In outlining the main movements of the century, I have mentioned
incidentally the fortunes of certain kinds of composition,—the
restriction of the lyrical form to devotional uses; the long dearth in
the records of humorous tales; the decadence of romances in rime, and
the flourishing of alliterative romances. The popular taste for stories
was still unsatisfied, and guided authors, from Robert Mannyng to
Chaucer, in their choice of subjects or method of treatment.
Translators were busier than ever in making Latin and French works
available to a growing public who understood no language but English;
and of necessity the greater number of our specimens are translations,
ranging from the crude literalness of Michael of Northgate to the
artistic adaptation seen in Gower's tales. But the chief new
contribution of the century is the vernacular Miracle Play, with which
the history of the English drama begins.
Miracle plays grew out of the services for the church festivals of
Easter and Christmas. Towards the end of the tenth century a
representation of the Three Maries at the Sepulchre is provided for in
the English Easter service. Later, the Shepherds seeking the Manger and
the Adoration of the Magi are represented in the services for the
Christmas season. In their early form these dramatic ceremonies consist
of a few sentences of Latin which were sung by the clergy with a minimum
of dignified action.
From the eleventh to the thirteenth century the primitive form underwent
a parallel development in all parts of Europe. Records of Miracles in
England are at this time scanty and casual:—Matthew Paris notes one at
Dunstable because precious copes were borrowed for it from St. Albans,
and were accidentally burnt; another, given in the churchyard at
Beverley, is mentioned because a boy who had climbed to a post of
vantage in the church, and thence higher to escape the sextons, fell and
yet took no harm. But the scantiness of references before 1200 is in
itself evidence of growth without active enemies, and the few
indications agree with the general trend observable on the Continent.
The range of subjects was extended to include the acts of saints, and
the principal scenes of sacred history from the Fall of Lucifer to the
Last Judgement. Single scenes were elaborated to something like the
scale familiar in Middle English. By the end of the twelfth century
French begins to appear beside or in place of Latin; the French verses
were spoken, not sung; the plays were often acted outside the church;
and it may be assumed that laymen were admitted as performers alongside
the minor clergy, who seem to have been the staunchest supporters of the
plays.
The Miracle had become popular, and there is soon evidence of its
perversion by the grotesque imaginings of the people. In 1207 masking
and buffoonery in the churches at Christmas came under the ban of Pope
Innocent III, and his prohibition was made permanent in the Decretals.
Henceforth we must look for new developments to the Miracles played
outside the church. To these freedom from the restraints of the sacred
building did not bring a better reputation. Before 1250 the most
influential churchman of the time, Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln, who
was far from being a kill-joy, urged his clergy to stamp out Miracles;
and later William of Wadington, and Robert Mannyng his translator, while
allowing plays on the Resurrection and the Nativity if decently
presented in the church, condemn the Miracles played in open places, and
blame those of the clergy who encouraged them by lending vestments to
the performers.[14]
[Foot-note 14: _Handlyng Synne_, ll. 4640 ff.]
From the first three-quarters of the fourteenth century, which
include the critical period for the English Miracles, hardly a
record survives. The memoranda on which the history of the English
plays is based begin toward the end of the century, and the texts
are drawn from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts. Hence
it will be simplest to set out the changes that were complete by
1400 without attempting to establish their true sequence; and to
disregard the existence, side by side with the fully developed
types, of all the gradations between them and the primitive form
that might result from stunted growth or degeneration.
The early references point to the representation of single plays or
small groups of connected scenes; and such isolated pieces survive as
long as there are Miracles: Hull, for instance, specialized on a play of
Noah's Ship. But now we have to record the appearance of series or
cycles of plays, covering in chronological order the whole span of
sacred history. Complete cycles were framed on the Continent as early as
the end of the thirteenth century. In England they are represented by
the York, Towneley (Wakefield), and Chester plays, and the so-called
_Ludus Coventriae_.[15] There are also records or fragments of cycles
from Beverley, Coventry, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Norwich. The
presentation of the cycle sometimes occupied a day (York), sometimes two
or three successive days (Chester), and sometimes a part was carried
over to the next year's festival (_Ludus Coventriae_).
[Foot-note 15: These are not the Coventry plays, of which only two
survive, but a cycle of plays torn from their local connexions (ed. J.
O. Halliwell, Shakespeare Society, 1841). The title is due to a
seventeenth-century librarian, who possibly had heard of no Miracle
cycle but the famous one at Coventry.]
The production of a long series of scenes in the open requires fine
weather, and once the close connexion with the church services had been
broken, there was a tendency to throw forward the presentation into May
or June. The Chester plays were given in Whitsun-week—at least in later
times. But normally the day chosen in fourteenth-century England was the
Feast of Corpus Christi (the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday), which
was made universal throughout the Church in 1311. So the Miracles get
the generic name of 'Corpus Christi Plays'.
The feature of the Corpus Christi festival was its procession. As a
result either of inclusion in this procession or of imitation, the
cycles came to be played processionally: each play had its stage on
wheels which halted at fixed stations in the streets, and at each
station the play was reenacted. This was the usage at York, Wakefield,
Chester, Coventry, and Beverley. The older practice of presentation on
fixed stages was followed in the _Ludus Coventriae_.
Our last records from the end of the thirteenth century indicated that
the open-air Miracle had been disowned by the Church from which it
sprang. Yet a century later processional performances appear on a scale
that postulates strong and competent management. In the interim the
control of the great cycles had passed from the clergy to the
municipalities, who laid upon each guild of craftsmen within their
jurisdiction the duty of presenting a play. Ecclesiastics still wrote
Miracles, and occasionally performed them; but when Canterbury, London,
Salisbury, Winchester, Oxford, which have no extant texts and few
records of popular performances, are named against York, Wakefield,
Chester, Coventry, Beverley, it is obvious that official Church
influences were no longer the chief factor in the development of
Miracles. For their growth and survival in England the cycles depended
on the interest of powerful corporations, willing to undertake the
financial responsibility of their production, and able to maintain them
against the attacks of the Lollards, or change of policy in the orthodox
Church, or the fickleness of fashion in entertainment.
The steps by which the English guilds assumed the guardianship of the
plays cannot now be retraced. We must be content to note that the
undertaking called for just that combination of religious duty, civic
patriotism, and pride of craft that inspired the work of the guilds in
their best days. And the clergy had every reason to welcome the
disciplining by secular authority of a wayward offspring that had grown
beyond their own control. The York texts, which bring us nearest to the
time when the corporations and guilds first took charge of the Miracles,
are very creditable to the taste of the city, and must represent a
reform on the irresponsible productions that scandalized the thirteenth
century. The vein of coarseness in some of the comic scenes of the
Towneley group seems to be due to a later recrudescence of incongruous
elements.
The last great change to be noted was inevitable when the plays became
popular: they were spoken in English and in rimed verse, with only an
occasional tag or stage direction or hymn in Latin to show their origin.
The variety of the texts, and of the modes and purposes of their
representation, make it impossible to assign a date to the transition
that would be generally applicable; and its course was not always the
same. There is an example of direct translation from Latin in the
Shrewsbury fragments,[16] which contain one actor's cues and parts in
three plays: first the Latin foundation is given in verse or prose, and
then its expansion in English alternate rime. That translations were
sometimes made from the French is proved by the oldest known manuscript
of a Miracle in English—an early fourteenth-century fragment of a
Nativity play, consisting of a speech in French followed by its
rendering in the same stanza form.[17] But there is no reason to doubt
that as English gained ground and secularization became more complete,
original composition appeared side by side with translation.[18]
[Foot-note 16: Shrewsbury School MS. Mus. iii. 42 (early fifteenth
century), ed. Skeat, _Academy_, January 4 and January 11, 1890. The
fragments are (i) the part of the Third Shepherd in a Nativity play;
(ii) the part of the third Mary in a Resurrection play; (iii) the part
of Cleophas in _Pilgrims to Emmaus_. Manly, who reprints the fragments
in _Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama_, vol. i (1900), pp. xxvi
ff., notes that these plays seem to have been church productions rather
than secular.]
[Foot-note 17: See _The Times Literary Supplement_ of May 26 and June 2,
1921. The fragment comes from Bury St. Edmunds. The dialect is E.
Midland.]
[Foot-note 18: On the production of Miracle plays see L. Toulmin Smith,
Introduction to _York Plays_, Oxford 1885; and A. F. Leach in _An
English Miscellany presented to Dr. Furnivall_, pp. 205 ff.]
For one other kind of writing the fourteenth century is notable—its
longer commentaries on contemporary life and the art of living. In the
twelfth century England had an important group of satirical poets who
wrote in Latin; and in the thirteenth there are many French and a few
English satires. Their usual topic was the corruption of the religious
orders, varied by an occasional attack on some detail of private folly,
such as extravagance in dress or the pride of serving-men. These pieces
are mostly in the early French manner, where so much wit tempers the
indignation that one doubts whether the satirist would be really happy
if he succeeded in destroying the butts of his ridicule.
This is not the spirit of the fourteenth century, when a darker side of
life is turned up and reported by men whose eyes are not quick to catch
brightness. The number of short occasional satires in English increases,
but they are seldom gay. The greater writers—Rolle, Wiclif, Langland,
Gower—were obsessed by the troubles of their time, and are less
satirists than moralists. Certainly the events of the century gave
little cause for optimism. The wane of enthusiasm throughout Europe and
the revival of national jealousies are evident very early in the failure
of all attempts to organize an effective Crusade after 1291, when the
Turks conquered the last Christian outposts in Palestine. There was no
peace, for the harassing wars with Scotland were followed by the long
series of campaigns against France that sapped the strength of both
countries for generations. The social and economic organization was
shaken by the severest famines (1315-21) and the greatest pestilence
(1349) in English history, and both famine and plague came back more
than once before the century was done. The conflict of popes and
anti-popes divided the Western Church, while England faced the domestic
problem of Lollardry. There was civil revolt in 1381; and the century
closed with the deposition of Richard II. A modern historian balances
the account with the growth of parliamentary institutions, the improving
status of the labouring classes, and the progress of trade: but in so
far as these developments were observable at all by contemporary
writers, they were probably interpreted as signs of general decay.
In such an atmosphere the serene temper with which Robert Mannyng
handles the sins and follies of his generation did not last long. Rolle
tried to associate with men in order to improve their way of life: but
his intensely personal attitude towards every problem, and the low value
he set on the quality of reasonableness, made success impossible; and
after a few querulous outbursts against his surroundings, he found his
genius by withdrawing into pure idealism.
Wiclif was the one writer who was also a practical reformer. Having made
up his mind that social evils could be remedied only through the Church,
and that the first step was a thorough reform of the government,
doctrine, and ministers of the Church, he acted with characteristic
logic. The vices and follies of the people he regarded as secondary, and
refused to dissipate his controversial energies upon them. His strength
was reserved for a grim, ordered battle against ecclesiastical abuses;
and while he pulled down, he did not neglect to lay foundations that
outlasted his own defeat.
_Piers Plowman_ gives a full picture of the times and their bewildering
effect on the mind of a sincere and moderate man. Its author belonged to
the loosely organized secular clergy who, by reason of their middle
position, served as a kind of cement in a ramshackle society. He has no
new system and no practical schemes of reform to expound—only
perplexing dreams of a simple Christian who, with Conscience and Reason
as his guides, faces in turn the changing shapes of evil. He attacks
them bravely enough, and still they seem to evade him; because he
shrinks from destroying their roots when he finds them too closely
entwined with things to which his habits or affections cling. In the end
he cannot find a sure temporal foothold: yet he has no vision of a
Utopia to come in which society will be reorganized by men's efforts.
That idea brought no comfort to his generation who, standing on the
threshold of a new order, looked longingly backward.
Passing over Gower, whose direct studies of contemporary conditions were
written in Latin and French, we come round again to Chaucer. He has not
Rolle's idealism, or Wiclif's fighting spirit, or Langland's
earnestness—in fact, he has no great share of moral enthusiasm. A man
of the world with keen eyes and the breadth of outlook and sympathy that
Gower lacked, he is at home in a topsy-turvy medley of things half-dead
with things half-grown, and the thousand disguises of convention and
propriety through which the new life peeped to mock at its puzzled and
despairing repressors were to him a never-ending entertainment. _Ubique
iam abundat turpitudo terrena_, says Rolle in an alliterative flight,
_vilissima voluptas in viris vacillat;... bellant ut bestiae; breviantur
beati; nullus est nimirum qui nemini non nocet_. That was one side, but
it was not the side that interested Chaucer. He had the spirit of the
thirteenth-century poets grown up, with more experience, more
reflection, and a mellower humour, but not less good temper and capacity
for enjoyment. He no longer laughs on the slightest occasion for sheer
joy of living: but he would look elvishly at Richard Rolle—a hermit who
made it a personal grievance that people left him solitary, a fugitive
from his fellows who unconsciously satisfied a very human and pleasing
love for companionship and admiration by becoming the centre of a
coterie of women recluses. A world that afforded such infinite amusement
to a quiet observer was after all not a bad place to live in.