
show, rather than by the story in itself or in its relation to the
cycle.
But still we must be careful not to generalize from a play here and
there to the quality of a cycle as a whole or to the common qualities
of various cycles. When we say that the mysteries, that is, the
scriptural miracles, possessed this, that, or the other merit or
defect, to what area and what object does the remark apply? Do we refer
to all the extant plays, or only to the one hundred and fifty plays in
the five cycles that may be called complete? Do we draw the inference
from a majority of all plays that might fall within the purview,
or from the plays of one cycle, or from a majority of the plays in
that cycle, or from a single striking example here or there in one
or another cycle or fragmentary collection? Do we draw the inference
from, or apply the conclusion indiscriminately to, later as well as
earlier cycles and plays? A generalization from the Chester does not
_prima facie_ fit the Towneley, nor does a dramatic estimate of the
Coventry characterize the isolated miracle morals of the Digby. Between
the composition of the earliest and the latest of the Chester plays
alone, centuries elapsed; centuries between the earliest Coventry and
the earliest Digby; generations between Chester and Coventry plays
upon the same subject, and generations more between the York and
Newcastle. York includes some of the youngest pageants of the species
and many of the oldest. Towneley is generally later than York; but it
sometimes retains an original which York had long ago discarded for
something more modern. Returning, therefore, to Professor ten Brink's
generalization, we must submit that most of the defects which he lays
at the door of the cyclic miracle were not inherent in the species,
but incidental to the period. Some attach to the crudeness of the
playwright, some to the simplicity of the audience; they no doubt
attached to the collective "morals" of the fourteenth century, such as
the _Paternoster Play_, and they would have characterized plays of any
other species attempted under like conditions. The best miracle plays
are as mature products of dramatic art as the best of the allegorical
kind, except in one point only--the development of character. That "the
subject and its idea should be unalterable" and their interrelation
fixed, is by no means a peculiarity of the scriptural play, but a
characteristic of period or place. If the reader will cast even a rapid
glance by way of comparison over the French _Corpus_ of mysteries
and the English, he will observe that the scope of subjects possible
to a religious cycle was amenable to widely different conditions of
restriction, selection, and enlargement, and that the treatment of
the same and similar subjects was infinitely varied. To illustrate at
length would be a work of supererogation. Everybody knows that the
French cycles have plays upon subjects, the Job, for instance, and
Tobias and Esther,[30] not touched by the English,--at any rate when in
their prime; and that the same subject or episode is frequently treated
in a way dissimilar to the English. When we turn to details we note
likewise the independence of the playwright: none of the English plays
avails itself, for instance, of Adam's difficulty in swallowing the
apple, though the incident figures both in _Le Mistere de la Nativite_
and that of the _Viel Testament_; nor of the attractive possibilities
of Reuben and Rachel's maid, Joseph and Potiphar's wife, Solomon and
the Queen of Sheba, and many another conjunction known to all readers
of the French religious play. And these discrepancies between national
cycles hold true even where, as in the case of the Chester plays, the
influence of the French mysteries of the thirteenth century and of the
later collections is in other respects evident. Of the four English
cycles, moreover, each does not select exactly the same subjects for
its pageants as the others,--Balaam and his Ass, for instance, appear
only in the Chester,--nor do all introduce the same incidents in the
handling of a common subject.
Professor ten Brink is by no means alone in his estimate of the
technical quality of the English scriptural miracle, but I must say
that the estimate seems to me to be hardly up to the deserts of the
species. The frequent absence of such refinements as the unities of
time and place was of the essence both of play and period; but it was
not of the essence of the miracle cycle that the expression should be
defective, or that conception and execution should fail to correspond,
or of the miracle play that it should be unable economically and
adequately to develop a dramatic action and produce an artistic
whole. It may be an insufficient argument to say that the plays of
the Wakefield dramatist are anything but defective in expression.
Let us, therefore, be somewhat more comprehensive in the scope of
inquiry. I have gone carefully through the four English cycles with
Professor ten Brink's censures in mind, and I conclude that at least
twenty of the individual plays have central motive, consistent action,
and well-rounded dramatic plot. Indeed I think a good case might be
made for thirty. That would be to say that one-fifth of the miracles
of the great cycles were artistic units in themselves, and must have
interested their spectators, not alone by the materials displayed, but
by a subject that meant something, and situations, scenes, and acting
characters by which it was sometimes not at all unworthily presented.
The inheritors of English literature will indeed carry away a false
impression of the artistic achievements of their ancestors, if they
believe that in spite of a development of five hundred years the
miracle play was "rarely or never dramatic."
Even though the sacred and traditional character of the biblical
narrative must have exercised a restraint upon the comic tendencies of
the cyclic poet not likely to have existed in the case of the writers
of saints' plays and single morals, still it is when he attempts
the comic that the cyclic poet is most independent. For as soon as
plays have passed into the hands of the gilds, the playwright puts
himself most readily into sympathy with the literary consciousness as
well as the untutored æsthetic taste of his public when he colours
the spectacle, old or new, with what is preëminently popular and
distinctively national. In the minster and out of it, all through
the Christian year, the townsfolk of York and Chester had as much of
ritual, of scriptural narrative, and tragic mystery as they wanted,
and probably more; when the pageants were acted, they listened with
simple credulity, no doubt, to the sacred history, and with a reverence
that our age of illumination can neither emulate nor understand;--but
with keenest expectation they awaited the invented episodes where
tradition conformed itself to familiar life,--the impromptu sallies,
the cloth-yard shafts of civic and domestic satire sped by well-known
wags of town or gild. Of the appropriateness of these insertions,
spectators made no question, and the dramatists themselves do not
seem to have thought it necessary to apologize for æsthetic creed or
practice. The objections thereto proceeded from the authorities of
the church, but the very tenor and tone of them are a testimony to
the importance attained by the comic element in the religious plays.
It is principally the "bourdynge and japynge" which attended the
"pleyinge of Goddis myraclys and werkes," that called forth the wrath
of the sermon that I have already cited from the end of the fourteenth
century.[31] And it was for similar reasons that Bishop Wedego ordered,
in 1471, the suppression of both passion play and saints' plays within
his continental diocese. In France, indeed, not only horse-play
characterized the performance of the mysteries, but absolutely
irrelevant farces invaded them, merely _afin que le jeu soit moins fade
et plus plaisans_.
I have alluded to the distinctively national note that characterizes
the comic contributions to the sacred plays, and I find that my opinion
is confirmed by the examples cited by Klein and Creizenach. The French
mystery poets, while they develop, like the English, the comic quality
of the shepherd scenes, introduce the drinking and dicing element _ad
lib._,--and sometimes the drabbing; they make, moreover, a specialty of
the humour of deformity, a characteristic which appears nowhere in the
English plays. The Germans, in their turn, elaborate a humour peculiar
to themselves,--elephantine, primitive, and personal. They seem to
get most run out of reviling the idiosyncrasies of Jews, whose dress,
appearance, manners, and speech they caricature,--even introducing
Jewish _dramatis personæ_ to sing gibberish, exploit cunning, and
perform obscenities under the names of contemporary citizens of the
hated race. In general a freer rein seems to have been given to the
sacrilegious, grotesque, and obscene on the Continent than in England.
In the _Passion_ of A. Greban (before 1452), Herod orders Jesus into
the garb of a fool; and in some of the German plays the judges dance
about the cross upon which the Saviour hangs. Much of the ribaldry
was of course impromptu, and on that account the more grotesque; as
in the story related by Bebel of how a baker playing the part of
Christ in the _Processus Crucis_ bore the gibes of his tormentors with
admirable composure, until one actor Jew insisted upon calling him a
corn thief,--"Shut up," retorted the Christ, "or I'll come down and
break your head with the cross." There is, of course, an occasional
license in the English plays, such as the dance about the cross in the
Coventry; but the excess of ribaldry, _grotesquerie_, and _diablerie_
does not assault the imagination as in the continental mysteries.
=4. The Contribution of Later "Marvels" and Early Secular Plays=
The advance which remained to be made upon the quality of play
presented in the miracle cycle before England could have an artistic
comedy were threefold: _first_, from the collective to the single play;
_second_, from the reproduction of traditional or accidental events to
the selection of such as possessed significance and continuity; and
_third_, from the employment of the remote in material and interest to
the employment of the immediate and familiar.
To attribute to the allegorical play all improvements that were made in
this transition is a mistake. Some steps in the right direction were
already necessitated by the popular demand, and had been taken by the
later miracle plays before the allegorical drama had itself passed out
of the experimental stages,--by the Digby _Magdalene_, for instance.
In that play, the dramatic management of a plot, invented and romantic
rather than scriptural in its nature and interest, and the portrayal
of commonplace events and characters side by side with the occasional
allegory, are evidence not only of contemporary taste, but, as Mr.
Courthope has said, of an artistic approach to the representation of
fables of simple secular interest. The play, in fact, bears a close
resemblance to and was apparently influenced by the popular life of
St. Mary Magdalene which appeared in Caxton's translation of 1483 of
the _Golden Legend_,--or perhaps by the French edition which Caxton
follows, or the original of Voragine. In the _St. Paul_ of the Digby
collection we note a similar fusion of secular and legendary material,
and an imaginative handling of the plot. Although the dramatist has
buried his opportunities of psychological invention in the apostle's
homily upon the deadly sins, he has at the same time crossed the border
of the "moral play" rich with psychological opportunity. In the same
direction of advance various steps had also been taken by other saints'
plays, purely legendary, like the _Sancta Katharina_ already mentioned,
and by such a 'marvel' as the Sacrament Play, or Miracle of the Host,
which we shall presently describe. A movement in advance had, moreover,
been made by our early secular drama, which comprised, besides the
farce interlude prepared by scholars for profane consumption, like the
_Interludium de Clerico et Puella_, certain popular festival plays,
for instance, the _Hox Tuesday_ and _Robin Hood_, and plays of saints
turned national heroes like St. George and St. Edward.
Concerning the plays of the miracles of saints I have already expressed
the belief that, whether these workers of marvels got off with their
lives or not, the representations in which they figured were, generally
speaking, of the essence of comedy: the persistent optimism which in
the end routs the spectres of temptation, persecution, and unbelief.
This would hold, with even greater probability, of the purely legendary
miracles, the nature of which is, of course, that of popular religious
thought and faith in the Middle Ages, and is embalmed for us in the
_Golden Legend_, in Eusebius and St. Jerome, and other writers from
whom the legend was derived. In spite of their exceeding interest,
these legendary saints' plays and pageants can be considered in this
place only with brevity; but in order that the reader may better
appreciate the variety of their subjects and the extent of the period
over which they were acted, I subjoin a list of some that we know to
have been presented.[32]
I have little doubt that the romantic combination of tragic,
marvellous, and comic later noticeable upon the Elizabethan stage was
in some degree due to the ancient and continuous dramatization of the
irrational adventures, blood-curdling tortures, and dissonant emotions
afforded by the legends of the saints. These 'marvels,' moreover, must,
because of their early emancipation from ecclesiastical restraints and
their adoption by the folk, have contributed to the development of the
freely invented, surprising, and amusing fable which is congenial to
comedy. That we have not more notices of them is owing, not to their
insignificance nor to any disappearance before the advancing popularity
of the craft cycles, for even the pageants of the saints still flourish
in Aberdeen as late as 1531, and the plays elsewhere much later,
but, as Ebert has already noted, to the fact that they were seldom
presented with the magnificence and publicity of the cyclic miracles;
but whenever a saint's play is taken up by a city or gild, it enjoys
frequent official notice and maintains its dignity for years.
Passing to the marvel or miracle of the Host, we notice that only one
in our language has survived. This _Play of the Blyssyd Sacrament_
bears the name of one of the East Midland Croxtons, and it was composed
between 1461 and 1500. Although some critics have a low opinion of
the play, I venture to say that it is one of the most important in
the early history of English comedy. The subject, the desecration
by Jews of a wonder-working Wafer and the discomfiture and ultimate
conversion of the offenders, is popular in the legend of the later
Middle Ages.[33] With ours a Dutch Sacrament Play, written about the
year 1500 by Smeken and acted in Breda, naturally calls for comparison;
but, though the latter exhibits the miraculous power of the Host and
has a certain diabolic humour, it lacks altogether the realism, the
popular reproduction of Jewish malignity, and the effective close of
the Croxton. The Croxton avails itself of the possibilities of the
subject. The idea has a significance; the plot possesses legitimate
motive, due proportions, unity ethical and æsthetic; and the conclusion
is happy. The mood, by turns serious and comic, and the _dramatis
personæ_, various and well-characterized, combine to furnish a most
diverting drama of the wonderful, horrible, elevated, and commonplace.
Colle's announcement of his master the leech, "a man off alle syence,"
who "syttyth with sum tapstere in the spence," is excellently ironical;
and Master Brundych himself, like the doctor in the St. George plays,
must have furnished a figure exactly suited to the popular taste. Nor
is the realism confined to the intentionally comic scenes; but it is
as vividly successful in the corruption of Aristorius by Jonathas
and in the futile and richly avenged efforts of the Jews to torture
the Host. Here certainly was a play adapted to meet the demands of
its time,--exhibiting closer affiliation with the folk than with
church or patron or school, acted perhaps by strolling players, an
unforced product of the artistic consciousness; a play which, though
it dealt with a sacred subject, still focussed itself in a single
plot, discarded all material, sacred or historical, not available for
its purpose, completed an alliance with the natural and the familiar,
and emphasized the comic realities of life. No miracle, cyclic or
individual, no allegorical drama, and no secular play of the same or
previous date excels the Croxton in dramatic concept and constructive
skill. Without the mediation offered by such Croxton plays, the English
drama would have had "old" bridging the space between miracles,
marvels, and morals of the earlier time and the comedy of Shakespeare.
The consideration of our early farce interludes may be conveniently
postponed for the present in favour of the more popular plays, or
shows, with which our forefathers celebrated festival occasions. Of the
pageants in honour of royal entries, to which reference has already
been made, it is impossible to say more here than that, developing
gradually into dramatic spectacles, and at the same time retaining
their symbolic character, they must have contributed to the taste for
allegorical plays, the moral, and the moral interlude. If we turn to
the secular shows presented on regular festivals, such as May-day, Hox
Tuesday, and the Eve of St. John and St. Peter, while we may at once
conclude that they were less efficient as dramas than some of which we
have spoken, such as the Sacrament play, they have the advantage, from
our present point of view, of indicating more directly the nature of
popular demand and the primitive conditions of popular art. Indeed,
Dodsley regards the mummers who commonly acted them as the earliest
genuine comedians of England. Of such disguisings, masks, and mummeries
there is evidence in the Wardrobe Accounts of 1389, according to
which a company of twenty-one men was disguised as the Ancient Order
of the Coif for a play before the king at Christmas; and of other
mummings--not satiric nor in mockery of church ritual, but genial--we
have mention in Stow and citations in Warton and Collier that take us
to the first half of the fourteenth century. They doubtless existed
much earlier, though I do not think that they anticipated the parodies
of sacred rites or the ecclesiastical saints' plays.
Naturally a much-loved figure in festival games was Robin Hood, and
that some kind of drama was made out of the ballads surrounding him
is proved by a Ms. fragment of 1475 or earlier of _Robin Hood and
the Knight_, and a play of _Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar_ with a
portion of _Robin Hood and the Potter_, printed by Copland, in 1550, as
"very proper to be played in May-games."[34] These May-games occurred
not only in May, but June, and gave employment to St. George and the
Dragon, the Nine Worthies (at whom Shakespeare poked run in _Love's
Labour's Lost_), the morris-dance, with its Lords and Ladies of the
May, giant, hobby-horse, and sometimes devils, as well as to Robin
and Little John, Maid Marian, and Friar Tuck; and they were popular
through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perhaps even earlier.
If we may trust old Fenn's editing, Sir John Paston wrote in 1473 of
a man whom he had kept for three years to play "Seynt Jorge and Robyn
Hod and the Shryff off Nottingham." There may be even earlier mention
of such plays. For, with all deference to the best of authorities,
Professor Child, I cannot but think that when Bower wrote, between 1441
and 1447, of the popular "comedies and tragedies" of _Robertus Hode et
Litill Johanne_, he had reference to acted plays, since he took pains
to specify in his account of them the _mimi_, as well as the _bardani_
who chanted them. These entertainments, he says, were then more popular
than any other, and it is only natural to suppose that they had existed
long before his time. The earliest mention of Robin in England is in
_Piers Plowman_, 1377, and then as the subject of a ballad; but, as
Warton long ago pointed out, pastoral plays of _Robin et Marion_ had
been given in France upon festival occasions before the end of the
thirteenth century. Although there appears to be no similarity between
the incidents of Adam de la Halle's comic opera of 1283 upon Robin and
his Marion and the English stories, and although we are ignorant of
the nature of the spring game, or play, of the same title, which was
already an annual function in Anjou, in 1392, the principal characters
and conditions of life in the two series are sufficiently similar to
suggest a connection by derivation or common source. If such connection
exist, it is not impossible that some kind of Robin pageant or play was
known in England earlier than we ordinarily think. The ballad plays,
at any rate, had attained popularity long before an artistic level
was reached by the allegorical drama, and while yet the craft cycles
were in their prime. Stow, in respect of Mayings, which he leads us to
believe were common in the reign of Henry VI., says that the citizens
of London "did fetch in May-poles with divers warlike shows, with good
archers, morris-dancers, and other devices for pastime all the day
long; and towards the evening they had stage-plays and bonfires in the
streets." Robin Hood and his archers are the heart of a Maying devised
under Henry VII. in 1505 and for Henry VIII. in 1516; and the archers
of the Maying in the time of Henry VI. are suggestive of the Robin Hood
as an accepted figure for some kind of pageant in the middle of the
fifteenth century, when Bower was writing of "comedies and tragedies,"
mentioned above. The pageants and probably the plays of Robin Hood
are still alive in the seventeenth century and later. Their dramatic
quality was of a very primitive sort, but the plot, wherever existent,
displayed sequence of motive and effect. The popular dramatist had, as
in the Sacrament play and saints' plays, learned how to magnify a hero
by making him the pivot of the action, how to interest the spectators
in the affairs and manners of their own class, how to produce a comic
effect by means of dialogue, as well as by the humour of the situation.
But he knew nothing of the development of character, and in that
respect, without doubt, was inferior to the contemporary author of the
moral play.
Passing the Hox Tuesday play, of which we cannot be sure that it was
anything more than a crude and entirely serious representation of the
historic massacre which it commemorated, and of which no adequate
account survives, we may turn with profit to the most popular and
long-lived of English festival dramas, the St. George play. Of this
Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that numerous versions are used in the
north of England, and that they are doubtless a degraded form of an old
"mystery."[35] Of course, he means legendary miracle or saint's play.
Ward more accurately describes this rural drama as a combination of
miracle and processional pageant. As the latter, it appears frequently
to have formed part of a mumming or disguising, and was early
associated with the morris-dance of May-day or Christmas. [Collier,
_Hist._, vol. I., p. 29.] The first indubitable mention of a St. George
pageant is in 1416, and would appear to refer to a "splendid dumb show"
rather than a play, which, as Caxton tells us, was presented for the
entertainment of Emperor Sigismund of Almayne when he "brought and
gave the heart of St. George for a great and precious relique to King
Harry the fifth." It is, however, more than probable that the soldier
saint had figured in saints' plays, and in popular play and pageant,
long before this time. He had been honoured in the eastern church
even in the fourth century, and in England there had been churches
and monasteries devoted to him before the Norman invasion. On account
of his fabled services in the crusade he was already the patron of
individual knights, and orders of chivalry and even of kingdoms, when
Edward III., in the years 1348-50, built the chapel in his honour
at Windsor, confirmed him as the saint and champion of England and
instituted the order that still bears his name. It is likely, indeed,
that the _ludi_ exhibited before the same monarch at Christmas, 1348,
were to some extent of St. George, for we read that the dragon figured
extensively in them.[36] And it would appear that when, in 1415, the
23d April, St. George's Day, was "made a major double feast and ordered
to be observed the same as Christmas day, all labour ceasing," his
play was no new thing. From that time on, at any rate, the procession
of St. George was one of the "pastimes yearly used," of which Stow
tells us that they were celebrated "with disguisings, masks, and
mummeries." Gilds were organized in his name, and the ceremony of
'Riding the George' spread over England. When Henry V. visited Paris,
in 1420, he was appropriately welcomed with a St. George show, and
the saint appears again in a pageant of 1474 performed at Coventry
in honour of young Prince Edward. We have already mentioned Sir John
Paston's reference to the play in 1473. A long-winded and serious
German dramatization of the legend exists in an Augsburg manuscript of
the end of the same century. In all probability the expensive miracle
play of the saint that was acted in the croft or field at Bassingbourne
in Cambridgeshire, in 1511, was of the same didactic kind, but
enlivened by _impromptus_ of the villagers who took part. St. George
and the dragon were features of the May-games at London, evidently in
procession, as late as 1559. There appears in Warburton's list a play
of _St. George for England_, by Wentworth Smith, of the first quarter
of the seventeenth century, and in the latter part of that century,
a droll called _St. George and the Dragon_ was by way of being acted
at Bartholomew Fair. The play seems from an early date to have been
performed on the occasion of other festivals besides that of the Saint
himself.
The versions of the play best known of recent years are the
Oxfordshire, acted during the eighteenth century and taken down from an
old performer in 1853, and the Lutterworth (Leicestershire) Christmas
play, acted as late as 1863.[37] Professor Child, in his _Ballads_,
mentions another, which was regularly acted on All Souls' Day at a
village a few miles from Chester. I would call attention, in addition,
to four others of interest; the Derbyshire Christmas play,[38] acted by
mummers as late as 1849, which is fuller than any other and appears to
me to retain traces of a fifteenth-century original; the two Bassingham
(Lincoln) Christmas plays,[39] 1823, and the Shetland play from a 1788
Ms., recounted in Scott's novel of _The Pirate_. The last three make
the connection between the St. George play proper and the sword play,
which was undoubtedly common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
and of which the Revesby version of 1779 is still extant.[40]
The following is the outline of the Derbyshire play: Enter Prologue,
who is apparently the same as "noble soldier," "Slasher," or "Jack,"
to clear a way for St. Gay.--Enter St. Gay, announcing himself with
proper bombast, pretending that "from England's ground he sprung and
came," and stating his purpose, which is to find King George.--Enter
King George, "in search of his enemy," St. Gay, who as "a stranger,
exposed and in danger," calls upon Slasher for help.--With loud words
Slasher threatens King George, who in his turn boasts of "close
escapes," giants and dragons subdued, and the King of Egypt's daughter
won.--They fight, and Slasher "tumbles down and dies."--Enter Doctor,
who has "travelled" imaginatively and can "fetch any dead man to
life again." He begins with Slasher, who signalizes his recovery by
summoning the "Black Prince of Paradise, black Morocco king," to renew
the fray.--"Here am I," cries that hero; it was I who "slew those seven
Turks," and it is I who now will "jam King George's giblets full of
holes, And in those holes put pebble stones!" George doubts the Black
Prince's ability, even though he be a "champion's squire,"--they are
about to fight, when Prologue intervenes with "Peace and Quietness is
the best," and "Enter in, owld Beelzebub!" That personage on entering
turns out to be, in dress, a kind of Devil and Vice combined, in
spirit a kind of Father Christmas summoning all to drink.--This queer
jumble is worth more space than I can afford it. Just a word or two in
passing. St. Gay is given up by Halliwell-Phillipps as an "addition to
the calendar not noticed elsewhere." But one observes that his squire
is a foreigner, as his name and garb both proclaim,[41] and that he is
the squire of a champion. This limits us to the three foreign champions
of Christendom, and from St. Gay's second speech we discover, not only
that he is San Diego of Spain, but (unless I am gravely mistaken) that
some author of the various generations of authors of this play had
acquaintance with Caxton's _Golden Legend_ of 1483, where, in the _Life
of St. James the More_, we find the original, in oddly similar terms,
of one altogether unintelligible phrase used by this English makeshift
for a Spanish champion.[42] Further not very definite but suggestive
similarities with the _Life of St. George_ add to the presumption that
the Caxton translation of the _Legenda Aurea_ underlies portions of
this folk play. Of course a play of the martyrdom of St. George may
have existed earlier still, but if, as would seem to be the case,
Voragine invented the dragon, that monster cannot have played a part
before 1270-90; it does not play a part even in the _South English
Legendary_ of 1285, but is prominent in Caxton's narrative.
With the play just described the Lutterworth is identical in some
seven or eight passages, and save that there is no Black Prince, and
that a Turkish Champion takes the place of St. Gay, the principal
characters are the same. The introduction of Beelzebub and a clown,
with remarks appropriate to each, would, however, indicate that this
part of the play is earlier than the amalgamated Beelzebub-clown of
the Derbyshire. Both plays preserve reminiscences of the crusades.
As to the Oxfordshire, I can say only that it is a rigmarole from
history, legend, and nursery tale, culminating in the destruction
of the dragon (or Old Nick) and the appearance of Father Christmas.
The Bassingham plays present the stock characters, but little of the
original story. They add elements of scandal and love, however,--the
former in connection with Dame Jane, who tries to fasten the paternity
of her child on a "Father's Eldest Son, And heir of all his land";
and the latter in connection with a Fair Lady, who is wooed by
Eldest Son, Farming Man, Lawyer, Old Man, and refuses them all, in
the end apparently to accept the Fool. This part of the story is a
link between the St. George plays and the sword-dance plays, as is
also the Shetland, where St. George himself sustains the part of
principal dancer. In the Revesby sword-dance play, acted in 1779 by
morris-dancers, the Fair Lady of the Bassingham reappears as Cicely to
refuse Pepper-breeches, "My father's eldest son, And heir of all his
land," Ginger-breeches, Blue-breeches, the Knight of Lee, and Pickle
Herring, the Lord of Pool, in favour of Rafe the Fool. Though the
phraseology of the Bassingham and Revesby is occasionally the same,
the latter is utterly removed from the St. George original save in the
mention of dragon and worm which accompany the morris-dancers. How far
back the Revesby sword-dance play may date I do not know. The dance was
common on the continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and
a similar performance with a fool in the middle is recorded as taking
place in Ulm in 1551. The name of the merry-andrew, Pickle Herring, may
possibly take us back to the first quarter of the sixteenth century.
For, as is well known, it is the usual designation for the clown in
the 1620 collection of plays acted by the so-called English comedians
in Germany. According to Creizenach,[43] the character was introduced
by Robert Reynolds, who was perhaps himself the Robert Pickelhäring
mentioned in connection with an entertainment given at Torgau in
1627. Floegel and Ebeling speak of "der alte Pickelhering aus der
Moralititäten des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts," as if he were the "old
Vice"; but surely without justification. I know of no mention of Pickle
Herring before 1620, and since he still held the stage in Löwen's
_Prinz Pickelhering_, about the middle of the eighteenth century, it
is not impossible that the character was borrowed by the English sword
play at a comparatively recent date. The continuance of the Devil and
his relation to the clown in these plays are a subject of historical
interest, but it would be a mistake to say, as Halliwell-Phillipps has
said of the Beelzebub, that either of them is "a genuine descendant of
the Vice."
Perhaps I should not have stayed to make these remarks, but they will,
I hope, direct attention to a phenomenon unique in the history of
English drama. The St. George play is an example of how a legendary
miracle, sacred in its origin, may pass into a folk drama of a national
hero, and that again degenerate into a mumming or dance; and how this,
oblivious of the original plot and finally of all fable, may first
transform the saintly hero into a performer in a sword dance, as in
the Shetland play, and then, as in the Revesby, eliminate even him and
substitute a fool. Both literary career and literary indignity of this
kind have been escaped by the other national saint of England, Edward
the Confessor. In earlier days he figured in frequent pageants, records
of which are preserved, for instance, in the Old Leet Book of Coventry,
of the years 1456 and 1471, but he readily gave way to St. George and
disappeared from the dramatic horizon.
=5. The Devil and the Vice=
The nexus between the comic qualities of the miracle plays and those
of the morals cannot well be made without some discussion of the rôles
of the Devil and the Vice. The treatise which I have before cited,[44]
and which appears to me fairly conclusive, shows that the Devil of the
English stage is originally a creation, not of folk mythology, but of
theology. He is concrete, to be sure, in accordance with scriptural
and legendary tradition, but in the 'mysteries' his character is
almost entirely serious, not ludicrous, as appears to be vulgarly
reported. The association of the genuinely comic or satirical with the
conception of the Devil is first evident in later representations of
that character, and then only in the case of lesser denizens of the
lower world. The humorous scene in the Chester _Harrowing_ between
the demons and the alewife abandoned in hell is, for instance, as Dr.
Deimling has said, a late interpolation. The Wakefield dramatist's
contribution to the _Judicium_, of _Tutivillus_ and his ilk, is about
the only diabolic humour in the miracles; and that the satirical speech
of the Coventry demon in the _Conspiracy_ was a still later borrowing
from _Tutivillus_, I have but little doubt. To credit the Devils of
the earliest miracles with a tendency and an ability to criticise
manners and morals would be just as wrong as to attribute to them a
buffoonery which accrues only at a later date. Of the Mephistophelian
style, more serious than Chaucer's and more satirical than Langland's,
we have no historical trace before the witty Devil of Wakefield--or
his maker. The humour of the miracle Devils shows itself in bombastic,
grotesque, or abusive language, rather than in anything of comic
utterance or incident. The uproarious laughter caused, according to
tradition, by this character cannot, therefore, have depended upon
the lines of the dramatist, except in so far as those consist of
threats, objurgation, profanity, and the like. There is little in the
asides of the printed page, or in the rare addresses of the Devil to
his audience, or the deportation of souls to hell[45] to account for
amusement. Rewfyn,[46] Rybald, and Tutivillus are the only humorous
devil-names in the five cycles of which we have been speaking; and of
the shouting and fireworks in which we are told the infernal spirits
were wont to indulge, we find scarcely any mention except in the plays
concerning the fall of the angels and the harrowing of hell. That the
merriment of the crowd was provoked by the appearance and antics of
the Devil--that is to say, by the improvisation of the actor--and
his raids upon the spectators is natural to infer. The dramatists
themselves did not provide for close association between the spirits
of hell and living men. The Devil addresses the audience but seldom,
and then, perhaps, to threaten with his club. In fact, the Devil of the
old miracles, as we usually conceive him, is an anachronism created
by certain historians of the drama; the buffoon roaring, pyrotechnic,
and familiar, springs into prominence only with the Digby plays, and
is but slowly developed in the moral plays and interludes. Though the
aspiring angels of the York and Chester plays "go down" in actual fact,
and the Lucifer of the former cycle complains of heat and smoke, there
is no mention of hell-mouth in the account-books before 1557, nor in
the stage directions of the Digby[47] before we reach the Digby _Paul_
and _Magdalene_ Mss. of about 1480-90; and even then the entries appear
to be the insertions of some later hand. In these plays the flames of
hell-mouth, the fireworks, and thunder are distinctive accessories of
the Devil's presence. Still, it is not in a miracle play after all,
but in a moral--the _Castell of Perseverance_ (about 1400)--that the
first stage direction of this nature is found. In the transitional
miracle morals, _Paul_, _Wisdom_, _Magdalene_, the Devil by his own
account as well as by stage direction "rores and cries." He was abusive
in the _Castell of Perseverance_; but in the later morals or moral
interludes he "rores and cries" for mere fun--in the _Lusty Juventus_,
for instance, the _Disobedient Child_, and _All for Money_.
Concerning the Devil even of this later birth, many false conceptions,
due to insufficient research, have obtained currency. It is commonly
imagined that he was the mainspring of the play, that he came into
close contact with human beings, that he represented phases of human
character, that he was a comical figure,--jester, or "roister," or
butt,--and that he held some fixed relation to the Vice, who was "his
constant attendant," says Malone. But the Devil was the principal
personage only in the earliest of the morals that survive, he rarely
associated with mankind, and he assumed the human rôle, such as that of
judge or sailor, only once or twice.[48] In the moral plays not more
than four or five comic Devils are extant--the Titivillus of _Mankynd_,
the Beelzebub of the _Nigromansir_, the Lucifer of _Like wil to Like_,
and the Devil of _All for Money_; and the last of these is the only
roysterer of the lot, one of the very few to serve as butt for the
Vice. Such jokes as that of the Devil taking "a shrewd boy with him"
from the audience in _Wisdom_ are interpolations, and it is only after
the moral has passed its zenith that, as in _Like wil to Like_ and the
early comedy _Friar Bacon_, the Devil carries off the Vice-clown. As
early as 1486-1500 the moral play, _Nature_,--called, when printed in
1538, a goodly interlude,--dispenses with the Devil altogether, and
from that time on the character appears only in some half-dozen extant
plays of the kind and its derivatives, and is subordinate. Towards
the end of the sixteenth century, however, the Devil is revived, and
in comedies of concrete life and character he frequently swaggers as
a blusterer or comic personage: in _Grim the Collier_, for instance,
in the _Knack to know a Knave_, and _Histrio-Mastix_, as well as
seventeenth-century plays like _The Devil is in It_ and _The Devil
is an Ass_. I have said that his office in the genuine moral was not
comic, neither was it satirical. It consisted largely in directing or
commissioning his agents, the Vices. Professor Cushman, who makes this
statement, further points out that this conception of the Devil did
not develop in any popular sense, nor gain in variety in the English
moral plays; but that the case is altogether dissimilar in the German
and French drama of the same period, where the devils are not only
numerous, but carefully differenced as representatives of the various
foibles of mankind,--a rôle which was assumed in England, as we shall
presently see, by the Vice.
Between the detached, and sometimes serious, Devil of the cycles and
the Vice of the moral plays, ever present, dominant and comical,
concrete in manifold person and guise, a middle or transitional
position is occupied by the fiend of the later miracle and the demon
of the earlier moral. Examples of the former are Tutivillus and his
humorous associates in the Wakefield _Judicium_, Lord Lucifer of the
Coventry _Council_ (who, like the Vice, euphemizes his attendant
Deadly Sins), the Prynse of Dylles of the _Magdalene_, and the sailor
devil of the Newcastle play; examples of the latter are the gunpowder
Belial of _Perseverance_, the intriguing Lucifer of _Wisdom_, now in
"devely aray," anon as a "prowde galaunt," the farcical and efficient
Titivillus of _Mankynd_, and Beelzebub, the judge and buffoon of the
_Nigromansir_. But though the demon of the morals bears some relation
to his predecessor of the miracles, he is not borrowed from the
miracles. He grows out of a common tradition.
Just as the Devil persists in spite of lapse and change through miracle
play, moral, and interlude into Elizabethan comedy, so the Vice,
though he did not obtain so early a footing upon the stage. There
are previsions of him in the later miracles and earlier morals; he
flourished in the morals of the middle period and the moral interludes,
and there are traces of him in the regular comedy. He disappeared only
in deference to the differentiated humours, follies, or vices of social
life, of which no controlling Folly or Vice may be regarded as the
sole incarnation,--for in the culture of them each of us indulges a
genius of his own.
The term Vice is not used as the designation of a stock dramatic
character till the appearance of Heywood's _Play of the Wether_
and _Play of Love_, before or about 1532. It is next employed in
_Respublica_, 1553, and _Jacke Jugeler_, 1553-61. These and similar
notices of that period, however, occur only on title-pages of plays or
in lists or stage directions. The earliest mention of the Vice in the
text of a play is found in _King Darius_, 1565. It is not until 1567,
with the _Horestes_, that we find the designation "used consistently
throughout, in the title, the list of players and the rubric."[49]
But whether the generic name of Vice was introduced by the authors of
these plays, or, as is more likely, by the actors, it was a well-known
designation of a stock figure, especially in the moral drama from
1530 onward; and from that time was used by publishers to advance
the interest of certain plays. Since, however, the idea of the Vice
seems to be inseparable from that of the moral play, the character
had achieved a prominence long before it was listed as a generic
designation. Collier defines the moral, or moral interlude, as "A drama
the characters of which are allegorical, abstract, or symbolical,
and the style of which is intended to convey a lesson for the better
conduct of human life." And the differencing quality of the moral is,
as Mr. Pollard has said, "the contest between the personified powers of
good and evil for the possession of a human soul. As the allegorical
representatives of the good were the Seven Cardinal Virtues, so the
representatives of the evil were the Seven Deadly Sins and their master
the Devil." From these Seven Deadly Sins or Vices, the Vice _par
excellence_ of the morals and interludes is without doubt descended.
With the opinion of Ward and Douce, however, that he is proved to be
of native English origin, I cannot unreservedly concur; nor with a
statement in the thesis to which I have already referred, that the
Germans and French had no Vice, but used instead the "differentiated"
devil. Idleness, a Vice, though not so called, appears in the French
_Bien-Avisé et Mal-Avisé_ (_c._ 1439), about as early as any Vice
appears in English drama; and the four confederates of the Devil in
_L'Homme Pêcheur_, Desperation, etc., perform the office, though they
have not the designation, of Vice. The Hypocrisie and Simonie of
Gringoire's attack upon _L'Homme Obstiné_ (Julius II.), about 1512, are
as true representatives of the Vice as are the corresponding figures
in _The Nigromansir_, _Thrie Estatis_, _Kyng Johan_, _Respublica_ and
_Conflict of Conscience_.
To understand the relations between the Vice and the moral play one
should turn, if there were opportunity, to the manifold representations
of the World, the Flesh, the Devil, the Seven Deadly Sins and similar
allegorical figures in mediæval literature of other kinds than the
dramatic. It must suffice here, however, to consider the relation of
these characters to each other in the later miracles and the earlier
moral plays. In the pageants of the _Play of Paternoster_ the Seven
Deadly Sins are represented. About the same time, in the Wakefield
cycle, they are already written on the rolls of the Doomsday Demon, and
discussed "in especiall" by Tutivillus. In the Coventry _Council of
the Jews_ they are new-named by their Lord Lucifer (after the manner
of the later Vice), Pride as Honesty, Wrath as Manhood, Covetousness
as Wisdom, and so on. It is through the Seven Deadly Sins that the
Belial of St. Paul (Digby) "raynes"; and the Saint himself[50]
preaches against them in general and in several, calling them not only
mortal sins, but, as if the terms were synonymous, Vices and Folly.
In the _Mary Magdalene_ they are not only personified, but, further,
classified as attendants upon their respective kings--Pride and
Covetyse, ministers of the World; Lechery, Gluttony, and Sloth, of the
Flesh; Wrath and Envy, of the Devil,--and as such they are sent into
action. This distinction by classes is interesting because it shows
that from a very early date the Vice was regarded as the servant, not
of the Devil alone, but of the World and the Flesh as well. And it will
be noticed later that, while the minor Vices of the moral interludes
frequently bear the names of specific sins, the leading Vice is still
likely to be called by a name which sums up all the specific sins
of just one of these three satrapies of the Flesh, the World, the
Devil,--Sensuality for the first, Hypocrisy or Avarice for the second,
and Sedition or Riot for the third,--when he is not indicated by some
synonym of Evil in general, such as Folly, Sin, Iniquity, Inclination,
or Infidelity. Gradually the minor Vices pass into dramatic
insignificance as compared with their principal representative, who
becomes the Vice in chief. The morals before 1500 or thereabouts had
one or more of the following figures: Devil, the World, the Flesh; and
their representatives, the Vice and minor Vices or Deadly Sins. Of
these plays--_Perseverance_, _Mankynd_, _Mary Magdalene_, _Wisdom_,
_Nature_, and _Everyman_,--all but the last three display the complete
aggregation: _Wisdom_ stars with only a Devil, _Nature_ lacks a Devil,
and _Everyman_ lacks both Devil and principal Vice. The morals of
the middle period, 1500 to 1560, generally eliminate the Devil and
concentrate the sins, temptations, and mischiefs in the Vice, sometimes
with, sometimes without, his foils, the minor Vices. In the _Castell of
Perseverance_, about 1400, the Deadly Sins are "children of the Devil";
in _The World and Child_, about 1506, they are expressly summed up in
one Vice,--Folly; in _Lusty Juventus_, _Like wil to Like_, and several
other moral interludes after 1550, the Vice parades as son or grandson
to the Devil; and finally, about 1578, while each of the minor Vices
represents "one sin particularly," the Vice himself embodies "all sins
generally."
It must be sufficiently evident by this time that the derivation of
this name, in spite of a half-dozen misleading conjectures, is no
other than that which is obvious. I notice, however, that Mr. Pollard
regards the etymology from _vitium_ as still doubtful, "because in one
of the earliest instances in which the Vice is specifically mentioned
by name, he plays the part of Mery Report, who is a jester pure and
simple, without any connection with any of the Deadly Sins." But the
Vice or Folly had been known for two or three centuries in allegorical
and satirical literature, and for a century and a half in the religious
drama before 1530, and the designation had acquired a supplementary
and degraded connotation when used in the _Wether_, _Jacke Jugeler_,
etc., as a player's term or means of advertisement. About his function
and habits, also, various misconceptions have gathered. I have, for
instance, referred to Malone's statement that he was a constant
attendant upon the Devil. Nothing could be more misleading. The Devil
appears in at least two morals unattended by a Vice of any kind,[51]
and the Vice appears in twenty-five or thirty without a Devil. They
appear together in but eight[52] that I know of; and in only four[53]
can the Vice be said to "attend." That he eggs the demons on to twit
or torment the Devil, I cannot discover in more than two plays,--_Like
wil to Like_, and _All for Money_. Since the days of Harsnet and
Ben Jonson it has been reported that the Vice of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries made a practice of riding to hell on the Devil's
back. But I have already pointed out that he does this in only one play
before 1580. The same _Like wil to Like_ is the only play in which he
specifically "belabours the fiend." I know of no other in which that
merriment was even likely to occur. In fact most of these attributions
belong, not to the Vice of the morals and interludes, but to one of
the later substitutes for him, the Vice-clown, such as Miles in _Friar
Bacon_, or Iniquity in _The Devil is an Ass_.
A general view of his history shows, then, that the Vice is neither
an ethical nor dramatic derivative of the Devil; nor is he a pendant
to that personage, as foil or ironical decoy, or even antagonist. The
Devil of the early drama is a mythical character, a fallen archangel,
the anthropomorphic Adversary. The Vice, on the other hand, is
allegorical,--typical of the moral frailty of mankind. Proceeding
from the concept of the Deadly Sins, ultimately focussing them, he
dramatizes the evil that springs from within. Though at first directed
by God's Adversary, who assails man with temptations from without, the
Vice is the younger contemporary of the Devil rather than his agent.
As he acquires personality, he assumes characteristics and functions
unknown to the Adversary, scriptural or dramatic. The functions were
gradually assimilated with those of mischief-maker, jester, and
counterfeit-crank; the characteristics, more and more affected by the
Fool-literature of Wireker, Lydgate, Brandt and Barclay, Skelton,
and the rest (which included vice in Folly, and by the Fool connoted
vicious characters in all variety), were insensibly identified with
social rather than abstract ethical qualities, and so came to be
distributed as tendencies or "humours" among the persons of the
drama,--who themselves are no longer allegorical, but representative
of the concrete individuals of everyday life. Though the conduct
of the interlude Vice may be anything but dignified, his function
was, accordingly, at first serious. It was only gradually, and as
the conflict between good and evil was supplanted by less didactic
materials,--in other words, as the moral became more of a play,--that
the Vice grew to be farcical, a mischief-maker, and ultimately
jester. So long as he acts the seducer in disguise, and the marplot,
he remains dramatically supreme. When he, however, assumes the rôle
of parasite, counterfeit-crank, or simple, he enhances the variety
of his fascination at the expense of his distinctive quality; and
when he once has identified himself with the Will Summer, the actor,
wag, or buffoon by profession, he plays below the function and level
of his pristine quality. The Vice proper should, therefore, not be
confounded with the Shakespearean fool, nor with the country clown.
The country clown or booby he in reality never is; indeed, in some
earlier manifestations[54] the clown exists contemporaneously with the
Vice, and is his natural though not always complaisant quarry. Though
the Vice, however, did not turn clown, the clown imperceptibly usurped
qualities of the vanishing Vice.