No More Learning

But, as is shown in a sub-
sequent chapter, it was not long before the strongest impulse ever
given in a contrary direction by the church was imparted by pope
Urban IV's institution of the great Roman Catholic festival of
Corpus Christi. It does not appear that this pope, who, at the
foundation of the feast, granted a 'pardon' for a certain number
of days to all who attended certain parts of the divine service
performed on it, took any note of the representation of religious
1 Cf. Hohlfeld, A. , 'Altenglische Kollektivmysterien,' etc. , in Anglia, vol. XI.
2 Schelling, F. E. , Elizabethan Drama, vol. 1, p. 74, and note.
1
3
g


## p. 13 (#37) ##############################################

I
The Church and the Religious Drama
13
plays; the 'pardon' mentioned in the proclamation for Whitsun
plays at Chester, and attributed to 'Clement then bishop of
Rome,' together with the concomitant excommunication of who-
soever should interfere with the performance of the said plays,
is supposed to have been issued by Clement VI, i. e. about a
generation later than the confirmation of the institution of Corpus
Christi. As is shown below, the Corpus Christi processions of
trading-companies in England very soon developed into the
performance by them of religious plays; but what in the present
connection it is desired to establish is the fact that the redinte-
gratio amoris between church and stage due to the popularity
of Corpus Christi long endured, though exposed to many inter-
ruptions and rebuffs from high quarters. The friars, above all,
as it would seem, the Minorites, were active in fostering an agency
of religious excitement which the older and more aristocratic
orders were probably less disposed to look upon with favour? .
The further development of the relations between the church
and the drama is examined at length elsewhere. No religious
plays preserved to us from this early period are known with
certainty to have been written by secular priests or monks for
performance by themselves or their pupils. Possibly some of the
extant isolated mysteries may have had clerical authors, but we
lack any knowledge on the subject. There is, however, no reason
for supposing that these clerical or monastic plays for popular
audiences differed very largely from the plays written for lay
performers by which, to all intents and purposes, they were super-
seded, or into which they were absorbed—more especially as there
seems every reason to believe that of these latter a large proportion
were, at least in the earlier part of the period, written by monks.
Nor can it be at all confidently asserted that the comic element
was less freely cultivated in clerical than in lay plays, and that
the friars were likely to exercise much self-restraint when desirous
of tickling the palates of their audiences. In general, though an
attentive study will prove capable of marking not a few distinctive
characteristics in particular religious plays or in groups of
i The disclaimer of the friar minor in Piers Plowman is too well known to need
quotation; but, as Collier, citing Drake's History of York, points out, another friar
minor, in 1420, not long after the composition of that poem, is found rting himself
at York to procure the annual representation of holy Corpus Christi plays; and he
was described as a 'professor of pageantry' (History of Dramatic Poetry, new ed. ,
vol. I, p. 20).
· The late miracle-play of Kynge Robert of Cicylye was stated to be written by &
priest (see chap. in below). Of the collective mysteries, the Towneley and the
Coventry Plays at all events must be ascribed to monkish bands.


## p. 14 (#38) ##############################################

14
The Origins of English Drama
1
1
1
them, of which the variance is due to difference of time or place,
it is by no means surprising that an essentially popular growth,
not at all intended to satisfy more elevated or refined tastes, still
less to secure to its products a place in literature, should have
altered but little in the course of several centuries. In nothing
are the illiterate more conservative than in their amusements;
and in this instance it could not be in the interests of the pur-
veyors, whether clerical or lay, to move far out of the beaten
track.
It will be shown in our next chapter by what steps the religious
drama in England had passed out of the hands of the church into
those of lay performers in town or gild, who, in ever increasing
numbers, were found desirous of gratifying their aspirations by
the practice of an art in which few think themselves incapable of
excelling. By the fifteenth century the process was complete, and
a considerable literature of religious drama was in existence,
although, from the nature of the case, every part of it was to be
subjected to more or less continuous revision and extension.
Of English religious plays, under their threefold designation
of mysteries—a name not in use in England, but convenient
as designating plays mainly founded upon the biblical narrative
-miracles or saints' plays, and moralities, a full account will be
found in the third chapter of the present volume; the question
of the relative antiquity of particular extant English plays (The
Harrowing of Hell, dating from the middle of the thirteenth
century, not being yet to be accounted a play proper) will be there
discussed, and special attention will, of course, be given to those
cycles of plays, following the chronological order of biblical
events, which, though not absolutely peculiar to our literature,
are by no other possessed in several complete examples. It will
be shown what was the relation of these plays to others of
the same species in foreign literatures, and in French more
especially', and from what sources besides Holy Writ, apocryphal,
apocalyptic, or legendary, they at times derive the incidents or
the colouring of their action. Thus, the basis of most of the
i
5
t
1 The paradox-for, considering that the Chester Plays are the youngest series of
the four, it may almost be so described according to which these plays were based
on a French original, is discussed by Hohlfeld, A. , in the notable essay on the
collective mysteries already cited, and by Hemingway, S. B. , English Nativity Plays
(Yale Studies in English), New York, 1909. The conclusion seems to be that there is
certainly evidence of the traces of a French original, but that this was not a collective
series, and that it was not copied by the writer who elaborated the Chester Plays in
their present form.


## p. 15 (#39) ##############################################

Cornish Miracle-plays
15
Christmas plays is not the Scriptural, but the apocryphal, narra-
tive! The most evident source of the episodes of Joseph of
Arimathea, The Harrowing of Hell, and The Coming of Anti-
christ, is the Latin Gospel of Nicodemus. The influence of
Cursor Mundi, extant in a large number of MSS, is particularly
strong in the York Plays, and to this source, and to the Legenda
Aurea of Voragine and similar sources, are largely due the tra-
ditions which are reproduced in the English religious plays, and
which have little or no basis in the Scriptural narrative. Such
are the conception of the hierarchy of the angelic orders, the
developed story of the fall of Lucifer, and the legends of the Oil
of Mercy and the Holy Rood-Trees.
The Cornish miracle-plays, their language being the native
Cymric dialect, stand apart from the English ; but though the
illusion of the still existing amphitheatres or 'rounds' may carry
the imagination of the modern visitor back into the past to a
time when York, the home of the earliest English cycle, was young;
and, though it is not impossible that the Cornish cycle, in its
original form, was earlier than any of the rest, there is not much
in these plays to distinguish them from French and English
dramatic mysteries, and, indeed, French words occasionally make
their appearance in them. Their language is stated to carry
back the date of their composition to a period earlier than
the fourteenth century, though the earliest MS, apparently, dates
from the fifteenth“, and though we possess no notice of the actual
performance of plays in Cornwall earlier than that in Richard
Carew's Survey, first printed in 1602, where mention is made of
the representation of the Guary miracles in amphitheatres con-
structed in open fields. The extant Cornish plays consist of a
connected series of three sub-cycles: Origo Mundi, a selection
of episodes from the creation to the building of the Temple;
Passio Domini, the life of Christ from the temptation to the
crucifixion; and the resurrection and the ascension; and the
whole cycle ends with a chorus of angels, and an epilogue by the
emperor. But to the first sub-cycle (or first day's performance)
is added a saint's play on the constancy and martyrdom of Maxi-
milla, and in the third is inserted an episodical play on the death
1 Hemingway, 6. 8.
? See Gayley, C. M. , Plays of our Forefathers, p. 260.
3 See ibid. pp. 224 ff. ; and cf. ten Brink, vol. I, p. 360.
* This assumption is supported by the fact, noted by Gayley, that in the opening
scene of Passio Domini a verse-form is used which closely approximates to the nine.
lined stanza used with great effect in Secunda Pastorum (Towneley Plays).


## p. 16 (#40) ##############################################

16 The Origins of English Drama
of Pilate, which stands quite apart from the rest? In addition
to this cycle a further saint's play, The Life of Saint Meriasek,
Bishop and Confessor, was discovered in 1869, and edited with
a translation by Whitley Stokes (1872). Its language is by him
described as Middle-Cornish, and rather more modern than that
of Passio.
The English mysteries and miracle-plays in general—for the
moralities, in this respect, are to be judged from a somewhat
different point of view-and the plays of the former class com-
bined in the four great cycles described below in particular,
possess certain artistic features and qualities which entitle them
to a place in our literature, not merely as interesting remains of
a relatively remote phase of our national civilisation. They were
written to please as well as to edify; and, in some of them, which
were almost indisputably from the hands of ecclesiastics, the
literary sense or instinct may occasionally be said to overpower
what sense of propriety existed in the writers. For to speak, in
this connection, of lack of reverence would be to betray a mis-
apprehension of the general attitude of the church militant of the
Middle Ages towards sacred names, and things, and persons.
Above all, it behoved the revisers of these plays—for whatever
may have been the original form of each of the four cycles, not
one of them has come down to us from the hand of a single
author, or without repeated changes and cross-borrowings-to
remain true to that spirit of naïveté which had presided at their
origin and which (with the exception, perhaps, in some respects,
of the Coventry Plays in their present form) they, on the whole,
consistently maintained. In this spirit they should be read and
1 See Norris, E. , The Ancient Cornish Drama, 2 vols. , Oxford, 1859, where these
plays are translated as well as edited.
• The scene of part 1 of this long drama is partly Britanny, where Meriasek, the
son of a duke of Britanny, is sent to school by his loving parents, returns home with
the best of characters, declines a' splendid marriage, preferring to be consecrated &
knight of God,' and, after incurring much resistance, performs his first miracle, sails
for Cornwall, miraculously tames & wolf and builds himself a hermitage. He then
performs a miracle on a larger scale, which purges Britanny from outlawed robbers,
and beholds the defeat of his pagan foe. The rest of the action is at Rome, where
Constantine is healed by pope Silvester and converted. In part 11, the double action
continues; but a sort of unity is given to it by the consecration of Meriasek as bishop,
in accordance with the pope's bull, before his last miracle and death. At the close of
each of the two parts, the audience is invited to drink and dance. The comic element,
which Stokes states to be de rigueur in all Cornish plays, is supplied by the torturers, a
quack doctor and one or two other characters; but its humpur has evaporated, and,
with the exception of a pathetic passage or two, the play may be pronounced devoid of
literary morit. The metrification is varied and elaborate.


## p. 17 (#41) ##############################################

>
Humour and Pathos in the Religious Plays 17
criticised by later generations—the quality of quaintness, or of
unconscious humour, being left to take care of itself. This
quality is most abundantly exhibited in the accounts, which we
must of course suppose to have been made out by the officers
of the gilds or crafts by whom, in the main, the plays were pro-
duced and represented, and who would be just the men to see
nothing comic in 'a link to set the world on fire,''paid for making
of 3 worlds, 3d! 2 yards and a half of buckram for the Holy
Ghost's coat, 28. 1d. ,' and the like; or in the matter-of-fact de-
scriptions of 'properties such as 'Hell-mouth, the head of a
whale with jaws worked by 2 men, out of which devil boys ran. '
Apart from other merits of composition, which, however, are of too
frequent occurrence to be justly regarded as incidental only, it
is by the conscious humour as well as by the conscious pathos
perceptible in these plays that certain of them, and even par-
ticular groups definitively marked out by careful and ingenious
criticism, must be held to rank as literary productions of no
common order. The pathos was, of course, directly suggested
by the materials out of which these plays were constructed; but
it is quite distinct and often 'drawn out' (if the phrase is appro-
priate) with considerable effect. Such a passage is the dialogue
between Abraham and Isaac, while preparing for the sacrifice, in
the Chester Play, which comes home to a modern as it did to a
medieval audience, though the dénouement is already lurking in
the thicket? Another passage of the kind is the wonderful burst
of passionate grief, which can have left no eye dry, from the Mother
of the Sufferer in The Betraying of Christ in the Coventry Play.
Of a different sort is the pathos-a touch of that nature which
comes home to the spectator in any and every kind of drama-
in the salutation by the shepherd who, reverencing in the infant
'I have elsewhere (History of English Dramatic Literature, vol. I, pp. 73 ff. )
directed attention to the evidence offered in these plays of other literary qualities
including ease and appropriateness of dialogue; a dramatic vigour quite distinct from the
vehement raging (deliberately intended to terrify the populace) of the Herods and
Pilates; conciseness and clearness of exposition; and adequacy—I can find no better
word-of meditative passages such as the opening reflections in the Prima Pastorum on
the uncertainty of human life: 'Lord, what thay ar weylle that hens ar past,' ete.
Nor is a grand severity of tone wanting where it is most in place; Jusserand has
pointed out that the discourses or ‘sermons, as they were called in the French
mystères, spoken by the Father in the Old, and by the Son in the New, Testament
plays, lack neither dignity nor power; see, for an English example, The Emission of the
Holy Ghost in the Chester Playe.
· Unless I mistake, this was the Abraham and Isaac presented at the Charterhouse
after the memorable first performance of Every-man, but then judiciously withdrawn,
es an afterpiece unsuitable to the morality, which, moreover, needed none.
E, L. v. CH. I.
2


## p. 18 (#42) ##############################################

18
The Origins of English Drama
Saviour the victor over the powers of hell, is won by his smile
into simple human sympathy with the Babe on His Mother's
knee:
Haylle comly and clean: haylle yong child!
Haylle maker, as I mene, of a madyn so mylde.
Thou has waryd, I weyne, the warlo? so wylde,
The fals gyler of teyn, now goys he begylde.
Lo, he merys;
Lo, he laghys, my swetyng,
A welfare metyng,
I have holden my hetyngs,
Have a bob of cherys“.
More notable, because imported of purpose prepense, is the
conscious humour introduced in these plays with the object of
gratifying the spectators. An audience must be amused, what-
ever may be offered to it, all the more so if that offering be a
periodical repetition of the same kind of spectacle, and if this
constitutes a strain upon the serious emotions. The collective
mysteries, as they are preserved to us, are generally true in
intention to the principle of allowing no occasion of the kind to
slip; but in the York, and still more so in the Towneley, Plays,
this intention manifestly becomes a progressive tendency towards
the elaboration of opportunities for realistic humour. It may
seem going rather far to speak of the York schools of humour
and realism, and of the Wakefield master who exhibits the full
flower of the promise of his predecessors; but it is one of the
legitimate-it is, indeed, one of the highest-functions of criticism
to discover and to verify the presence and the influence of
personality. And there can be no reasonable doubt as to the
individuality of the work in the Towneley Plays, of which the
outward sign is the use, preferential rather than uniform, of the
nine-lined stanza, not less effective in its way than the Spenserian in
its own, of which the unknown contributor may have been the
inventor, and of which an example was cited above. “If anyone, '
writes A. W. Pollard, 'will read the plays' which bear this mark
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 day6.
1 Wizard.
• Sorrow.
3 Promise.
4 Secunda Pastorum in Towneley Plays.
5 Even at Oberammergau, where the strain was heavy, and where all humour had
been effaced from the composition, the escape of Barabbas with a single cut of the whip
was hailed with a modest burst of merriment (1871).
6 Introduction to the Towneley Plays, p. xxii (cf. ) cited by Gayley, C. M. , in the two
very notable chapters in Plays of our Forefathers (21 and xn) in which the position
stated in the text is fully explained and illustrated.


## p. 19 (#43) ##############################################

The Comic Element in the Religious Plays 19
In his hands, the time-honoured incident of what Chaucer calls
The sorwe of Noe with his felawship
Or that he might get his wif to ship
becomes a farcical play in a series of scenes, of which the interest
centres in the tenacity of Noah's wife rather than in the preserva-
tion of the patriarch and the human races. The curious Processus
Talentorum, which treats of Pilate's decision as to the Saviour's
garments, is, in its details, singularly original. But the height of
independent treatment, with the comic element in the ascendant,
is reached in an earlier play of the same series, the famous
Secunda Pastorum, the merry tale of the sheep-stealing Mak-
which is nothing short of a play within a play, and which, in
freshness of conception and in gaiety of treatment, may be ranked
alongside of the famous Maitre Pathelin, and the Schwänke of
Hans Sachs, though considerably earlier in date than either of
them. In the Chester Plays, though altogether they are less
popular in treatment, the popular demand which the Play of the
Shepherds brought with it, is satisfied by the coarse fooling of
Trowle; in the Coventry Plays, both humour and coarseness are
further subdued, and literary endeavour directs itself rather to
the preservation of regularity of form on the one hand and to
the display of biblical learning on the other, while humour
occasionally takes the form of satiret. Contrariwise, it was but
natural that the danger of the degeneration of the comic element
in religious plays should be ignored, especially where no care
was taken for maintaining the time-honoured character of a
celebrated cycle. The Digby Conversion of St Paul (of which
.
the MS seems to belong to the close of the fifteenth century or
a slightly later date) contains a scene of unsavoury fun; and in
the Mary Magdalene of the same collection (which, generally,
by its almost unprecedented accumulation of sensational effects
betrays its late date) there is a burlesque scene between a priest
and his boy, who, after being threatened with a flogging, proceeds
to deserve it by intoning a mock service in nonsense Latin with
snyguer snagoer werwolfforum
standgardum lamba beffettorum.
What could be sillier or more modern5?
1 The Miller's Tale.
· His other, in this instance not his better, half.
* In the Chester Plays she does not absolutely refuse to come, but, in the spirit
of a true head of the family, she insists on taking all her relations with her.
* See, for example, the passage against extravagance in dress, in The Council of
the Jews (Coventry Mysteries, xxv).
• It is only right to say, as to the serious side of this strange play, which has a
2-2


## p. 20 (#44) ##############################################

20 The Origins of English
of English Drama
The great English collective mysteries are, of course, differen-
tiated by linguistic, as well as by literary, features; for, while both
the York and the Towneley Plays are written in the Northumbrian
dialect, which suits so many of their characteristics though it
makes them by no means easy reading, we seem in the Chester
and Coventry Plays to be moving on ground less remote from the
more common forms of fifteenth century English. The so-called
Coventry Plays show east-midland peculiarities in their dialect,
which agrees with the conclusions as to their origin reached by
some of the best authorities, such as ten Brink and A W. Pollard.
In the matter of metre, the most striking feature common to
English religious plays is the great variety exhibited by them.
(The Harrowing of Hell, which in form has hardly passed from
that of the dialogue into that of the drama, and in metre confines
itself to a very irregular octosyllabic couplet, can hardly be cited
as an exception) This variety of metrification, contrasting very
strongly with the consistency with which the French miracle- and
mystery-plays adhere to the metre of the octosyllabic couplet,
though permitting themselves an occasional excursion into the
fashionable form of the triolet', is already very noticeable in the
York Plays: in the Towneley, notwithstanding their close con-
nection with the York Plays, there seems a recognition of the
expediency of maintaining the octosyllabic metre as the staple
metre of the drama, though, as has already been noticed, the last
and most conspicuous writer of all who had a hand in these plays
enriched them by the introduction of a new and elaborate stanza
of his own. His ordinary stanza-form, which is to be found in
practically all the plays in this collection which reveal the comic
elaboration of his master hand, is the thirteen-lined stanza riming
ababababedade? The Coventry Plays show a less striking
metrical variety, and a tendency towards that length of line,
which was to end in the fashion of the doggerel alexandrine,
and thus, as Saintsbury observes, to help, by reaction, to establish
blank verse as the metre of the English drama. In the Chester
Plays, there is again that marked variety of metre which speaks
romantic colouring almost removing it out of the general sphere of the religious
drama, that the figure of the much-erring and much-suffering heroine is not devoid of
true pathos, while Satan rejoicing over her fall reminds us of Mephistopheles gloating
over that of Margaret in Faust.
· Saintsbury, G. , A History of English Prosody, vol. I, pp. 203 ff. , where, in
book 111, . The Fifteenth Century,' chap. 1, 'The Drama,' see a full discussion of the
metrification of the religious play3.
2 Hohlfeld, u. 8. pp. 287 ff.


## p. 21 (#45) ##############################################

Origin of the Moralities
21
?
for the early origin of these plays in their first form; and this
conclusion is corroborated by the frequent use of alliteration
Altogether, the religious plays exhibit a combined looseness and
ingenuity of metrification corresponding to what the historian of
English prosody terms its “break-up' in the fifteenth century, to
which the bulk of the plays in their present form belong, and
harmonising with the freedom of treatment which, notwithstanding
the nature of its main source, and what may be termed the single-
mindedness of its purpose, was characteristic of the English
mystery- and miracle-drama.
In the chapter of this work dealing with the early religious
drama, it will be shown how its third species, the 'moral plays'
or ‘moralities,' originated in the desire to bring into clear relief
the great lesson of life—the struggle between good and evil to
which every man is subjected, and the solution of which depends
for every man upon his relation to the powers contending for his
soul. The conception is familiar to religious literature long before
it is put into dramatic shape, and theological moralities were
produced some time before they found their way to the popular
stage. The productions of the Anglo-Norman trouvère Guillaume
Herman (1127—70) and of Étienne Langton, doctor of theology
at Paris and afterwards, as everyone knows, archbishop of
Canterbury (1207) and cardinal, in general conception and treat-
ment resemble the moralities of later date; though in each the
strife of Mercy and Peace against Truth and Righteousness on
behalf of sinful man, indirectly suggested by Psalm lxxxv, 10,
11, is solved by the personal intervention of the Saviour! It
is clearly erroneous to suppose that the English moralities, to
which these remarks are confined, grew gradually out of the
mysteries and miracles, under the cooperating influence of the
pageantry which had become a public custom in the English
towns in the latter part of the Middle Ages. The love of allegory
from a very early period onwards domesticated itself in the English
mind, to which there seems to be nothing intrinsically congenial
in this species of composition, but which at all times has been
singularly tenacious of tastes and tendencies to which it has
once given admittance. This particular taste must have been im-
planted by Christianity by means of the Bible. Paraphrases of the
Bible are the chief fruits of the earliest productive age of English
poetical literature. The Old and the New Testament were alike
i The same four Virtues, Veritas, Justitia, Misericordia and Pax, appear in The
Salutation and Conception in the Coventry Plays (XI).


## p. 22 (#46) ##############################################

22 The Origins of English Drama
composed in eastern tongues; the scenes of their narratives are
eastern; certain books of the Bible have always been declared
by the church to be allegorical in design; and there are few
portions of the holy text that are not full of allegory, parable and
symbolism. It is needless here to pursue further a theme which
has been fully treated elsewhere, and which has not been left
out of sight in earlier volumes of this History! Before English
literature, in which the love of allegory had continued to assert
itself wherever that literature continued most popular in its
forms as well as in its sympathies, had produced one of the
masterpieces of the species in the Vision concerning Piers the
Plowman, the taste of western literature in general, and of
French in particular, had already set in the same direction, and
the Roman de la Rose had established an ascendancy in the
world of letters which was to reflect itself in our own allegorical
literature, and which endured down to the time of the renascence
and the reformation. To the French taste for allegorical poetry
and satire, the drama, which, in the thirteenth century, had
completely emancipated itself from the control of the church,
no doubt in its turn contributed; by the end of the fourteenth,
the Confrérie de la Passion found it difficult to maintain its
religious plays against the moralities, full of polemical satire, of
the Confrérie de la Basoche, or against the Aristophanic soties
of the Enfans sans souci ; while the Basoche, which had begun
with moralising allegories, soon took a leaf out of their rivals'
book, and interspersed their moralities with farces and soties,
till the didactic species virtually passed away. If, then, the love
,
of allegory which had been early implanted in the English people,
and the impulse given to this predilection by French examples
both in literature and on the stage in the period between Chaucer
and the renascence be remembered, it will not be difficult to
account for the growth, side by side with the biblical and saintly
religious drama, of a species differing from it in origin, except as
to their common final source, and varying from it in method, and,
as time went on, more or less in character also. Nevertheless,
the growth of this didactic species accompanies that of the plays
following, with more or less of digression, the biblical narrative,
or dealing with lives of saints or the after-effects of their
martyrdoms in the form of miracles, and continues to affect these
sister species in many instances, or actually in some cases to
* See vol. I, chap. IV et al; and cf. Courthope's History of English Poetry, vol. I,
chap. 1x, 'The Progress of Allegory. '


## p. 23 (#47) ##############################################

The Evolution of Tragedy and Comedy 23
intermingle with them. Gradually, and under the influence of
the general widening of the range of ideas and interests due to
the renascence, the moralities begin to abandon the path of
religious teaching for that of the inculcation of intellectual or
philosophical, and even of political, principles and truths; and
a further step is thus taken towards the complete secularisation of
the drama.
The following pages will, it is believed, sufficiently illustrate
the consummation of this change, and describe the process by
which, after the biblical religious drama had begun to die out in
England, where saints' plays had never enjoyed much popularity,
the abstract figures of the moralities were associated with concrete
personages of the national past, or types of actual contemporary
life, and gradually gave way before them. The progress of the
narrative will show how thus, with the aid of the transitional
species of the chronicle history on the one hand, and of the
interlude, in the narrower sense of the term, on the other, tragedy
and comedy were found ready to be called into being, so soon
as the light of classical example shone forth which had been lit by
the enthusiasm of the renascence.


## p. 24 (#48) ##############################################

CHAPTER II
SECULAR INFLUENCES ON THE EARLY
ENGLISH DRAMA
MINSTRELS. VILLAGE FESTIVALS. FOLK-PLAYS
-
BEFORE the religious origins of the English drama are specially
considered, certain secular influences should be noted. The first
of these is that of the minstrels, a heterogeneous class of composers
and performers, drawn from several sources.
The theatrical history of the Roman empire is the story of
the degradation of tragedy into pantomime, of comedy into farce.
The tragic actor became the pantomimus who danced, first the
lyric portions and, finally, the whole ‘book’ of the play, to an
accompaniment of music, for the pleasure of the more refined
classes; while, in place of the comedy imported from Greece, the
old Italian (Campanian) Fabula Atellana, united with the farcical
Miuos, imported from Magna Graecia, became the amusement of
the vulgar. Both pantomimus and mimus (the names being
equally those of performer and performance) degenerated into
sensuous displays, and performers, though their rivalries led to
public brawls and they were the spoiled darlings of their admirers,
fell back, as a class, to the low social level from which the later
republic and the earlier empire had done something to rescue
them. The Christian church, naturally, was no friend to such
exhibitions as the multilingual and degraded population had come
to expect; but more important than the opposition of the church
was the contempt of the barbarians of the later irruptions. The
coming of the Lombards, in the sixth century, dealt the death-
blow to the scotched art of public amusement.
Private amusement, however, in which these scenici had been
as busily employed as on public stages, continued in all parts
of the empire, and was the means of prolonging the existence of
the class. Its members became confused and intermingled with the
lower orders of entertainer, tumblers, rope-walkers, bear-leaders
and so forth, and shared with them a precarious and a wandering
existence. The evidence as to their dramatic répertoire in England
a


## p. 25 (#49) ##############################################

25
Strolling Performers
is very slight; but the conclusion is reasonable that it decreased to
the smallest dimensions and may, in time, have come to include
little more than imitations of beasts and of drunken or half-witted
men, combined with displays of such indecent buffoonery and ribald
rimings as naturally delighted the medieval population in both
castle and village. For several reasons, however, it is almost
necessary to suppose that these tricks were linked together by some
sort of dramatic interest, however rude. They are more amusing
when 80 treated. Dialogue was certainly among the strollers
accomplishments; and so was the use of marionettes, which implies
not only dialogue but plot. The literature of medieval Germany
and France contains several works, such as Le Roi đ Angleterre
et le Jougleur d Ely, and Le Garçon et l'Aveugle, which seem to
show the existence of a répertoire founded more or less on mere
farce. And, by the fourteenth century, we find in England not
only a mention in the Tretise of miraclis pleyinge of 'other
japis ’ distinct from miracles", but a fragment of the text of the
Interludium de Clerico et Puella, a humorous little play, founded
on the popular medieval story of Dame Siriz? There is, however,
in England scarcely a trace of anything corresponding to the
Schembartlaufen of the Meistersingers of Nürnberg, or such
amateur organisations as the Enfants sans souci or the Basoche
in Paris, which secured a healthy existence for farce. In the four-
teenth century (1352), indeed, we find bishop Grandison of Exeter
prohibiting a performance by the youths of the city in contumeliam
et opprobrium allutariorum, a satirical attack on the cloth-dressers'
guild, who had been charging too high for their wares. But, for
the most part, the early history of the comic element in secular
drama in England is dark. It appears to have remained in the
hands of the descendant of the ribald mimus, and seldom, if ever,
to have achieved the honour of association with his betters. Until
its appearance in literature in the work of John Heywood, its
existence in England can only be inferred. Nevertheless, merely
for preserving its existence, however rudely, the mimus deserves
our gratitude. When English drama became secularised, the
interlude found at least some sort of criticism of social types and
of the actual world on which to work.
Another stream of tradition, affecting mainly the serious, as
distinct from the comic, side of his répertoire, contributed to the
formation of the medieval entertainer. This flowed from the
minstrels, who were in England some centuries before the spread
i Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, vol. I, p. 84. * Cf. ante, vol. I, pp. 305~0.


## p. 26 (#50) ##############################################

26 Secular Influences on the Early Drama
>
of Latin civilisation opened the country to invasion by mimi
as well as by ecclesiastics. When the bard emerged from the
communal singing of pagan races it is impossible to say; but
the state of war for which, in their migrations westward, they
exchanged their pastoral life brought into existence a class of
heroes, and the existence of heroes accounts for the singing of
cantilenae to celebrate their exploits. By the fifth century, there
is plenty of evidence of the existence of a class of professional
singers attached to the courts of great leaders. Such a singer was
not despised, like the mimus and the joculator, his successors, but
honoured, an owner of land and gold, the professional representa-
tive of an art in which his master himself was not ashamed to be
his rival. Such a scop or minstrel was Widsith', who was both
attached to a leader's court and allowed to wander abroad. The
complaint of Deor and the feast in Hrothgar's hall in Beowulf
give other pictures of the Teutonic minstrel's life. The duty of
such a minstrel was to sing to the harp the praises of his lord and
the delights of war, and, under the names of scop and gleeman? ,
he was a prominent figure in unconverted England. In converted
England, the ecclesiastic, as a man, encouraged this minstrelsy; as
an official, he discouraged it; and, from the eighth to the eleventh
centuries, its history is obscure. During these centuries began
the gradual assimilation of Teutonic and Latin entertainer, of
scop and mimus. During the same centuries in France, there
grew up the distinction between the Norman trouvères, or minstrels
of war, and the Provençal troubadours, who sang in the south their
songs of love. The Norman conquest opened up England still
further, not only to the trouvères or jongleurs, the Taillefers
and Raheres who brought honour and glory to the exploits of
feudal lords, but to entertainers of all kinds, from respectable
musicians and reciters to the juggling, tumbling rogues who
haunted the highways of Europe. Under this invasion, the English
minstrel sank yet lower. He was forced to appeal, not to the
great ones of the land, whose language he did not speak, but to
the down-trodden of his own race; and the assimilation with the
vagabond mime must be supposed to have become more complete.
In the eyes of the church, at any rate, the confusion between the
higher and the lower class of minstrel was always an accomplished
)
I
? See vol. 1 of the present work, chaps. I and in, and Chambers, vol. 1, pp. 2830.
> Scop=maker; gleeman=the man of glee or mirth ; but, originally at any rate,
the two terms were interchangeable and do not imply the separation into a higher and
lower class of minstrel which will be seen later.


## p. 27 (#51) ##############################################

English Minstrels
27
fact; but her indiscriminate condemnation of both kinds was not,
on the whole, to the disadvantage of the lower class, inasmuch as,
in conjunction with the common taste of both noble and peasant
for something a little more amusing than the court minstrel could
supply, it helped to break down a class distinction between the
various kinds of entertainer. To some extent, the court minstrel
learned to be a buffoon; to some extent, the despised English
minstrel learned the language and the stories of the conquerors,
and began to translate the disputations, the jeux-partis and the
tençons, which were popular in Norman castles, following them in
time with the estrifs, among which The Harrowing of Hell
formed an important link between the répertoire of the minstrels
and the early drama, and may, indeed, be considered one of the
sources of the morality. Aided, no doubt, by the goliardi or
wandering scholars, vagabond disseminators of learning and wit,
English minstrels formed at least part of the means of union
between conquerors and conquered. In this, they may be con-
trasted with the Celtic minstrels, the harpers and the bards, who,
though they sang their own heroes, as English minstrels had
continued to sing of Hereward, did not, like the English minstrels,
act, whether in intention or in fact, as peace-makers between the
conquered, Wales, and the conqueror, England.
In France, where conditions were more favourable, a definite
influence was exerted by professional minstrels on the religious
drama. In England, it was not so. There is, indeed, some slight
evidence that minstrels, to some extent, took up the composition
and performance of religious plays! For the most part, however,
their share appears to have been limited to supplying the music and,
occasionally, some comic relief, in the later days when town, parish or
guild had taken over from the church the production of the miracle.
When, therefore, we look for the influence of the minstrel on
the formation of the English drama, we find it to be, at any rate
until the fifteenth century, of the very slightest. The superior
class, whose art descended from that of scop and trouvère, may
have prepared the ground for the morality by the composition, if
not the recitation by two mouths, of estrifs in dialogue form.
The lower class may have been of service in two ways : first, by
their preservation of the art of the puppet-showor 'motion,
though, even here, during the later period, when a dramatic
1
1 Ward, vol. I, p. 50.
On the subject of marionnettes see Magnin, Ch. , Histoire des Marionnettes (2nd
edition, 1862), especially Books 11 and vi.


## p. 28 (#52) ##############################################

28 Secular Influences on the Early Drama
1
literature for puppets can be distinctly traced and the nascent
secular drama was ripe for its influence, that art appears to have
been chiefly practised by new-comers from the continent; and,
secondly, by their relation, noted above, to the art of farce. But,
perhaps, the most genuine service performed by both classes up to
the fifteenth century was nothing more than that of keeping alive
the desire to be amused; while, in the case of the lower class, we
may add to this the fact that they did consistently carry on, no
matter how poorly, the practice which lies at the root of dramatic
art and of the pleasure to be gained from it—that of pretending to
be someone or something else.
By the fifteenth century, religious drama had passed out of
the hands of the church into those of the amateur performers
of town or guild. Moreover, the stimulus given to the love of
dramatic performances had resulted in the birth of the interlude
the short play, sometimes religious, but usually moral, in character,
which could be played in the banqueting hall of the noble or in
the market place or village green by a few players, and without
the expensive and elaborate machinery of the miracle. The
popularity and ease of preparation of the interlude soon induced
its amateur performers to extend a practice not unknown in the
case of miracles, and take it on tour,' as we should say now, from
town to town and village to village. The minstrels had already
suffered, not only from the invention of printing, which left them
no longer the sole repositories of story and poem, but from the
increasing command of literature by the amateur (knight or
tradesman) which followed the development of the English language.
The poaching on their preserves of the amateur interlude player
spurred them to double action. In the first place, they con-
.
,
solidated their formation into guilds. A charter of Edward IV
(1469)_after reciting that certain 'rude rustics and artificers'
were pretending to be minstrels and neglecting their business, to go
about the country, levying heavy exactions on the liegesorders
all minstrels to join the guild on pain of suppression; and this guild
still exists in the corporation of the Musicians of London. In the
second place, they took the wind out of the sails of the amateurs
by becoming interlude players themselves. They are found doing
this probably so early as 14272; and it was not long before the
greater convenience of hiring professional players than of training
amateurs began to make itself felt-not to mention the element of
· Analysed in Chambers, vol. 11, Appendix F, pp. 260-1.
3 Rymer, Foedera, vol. 2, p. 387.


## p. 29 (#53) ##############################################

Primitive Festivals
29
farce, which the minstrels had kept alive and were ready and able
to contribute to the attractions of the show. While the great towns
continued to produce miracle-plays by means of their craft-guilds,
smaller places and private houses depended on the transformed
minstrels. They are found attached to the establishments of
nobles by the middle of the fifteenth century, and Henry VII
and his successors kept their own companies. Under Elizabeth,
they, in their turn, made way before, or were incorporated into,
the professional actors of the new drama'.
The history of the other influence on our early drama with which
this chapter has to deal belongs in a large measure to the study of
folk-lore? The pagan festivals of summer and winter which had,
or came to have, the object of securing by ritual observance
plenteous crops and fruitful herds, had, also, a side which explains
what influence they may have had on the drama—the holiday mood,
the desire for the exercise of activity purely for the pleasure in it,
to which we give the name of play. The churl who would not
play on festival days was, from immemorial times, the object of
the holiday-makers' dislike and rough treatment
At the same time, the ritual itself came to include many
elements—disguise, combat, procession, dance, song, action-
which, arising from whatever symbolical and ritual origins, lent
themselves easily to the spirit of play, and approximated to the
acted drama. It is not possible, of course, to trace any such direct
road from village festival to drama in England as in Greece; but a
certain connection, besides the mere fostering of the spirit of play,
is to be observed between the early drama and pagan observance,
wholly or partly or not at all absorbed by Christianity.
On the literary side, the connection is very slight. The folk
had their cantilenae, or songs celebrating mythological or historical
heroes &; but epic poetry owes more to these than does the drama.
The people had, also, their festival songs, sung in procession or during
the dance round the sacred fire or tree, of which Sumer is i-cumen
in is a sophisticated remnants; and in these songs the growth of
the amoebaean form shown in the existence of the burden implies
1 See vol. vi, chap. x below.
· For a fuller treatment of the subject of early village festivals and their develop-
ment, from the point of view both of the student of folk-lore and the historian of the
stage, see Chambers, vol. 1, pp. 89 ff.
* Ten Brink, History of English Literature, vol. I, p. 148; Chambers, vol. I, p. 26.
• Ante, vol. I, pp. 360—1.
• Chambers and Sidgwick, Early English Lyrics.


## p. 30 (#54) ##############################################

30 Secular Influences on the Early Drama
the same seed of drama which grew in Greece to the pre-
Aeschylean tragedy, with its protagonist and chorus, but had no
corresponding development in England.
The influence, or the remnants, of cantilenae may, indeed, be
traced in certain later growths, like the mummers' play and the
Hock-Tuesday play, to which we shall return; but folk-song, either
heroic or pastoral, may be held to have been practically without
effect on the main stream of English drama. A more valid in-
fluence is to be traced from the dances, combats and ritual actions
of village-festivals. Writers on folk-lore point out that such
games as football and hockey descend from the struggles for the
possession of the head of the sacrificial victim, and the tradition
still survives in special varieties, such as the 'Haxey-hood' contest
at Haxey in Lincolnshire. They point out, also, that disguise has
its origin in the clothing of leaves and flowers or of the skin or
head of the sacrificed animal, with which the worshipper made him-
self 'a garment of the god' thus bringing himself into the closest
possible contact with the spirit of fertilisation. The maypole,
which was a common feature of every green in England till the
Rebellion, and enjoyed a shadow of its former glory after the
Restoration, stands for the sacred tree, and the dance round it for
the ritual dance of the pagan worshipper, just as some children's
games, like 'Oranges and Lemons,' enshrine the memory of the
sacrifice and of the succeeding struggle for possession of the victim's
head. In some instances, folk-observances have grown into some-
thing like plays, or have affected plays drawn from other sources;
and of these a few words must now be said.
In the form in which its scanty remnants have reached us, the
folk-play has mainly been affected by humanist learning through
the hands of the local scholar. A play—at least a performance
consisting of 'actionz and rymez'-which appears to have com-
paratively or entirely escaped that kind of improvement, was the
‘olld storiall sheaw' of the Hock-Tuesday play at Coventry. Our
knowledge of it is chiefly derived from the description in Robert
Laneham's letter to his friend Humfrey Martin, mercer, of London,
describing the festivities before Elizabeth at Kenilworth in 1575,
during which the play was revived? We there read that it was
‘for pastime woont too bee plaid yeerely’; that it
had an auncient beginning, and a long continuauns: tyll noow of late laid dooun,
they knu no cauz why, onless it wear by the zeal of certain theyr Preacherz.
1 Reprinted by Furnivall for the Ballad Society in 1871. The reprint, with additional
notes, is included in The Shakespeare Library, 1908. See pp. 26-28, 31, 32, of that edition.


## p. 31 (#55) ##############################################

a
>
Hock-Tuesday Play and Sword-Dance 31
Its argument, according to Laneham, was: how the English under
Huna defeated the Danes and rid the realm of them in the reign of
Ethelred on St Brice's night (13 November 1002—he gives the date
in error as 1012). Rous? ascribed to it another origin, the sudden
.
death of Hardicanute, and the suspicion of his having been poisoned
at a wedding, together with the delivery of England from the Danes
at the accession of Edward the Confessor in 1042. Both explana-
tions are held by some to be later substitutes for the real origin,
which, in their opinion, was the immemorial folk-custom of obtain-
ing by force a victim for the sacrifice. Hocktide—the Monday and
Tuesday after the second Sunday after Easter-has parallel customs
in other parts of the country, in which the women 'hocked' the
men (caught and bound them with ropes), or vice versa, or strangers
or natives were whipped or 'heaved. ' Women acted prominently
on the offensive in these customs, and they did the same in the
Hock-Tuesday Coventry play. First of all, the Danish 'launs-
knights' and the English, armed with alder poles, entered on
horseback and fought together; then followed the foot and, after
manoeuvring, engaged.
Twise the Danes had the better; but at the last conflict, beaten doun,
overcom, and many led captive for triumph by our English wéemen.
It is possible that the combat for the victim's head referred to
above may have had some influence on the game; and the
evolutions of the footsoldiers in ranks, squadrons, triangles, ‘from
that intoo rings, and so winding oout again' may be connected
with the sword-dance, mentioned below. It seems clear, however,
that this was a genuine folk-play; and it is suggested that 'the
rymez' had been worked up from local cantilenae of the folk. The
Hock-Tuesday play, as we have seen, was only a revival in the
early days of Elizabeth, and it is not heard of afterwards.
Another folk-custom, out of which grew a play of more im-
portance than the Hock-Tuesday play, was the sword-dance. This
dance seems to have had its ritual origin in the primitive
expulsion of Death or Winter, the death and resurrection of
Summer, or in that conflict between Winter and Summer which, on
the literary side, was also the origin of many débats and estrifs.
It was, moreover, a natural mode of play for warlike peoples.
Like all dancing, it became mimetic in character. Its chief per-
sonages are the fool, who wears the skin of a fox or some other
animal, and the ‘Bessy,' a man dressed in woman's clothes-figures
1 Historia Regum Angliae (1716), pp. 105, 106.
• Chambers, vol. u, p. 155.


## p. 32 (#56) ##############################################

32 Secular Influences on the Early Drama
>
in which folk-lore finds the survival of the ritual of agricultural
worship. One of its off-shoots in England is held to be the morris-
dance, which, however, in Robin Hood (who sometimes appears)
and in Maid Marian (who always does) has drawn to itself features
of other celebrations to be mentioned later. The points of interest
in the sword-dance, for our present purpose, are its use of rimed
speeches to introduce the characters, and its development into
the mummers' or St George play, still to be seen in many rural
districts of the British Isles.
Some types of sword-dance still or recently extant, mainly in
the north of England, have many more characters than the fool or
'Bessy? ' In one case at least, that of the Shetland dance, they
include the seven Champions of Christendom. ' It is possible that
their names only superseded those of earlier national heroes, and
that the verses introducing the characters in the dance are, in
fact, the remains of the folk cantilenae which have been mentioned
before. In several of the extant sword-dances in Britain and on
the continent, one of the dancers is, in different manners, attacked
or killed, or, perhaps, merely symbolically surrounded or approached,
with the swords ; and this feature, which enshrines the memory of
the sacrifice, becomes the principal point of action in the mummers'
or St George plays which developed from the sword-dance. In
these, the dance has developed into a play. Amid a bewildering
variety of nomenclature and detail, the invariable incident of the
death and restoration to life of one of the characters is the point
upon which has been based the descent of this play from pagan
festivals celebrating the death and resurrection of the year. The
fact that this play is nowadays usually performed at Christmas-
time is largely due to a well-known shifting of the seasons of
festivals, due to the fixing of the Christian ecclesiastical feasts.
Analysis of the many varieties known would extend this
chapter unduly? , and it must be our task rather to point out
what is common to all. A transition stage between the sword-
dance and the play may be noticed in the performance of the
plow boys or morris dancers' at Revesby in Lincolnshire, pro-
bably on Plough Monday (the Monday after Twelfth Night)
in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and several
Plough Monday performances in the eastern midlands. These
have retained their original season that of the resumption of
| The motley crew are collected by Cbambers, vol. 11, pp. 193, 194.
The reader is referred to Chambers, vol. II, pp. 208 ff. and to Ordish.
8 Printed by Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, vol. I, p. 296.


## p. 33 (#57) ##############################################

The Mummers' Play
33
agricultural work after winter, and they are entirely unaffected
by heroic influences. In both, the characters are the traditional
grotesques of village festivals—the fool and the Hobby-horse,
who represent worshippers disguised in skins of beasts, and
the ‘Bessy,' the woman or man dressed in woman's clothes. The
latter custom is recorded as obtaining among the Germans by
Tacitus. Some of the eastern midlands performances introduce
farm-labourers. In both there is much dancing; at Revesby, the
fool, and, in the eastern midlands the old woman, Dame Jane,
are killed and brought to life again.
The mummers' plays show another stage of advance. In them,
the central incident is still the killing and restoring to life of one
of the characters, and there is still enough dancing to show their
descent from the sword-dance. First, the characters are intro-
duced in a speech; then comes the drama, in which each personage
has his own introductory announcement; and the whole winds up
with the entrance of subsidiary charaoters, more dancing and the
inevitable collection in itself a survival of hoary antiquity. The
old grotesques of the village festival are mainly relegated to the
third part of the performance; and the principal characters, pre-
sented under almost infinite variety of manner and style, are a
hero, his chief opponent and the (usually comic) doctor. The hero
sometimes kills and sometimes is killed by his opponent; in either
case, the doctor comes to restore the dead man to life. The name
of the hero is almost always saint, king, or prince George; the
chief opponent is divisible into two types : the Turkish knight,
who sometimes has a black face, and a kind of capitano or
blustering Bobadill. There is also a large variety of subsidiary
fighters. The grotesques of the sword-dance, now pushed away
into the third part of the performance, include such figures as the
fool, or the Beelzebub, who, perhaps, are the same person under
different names, the ‘Bessy' and the Hobby-horse. Sometimes,
these figures are allowed a subordinate position in the drama
itself.
The presence of St George (for king and prince George may be
regarded as Hanoverian 'improvements ') implies the influence of
heroic legend and literature. It is very seldom that anything more
than a passing reference to the exploits of the saint is found in
the mummers' play; and, though the dragon appears here and
there, the contest with him is never the main point of the action.
How St George came into the story at all is a matter of some
obscurity. He was, undoubtedly, the patron saint of England.
E. L. V.
3
CH. IL


## p. 34 (#58) ##############################################

34 Secular Influences on the Early Drama
His day, 23 April, was a day on which processions or 'ridings' in
his honour-in which the representations of his defeat of the
dragon had replaced, perhaps, the earlier subject of the victory of
summer over winter-were organised by the guilds of St George
in many parts of England. These 'ridings,' which lasted even as
late as the eighteenth century, were dumb shows or pageants
rather than plays; but cases are known of religious dramas on
the subject. It is possible that the sword-dance, in its development
into the mummers' play, was influenced by these 'ridings' and by
the miracle-plays. On the other hand, the name of St George
may have come into them by way of Richard Johnson's History
of the Seven Champions, first published in 1596—7. In either
case, the introduction of this character has modified the popular
cantilenae which formed the basis of the rude dialogue accompany-
ing the symbolical representation.
Another instance of folk-festivals turned into plays and modi-
fied by the introduction of principal characters of later date is
the development of the May-game into the Robin Hood play.
From the earliest times, dance and song bad celebrated the
coming of spring; and we have seen the elements of drama in
the amoebaean form of the reverdies as well as in the use of the
cantilenae. In France, a direct descent can be traced from the
chansons of the folk to the plays of Adam de la Halle; the lack
of English folk-song makes a corresponding deduction impossible
with regard to English drama. But it is known that, both in
spring or summer and in autumn, a 'king,' or 'queen,' or both,
were appointed leaders of the revel; and the May-game-the
* Whitsun Pastorals' to which Perdita in The Winter's Tale (act iv,
sc.