No More Learning

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. 4) likens her play with the flowers—was protested against by
the clergy as early as the thirteenth century.
The influence of the May-game on the drama may be traced
in such plays as The Winter's Tale, Chapman's May Day and
Jonson's Sad Shepherd; but it achieves its highest importance
through an impetus towards the dramatic form derived from the
minstrels. In France, Robin, as we see from de la Halle's plays,
was the type-name of the shepherd lover, and Marion of his
mistress. It is suggested that these names were brought to
England by French minstrels, and that here, by the sixteenth
century, Robin became confused with the Robin Hood (or
6
1
i
1
1
1
1
1 For a description of the 'riding' at Norwich see Chambers, vol. I, p. 222.
? At Lydd and Bassingbourne. See Chambers, Appendix W, vol. II, p. 383.
s By Chambers, vol. 1, pp. 175, 176.


## p. 35 (#59) ##############################################

Robin Hood Plays
35
d-Wood) who first appears in Piers the Plowman, but who,
perhaps, bad, long before this time, been a popular hero of the
ballads, his origin being purely fictitious, or, perhaps, nothing less
than the personality of Woden himself. Robin becoming Robin
Hood, Marion became Maid Marian, who does not appear at all in
the earliest ballads; the May-game king and queen were now the
central figures of a story, in which subsidiary characters-Friar
Tuck, Little John, the sheriff of Nottingham and others-found
their places; and the old May-game-probably consisting merely
of dances, processional or circular, with the inevitable quête or
collection, still maintained by small boys who go a-maying in the
streets of London-was transformed into the Robin Hood play.
The Paston letters mention a servant who played Robin Hood
and the sheriff of Nottingham. A fragment of such a play dating
from the fifteenth century is extant? . And the Garrick collection
in the British Museum includes a 'mery geste' of Robin Hood,
‘wyth a newe playe for to be played in Maye games' printed
about 1561. In Scotland the play of Robin Hood survived, in
spite of Puritan protest and of legal prohibition, at least till
15784; and in England the new drama was not slow to avail itself
of the story. Anthony Munday was writing for Henslowe in
February 1598 a Downfall and Death of Robert Earl of
Huntingdon, 'surnamed Roben hoodes,' and introduced him again
in his pageant, Metropolis Coronata (1615). He appeared, also, in
Haughton's Roben hooď s penerthese and other lost plays, as well
as in Peele's Edward I, Greene's George a Greene—the Pinner of
Wakefield and the anonymous Look About You. After the
Restoration, he is to be found in Robin Hood and his Crew of
Soldiers (1661). At least four other Robin Hood plays or operas
are noticed in Biographia Dramatica, and a recent production
in London proves that the public is not yet tired of the old story.
More important, however, than the actual subject is the fact that
Robin Hood, whatever his origin, became a national hero, and, as
such, was celebrated in the drama. The new national spirit
awakened in the days of Elizabeth was destined to extend this
narrow field into the spacious domain of the chronicle play.
i Gairdner's edition, vol. in, p. 89.
Manly, vol. 1, p. 279.
3 Furnivall's Laneham's Letter, pp. li, liii, liv.
• See Chambers, vol. 1, p. 181, vol. II, pp. 335, 336, and references.
s Greg's Henslowe's Diary, Part I, pp. 83, 84. 6 Ibid. pp. 124, 125.
3--2


## p. 36 (#60) ##############################################

CHAPTER III
THE EARLY RELIGIOUS DRAMA
MIRACLE-PLAYS AND MORALITIES
THE growth of the medieval religious drama pursued the same
course in England as in the other countries of Europe joined
together in spiritual unity through the domination of the Roman
Catholic church. Everywhere, we may follow the same process,
and note how, from about the tenth century, the production in
churches of a certain species of alternating songs is combined
with a sort of theatrical staging; how, simultaneously with the
progress of this staging, the texts of the songs were enlarged by
free poetical additions, till, finally, a separation of these stage per-
formances from their original connection with religious service
took place, and they were shifted from the church into the open air.
Most of the literary monuments that enable us to reconstruct
the gradual rise of the Christian drama are of German or
French origin; but England, too, furnishes us with several such
monuments representing the earliest stage of the growth in
question. One of special importance is Concordia Regularis,
which contains rules for divine service in English monasteries, and
which was composed during the reign of Edgar (959—975). In
this, we have the oldest extant example in European literature of
the theatrical recital of an alternating song in church. These
rules prescribe that, during service in the night before Easter,
an alternating song between the three women approaching the
grave, and the angel watching on it, shall be recited; the monk
who sings the words of the angel is to take his seat, clad in an
alb and with a palm-twig in his hand, in a place representing
the tomb; three other monks, wearing hooded capes and with
censers in their hands, are to approach the tomb at a slow pace, as
if in quest of something. This alternating song was composed at
St Gallen about the year 900 and was intended to be sung during
mass on Easter morning? ; the statement as to its theatrical
1 The original is as follows:
Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae ?
Jesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicolae.
Non est hic, surrexit, sicut praedixerat. Ite, nuntiate, quia surrexit de sepulchro.


## p. 37 (#61) ##############################################

a
Liturgical Drama
37
production can hardly be a fiction that originated at St Gallen, or
Ekkehard, the historian of that monastery, who generally gives
detailed reports of such matters, would surely not have failed to
mention it. But the custom, undoubtedly, is of continental origin;
in the preface to Concordia Regularis, it is expressly stated
that customs of outlandish monasteries, such as Fleury-sur-Loire
and Ghent, served as models for the present composition; and, in
the description of the ceremonies at the place which is to represent
the tomb, reference is made to a commendable practice of
priests in some monasteries who ‘had introduced this custom, in
order to fortify the unlearned people in their faith. ' These words
also reveal to us the original purpose of Christian drama: it was
to be a sort of living picture-book; the people, ignorant of Latin,
were to perceive by sight what was inaccessible to the ear. For
this reason, also, the tendency to place the whole action visibly
before the eyes of the spectator, to leave nothing to be done behind
the scenes or told by messengers, prevailed in medieval drama
from the very beginning. Thus, the chief difference between
ancient classical and modern romantic drama manifests itself
in the first stage of medieval drama.
That the theatrical development of Easter celebrations in
England did not stop short at this initial stage is proved by several
MSS, more especially by one of the fourteenth century, and of
Sarum origin, where the scene is enlarged by various additions,
including a representation of the race to the tomb run by Peter
and John (St John xx, 4). Nor can it be doubted that, in England
as on the continent, & drama on Christ's birth and childhood
gradually shaped itself out of the Christmas service, where the
dramatic development likewise began with an alternating song ;
thus, e. g. , the tin crowns, mentioned in an inventory of Salisbury
cathedral, drawn up in 1222, were evidently for the use of the
magi at the crib of Bethlehem.
Another species of Latin church drama consisted of the plays
acted by pupils in monastery schools in honour of their patron
saints. The younger pupils honoured as their patron St Nicholas,
whose cult, after the transportation of his body from Asia Minor to
Bari in 1087, spread over all Europe, and of whom legends told
how, on one occasion, he restored to life three convent pupils put
to death for the sake of their money. The patron of older pupils
was St Catharine of Alexandria, who had been victorious in
disputes against heathen philosophers. The best evidence of the
existence of these plays is, again, furnished from England. About


## p. 38 (#62) ##############################################

38
The Early Religious Drama
the year 1110, Godefroy of Le Mans, a Frenchman, headmaster of
the monastery school at Dunstable, caused his pupils to perform
a play on St Catharine; as costumes for the players, he borrowed
church robes from the abbey of St Albans, to which the school
belonged. As it chanced that, on the following night, these
robes were burnt in his lodgings, Godefroy-80 Matthew Paris
tells us-offered himself in compensation and entered the monas-
tery as a monk. But the most remarkable of all school dramas
are those composed by Hilarius, a pupil of Abelard, about 1125.
Hilarius, probably, was an Englishman, for a large proportion of
his verses are addressed to English persons ; at all events, he is
the first definite personality in the way of a dramatic author who
crosses the student's path. In the collection of his poems, worldly
merriment and loose libertinism are apparent, together with all
the enchanting melody characteristic of the songs of vagrant clerks.
This collection contains three small religious dramas, two of which
belong to the Christmas and Easter-cycles, respectively; the third
is a half-humorous play about St Nicholas, who helps a bar-
barus to recover a treasure stolen from him. In this play, the
poet intersperses his Latin verses with French.
The often-quoted mention by William Fitzstephen of religious
plays in London may also, possibly, relate to performances in Latin.
Fitzstephen observes, in his Life of Thomas Becket (c. 1180), that
London, instead of the spectacula theatralia acted in Rome,
possesses other, holier, plays-representations of miracles wrought
by holy confessors, or of the tribulations in which the con-
stancy of martyrs splendidly manifested itself. It is, however,
possible that performances in Anglo-Norman are here intended;
for we see that in France, too, after the vernacular language
had taken possession of the drama, subjects from legends of the
saints were preferred to Scriptural themes. It is well worth note
that here, for the first time, we hear of dramatised martyria,
which take a prominent place in the religious répertoire of the
later Middle Ages. By 'miracles,' it would seem that chiefly
those are to be understood which saints wrought after their
death, when invoked by their faithful worshippers. In any case,
all the miracles produced in the Nicholas plays are of this sort;
and, in France, the application of the word ‘miracle,' as a
theatrical term, continued to be restricted to plays treating of
subjects of this kind only; whereas, in England, it assumed a more
general meaning. Thus, in the statutes of Lichfield cathedral,
c. 1190, mention is made of repraesentatio miraculorum in nocte


## p. 39 (#63) ##############################################

The Vernacular in Medieval Drama
39
Paschae; and bishop Grosseteste, likewise, seems to use the word
in a more general sense, when ordering, in 1244, the suppression
of miracula in the diocese of Lincoln.
The use of the vernacular as the language of religious drama
was not brought about in England by any process analogous to
that observable in continental countries. For the normal develop-
ment of the English language was interrupted by the Norman
conquest, in consequence of which the chief offices in bishoprics
and abbeys were occupied by men of foreign origin. Thus it
happened that the oldest vernacular dramas written in England
belong not to English, but to French, literary history: the play
of Adam and the play of the Resurrection, the oldest two
dramatic poems in the French language, were, according to general
opinion, composed in England in the twelfth century. Only a
very small number of dramatic works and accounts of performances
have been preserved belonging to the long period which begins
with the introduction of the vernacular into medieval drama and
ends at the point at which it had reached its height—that is,
from about 1200 to 1400—in England, as well as in Germany
and France. The material is insufficient for reconstructing the
process of growth, and the historian must needs limit his task
to that of a mere recorder. Later monuments, however, suffice
to indicate how, in this domain too, the native English element
regained its superiority. A remarkable document has been dis-
covered recently at Shrewsbury, which shows how, in English
literature also, the vernacular drama was prepared by the insertion
of vernacular verses in Latin songs. The MS, written in a
northern dialect, is not a complete play, but consists of three
parts written out in full in both English and Latin, with the
respective cues : namely, the part of one of the three Maries at
the tomb, the part of a shepherd at Christ's nativity and the part
of a disciple on the way to Emmaus. The English words para-
phrase the Latin by which they are preceded; but they are not,
like the Latin, provided with musical notes. As the vernacular
found its way into Latin texts, declamation simultaneously took
its place by the side of song, which, till then, had been the only
form in use. Here, we observe a remarkable analogy to the Easter
play of Treves, which represents the same transitional stage in the
history of the German drama.
The earliest purely English drama known to us (if ten Brink's
date be right) was a play on Jacob and Esau, now only
preserved as part of one of the large collections of mysteries of


## p. 40 (#64) ##############################################

40
Religious Drama
The Early
the fifteenth century, the Towneley Mysteries, where it is dis-
tinguished from its surroundings by its short, detached manner
of representing facts, as well as by the simplicity of its versi-
fication (short riming couplets). It is possible that this play,
in its original connection, belonged to a series of prophetical
plays: that is to say, plays in which some of the chief passages from
Old Testament history are selected in chronological order, and
which were produced in the Christmas season, with the intention
of showing forth the birth of Christ as the fulfilment and con-
clusion of the whole process of historical evolution preceding it.
Hereupon, however, the tendency manifested itself to compose
in English, too, legendary narratives of miracles, besides Bible
stories. We met with early instances of this in the period immedi-
ately after the Norman conquest; and the custom was specially
fostered by the increasing cult of the Virgin Mary in the Roman
Catholic church. Ever since the great religious movement of the
eleventh century, we find in all European literatures a multitude
of miraculous stories, which relate how those who devote them-
selves to the service of Mary are aided by her in seasons of
oppression and peril, and how her protection is not denied even
to wrongdoers and criminals, if they but show her the reverence
which is her due. Dramatic handlings of the miracles of Mary
are particularly frequent in French literature, where an example
occurs so far back as the thirteenth century; and, in a MS dating
from the beginning of the fifteenth century, no less than forty
of these plays are preserved. Events which have, originally, nothing
to do with the legend of Mary are here, also, represented in dramatic
form: thus, for instance, the story of Bertha, mother of Charle-
magne, is fitted into this cycle by the single link of the heroine's
losing her way in a wood, where the Mother of God appears to her
and consoles her. Such plays were probably known and popular
in England also, though only one possible specimen of this group is
now extant.