Note 130 — Chapter VI

These three periods are not historically accurate. The author uses them to emphasize three different views of our earliest plays rather than to suggest that there was any orderly or chronological development from Miracle to Morality and thence to the Interludes. The latter is a prevalent opinion, but it seems hardly warranted by the facts. Thus, though the Miracles precede the Moralities by two centuries (the first known Morality, "The Play of the Lord's Prayer," mentioned by Wyclif, was given probably about 1375), some of the best known Moralities, like "Pride of Life," precede many of the later York Miracles. And the term Interlude, which is often used as symbolical of the transition from the moral to the artistic period of the drama, was occasionally used in England (fourteenth century) as synonymous with Miracle and again (sixteenth century) as synonymous with Comedy. That the drama had these three stages seems reasonably certain; but it is impossible to fix the limits of any one of them, and all three are sometimes seen together in one of the later Miracles of the Wakefield cycle.