It is noteworthy that, in the pageants which have of late been exhibited in many
English towns, not only has the admonitus loci been emphasised as much as possible-
nowhere with such overpowering effect a8 at Bury St Edmunds, where the actual soene
of the performance was the Abbey gardens—but dialogue and even dramatio action
have formed an integral part of the presentment.
English towns, not only has the admonitus loci been emphasised as much as possible-
nowhere with such overpowering effect a8 at Bury St Edmunds, where the actual soene
of the performance was the Abbey gardens—but dialogue and even dramatio action
have formed an integral part of the presentment.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v05
New York, 1916.
Stephen, Sir Leslie. Shakespeare as a man. (Studies of a Biographer. Ser. ii,
vol. iv.
1902. )
Stopes, C. C. Shakespeare's industry. 1916.
Suddard, S. J. M. Essais de littérature anglaise. Cambridge, 1912.
Keats, Shelley, and Shakespeare. Cambridge, 1912.
Swinburne, A. C. Shakespeare. (Introductory essay to the 3 volume edition of
Shakespeare's works. ) Oxford, 1909.
Symons, A. Studies in two literatures. 1897.
Geikie, Sir Archibald. The birds of Shakespeare. Glasgow, 1916.
Whall, W. B. Shakespeare's sea terms explained. 1910.
$ 9. Onions, O. T. A Shakespeare glossary. Oxford, 1911.
Simpson, P. Shakespearian punctuation. Oxford, 1911.
$10. A book of homage to Shakespeare. Ed. by Gollancz. Oxford, 1916.
Lee, Sir Sidney. A Life of William Shakespeare. Re-written and enlarged
version. Second edition. 1916.
Madden, D. H. Shakespeare and his fellows. 1916.
Masson, D. Shakespeare personally. Ed. by Masson, R. 1914.
Neilson, W. A. and Thorndike, A. H. Facts about Shakespeare. New York,
1913.
Shakespeare's England, an account of the life and manners of his age. 2 vols.
Oxford, 1916.
Stopes, C. C. Shakespeare's environment. 1914.
Thompson, Sir E. M. Shakespeare's hand-writing: a study. Oxford, 1916.
$11. Lang, A. Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown. 1912.
Greenwood, G. G. Is there a Shakespeare problem? 1916.
## p. xviii (#24) ###########################################
## p. 1 (#25) ###############################################
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGINS OF ENGLISH DRAMA
INTRODUCTORY
THE present volume and its successor will be devoted to the
discussion of English drama-a growth which, in the meridian
splendour of its maturity, is without an equal in the history of
literature. Attic drama, in literary art, at all events, the choicest
product of an age from which posterity has never ceased to
derive its serenest conceptions of human culture, was restricted
in its higher creativeness by the brief duration of that age itself.
.
Spanish drama, nearest to English in the exuberance of its
productivity, is, in its greatest period, associated with the decay
of the nation's vigour. French classical drama, in a much larger
measure than that in which the same assertion could be made of
English, was bound by its relations to a royal court, and de-
barred from an intimate union with the national life. English
drama, as, with marvellous rapidity, it rose to the full height of its
literary glories, reflected and partook of the imaginative strength
of an age in which England consciously, nor for a generation only,
assumed her place in the van of nations.
In view of the twofold fact, that English drama was destined
to rank not only among the most glorious but among the most
characteristic of national achievements, and that an English nation
and an English national literature were already in existence before
the Norman conquest, it may seem strange that, with the ex-
ception of certain suggestive features in the church liturgy to
which attention will be directed below, the beginnings of the
growth which we are considering cannot be safely traced beyond
that date. In other words, we are unable to assume the existence
in these islands, before the Norman conquest, of anything recog-
nisable by us as drama or dramatic literature. Our English
ancestors, with whose advent the Roman empire in Britain had
come to an abrupt end, can hardly, except in a few isolated
instances, have been brought into contact with the broken and
E. L. V.
1
CH. 1.
## p. 2 (#26) ###############################################
2 The Origins of English Drama
scattered remnants of the Roman theatre—the strolling mimes
who, after their fashion, may have preserved some ignoble remi-
niscences of the Roman acting drama in the days of its decadence.
And when Christianity—that is to say, Roman Christianity-came
to England, and gradually, more especially through the efforts
of king Alfred, fostered the growth of English literature, the
last literary form which it was likely to introduce or sanction
was that of the drama, the feeder of the theatre. The strange
and shifting relations between the Christian church and the stage
had begun, in the fourth century, with loud anathemas launched
by the one against the other; in the fifth, the whole craft of
actors and entertainers was denounced by an ecclesiastical council;
and, as the empire of the west broke up under the inroads of
the barbarians, histriones and nugatores went forth as homeless
outlaws under the ban of both church and state. If any of these
found their way to England and, as they passed along the high-
ways and byways, displayed their tricks for a crust of bread or a
cup of ale, they were, no doubt, despised and accounted infamous.
Far otherwise was it with the gleeman, who sat among the warriors,
telling in a solemn and religious strain of the great deeds of the
past, and the scop, whose songs had the king and his companions for
an audience, and who, on his travels, found himself everywhere an
honoured guest. Anything less dramatic could hardly be imagined
than the poems or recitations of the Old English singer, and even in
those dialogues which form an interesting part of English literature
before the Norman conquest a dramatic element is only occasion-
ally perceptible--for there could be no greater mistake than to
suppose that a dialogue, be its progress never so vivacious, is,
of necessity, a drama in embryo. A certain species of English
dialogues, however, to which reference is made in the next
chapter, and of which examples are to be found both before and
after the Norman conquest, the estrifs, one of the forms of the Old
French débats, must be allowed to contain dramatic elements,
or the possibilities of dramatic development; and one of these,
The Harrowing of Hell, dealt with a theme afterwards treated
in religious drama (both in an isolated piece and in two of the
collective mysteries). In The Pride of Life, which, in its turn, has
been described as the earliest written text of an English morality,
a contention of this sort, as we learn from the prologue to the frag-
mentary play, was introduced in the shape of a disputation between
body and soul, held at the request of the Blessed Virgin, after the
devils had laid hands on the King of Life's soul, in the struggle
## p. 3 (#27) ###############################################
The Normans and their Minstrels
3
of the King with Death? Other debates of the kind may, like-
wise, have incidentally influenced the early growth of English
drama; but no general connection between it and Old English
literature has been proved.
The Norman conquest brought into England a foreign baron-
age; the high places in church and state were now filled by foreign
occupants; at the altars of many of the churches of the land knelt
foreign priests ; in the cloisters of most of its convents walked
foreign monks. But it also provided with an English 'establish-
ment' many a French or Flemish adventurer of lowly origin or
doubtful past. Moreover, these very Normans, who had been the
hero-adventurers of the western world, who were the combatant
sons of the church, and some of whose most signal successes were
even now only in process of achievement, had begun to enter into
a phase of chivalry in which doughty deeds are done, and difficult
enterprises are carried on, with one eye to a crown of glory and
the other to material profit. Thus, the influence of the Norman
conquest upon English life, where it was something more than
the pressure exercised by overbearing masters, was by no means
altogether ennobling or elevating. The diversions, too, of what
was now the ruling class in England were so mixed in character
that the very names of their purveyors cannot be kept asunder
with precision. The trouvères of Normandy and northern France,
'inventors' of romances about deeds of prowess which they
sang to their own accompaniment on harp or lute or viol, were
frequently called jongleurs (joculatores)—a term so compre-
hensive that it may appropriately be translated by entertainers. '
The third designation, ménestrels or minstrels, which became the
usual term in England, is, of course, only another form of the
Latin ministeriales, servants of the house, implying the attach-
ment of those who bore it to a particular household, whence,
however, they might set forth to exhibit their skill abroad. The
fourth term, gestours (singers of chansons de geste), whom Chaucer
couples with ‘minestrales' as telling tales
6
>
Of romaunces that ben reales
Of popes and of cardinales,
And eke of love-longing,
is, in its original significance, the exact equivalent of trouvères.
It will be shown in the next chapter how, with these singers'
i See the text in Brandi, A. , Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England vor
Shakespeare.
: The Rime of Sire Thopas.
1-2
## p. 4 (#28) ###############################################
4
The Origins of English Drama
6
and 'entertainers' came to be mixed up already in France and in
Normandy, and with them were by the Conquest transplanted to
England, those humbler strollers to whom reference has been
already made, and of whose survival from the days of the Roman
Caesars into those of the Carolings sufficient evidence remains.
There has at all times been a familiarity amounting to a kind of
freemasonry between all branches of the profession’; and Activa
Vita's contemptuous summary in Piers Plowman of the minstrel's
accepted accomplishments includes the widest ‘variety' possible
of resources open to those who live to please. '
Upon the whole, it may safely be asserted that the influence
of these minstrels (using the term in the widest sense permissible)
was not great upon the beginnings of English drama and was
very far from being one of its main sources. On the other hand,
some dramatic touches, reminiscences, traditions-call it what you
will, for of all crafts this is the most tenacious of what appertains
to its 'business'-must have lingered on in the performances
of that lower or more popular species of minstrels who cannot
but have retained some sort of contact with the higher and
more refined as well as more creative class. Thus, though in-
visible to the eye of the closest student, some slender thread of
. continuity may connect the end of the ancient with the beginnings
of the modern, including the English, stage. It was the theatre
which, towards the close of the fifteenth century, in all but the
lowest spheres of their activity, cut the ground from under the feet
of the ‘last minstrels'; yet this very theatre may owe them a debt
of the kind which it is never possible to recover. In England, the
performances of the minstrels cannot be shown to connect them-
selves with the beginnings of any particular dramatic species (as
the jeux of their French confrères connect themselves with the
beginnings of farce, and thus, indirectly, with those of comedy);
but the wandering minstrels with the tread of whose feet the
roads of England were familiar certainly sped the early efforts of
English drama if they did not contribute to them, and, what
is more, they helped to secure its vitality by making and keeping
it popular. In the nomad life of medieval England, of which
we owe an incomparable picture to the genius of Jusserand, the
minstrels were alike omnipresent and indispensable-as news-
bearers, as story-tellers, as makers of mirth; and the rewards
showered upon them, even if they were 'king's minstrels' by
no better right than that by which obscure provincial' playhouses
1 Piers Plowman, Passus XIII.
a
6
## p. 5 (#29) ###############################################
Stray Influence of Classical Drama
5
call themselves "Theatres Royal, probably exhausted the kindly
and charitable impulses of no small a proportion of the com-
munity. As Normans and Englishmen were more and more
blended together, the diversions of the lords became more and more
those of the people, although the latter might be less exacting
as to the quality of the performances produced by the minstrels
for their entertainment. Attempts at suppression as well as at
restriction in the interests of the 'party of order' followed, and were
met, in the Plantagenet period, by satire, by what might almost
be called 'nationalist' ballads, and by 'merry tales' discreditable
to the church-in all of which we shall not err in recognising the
irrepressible voice of the minstrels. But neither their vitality nor
their decay can occupy us in this place; and all that the student
will here be asked to concede is that the vigorous and long-lived
growth of minstrelsy, which undoubtedly derived its origin in part
from the remnants of the ancient theatre, in its turn effectively
helped to prepare the soil for the advent of the modern drama, in
England as elsewhere, and to foster the growth which gradually
sprang up from the seed cast into it. The question still remains :
whence did that seed come ?
Of that which was carried over from classical dramatic litera-
ture, very few grains, in this early period, impregnated the medieval
ground, or even so much as fell by the wayside, now and then pro-
ducing a stray flower. In insular England, more especially, little or
no influence was exercised by the scant dramatic writings of the
earlier Middle Ages which imitated Attic examples. Whatever
may have been the contemporary knowledge of the tragedies and
comedies said to have been modelled on Euripides and Menander
by Apollinaris (who has been held identifiable with a Laodicean
bishop of the later part of the fourth century) the Suffering Christ
(XPLOTÒs Táo xwv), which, after being long attributed to St Gregory
the Nazianzene in the fourth century, is now on sufficient grounds
assigned to a Byzantine writer of the early part of the twelfth',
and which may be described as a religious exercise in the garb
of Euripidean diction, was composed for the closet, and probably
remained unknown to western readers till the sixteenth century.
For students of English literature, the chief interest of this much-
mentioned play lies in the fact that, among many others, its
subject commended itself, for dramatic treatment to the one English
poet capable of addressing himself to it in a spirit corresponding,
in some sense, to the sublimity of the theme. Milton at one time
• Theodore Prodromos, whose monastic name was Hilarion.
## p. 6 (#30) ###############################################
6 6 The Origins of English Drama
a
thought of a drama to be entitled Christus Patiens, on the scene
of the Agony in the Garden. Other attempts seem, in the long
course of the centuries, to have been made to clothe in a dramatic
form borrowed from the ancients the Christian wisdom and morality
which had become the norm of the spiritual life of the west; among
these, the most notable were the Terentian comedies, written in the
tenth century by Hrotsvitha, the Benedictine abbess of Gander.
sheim, in Eastphalian Saxony, for the edification of the inmates
of her convent, where, very probably (though we have no evidence
on the subject), they may have been performed. The moral and
intellectual current of which these high-minded, if not very
brilliant, efforts formed part and which is associated with the
name and reign of Hrotsvitha's kinsman, Otto the Great, carried
its influence beyond the Rhine into French territory. When,
therefore, among the many strangers whom the Norman conquest
brought into England, monks and nuns immigrated in large
numbers and carried on in the new country their old avocation
of trainers of youth, nothing could have been more natural than
that there should have transplanted itself with them the practice
of writing-and perhaps of performing-religious exercises in the
regular dramatic form derived from classical examples, and re-
counting the miraculous acts of holy personages and the miraculous
experiences of holy lives. At the same time, inasmuch as these
compositions were virtually mere hybrids, and were primarily
designed for the use of only a very limited class under very
special direction and discipline, the dramatic element which they
introduced might, at first sight, have seemed likely to prove so
weak and transitory as to be almost negligible. Yet the literary
monastic drama, whenever it first became an acting drama, was
not a thing so entirely away from the world as might be supposed.
In the period which comes into question, monasteries and nun-
neries were not so much retreats from, as centres of, social life
and intellectual intercourse; and suggestions or influences im-
parted by them were not communicated by habitantes in sicco.
From the church in general, and not the least from her monastic
institutions, proceeded the main literary impulses felt in England
for several centuries after the Norman conquest; Layamon was
a priest, Ormin or Orm a monk, not to speak of the author or
authors of Piers Plowman. When, half a century or so after
the Conquest, pupils of convent schools in England represented
religious plays in very much the same fashion as that in which
the abbess Hrotsvitha’s scholars may have performed her Terentian
## p. 7 (#31) ###############################################
Popular Survivals
7
comedies at Gandersheim, some knowledge of these performances
must have rapidly spread beyond the cloister, and, we may rest
assured, have been eagerly conveyed to the ears of all and sundry
by strolling minstrels, if by no other agents. Beginning with
the play in honour of St Catharine, acted (in what language is
not known) at Dunstable about the year 1110 by scholars of the
Norman Geoffrey, afterwards bishop of St Albans, and extending
through the series of 'miracles of saints and passions of holy
martyrs,' stated by William Fitzstephen to have been produced
between 1170 and 1182, these saints' plays, among which must be
reckoned one of the extant plays of Hilarius—very probably
a native of England—continued to appear and reappear in this
country, where, however, they cannot be said to have flourished
till the middle of the fifteenth century. Long before this, they
had begun to coalesce with a dramatic growth of very different
strength; and it is because of its separate origin, rather than
because it can be said to have run either a vigorous or a distinct
course of its own, that reference has been made in this introductory
section to what can only with hesitation be described as the
English monastic literary drama? .
The roots of such a growth as the English drama lay, and must
have lain, deeper than in the imported remnants of more or less
alien civilisations which interwove their fibres with the national
life. Of that life itself, religious beliefs and conceptions were of
the very essence, though among these a considerable proportion
were survivals of earlier periods, into which Christianity had not
entered as a conquering, and, at times, a destructive, force. In the
earliest of the succeeding chapters it will be shown in what
directions the study of folk-lore has thrown light on the influence of
these survivals upon the growth of the drama in England. By
far the most important process in the present connection is the
gradual conversion of popular festivals, ancient or even primitive
in origin, with their traditional ritual of dance and song, into
plays; though it is their action, rather than its vocal accompani-
ment, which, in the case of these festivals, has exercised any
significant influence on English drama. Elements of the pagan
festivals in question are discoverable even in feasts whose origin
can be directly traced to the services of the Christian church,
but which grew into universally recognised occasions of fun and
licence, when no extravagance was accounted out of place or
1 As to saints' plays, or 'miracles' (according to the French use of the term), see
chap. 111 below, and Schelling, F. E. , Elizabethan Drama, vol. I, pp. 11, 12.
1
## p. 8 (#32) ###############################################
8
The Origins
of
of English Drama
season by 'laughter, holding both his sides. ' Such, above all, was
the feast of Fools, associated, in the first instance, with the ritual
of the feast of the Circumcision (New Year's eve and day), and
then developed into something very like the Saturnalia, or New
Year's festival of pagan Rome. It survived in England till
near the close of the fourteenth century, though, as early as the
thirteenth, it had attracted the censures of the spirit of reform
in the austere person of bishop Grosseteste. Still more pro-
tracted was the life in England of the kindred feast of Innocents,
which cannot be shown to have had any integral connection with
the ritual of Innocents' Day, but which was soon appended to it
as suiting the day on which the Boy bishop, elected by his fellow
choir-boys on the feast of St Nicholas, took office. The topsy-
turvydom of this celebration, to which there are other parallels
(as late as 1566 a 'Christmas Abbess' was elected by the nuns
at Carrow), was naturally of a more harmless kind and more
amenable to discipline, and, in consequence, less provocative of
prohibitions. Dramatic performances became a regular accom-
paniment of this festival, and, though the French or Anglo-Norman
St Nicholas plays which have been preserved (including one by
Hilarius) cannot be regarded as examples of the literary monastic
drama belonging to our literature, it may safely be concluded
that out of these performances grew those of the chapel boys and
schoolboys to which, as developed in the Elizabethan age, a special
chapter is devoted in the next volume. The general influence
of these festivals and their associations must have tended to
foster the element of humour and satire—the comic element-
which was to assert itself with enduring success in the course of
the growth of the religious, and, later, in that of the regular,
drama in England. Even at court, the authority of the Christmas
lord' or lord of Misrule survived the appointment of a per-
manent official with the title of master of the revels (1545),
and a conflict between the real and the mock authority naturally
ensued?
It is hardly necessary, before reaching the main root of the
growth which we are discussing, to point out that, by the side of,
or in connection with, the festival plays to which reference has
See Schelling, u. 8. , vol. I, p. 47; and cf. chaps. III and iv of Gayley's Plays of
our Forefathers for an admirable account of what he describes as the Invasion of the
Humorous. ' The feast of Asses, which is there described with particular gusto on the
basis of Chambers's account of the Beauvais MS discovered by him, does not appear to
have been known in England.
Schelling, vol. I, p. 76.
2
## p. 9 (#33) ###############################################
>
Pageants
9
been made, the general favour bestowed in England as well as else-
where, during the later Middle Ages, upon processional exhibitions
and moving shows of various kinds, devoid of either action or
dialogue, cannot be left out of account among the elements of
popular life which helped to facilitate the growth of the drama.
Notice will be taken below of the processional solemnities which
accompanied the celebration of the Corpus Christi festival, and
which certainly had their effect upon the pageants, as the par-
ticular religious plays afterwards collected into cycles were very
commonly called? . In later times, however, the term 'pageant'
came to be more generally employed in the sense which, at all
events till our own days, has usually attached to it-namely, a
show or exhibition in which costume, with its accessories, including,
sometimes, the suggestion of scenery, plays the principal part,
music lending its frequent aid, words being, at the most, used
in the way of illustration or introduction? Pageants, in this
narrower sense of the term, were often called 'ridings'; and in
London, as is well known, this kind of exhibition secured a
popularity which has survived the lapse of many centuries. The
Norman conquest, supposed to have been largely responsible for
bringing horsemanship into permanent popular favour in England,
certainly introduced the refining influences of chivalry into these
occasions of contact between court and people; they continued
to be in favour throughout the whole of the Plantagenet, and
down into the Tudor, period; and it is needless to specify
examples of 'ridings in Chepe' or along the green Strand to
Westminster by kings, queens and other royalties, or by the lord
mayor, who, from 1457 onwards, substituted for his 'annual riding'
a procession still more characteristic of London and the true
source of her wealth, by water. At the same time, particular
note should be taken of the measure in which these ridings, by
the introduction of characters of national historical interest - such
1 The term was applied to the plays even when regarded as literary productions :
thus, in the time of Henry VI, we hear of & ' Pageant of the Holy Trinity' painted with
gold_i. e. an illuminated MS of some dramatic piece in the nature of a mystery or
miracle-play.
?
It is noteworthy that, in the pageants which have of late been exhibited in many
English towns, not only has the admonitus loci been emphasised as much as possible-
nowhere with such overpowering effect a8 at Bury St Edmunds, where the actual soene
of the performance was the Abbey gardens—but dialogue and even dramatio action
have formed an integral part of the presentment. In several instances, these modern
pageants have fully met their purpose, and, in any case, there is no reason for cavilling
at a perfectly legitimate development, except in so far as to point out that all moderni.
sations of an artistic species are apt to produce, for better or for worse, something
quite different from their supposed prototype in kind as well as in degree.
:
## p. 10 (#34) ##############################################
IO The Origins of English Drama
6
6
as St Edmund and king Arthur in the 'riding against Queen
Margaret' at Coventry in 1445-fostered the patriotic sentiment
to which the later chronicle histories made a direct appeal,
cooperating with the influences of ballad literature and general
popular tradition! 'Disguisings' was a still more general term,
applied to all processional and other shows of the kind dependent
on costume and its appurtenances, without any approach to
dramatic action, but, at least in Tudor times, accompanied
by dancing. The old term 'mummings,' which, at one time, was
applied to the unexpected appearance of masked and disguised
revellers, who invited the company to dance, was also used more
widely in much the same sense as 'disguisings,' though the account
of the ‘mummers' plays' and their origin which will be found
in the next chapter lends colour to Collier's assertion that a
‘mumming' was properly a dumb show as well as an assumption
of disguise. The development of these amusements into a form
of composition, the masque, a name first heard in the reign of
Henry VIII-the Italian origin of the species did not prevent it
from becoming one of the glories of English literature, although
always standing apart from the main growth of the English drama
—will be separately treated in a later chapter of this work.
Meanwhile, 'disguisings' of one sort or another, besides serving
to foster the love for the assumption of character-for being some-
one else'-had helped, as we shall see, to build a bridge by which
players and plays passed into the sunshine of court favour, and,
under the influence of the renascence and humanistic learning,
encouraged the growth of a species of the religious drama in
which the didactic element, clothed in a more or less conven-
tional series of abstract conceptions, gradually asserted its
predominance.
It was not, however, from half fortuitous, half barren survivals,
or from exhibitions primarily designed to gratify the eye, that a
drama could spring which was not only to mirror, but to form part
of, the national life, and more and more so as that life advanced
in vigour, in intensity and in self-consciousness. As will be shown
in the chapter devoted to the discussion of this all-important
aspect of the beginnings of English drama and of English
dramatic literature, it was from the services of the Christian
church of the Roman obedience that, in England as elsewhere
in Europe, the medieval religious drama directly took its origin;
i On this head see chap. 1 ("Forerunners of the Chronicle Play ') of Schelling, F E. ,
The English Chronicle Play, New York, 1902.
6
## p. 11 (#35) ##############################################
The Liturgical Drama
II
and it was thus that the growth with a survey of which down
to the days of the puritan revolution these volumes are to be
occupied actually began. How could it have been otherwise ?
On the one hand, those services, culminating in that of the mass,
display their symbolical design by a variety of processes illustrating
in turn all the dogmas which the church proclaims as possessed of
commanding importance. On the other, the very circumstance
that her worship was conducted according to one rule, in one
ecclesiastical tongue accepted by all nations, shows how the main
effect of that worship lay not in its words but in its symbols 1.
The history of the religious drama in England, if in it be
included a survey of the adjuncts to the church liturgy in the
form of alternating song and visible action, goes back to a period
before the Norman conquest. Out of the mystical liturgy, the
liturgical mystery grows by a process alike inevitable and un-
forced, of which sufficient illustrations will be given-beginning
with the Quem quaeritis of the Easter morning Mass. In England,
however, we meet with no examples proper of tropes, by the inter-
polation of which in the offices of the church the liturgical mystery
had advanced beyond its earliest stage, or what might be called
that of mere ornamentation—such as the Provençal production of
The Foolish Virgins, and The Raising of Lazarus, written by
Hilarius in Latin with occasional French refrains. These and
other examples seem to show that, in the century succeeding that
of the Norman conquest, the process of the emancipation of the
dramatic mystery from the liturgy had already begun in France,
where, in the eleventh century, we know that the former had been
considered an integral part of the latter. To the twelfth century
belongs the famous Norman-French-perhaps Anglo-Norman-
play of Adam, which may very possibly have grown out of a
processional representation of the prophets, but which seems
(for the later portion of it is lost) to have aimed at dramatic
representation of the entire Scriptural story, after the manner of
the French and English collective mysteries of later date. We
may safely conclude that the Norman conquest, or the period
which followed immediately upon it, introduced into England as
a virtually ready-made growth the religious performance or ex-
hibition which could and did edify the devout, without actually
1 Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, vol. 11, p. 397.
a Gayley, C. M. , Plays of our Forefathers, p. 27. Cf. Schofield, W. H. , English
Literature from the Norman Conquest to Charles, p. 136, where Adam, which consisted
of three parts, the Fall, the Death of Abel, and the Prophecies of Christianity-is
described as “the earliest extant mystery in the vulgar tongue. '
## p. 12 (#36) ##############################################
I 2 The Origins of English Drama
forming part of the religious exercises incumbent upon them. At
the same time, the English mystery-play did not fail to reveal its
liturgical origin by such stage directions as Tunc cantabit angelus
in the Chester Ascensio, or by the disquisitions of the Chester
Expositor and the Coventry Contemplacio, recalling the priest's
elucidatory comment! These plays were acted either within the
church walls, or on a scaffold immediately outside them, the
performers being no doubt, in the first instance and ordinarily,
ecclesiastics or the pupils of ecclesiastics. Gradually, the pro-
fessional secular entertainers, who, as we saw, were unlikely to
forego such a chance of attracting the public, sought to compete
with the clerics and to interfere with their monopoly; in the
middle of the thirteenth century, it was certainly no unheard-of
thing for secular players to solicit the favour of audiences-surely
by means of plays in the vernacular; in 1258, they were forbidden
to give such performances in the monasteries of the land. Either
this prohibition was effectual, or the practice never became quite
common; for, a century and a half later, Lydgate, though in some
of the verses he wrote to accompany the mummings of his age he
showed a strong dramatic instinct? , makes no mention of players
in his poem Danse Macabre, while among the representatives
of divers classes of men he introduces minstrels and 'tragitours'
(i. e. jugglers).
Thus, then, it seems clear that what dramatic performances
were to be seen in England during the latter part of the eleventh,
the twelfth and the greater part of the thirteenth centuries, were
mainly in the hands of the clergy. Attempts were not wanting,
even in this early period, to free from exclusive clerical control a
species of entertainment the popularity of which was continually
on the increase; and there doubtless were from the first, as there
certainly were later, voices in the church itself which reprobated
loudly and authoritatively this method of attracting the public
to the church door or its vicinity. 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.
Stephen, Sir Leslie. Shakespeare as a man. (Studies of a Biographer. Ser. ii,
vol. iv.
1902. )
Stopes, C. C. Shakespeare's industry. 1916.
Suddard, S. J. M. Essais de littérature anglaise. Cambridge, 1912.
Keats, Shelley, and Shakespeare. Cambridge, 1912.
Swinburne, A. C. Shakespeare. (Introductory essay to the 3 volume edition of
Shakespeare's works. ) Oxford, 1909.
Symons, A. Studies in two literatures. 1897.
Geikie, Sir Archibald. The birds of Shakespeare. Glasgow, 1916.
Whall, W. B. Shakespeare's sea terms explained. 1910.
$ 9. Onions, O. T. A Shakespeare glossary. Oxford, 1911.
Simpson, P. Shakespearian punctuation. Oxford, 1911.
$10. A book of homage to Shakespeare. Ed. by Gollancz. Oxford, 1916.
Lee, Sir Sidney. A Life of William Shakespeare. Re-written and enlarged
version. Second edition. 1916.
Madden, D. H. Shakespeare and his fellows. 1916.
Masson, D. Shakespeare personally. Ed. by Masson, R. 1914.
Neilson, W. A. and Thorndike, A. H. Facts about Shakespeare. New York,
1913.
Shakespeare's England, an account of the life and manners of his age. 2 vols.
Oxford, 1916.
Stopes, C. C. Shakespeare's environment. 1914.
Thompson, Sir E. M. Shakespeare's hand-writing: a study. Oxford, 1916.
$11. Lang, A. Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown. 1912.
Greenwood, G. G. Is there a Shakespeare problem? 1916.
## p. xviii (#24) ###########################################
## p. 1 (#25) ###############################################
CHAPTER I
THE ORIGINS OF ENGLISH DRAMA
INTRODUCTORY
THE present volume and its successor will be devoted to the
discussion of English drama-a growth which, in the meridian
splendour of its maturity, is without an equal in the history of
literature. Attic drama, in literary art, at all events, the choicest
product of an age from which posterity has never ceased to
derive its serenest conceptions of human culture, was restricted
in its higher creativeness by the brief duration of that age itself.
.
Spanish drama, nearest to English in the exuberance of its
productivity, is, in its greatest period, associated with the decay
of the nation's vigour. French classical drama, in a much larger
measure than that in which the same assertion could be made of
English, was bound by its relations to a royal court, and de-
barred from an intimate union with the national life. English
drama, as, with marvellous rapidity, it rose to the full height of its
literary glories, reflected and partook of the imaginative strength
of an age in which England consciously, nor for a generation only,
assumed her place in the van of nations.
In view of the twofold fact, that English drama was destined
to rank not only among the most glorious but among the most
characteristic of national achievements, and that an English nation
and an English national literature were already in existence before
the Norman conquest, it may seem strange that, with the ex-
ception of certain suggestive features in the church liturgy to
which attention will be directed below, the beginnings of the
growth which we are considering cannot be safely traced beyond
that date. In other words, we are unable to assume the existence
in these islands, before the Norman conquest, of anything recog-
nisable by us as drama or dramatic literature. Our English
ancestors, with whose advent the Roman empire in Britain had
come to an abrupt end, can hardly, except in a few isolated
instances, have been brought into contact with the broken and
E. L. V.
1
CH. 1.
## p. 2 (#26) ###############################################
2 The Origins of English Drama
scattered remnants of the Roman theatre—the strolling mimes
who, after their fashion, may have preserved some ignoble remi-
niscences of the Roman acting drama in the days of its decadence.
And when Christianity—that is to say, Roman Christianity-came
to England, and gradually, more especially through the efforts
of king Alfred, fostered the growth of English literature, the
last literary form which it was likely to introduce or sanction
was that of the drama, the feeder of the theatre. The strange
and shifting relations between the Christian church and the stage
had begun, in the fourth century, with loud anathemas launched
by the one against the other; in the fifth, the whole craft of
actors and entertainers was denounced by an ecclesiastical council;
and, as the empire of the west broke up under the inroads of
the barbarians, histriones and nugatores went forth as homeless
outlaws under the ban of both church and state. If any of these
found their way to England and, as they passed along the high-
ways and byways, displayed their tricks for a crust of bread or a
cup of ale, they were, no doubt, despised and accounted infamous.
Far otherwise was it with the gleeman, who sat among the warriors,
telling in a solemn and religious strain of the great deeds of the
past, and the scop, whose songs had the king and his companions for
an audience, and who, on his travels, found himself everywhere an
honoured guest. Anything less dramatic could hardly be imagined
than the poems or recitations of the Old English singer, and even in
those dialogues which form an interesting part of English literature
before the Norman conquest a dramatic element is only occasion-
ally perceptible--for there could be no greater mistake than to
suppose that a dialogue, be its progress never so vivacious, is,
of necessity, a drama in embryo. A certain species of English
dialogues, however, to which reference is made in the next
chapter, and of which examples are to be found both before and
after the Norman conquest, the estrifs, one of the forms of the Old
French débats, must be allowed to contain dramatic elements,
or the possibilities of dramatic development; and one of these,
The Harrowing of Hell, dealt with a theme afterwards treated
in religious drama (both in an isolated piece and in two of the
collective mysteries). In The Pride of Life, which, in its turn, has
been described as the earliest written text of an English morality,
a contention of this sort, as we learn from the prologue to the frag-
mentary play, was introduced in the shape of a disputation between
body and soul, held at the request of the Blessed Virgin, after the
devils had laid hands on the King of Life's soul, in the struggle
## p. 3 (#27) ###############################################
The Normans and their Minstrels
3
of the King with Death? Other debates of the kind may, like-
wise, have incidentally influenced the early growth of English
drama; but no general connection between it and Old English
literature has been proved.
The Norman conquest brought into England a foreign baron-
age; the high places in church and state were now filled by foreign
occupants; at the altars of many of the churches of the land knelt
foreign priests ; in the cloisters of most of its convents walked
foreign monks. But it also provided with an English 'establish-
ment' many a French or Flemish adventurer of lowly origin or
doubtful past. Moreover, these very Normans, who had been the
hero-adventurers of the western world, who were the combatant
sons of the church, and some of whose most signal successes were
even now only in process of achievement, had begun to enter into
a phase of chivalry in which doughty deeds are done, and difficult
enterprises are carried on, with one eye to a crown of glory and
the other to material profit. Thus, the influence of the Norman
conquest upon English life, where it was something more than
the pressure exercised by overbearing masters, was by no means
altogether ennobling or elevating. The diversions, too, of what
was now the ruling class in England were so mixed in character
that the very names of their purveyors cannot be kept asunder
with precision. The trouvères of Normandy and northern France,
'inventors' of romances about deeds of prowess which they
sang to their own accompaniment on harp or lute or viol, were
frequently called jongleurs (joculatores)—a term so compre-
hensive that it may appropriately be translated by entertainers. '
The third designation, ménestrels or minstrels, which became the
usual term in England, is, of course, only another form of the
Latin ministeriales, servants of the house, implying the attach-
ment of those who bore it to a particular household, whence,
however, they might set forth to exhibit their skill abroad. The
fourth term, gestours (singers of chansons de geste), whom Chaucer
couples with ‘minestrales' as telling tales
6
>
Of romaunces that ben reales
Of popes and of cardinales,
And eke of love-longing,
is, in its original significance, the exact equivalent of trouvères.
It will be shown in the next chapter how, with these singers'
i See the text in Brandi, A. , Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England vor
Shakespeare.
: The Rime of Sire Thopas.
1-2
## p. 4 (#28) ###############################################
4
The Origins of English Drama
6
and 'entertainers' came to be mixed up already in France and in
Normandy, and with them were by the Conquest transplanted to
England, those humbler strollers to whom reference has been
already made, and of whose survival from the days of the Roman
Caesars into those of the Carolings sufficient evidence remains.
There has at all times been a familiarity amounting to a kind of
freemasonry between all branches of the profession’; and Activa
Vita's contemptuous summary in Piers Plowman of the minstrel's
accepted accomplishments includes the widest ‘variety' possible
of resources open to those who live to please. '
Upon the whole, it may safely be asserted that the influence
of these minstrels (using the term in the widest sense permissible)
was not great upon the beginnings of English drama and was
very far from being one of its main sources. On the other hand,
some dramatic touches, reminiscences, traditions-call it what you
will, for of all crafts this is the most tenacious of what appertains
to its 'business'-must have lingered on in the performances
of that lower or more popular species of minstrels who cannot
but have retained some sort of contact with the higher and
more refined as well as more creative class. Thus, though in-
visible to the eye of the closest student, some slender thread of
. continuity may connect the end of the ancient with the beginnings
of the modern, including the English, stage. It was the theatre
which, towards the close of the fifteenth century, in all but the
lowest spheres of their activity, cut the ground from under the feet
of the ‘last minstrels'; yet this very theatre may owe them a debt
of the kind which it is never possible to recover. In England, the
performances of the minstrels cannot be shown to connect them-
selves with the beginnings of any particular dramatic species (as
the jeux of their French confrères connect themselves with the
beginnings of farce, and thus, indirectly, with those of comedy);
but the wandering minstrels with the tread of whose feet the
roads of England were familiar certainly sped the early efforts of
English drama if they did not contribute to them, and, what
is more, they helped to secure its vitality by making and keeping
it popular. In the nomad life of medieval England, of which
we owe an incomparable picture to the genius of Jusserand, the
minstrels were alike omnipresent and indispensable-as news-
bearers, as story-tellers, as makers of mirth; and the rewards
showered upon them, even if they were 'king's minstrels' by
no better right than that by which obscure provincial' playhouses
1 Piers Plowman, Passus XIII.
a
6
## p. 5 (#29) ###############################################
Stray Influence of Classical Drama
5
call themselves "Theatres Royal, probably exhausted the kindly
and charitable impulses of no small a proportion of the com-
munity. As Normans and Englishmen were more and more
blended together, the diversions of the lords became more and more
those of the people, although the latter might be less exacting
as to the quality of the performances produced by the minstrels
for their entertainment. Attempts at suppression as well as at
restriction in the interests of the 'party of order' followed, and were
met, in the Plantagenet period, by satire, by what might almost
be called 'nationalist' ballads, and by 'merry tales' discreditable
to the church-in all of which we shall not err in recognising the
irrepressible voice of the minstrels. But neither their vitality nor
their decay can occupy us in this place; and all that the student
will here be asked to concede is that the vigorous and long-lived
growth of minstrelsy, which undoubtedly derived its origin in part
from the remnants of the ancient theatre, in its turn effectively
helped to prepare the soil for the advent of the modern drama, in
England as elsewhere, and to foster the growth which gradually
sprang up from the seed cast into it. The question still remains :
whence did that seed come ?
Of that which was carried over from classical dramatic litera-
ture, very few grains, in this early period, impregnated the medieval
ground, or even so much as fell by the wayside, now and then pro-
ducing a stray flower. In insular England, more especially, little or
no influence was exercised by the scant dramatic writings of the
earlier Middle Ages which imitated Attic examples. Whatever
may have been the contemporary knowledge of the tragedies and
comedies said to have been modelled on Euripides and Menander
by Apollinaris (who has been held identifiable with a Laodicean
bishop of the later part of the fourth century) the Suffering Christ
(XPLOTÒs Táo xwv), which, after being long attributed to St Gregory
the Nazianzene in the fourth century, is now on sufficient grounds
assigned to a Byzantine writer of the early part of the twelfth',
and which may be described as a religious exercise in the garb
of Euripidean diction, was composed for the closet, and probably
remained unknown to western readers till the sixteenth century.
For students of English literature, the chief interest of this much-
mentioned play lies in the fact that, among many others, its
subject commended itself, for dramatic treatment to the one English
poet capable of addressing himself to it in a spirit corresponding,
in some sense, to the sublimity of the theme. Milton at one time
• Theodore Prodromos, whose monastic name was Hilarion.
## p. 6 (#30) ###############################################
6 6 The Origins of English Drama
a
thought of a drama to be entitled Christus Patiens, on the scene
of the Agony in the Garden. Other attempts seem, in the long
course of the centuries, to have been made to clothe in a dramatic
form borrowed from the ancients the Christian wisdom and morality
which had become the norm of the spiritual life of the west; among
these, the most notable were the Terentian comedies, written in the
tenth century by Hrotsvitha, the Benedictine abbess of Gander.
sheim, in Eastphalian Saxony, for the edification of the inmates
of her convent, where, very probably (though we have no evidence
on the subject), they may have been performed. The moral and
intellectual current of which these high-minded, if not very
brilliant, efforts formed part and which is associated with the
name and reign of Hrotsvitha's kinsman, Otto the Great, carried
its influence beyond the Rhine into French territory. When,
therefore, among the many strangers whom the Norman conquest
brought into England, monks and nuns immigrated in large
numbers and carried on in the new country their old avocation
of trainers of youth, nothing could have been more natural than
that there should have transplanted itself with them the practice
of writing-and perhaps of performing-religious exercises in the
regular dramatic form derived from classical examples, and re-
counting the miraculous acts of holy personages and the miraculous
experiences of holy lives. At the same time, inasmuch as these
compositions were virtually mere hybrids, and were primarily
designed for the use of only a very limited class under very
special direction and discipline, the dramatic element which they
introduced might, at first sight, have seemed likely to prove so
weak and transitory as to be almost negligible. Yet the literary
monastic drama, whenever it first became an acting drama, was
not a thing so entirely away from the world as might be supposed.
In the period which comes into question, monasteries and nun-
neries were not so much retreats from, as centres of, social life
and intellectual intercourse; and suggestions or influences im-
parted by them were not communicated by habitantes in sicco.
From the church in general, and not the least from her monastic
institutions, proceeded the main literary impulses felt in England
for several centuries after the Norman conquest; Layamon was
a priest, Ormin or Orm a monk, not to speak of the author or
authors of Piers Plowman. When, half a century or so after
the Conquest, pupils of convent schools in England represented
religious plays in very much the same fashion as that in which
the abbess Hrotsvitha’s scholars may have performed her Terentian
## p. 7 (#31) ###############################################
Popular Survivals
7
comedies at Gandersheim, some knowledge of these performances
must have rapidly spread beyond the cloister, and, we may rest
assured, have been eagerly conveyed to the ears of all and sundry
by strolling minstrels, if by no other agents. Beginning with
the play in honour of St Catharine, acted (in what language is
not known) at Dunstable about the year 1110 by scholars of the
Norman Geoffrey, afterwards bishop of St Albans, and extending
through the series of 'miracles of saints and passions of holy
martyrs,' stated by William Fitzstephen to have been produced
between 1170 and 1182, these saints' plays, among which must be
reckoned one of the extant plays of Hilarius—very probably
a native of England—continued to appear and reappear in this
country, where, however, they cannot be said to have flourished
till the middle of the fifteenth century. Long before this, they
had begun to coalesce with a dramatic growth of very different
strength; and it is because of its separate origin, rather than
because it can be said to have run either a vigorous or a distinct
course of its own, that reference has been made in this introductory
section to what can only with hesitation be described as the
English monastic literary drama? .
The roots of such a growth as the English drama lay, and must
have lain, deeper than in the imported remnants of more or less
alien civilisations which interwove their fibres with the national
life. Of that life itself, religious beliefs and conceptions were of
the very essence, though among these a considerable proportion
were survivals of earlier periods, into which Christianity had not
entered as a conquering, and, at times, a destructive, force. In the
earliest of the succeeding chapters it will be shown in what
directions the study of folk-lore has thrown light on the influence of
these survivals upon the growth of the drama in England. By
far the most important process in the present connection is the
gradual conversion of popular festivals, ancient or even primitive
in origin, with their traditional ritual of dance and song, into
plays; though it is their action, rather than its vocal accompani-
ment, which, in the case of these festivals, has exercised any
significant influence on English drama. Elements of the pagan
festivals in question are discoverable even in feasts whose origin
can be directly traced to the services of the Christian church,
but which grew into universally recognised occasions of fun and
licence, when no extravagance was accounted out of place or
1 As to saints' plays, or 'miracles' (according to the French use of the term), see
chap. 111 below, and Schelling, F. E. , Elizabethan Drama, vol. I, pp. 11, 12.
1
## p. 8 (#32) ###############################################
8
The Origins
of
of English Drama
season by 'laughter, holding both his sides. ' Such, above all, was
the feast of Fools, associated, in the first instance, with the ritual
of the feast of the Circumcision (New Year's eve and day), and
then developed into something very like the Saturnalia, or New
Year's festival of pagan Rome. It survived in England till
near the close of the fourteenth century, though, as early as the
thirteenth, it had attracted the censures of the spirit of reform
in the austere person of bishop Grosseteste. Still more pro-
tracted was the life in England of the kindred feast of Innocents,
which cannot be shown to have had any integral connection with
the ritual of Innocents' Day, but which was soon appended to it
as suiting the day on which the Boy bishop, elected by his fellow
choir-boys on the feast of St Nicholas, took office. The topsy-
turvydom of this celebration, to which there are other parallels
(as late as 1566 a 'Christmas Abbess' was elected by the nuns
at Carrow), was naturally of a more harmless kind and more
amenable to discipline, and, in consequence, less provocative of
prohibitions. Dramatic performances became a regular accom-
paniment of this festival, and, though the French or Anglo-Norman
St Nicholas plays which have been preserved (including one by
Hilarius) cannot be regarded as examples of the literary monastic
drama belonging to our literature, it may safely be concluded
that out of these performances grew those of the chapel boys and
schoolboys to which, as developed in the Elizabethan age, a special
chapter is devoted in the next volume. The general influence
of these festivals and their associations must have tended to
foster the element of humour and satire—the comic element-
which was to assert itself with enduring success in the course of
the growth of the religious, and, later, in that of the regular,
drama in England. Even at court, the authority of the Christmas
lord' or lord of Misrule survived the appointment of a per-
manent official with the title of master of the revels (1545),
and a conflict between the real and the mock authority naturally
ensued?
It is hardly necessary, before reaching the main root of the
growth which we are discussing, to point out that, by the side of,
or in connection with, the festival plays to which reference has
See Schelling, u. 8. , vol. I, p. 47; and cf. chaps. III and iv of Gayley's Plays of
our Forefathers for an admirable account of what he describes as the Invasion of the
Humorous. ' The feast of Asses, which is there described with particular gusto on the
basis of Chambers's account of the Beauvais MS discovered by him, does not appear to
have been known in England.
Schelling, vol. I, p. 76.
2
## p. 9 (#33) ###############################################
>
Pageants
9
been made, the general favour bestowed in England as well as else-
where, during the later Middle Ages, upon processional exhibitions
and moving shows of various kinds, devoid of either action or
dialogue, cannot be left out of account among the elements of
popular life which helped to facilitate the growth of the drama.
Notice will be taken below of the processional solemnities which
accompanied the celebration of the Corpus Christi festival, and
which certainly had their effect upon the pageants, as the par-
ticular religious plays afterwards collected into cycles were very
commonly called? . In later times, however, the term 'pageant'
came to be more generally employed in the sense which, at all
events till our own days, has usually attached to it-namely, a
show or exhibition in which costume, with its accessories, including,
sometimes, the suggestion of scenery, plays the principal part,
music lending its frequent aid, words being, at the most, used
in the way of illustration or introduction? Pageants, in this
narrower sense of the term, were often called 'ridings'; and in
London, as is well known, this kind of exhibition secured a
popularity which has survived the lapse of many centuries. The
Norman conquest, supposed to have been largely responsible for
bringing horsemanship into permanent popular favour in England,
certainly introduced the refining influences of chivalry into these
occasions of contact between court and people; they continued
to be in favour throughout the whole of the Plantagenet, and
down into the Tudor, period; and it is needless to specify
examples of 'ridings in Chepe' or along the green Strand to
Westminster by kings, queens and other royalties, or by the lord
mayor, who, from 1457 onwards, substituted for his 'annual riding'
a procession still more characteristic of London and the true
source of her wealth, by water. At the same time, particular
note should be taken of the measure in which these ridings, by
the introduction of characters of national historical interest - such
1 The term was applied to the plays even when regarded as literary productions :
thus, in the time of Henry VI, we hear of & ' Pageant of the Holy Trinity' painted with
gold_i. e. an illuminated MS of some dramatic piece in the nature of a mystery or
miracle-play.
?
It is noteworthy that, in the pageants which have of late been exhibited in many
English towns, not only has the admonitus loci been emphasised as much as possible-
nowhere with such overpowering effect a8 at Bury St Edmunds, where the actual soene
of the performance was the Abbey gardens—but dialogue and even dramatio action
have formed an integral part of the presentment. In several instances, these modern
pageants have fully met their purpose, and, in any case, there is no reason for cavilling
at a perfectly legitimate development, except in so far as to point out that all moderni.
sations of an artistic species are apt to produce, for better or for worse, something
quite different from their supposed prototype in kind as well as in degree.
:
## p. 10 (#34) ##############################################
IO The Origins of English Drama
6
6
as St Edmund and king Arthur in the 'riding against Queen
Margaret' at Coventry in 1445-fostered the patriotic sentiment
to which the later chronicle histories made a direct appeal,
cooperating with the influences of ballad literature and general
popular tradition! 'Disguisings' was a still more general term,
applied to all processional and other shows of the kind dependent
on costume and its appurtenances, without any approach to
dramatic action, but, at least in Tudor times, accompanied
by dancing. The old term 'mummings,' which, at one time, was
applied to the unexpected appearance of masked and disguised
revellers, who invited the company to dance, was also used more
widely in much the same sense as 'disguisings,' though the account
of the ‘mummers' plays' and their origin which will be found
in the next chapter lends colour to Collier's assertion that a
‘mumming' was properly a dumb show as well as an assumption
of disguise. The development of these amusements into a form
of composition, the masque, a name first heard in the reign of
Henry VIII-the Italian origin of the species did not prevent it
from becoming one of the glories of English literature, although
always standing apart from the main growth of the English drama
—will be separately treated in a later chapter of this work.
Meanwhile, 'disguisings' of one sort or another, besides serving
to foster the love for the assumption of character-for being some-
one else'-had helped, as we shall see, to build a bridge by which
players and plays passed into the sunshine of court favour, and,
under the influence of the renascence and humanistic learning,
encouraged the growth of a species of the religious drama in
which the didactic element, clothed in a more or less conven-
tional series of abstract conceptions, gradually asserted its
predominance.
It was not, however, from half fortuitous, half barren survivals,
or from exhibitions primarily designed to gratify the eye, that a
drama could spring which was not only to mirror, but to form part
of, the national life, and more and more so as that life advanced
in vigour, in intensity and in self-consciousness. As will be shown
in the chapter devoted to the discussion of this all-important
aspect of the beginnings of English drama and of English
dramatic literature, it was from the services of the Christian
church of the Roman obedience that, in England as elsewhere
in Europe, the medieval religious drama directly took its origin;
i On this head see chap. 1 ("Forerunners of the Chronicle Play ') of Schelling, F E. ,
The English Chronicle Play, New York, 1902.
6
## p. 11 (#35) ##############################################
The Liturgical Drama
II
and it was thus that the growth with a survey of which down
to the days of the puritan revolution these volumes are to be
occupied actually began. How could it have been otherwise ?
On the one hand, those services, culminating in that of the mass,
display their symbolical design by a variety of processes illustrating
in turn all the dogmas which the church proclaims as possessed of
commanding importance. On the other, the very circumstance
that her worship was conducted according to one rule, in one
ecclesiastical tongue accepted by all nations, shows how the main
effect of that worship lay not in its words but in its symbols 1.
The history of the religious drama in England, if in it be
included a survey of the adjuncts to the church liturgy in the
form of alternating song and visible action, goes back to a period
before the Norman conquest. Out of the mystical liturgy, the
liturgical mystery grows by a process alike inevitable and un-
forced, of which sufficient illustrations will be given-beginning
with the Quem quaeritis of the Easter morning Mass. In England,
however, we meet with no examples proper of tropes, by the inter-
polation of which in the offices of the church the liturgical mystery
had advanced beyond its earliest stage, or what might be called
that of mere ornamentation—such as the Provençal production of
The Foolish Virgins, and The Raising of Lazarus, written by
Hilarius in Latin with occasional French refrains. These and
other examples seem to show that, in the century succeeding that
of the Norman conquest, the process of the emancipation of the
dramatic mystery from the liturgy had already begun in France,
where, in the eleventh century, we know that the former had been
considered an integral part of the latter. To the twelfth century
belongs the famous Norman-French-perhaps Anglo-Norman-
play of Adam, which may very possibly have grown out of a
processional representation of the prophets, but which seems
(for the later portion of it is lost) to have aimed at dramatic
representation of the entire Scriptural story, after the manner of
the French and English collective mysteries of later date. We
may safely conclude that the Norman conquest, or the period
which followed immediately upon it, introduced into England as
a virtually ready-made growth the religious performance or ex-
hibition which could and did edify the devout, without actually
1 Hagenbach, Kirchengeschichte, vol. 11, p. 397.
a Gayley, C. M. , Plays of our Forefathers, p. 27. Cf. Schofield, W. H. , English
Literature from the Norman Conquest to Charles, p. 136, where Adam, which consisted
of three parts, the Fall, the Death of Abel, and the Prophecies of Christianity-is
described as “the earliest extant mystery in the vulgar tongue. '
## p. 12 (#36) ##############################################
I 2 The Origins of English Drama
forming part of the religious exercises incumbent upon them. At
the same time, the English mystery-play did not fail to reveal its
liturgical origin by such stage directions as Tunc cantabit angelus
in the Chester Ascensio, or by the disquisitions of the Chester
Expositor and the Coventry Contemplacio, recalling the priest's
elucidatory comment! These plays were acted either within the
church walls, or on a scaffold immediately outside them, the
performers being no doubt, in the first instance and ordinarily,
ecclesiastics or the pupils of ecclesiastics. Gradually, the pro-
fessional secular entertainers, who, as we saw, were unlikely to
forego such a chance of attracting the public, sought to compete
with the clerics and to interfere with their monopoly; in the
middle of the thirteenth century, it was certainly no unheard-of
thing for secular players to solicit the favour of audiences-surely
by means of plays in the vernacular; in 1258, they were forbidden
to give such performances in the monasteries of the land. Either
this prohibition was effectual, or the practice never became quite
common; for, a century and a half later, Lydgate, though in some
of the verses he wrote to accompany the mummings of his age he
showed a strong dramatic instinct? , makes no mention of players
in his poem Danse Macabre, while among the representatives
of divers classes of men he introduces minstrels and 'tragitours'
(i. e. jugglers).
Thus, then, it seems clear that what dramatic performances
were to be seen in England during the latter part of the eleventh,
the twelfth and the greater part of the thirteenth centuries, were
mainly in the hands of the clergy. Attempts were not wanting,
even in this early period, to free from exclusive clerical control a
species of entertainment the popularity of which was continually
on the increase; and there doubtless were from the first, as there
certainly were later, voices in the church itself which reprobated
loudly and authoritatively this method of attracting the public
to the church door or its vicinity. 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.
