An Historical View OF THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH COMEDY

By Charles Mills Gayley

AN HISTORICAL VIEW OF THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH COMEDY

I. Liturgical Fragments, Early Saints' Plays and Parodies

The earliest evidence of dramatic effort in England is to be found in Latin tropes of the Easter service, composed for use in churches at different periods between 967 and the middle of the eleventh century. While these are, of course, serious in nature and function, they interest the historian of comedy because they show that the dramatic spirit was at work among our ancestors before the Anglo-Saxons had passed under the yoke of the Normans. Likewise naturally devoid of comic interest, but of vital importance in the development of a dramatic technique, are certain fragments of liturgical plays, belonging to the library of Shrewsbury School, which were published in 1890 by Professor Skeat.[1] Each of these deals, as an integer, with a crisis in the career of our Lord; and, except for occasional choruses and passages from the liturgy in Latin, the plays are English—the English, in fact, translating and enlarging upon the Latin of the service. Though the manuscript is probably not older than 1400, it is a fragment, as Professor Manly has said, of a series of plays of much earlier date, which were "performed in a church on the days and in the service celebrating events of which the plays treat."[2] These fragments are of great importance as constituting a link between the dramatic tropes of the tenth and eleventh centuries and the scriptural pageants presented at a later period outside the church: first by the clergy, with the assistance, perhaps, of townspeople (as may have been the case when a Resurrection play was given in the churchyard of St. John's, Beverley, about 1220); afterward by the civic authorities and the several gilds when church plays had come to be acted commonly in the streets, that is, after the reinstitution of the feast of Corpus Christi in 1311.

The existence of tropes at a period earlier than that in which mention is made of plays based upon the miracles of the saints appears to me to negative Professor Ten Brink's conjecture that in the development of our sacred drama legendary subjects preceded the biblical. Indeed, the fact that dramas on subjects both biblical and legendary, and of a technique even more highly developed than that of the Shrewsbury, were, as early as 1160, produced for liturgical functions in France, not only by Frenchmen, but by one Hilarius, who was presumably an Englishman, favours the opinion that the earliest saints' plays in England, also, were as frequently derived from scriptural as from legendary sources. It is, moreover, likely that the first saints' plays on legendary subjects in England of which we have record were neither the first of their kind in the period attributed to their presentation, nor a notable advance in dramatic art when they were presented. There is nothing in the earliest record of a legendary saint's play, the miracle of St. Katharine, presented by Geoffrey, afterwards Abbot of St. Albans, at Dunstable about 1100, to warrant the inference that it was a novelty, even at that date. Since Geoffrey was at the time awaiting a position as schoolmaster, he was probably within his function, de consuetudine magistrorum et scholarum,[3] when he produced the play; and it is to be noticed that when Matthew of Paris writes concerning the matter, about 1240, he appears to be much more interested in an accident which attended the performance than in the mere composition and presentation of what he calls "some play or other of St. Katharine, of the kind that we commonly call Miracles."[4] Indeed, William Fitzstephen, writing some seventy years before Matthew, speaks of such plays of the saints as in his time quite customary. The probabilities are, then, that this first legendary saint's play recorded as acted in England had been preceded by others of its kind, and they in turn by miracles of biblical heroes and by liturgical plays and dramatic tropes of the services of the church.

It is not unreasonable to surmise that this legendary kind of miracle, although sometimes used as part of the church service on the saint's day, and originally possessed of serious features, speedily developed characteristics helpful in the progress of the comic drama. All we know of the St. Katharine play is that it was written for secular presentation at a date when no mention is yet made of the public acting of scriptural plays. The dramatist would, however, be more likely to adorn the useful with the amusing in the preparation of a play not necessarily to be performed within the sacred precincts; and while the technique of the legendary miracle was presumably akin from the first to that of the biblical, it is natural to suppose that the plot was handled with larger imaginative freedom.

But our knowledge of these early saints' plays need not be entirely a matter of surmise. We may form a fair idea of their character from contemporary testimony, from the style of the Latin or French saints' plays of the time that have survived, from the nature of the legends dramatized, and from the analogy of contemporary biblical plays. To the locus classicus of contemporary testimony in William Fitzstephen's Life of Thomas à Becket (1170-82) I have already made reference. Speaking of the theatrical shows and spectacular plays of Rome, the biographer says that "London has plays of a more sacred character—representations of the miracles which saintly confessors have wrought, or of the sufferings whereby the fortitude of martyrs has been displayed." According to this, the ludi sanctiores, or marvels, as they seem later to be called,[5] are of two classes: the marvel of the faith that removes mountains, the marvel of the fortitude that endures martyrdom. In either case the saint's play is of the stuff that produces comedy; for, whether the miracles are active or passive, the Christian saint and soldier always proceeds victorious, and with increasing merit abides as ensample and intercessor in the church invisible.

This relation of the saint's play to comedy appears the more evident when we read in the Golden Legend and elsewhere the histories of the saints who became favourites in English or foreign drama or pageant,—St. Katharine, St. George, St. Susanna, St. Botulf, and the like. In most cases the triumph of the marvel naturally outweighed the terror; and in the one of the few English plays of the purely legendary kind that survives, the St. George—degenerate in form and now merely a folk drama—the self-glorification of the saint and the amusing discomfiture and recovery of himself and his foes are the only elements that have outlived the stress of centuries. The Miracle of St. Nicholas, written in the middle of the twelfth century, affords still better opportunity of studying the dramatic quality of the kind in question. For the author, Hilarius, wrote also in a like mixture—Latin with French refrains—a scriptural play of Lazarus; and in collaboration with others, but entirely in Latin, a magnificent dramatic history called Daniel. These, like the St. Nicholas, were adapted to performance in church at the appropriate season in the holy year, and no better illustration can be found of the essential difference between the scriptural or so-called 'mystery' play, on the one hand, and the saint's play, on the other, than is offered by them. The two scriptural plays, stately, reverent, adapted to the solemn and regular ritual of which they are an illustration in the concrete betray not a gleam of humour; the play of the other kind, written as it is for the festival of a jovial saint, leaps in medias res with bustle and surprise; and from the speech with which Barbarus entrusts his treasure to the saint even to the last French refrain, after Nicholas has forced the robbers to restitution, we are well over the brink of the comic. By the concluding scene, serious and in Latin of the church, setting forth the conversion of the pagan, the feelings of the congregation are restored to the level of the divine service, momentarily interrupted by the comedy but now resumed.

These, and all saints' plays not, like the St. Anne's play, of a cyclic character, were, from the first, dramatic units; they represented a single general plot, generally of a single hero; the action was focussed on the critical period of his life; and a considerable incitement was consequently offered to invention of incident and development of character. A comparative study of the plays concerning St. Nicholas will justify the statement that the dramatist was by way of taking liberties with, or varying, his selection from legend. The Einsiedeln Nicholas play of the twelfth century deals with a different miracle from that dramatized by Hilarius; and of the four Fleury plays of St. Nicholas, probably composed in the same century, the two that deal with these miracles vary the treatment; the other two are on different themes, but all would appear, from the editions which we have of them, to be promising little comedies. The possibilities of this kind of drama are best displayed in still another play of St. Nicholas, written in the vernacular by a Frenchman of Arras, Jean Bodel, about the year 1205. Throwing the traditional legends entirely overboard, he gives his imagination free course with favouring winds of knightly adventure, but over the waters of everyday life. He produces a play at once comic, fanciful, and realistic, the first of its kind—of so excellent a quality that Creizenach says that it would appear as if dramatic poetry were even then well on the way of development from the ecclesiastical model to a romantic kind of art in the style of the later English and Spanish drama: chivalric, fantastic, and realistic.[6]

Unfortunately, other plays of this kind, like the Theophilus of Rutebeuf, do not always avail themselves of their chances; but we may in general surmise that such plays in English—and we have evidence of many—contributed as much as the biblical miracle to the cultivation of a popular taste for comedy and the encouragement of inventive power in the handling of dramatic fable. I believe that they contributed more than the pre-Reformation morals, and from an earlier period.

I have said that in all probability there was nothing unusual in the presentation of saints' plays by Hilarius and Geoffrey. Latin plays were not a novelty in the twelfth century, at any rate to men of culture and the church. When we consider the history of the Terentian and Plautine manuscripts, how carefully the former were cherished, and with what appreciation a portion at least of the latter, during the Middle Ages, we cannot but apprehend the extent of their influence, even when unapparent, upon taste, style, and thought. Plautus (in whose comedies, with those of Terence, St. Jerome was wont to seek consolation after seasons of strenuous fasting and prayer) was imitated in a Querolus and probably a Geta, as early as the fourth century; and Terence was adapted by Hrosvitha in the tenth. We are, therefore, not at all surprised when we find Latin comedy during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries clothing itself through France and Italy in the verdure of another spring. To be sure the new style of production—a declamation by way of dialogue or conversational narrative, in elegiac verse—was not intended for histrionic presentation; but it was nevertheless of the dramatic genus; little by little the narrative outline dwindled and the mimetic opportunities of the speaker were emphasized. His success was measured by his skill in representing diverse characters merely by changes of voice, countenance, and gesture. He is the impersonator in transition to the actor. These elegiac comedies indicate the continuing influence of Latin comedy upon the literary creativity of the day; they furnish, besides, both the material for the regular drama that was coming, and the taste by which it should be controlled. I am, indeed, of the opinion that from this source the farce interludes of England, France, and Italy drew much of their content during the next three centuries, and that the saint's plays of that period, at least those in Latin, derived therefrom their dramatic technique. The revival of Latin comedy during the twelfth century was partly by way of adaptations, as in the dramatic poems of Vitalis of Blois; partly of independent productions, fashioned upon classical models but dealing with contes, fabliaux or novelle of contemporary quality. Of the latter kind the more interesting examples upon the continent were the Alda of William of Blois, and two elegiac poems, perhaps Italian, of lovers and go-betweens,—a graceful and passionate comedy of Pamphilus and a dramatic version by one Jacobus of the intrigue, so dear to mediæval satirists, between priest and labourer's wife. The subject and treatment of the last of these suggest, at once, a kinship with an Interludium de Clerico et Puella in English of the end of the thirteenth century, and with an earlier English story from which that is derived; also with Heywood's much later play of Johan. That there was a Latin elegiac comedy in England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,—comedy of domestic romance with all or some of the characters common to the kind—youth and maid, wife and paramour, enamoured cleric, faithless husband, cuckold, enraged father, parasite, slave, go-between, and double,—is rendered probable by the survival of two such poems, one of which bears internal evidence of its origin in England, while the only manuscripts extant of the other were found in that country. The first lacks a title, but has been called the Baucis after the manipulator of the intrigue, a procuress; the second is named Babio for the unhappy hero who is at one and the same time fooled by his wife whom he doesn't love, and his step-daughter whom he does. Both comedies display the influence of classical Latin, but the latter sparkles with the humour and spontaneity of the comedy of contemporary life.[7]

I agree, therefore, with Dr. Ward that the burden of proof is with those who assert that the Latin comedy of the Middle Ages made no impression upon the earlier drama of England. That the former was one of the tributaries of the farce interlude and the principal source of the romantic play of domestic intrigue I have no doubt whatever. And, considering the influx of French clerics and culture during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and the French affiliations of Geoffrey of St. Albans and Hilarius, our earliest recorded writers of saints' plays, not to speak of the latinity of our Maps, Wirekers, and other scholars of Henry II.'s reign, and their familiarity with the literature of the Continent, which was Latin,—it would be unreasonable to assume that the authors of our saints' plays, whether in Latin or not, did not derive something of their technique from the elegiac comedies of their contemporary latinists in France and England, or indeed from the adaptations of Plautus and Terence in previous centuries, or from the originals themselves.

When the religious drama passed into the hands of the crafts, it carried with it such individual plays, of both scriptural and legendary kinds, as were suitable to the collective character which it was assuming. The Corpus Christi, Whitsuntide, Easter, or Christmas cycle, though it aimed to illustrate sacred history and so justify God's ways to man, drew its materials, not only from the scriptures of the canon, but from the Apocrypha, the pseudo-Gospels, and mediæval legends of scriptural and sometimes non-scriptural saints. There was no real ground for distinction, and there is none now, dramatic or didactic, between the non-scriptural stories of scriptural characters, St. Joseph, and St. Thomas, stories of the Death, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin, stories of St. Paul and St. Mary Magdalene, which happened to be absorbed into this or the other miracle cycle, and the non-scriptural stories of extra-biblical saints in plays which have retained their independence: that of Nicholas, for instance, or of Katharine or Laurence or Christina, except that these and their heroes are concerned with events later than those which conclude the earthly career of our Lord and of the Virgin Mary. All religious historical plays, biblical or legendary, cyclic or independent, of events contemporaneous with, or subsequent to, the scriptural, were miracles, properly so called by our forefathers; and as the didactic intent of the species waned, one was as likely as another to develop material for amusement. Indeed, the authors of the Manuel des Pechiez and The Handlynge Synne,—the preacher of that fourteenth-century attack upon miracle plays which has been preserved in the Reliquiæ Antiquæ,—these, and Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif make no distinction between miracles of the central mystery from the Old and New Testaments and miracles worked and suffered by saints, whether legendary or biblical. The distinction, if any, made by them, is between miracles acted to further belief by priests and clerks in orders in the church, and those acted for amusement by these or by laymen in the streets and on the greens. And it is safe to say that as soon as a play became more amusing than edifying, it fell under the censure of the church. This happened as early as 1210, when a decretal of Innocent III. forbade the acting of ludi theatrales in churches. Indeed much earlier, for Tertullian and St. Augustine and the Councils had consistently condemned the performances of histriones, mimi, lusores, and others who perpetuated the traditions of the pagan Roman stage. In 1227 the Council of Treves took such action. Gregory IX. attempted to put a stop to the growing participation of the clergy, "lest the honour of the church should be defiled by these shameful practices."[8] And during the succeeding decades more than one Synod issued orders of the same tenor. Now, even though it is practically certain that these fulminations were directed against perversions of divine worship, mock festivals and profane plays with the monstrous disguisings or mummings involved,[9] there is also no doubt that the prohibition came speedily to apply to the use of masks and other disguises in sacred plays, and then to the presentation of plays in church for any other than devotional purposes. Such for instance was the animus with which William of Wadington, in the Manuel des Pechiez, about 1235, called attention to the scandal of the foolish clergy who, in disguise, acted miracles 'ky est defendu en decré.' To play the Resurrection in church, pur plus aver devociun, was permissible; but to gather assemblies in the streets of the cities after dinner, when fools more readily congregate, that was a sacrilege. At this early date, we may be sure that the kind of drama which was extruded from the church had already invested such of its subjects as were biblical or legendary with the realistic and comic qualities which made for popularity, and so was fitting itself for adoption by the crafts. Indeed, we are told by a thirteenth-century historian of the Church of York,[10] that, at a date which must be set near 1220, there was a representation as usual of the Lord's Ascension by masked performers, in words and acting; and that a large crowd of both sexes was assembled, led there by different impulses, some by mere pleasure and wonder, others for a religious purpose. This was the play in the churchyard of St. John's, Beverley, to which I have referred before. The miracula of the story cited by Wright[11] and conjecturally assigned to the thirteenth century, had also passed beyond the sheer didactic stage, for the auditors, who resorted to the spectacle in the "meadow above the stream," expressed their appreciation nunc silentes nunc cachinnantes. When, after the reinstitution of the festival of Corpus Christi, in 1311, these plays began to be a function of the gilds, their secularization, even though the clerks still participated in the acting, was but a question of time; and the occasional injection of crude comedy was a natural response to the civic demand. It would be erroneous, however, to imagine that the church abandoned the drama when the town took it up: the church maintained a liturgical drama, in some places, until well into the sixteenth century; and as late as 1572 individual clergymen are condemned for playing interludes in churches.[12]

If the writers of saints' plays, with their attempt to satisfy the yearning for ideal freedom which is natural in all times and places, took, in their fictions of the religious-marvellous, a step towards what may be called romantic comedy,—a step no less important, though nowadays often unnoticed, was taken toward the comedy of ridicule, satire, and burlesque, at a date quite as remote, by the contrivers of religious parodies. It is curious, though not at all unnatural, that some of the earliest efforts at comic entertainment should proceed from the revolt against ecclesiastical formality and constraint. I cannot in this place do more than remind the reader of the antiquity of three of the most notable of these dramatic travesties: the Feast of Fools, the election of the Boy Bishop, and the Feast of the Ass. The first of these was celebrated on the Continent as early as 1182, one may say with reasonable certainty, 990. It is indeed more than a conjecture that the Feasts of Fools and the Ass inherited the license of the Roman Saturnalia, the season and spirit of which were assimilated by the Christian Feast of the Nativity. Whether adopted by the church in its effort to conciliate paganism, or tolerated for reasons of secular policy, these mock-religious festivals were soon the Frankenstein of Christianity; and it was doubtless against them rather than the seductions of the sacred drama that most of the ecclesiastical prohibitions of the Middle Ages were aimed. With its necessary comic accessories, the Feast of Fools was well established in England before 1226, and it was still flourishing in 1390 when Courtney forbade its performance in London. "The vicars," he said, "and clerks dressed like laymen, laughed, shouted, and acted plays which they commonly and fitly called the Feast of Fools." They travestied the dignitaries of the church, they turned the service inside out, put obscenity for sanctity and blasphemy for prayer. While it does not appear that in England, as on the Continent,[13] the procession of the Boy Bishop was attended with frivolity or profanity, it was certainly celebrated with mummings and plays of suitable kind, not altogether serious. This ceremony dates as far back as St. Nicholas day, 1229, and was still to the fore in 1556. The Feast of the Ass appears to have been recognized by the church as early as the Feast of Fools. I do not know when it was introduced into England, but it was played upon Palm Sunday as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. In France it had been notoriously wanton since the beginning of the thirteenth; and it could not exist anywhere without promoting the spirit of burlesque and farce. Although the initial purpose of these festivals was to satirize the hierarchy and ecclesiastical convention, they applied themselves after they had been repudiated by the church to the ridicule of social folly in general; and, according to the descriptions of Warton, Douce, Hone, Klein, Petit de Julleville, and others, they came to be a vivid interpreter of the popular consciousness, a most potent educator of critical insight and dramatic instinct, an incitement to artistic even though naïve productivity. In France, indeed, the Fraternities of Fools produced national satirists and dramatic professionals in one. In England, if they did nothing else, they helped to stimulate a taste for realistic and satiric drama.

2. The Miracle Cycles in their Relation to Comedy

Miracle plays and 'marvels,' morals too as we soon shall see, were a propædeutic to comedy rather than tragedy. For the theme of these dramas is, in a word, Christian: the career of the individual as an integral part of the social organism, of the religious whole. So also, their aim: the welfare of the social individual. They do not exist for the purpose of portraying immoderate self-assertion and the vengeance that rides after, but rather the beauty of holiness or the comfort of contrition. Herod, Judas, and Antichrist are foils, not heroes. The hero of the miracle seals his salvation by accepting the spiritual ideal of the community. These plays contribute in a positive manner to the maintenance of the social organism. The tragedies of life and literature, on the other hand, proceed from secular histories, histories of personages liable to disaster because of excessive peculiarity,—of person or position. Whether the rank of the tragic hero be elevated or mean, he is unique: his desire is overweening, his frailty irremediable, or his passion unrestrained,—his peril unavoidable; and in his ruin not the principal only, but seconds and bystanders, are involved. Tragedy, then, is the drama of Cain, of the individual in opposition to the social, political, divine; its occasion is an upheaval of the social organism.

While the dramatic tone of the miracle cycle is determined by the conservative character of Christianity in general, the nature of the several plays is modified by the relation of each to one or other of the supreme crises in the career of our Lord. The plays leading up to, and revolving about, the Nativity, are of happy ending, and were doubtless regarded, by authors and spectators, as we regard comedy. The murder of Abel, at first sombre, gradually passes into the comedy of the grotesque. The massacre of the innocents emphasizes, not the weeping of a Rachel, but the joyous escape of the Virgin and the Child. In all such stories the horrible is kept in the background or used by way of suspense before the happy outcome, or frequently as material for mirth. Upon the sweet and joyous character of the pageants of Joseph and Mary and the Child it is unnecessary to dwell. They are of the very essence of comedy. The plays surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection are, on the other hand, specimens of the serious drama, the tragedy averted. It would hardly be correct to say tragedy; for the drama of the cross is a triumph. In no cycle does the consummatum est close the pageant of the Crucifixion; the actors announce, and the spectators believe, that this is "goddis Sone," whom within three days they shall again behold, though he has been "nayled on a tree unworthilye to die." By this consideration, without doubt, the horror of the buffeting and the scourging, the solemnity of the passion, the inhuman cruelty—but not the awe—of the Crucifixion, were mitigated for the spectators. Otherwise, mediæval as they were, they could have taken but little pleasure in the realism with which their fellows presented the history of the Sacrifice.

To indulge in a comprehensive discussion of the beginnings of comedy in England would be pleasant, but I find that I cannot compel the materials into the limits at my command. Accordingly, since the miracle cycles (to which Dodsley, following the French, gave the convenient, but un-English and somewhat misleading, name of 'mysteries') have been more frequently and generously treated by historians than those other miracles, non-scriptural, which I would call 'marvels,' and the no less important popular festival plays and early farces, and 'morals' or moral and 'mery' interludes, it seems that, in favour of the latter, I should defer much that might be said about the cycles until a more spacious occasion.

The manuscript of the York plays appears to have been made about 1430-40; that of the Wakefield, or so-called Towneley, toward the end of the same century; the larger part of the N-town, or so-called Coventry, in 1468; and the manuscripts of the Chester between 1591 and 1607. The last are, however, based upon a text of the beginning of the fifteenth or the end of the fourteenth century; and there is good reason to believe that some of the plays were in existence during the first half of the fourteenth. A tradition, suspicious but not yet wholly discredited, assigns their composition to the period 1267-76. The York cycle, according to Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith, was composed between 1340 and 1350. As to the Towneley plays, Mr. Pollard decides that they were built in at least three distinct stages, covering a period of which the limits were perhaps 1360 and 1410. While the composition of the so-called Coventry (apparently acted by strolling players) may in general be assigned to the first half of the fifteenth century, some parts give evidence of earlier date. The authenticated dates of the representation of miracles in Coventry, 1392-1591, I prefer to attribute not to this N-town cycle, but to the Coventry Gild plays, two of which still exist.[14] They possess no special importance for our present purpose. The Newcastle Shipwrights' Play is the much battered survivor of a cycle that was in existence in 1426. The Ms. of the three Digby plays of interest to us is assigned by Dr. Furnivall to the latter half of the fifteenth century. The subject of the first of them, the Killing of the Children, is of early dramatic use, and the treatment of the poltroon knight corresponds suggestively with Warton's account of the Christmas play given by the English bishops at the Council of Constance in 1417. The two Norwich pageants which survive are by no means naïve: they were touched up, if not written, during the second third of the sixteenth century.

Other cycle plays which might be enumerated must be omitted, with the exception of the Cornish. These were written in Cymric, apparently somewhat before 1300. They are suggestive to the historian of comedy particularly because they yield no faintest glimmer of a smile, save at their exquisite credulity and unconsciousness of art. They are a noble instance of the sustained seriousness of the scriptural cycle in its early, if not its original, popular stage, and, also, of that familiar handling of the sacred that prepares the way for the liberty of the comic.

In approaching the English miracle plays we notice that, as in the Cornish, the earliest secular form of the older cycles was principally, if not entirely, serious. Reasons which I cannot stay to enumerate prove that comic plays in the older cycles are not of the original series, and that humorous passages in plays of the older series are of later interpolation. Now, so far as the direct effect upon the comedy of Heywood, Greene, and Shakespeare is concerned, it may appear to some of no particular importance in what order the cycles in general were composed or the plays within the cycles. But the Tudor dramatists did not make their art, they worked with what they found, and they found a dramatic medium of expression to which centuries and countless influences had contributed. An extended study of the beginnings of English comedy should determine, so far as possible, the relative priority, not only of cycles, but of the comic passages within the cycles: what each composition has contributed to the enfranchisement of the comic spirit and the development of the technical factors of the art; to what extent each has expressed or modified the realistic, satirical, romantic, or humorous view of life, and in what ways each has reflected the temper of its time, the manners and the mind of the people that wrote, acted, and witnessed. If I arrange the plays that bear upon the development of comedy according to my conclusions regarding priority of composition, the order, broadly stated for our present rapid survey, is as follows: first, the Cornish and the Old Testament portions of the Chester and Coventry; then the productions of the second and third periods of the York, and, closely following these, the crowning efforts of the Towneley; then the New Testament plays of the Chester and Coventry; and, finally, the surviving portions of the cycles of Digby and Newcastle. This order, which is roughly historical, has the advantage, as I perceive after testing it, of presenting a not unnatural sequence of the æsthetic values or interests essential to comedy: first, as a full discussion would reveal, the humour of the incidental; then of the essential or real, and, gradually, of the satirical in something like their order of appearance within the cycles; afterwards, the accession of the romantic, the wonderful, the allegorical, the mock-ideal; and, finally, of the scenic and sensational.

Of the significant lack of humour in the Cornish plays I have already spoken. I find, though I may not stay to illustrate, a livelier observation and a superior faculty of characterization and construction in the early comic art of Chester than in that of Coventry, but in both a cruder sense of the humour of incident than in the other English cycles. In the York cycle there are fewer situations that may be called purely comic than in the Chester, and none of these occurs in the oldest plays of the series; but for its other contributions to dramatic art and its relation to the remarkable productions of the Wakefield or Towneley school of comedy it deserves special attention. A comparative study of its versification, phraseology and dramatic technique, leads me to the conclusion that the original didactic kernel of the York cycle was enlarged and enriched during two well-defined periods, which may be termed the middle and the later, and that there was at least one playwright in each of these periods or schools who distinctly made for the development of English comedy. Of the middle period, to which belong Cain, Noah, and the Shepherds' Plays, the playwright or playwrights are characterized by an unsophisticated humour; the distinctive playwright of the later or realistic period is marked by his observation of life, his reproduction of manners, his dialogue, and the plasticity of his technique. That the later school or period, to which belongs a group of half a dozen plays[15] gathering about The Dream of Pilate's Wife, and The Trial before Herod, was, moreover, influenced by the manner of its predecessor is indicated by the fact that of its two most efficient stanzaic forms one, namely that used in The Conspiracy, is anticipated (though in simpler iambic beat) by that of Noah, the typical play of the middle, that is the first comic, school,[16] while the other, of which the variants are found in The Mortificacio and The Second Trial, has its germ more probably in The Cayme of that same school than in any other of the middle or of the earlier plays.[17] With these two stanzaic forms the later group, so far as we may conclude from the mutilated condition of the surviving plays, seems to experiment; and the second of them, that of the Mortificacio, may be regarded as the final and distinctive outcome of York versification. To the leading playwrights of each of these schools,—the former the best humorist, the latter the best realist, of the York drama,—to these anonymous composers of the most facile and vivid portions of the York cycle our comedy owes a still further debt; for from them it would appear that a poet of undoubted genius derived something of his inspiration and much of his method and technique—our first great comic dramatist, the Playwright of Wakefield.

We know that Wakefield actors sometimes played in the Corpus Christi plays of York, and it was only natural that the smaller town should borrow from the dramatic riches of its metropolitan neighbour. We are, therefore, not surprised to find in the Wakefield cycle a number of plays which have been taken bodily from the York cycle.[18] None of these is in the distinctive stanzaic form of which we have just spoken; but imbedded in certain other Wakefield plays[19] that in other respects show marks of derivation from earlier and discarded portions of the York cycle, we find occasional affiliated forms of the distinctive later York strophe evidently in a transitional period of its development. We find, furthermore, passages in this transitional York strophe side by side with Wakefield stanzas which display the strophe in a more highly artistic technique than anything found in the York.[20] The writer of the perfected York-Wakefield stanza, such as appears in the Towneley plays, must have, consciously or unconsciously, been influenced by the middle and later York schools of dramatic composition. This fully developed outcome of the distinctive York stanza of the later school is found in the guise of a nine-line stanza in certain Towneley plays which we see reason for attributing to a Wakefield genius, and which we shall presently consider. Suffice it in this place to say that of the Wakefield stanza the first four lines, when resolved, according to their internal rhymes, into separate verses, run thus: abababab². If to this we add the cauda, our stanza runs abababab²c¹ddd²c². Sometimes, indeed, a three-accented line occurs among the first eight, showing the more plainly that this thirteen-line stanza of Wakefield (though set down in nine lines) is a variant or derivative of the thirteen-line York XXXVI.,—ababbcbc³d¹eee²d³. And that in itself is, as I have already said, a refinement upon the fourteen-line stanza of the earlier comic school of York, as used in the Noah. Whether the rapid beat and frequently recurring rhyme of the Wakefield are a conscious elaboration of the York or a happy find or accident, the stanzaic result is an accurate index to the superiority in spirit and style achieved over their congeners of York by these comedies of Wakefield.

Now, the contiguity of what is undoubtedly borrowed from the York with what is imitated from it and what is elaborated upon it, is strong proof of a conscious relation between these Wakefield productions and those of York; and since the work of the poet, especially the provincial poet, was in those days (though verse forms, like air, are free to all) likely to be cast in a fixed mould—his favourite metrical and strophaic medium, there is at any rate a possibility that the plays and portions of plays in the Wakefield cycle, written in this fully developed and distinctive stanza, were the work of one man. When we examine the contents of the plays and their style, we find that the possibility becomes more than a probability, practically a certainty; and that being so, I can hardly deem it an accident that the most dramatic portions of the Wakefield cycle show so close an external resemblance to the best comic and realistic portions of the York. It is, then, with something of the interest in an individual, not a theory, that one may segregate the plays and bits of plays bearing this metrical stamp, look for the personality behind them, and attempt to discover the relation of the Wakefield group of comedies to its forerunners of York.

The Wakefield cycle is still in flux when its distinctive poet-humorist takes it in hand. Insertions in his nine-line stanza are found in one[21] of the five plays derived from the York cycle. Of the two plays which show a general resemblance to a corresponding York, one[22] is in this stanza, and to the other[23] a dozen of the stanzas are prefixed. The Fflagellacio (XXII.), the second half of which is an imitation, sometimes loose, sometimes literal, of York XXXIV. (Christ Led up to Calvary), opens with twenty-three of these stanzas,—nearly the whole of the original part. One of them, No. 25, is, by the way, based upon stanza 2 of that part of York XXXIV. which is not taken over by the Wakefield play. In the Wakefield Ascension (XXIX.), which adapts, but in no slavish manner, a few passages from the York (XLIII.), we find two of this playwright's nine-line stanzas;[24] and in the Wakefield Crucifixion (XXIII.), which has some slight reminiscence of York XXXV. and XXXVI., we find one. In that part of the Wakefield less directly, or not at all, connected with the York cycle, four whole plays,[25] the Processus Noe, the two Shepherds' Plays, and the Buffeting, and occasional portions of other plays[26] are written in this stanza. This contribution in the nine-line stanza amounts to approximately one-fourth of the cycle; and, allowing for modifications due to oral and scribal transmission, is of one language and phraseology. Not merely the identity of stanza and diction, however, leads one to suspect an identity of authorship; but the prevalence in all these passages, and not in others, of spiritual characteristics in approximately the same combination,—realistic and humorous qualities singularly suitable to the development of a vigorous national comedy. "If any one," says Mr. Pollard, "will read these plays 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 day." And, speaking of the Mactacio Abel, where we lack the evidence of identity of metre, this authority continues, "The extraordinary youthfulness of the play and the character of its humour make it difficult to dissociate it from the work of the author of the Shepherds' Plays, and I cannot doubt that this, also, at least in part, must be added to his credit."[27]

To this conclusion I had come before reading Mr. Pollard's significant introduction to the Towneley Plays; and I may say that I had suspected the Wakefield master in the Processus Talentorum as well; for though, with the exception of some insertions, the stanzaic form of that pageant is not his favourite, the humour, dramatic method, and phraseology of the whole are distinctly reminiscent of him. In the revising and editing of the Wakefield cycle as he found it this playwright was brought into touch with the York schools of comic and realistic composition. What he derived from them and what he added may be gathered from a comparative view of the related portions of these cycles. That, however, I must defer until another time. The best of his plays are of course the Noe and the Secunda Pastorum; the latter a product of dramatic genius. It stands out English and alone, with its homespun philosophy and indigenous figures,—Mak and Gyll and the Shepherds,—its comic business, its glow, its sometimes subtle irony, its ludicrous colloquies, its rural life and manners, its naïve and wholesome reverence: with these qualities it stands apart from other plays of cycles foreign or native, and in its dramatic anticipations, postponements, and surprises is our earliest masterpiece of comic drama. A similar dramatic excellence characterizes all this poet's plays, as well as the insertions made by him in other plays. But he is no more remarkable for his dramatic power than for his sensitive observation and his satire.

Of the realism of his art much might be said. To be sure, we cannot accredit to him the grim photography of certain plays—the preparations for the crucifixion, for instance, which are the counterpart of scenes in the York. But the Buffeting proves his power in this direction, and parts of the Scourging—each a genre picture on a background of horrors. Of conversations caught from the lip those in the second and fourth scenes of the Processus Noe are his, and those between the shepherds in Prima and Secunda Pastorum,—all of them unique. So also the description of the dinners in these Shepherds' Plays: the boar's brawn, cow's foot, sow's shank, blood puddings, ox-tail, swine's jaw, the good pie, "all a hare but the loins," goose's leg, pork, partridge, tart for a lord, calf's liver "scored with the verjuice," and good ale of Ely to wash things down. What more seasonable than the afterthought of collecting the broken meats for the poor? what more naïve than the night-spell in the name of the Crucified just preceding the angelic announcement of his birth? what more typical of unquestioning faith than the reverence of these "Sely Shepherds" before the Saviour Child, the simplicity and acceptability of their rustic gifts? This is the fresh and sympathetic handling of a well-worn theme. But the Wakefield poet is no sentimentalist: his anger burns as sudden as his pity. Otherwhere genially ironical, it is in his revision of the Judicium that he displays his full power as a satirist. Here his hatred of oppression, his scorn of vice and self-love, his contempt of sharp and shady practice in kirk or court, upon the bench, behind the counter, or by the hearth are welded into one and brought to edge and point. He strikes hard when he will, but he has the comic sense and spares to slay. We may hear him chuckling, this Chaucerian "professor of holy pageantry," as he pricks the bubble of fashion, lampoons Lollard and "kyrkchaterar" alike, and parodies the latinity of his age. When his demons speak the syllables leap in rhythmic haste, the rhymes beat a tattoo, and the stanzas hurtle by. Manners, morals, folly, and loose living are writ large and pinned to the caitiff. But the poet behind the satire is ever the same, sound in his domestic, social, political philosophy, constant in his sympathy with the poor and in godly fear.

Though there are comic scenes of some excellence in the later Chester and so-called Coventry plays, they add little to the variety of the Wakefield. I would, however, call attention to a few other comparatively modern, but, generally speaking, contemporaneous, characteristics of these and the remaining cycles: the foreshadowing of the chivalrous-romantic in the Joseph and Mary plays of York, Wakefield, and especially Coventry; of the melodramatic in the wonder and mediæval magic of the York and Chester cycles, and again especially in the Coventry; of the allegorical in the Coventry, and of the burlesque in all cycles when Pride rides for a fall or Cunning is caught in his own snare.

In respect of the sensational, the older cycles are surpassed by the surviving plays of Newcastle and Digby; so also in the increasing complexity of motive and interest. These Digby plays were acted, probably one by one in some midland village from year to year during the latter half of the fifteenth century, and maybe somewhat earlier. They are of interest, not only because they emphasize the sensational element, but because they stand half-way, if not in time, at any rate in spirit and method, between the miracles that we have so far discussed and the moral plays of which we shall presently treat. The Digby Killing of the Children of Israel lends a decided impetus to the progress of the comic and secular tendencies of the drama. The Herod brags as usual, but he is artistically surpassed in his metier by a certain miles gloriosus, the descendant of Bumbommachides and Sir Launscler Depe, and himself the forerunner of Thersites and Roister Doister, and countless aspirants for knighthood, whose valour "begynnes to fayle and waxeth feynt" under the distaff of an angry wife. Such is the Watkyn of this Digby play. Both here and in the Conversion of St. Paul, the joyous element has been enhanced, as Dr. Furnivall points out, by the introduction of dancing and music. In the Conversion the charm supplied by the ammoniac Billingsgate of Saul's servant and the ostler adds thrills galore. Saul, "goodly besene in the best wyse, like an aunterous knyth," the thunder and lightning, the persecutor felled to earth, "godhed speking from hevyn," the Holy Ghost, the "dyvel with thunder and fyre" sitting cool upon a "chayre in hell, another devyll with a fyeryng, cryeng and roryng,"—the warning angel, Saul's escape,—there is sign enough of invention here. To be sure, these seductions are counterbalanced by a didactic on the Seven Deadly Sins, worthy of a preceding or contemporary moral drama; but that was part of the bargain. The spectacular plays of this group, especially the Mary Magdalene, comic and didactic by turns, denote a further advance in a still different direction. They portray character in process of formation: the rejection of former habits and motives, and the adoption of new, the resulting change of conduct, and the growth of personality. From this point of view Mary Magdalene is a figure of as rare distinction in the history of romantic comedy as the Virgin Mary,—perhaps even of greater importance. Interesting as the sensational elements of the play may have been, and novel—the vital novelty here is that of character growing from within. Wonderful as the career of the virgin mother was,—an essential propædeutic to that woman worship which characterizes a broad realm of Christian romance,—her career could never have awakened the peculiar interest, dramatic and humane, that was stirred by the legend so often dramatized of the wayward, tempted, falling, but finally redeemed and sainted Mary of Magdala.

With regard to the transitional character of the Digby plays, it has been maintained that this particular play, combining materials of the biblical miracle and the saint's play or marvel, approaches more nearly than any other of the group to the morals and moral interludes, because of the prominence of the Sensual Sins in the dramatic career of the Magdalene. Professor Cushman, in his excellent thesis on The Devil and the Vice, even asserts that the downfall of the heroine, as the result of sensual temptation which is the office of seven personified deadly sins "arayyd lyke vij dylf," is a special 'development' of this play. I can hardly go so far: the church of the Middle Ages, Caxton's Golden Legend of 1483, and Voragine's of 1270-90 had already amalgamated the biblical narratives of the Mary of seven devils, Mary of Bethany, and the woman who was a sinner. In fact, the suggestion of the 'device,' if such was necessary, is contained in seven consecutive lines of Caxton's Life of the Magdalene. This biblical and legendary play is, however, undoubtedly well on the way toward the drama of the conflict of good and evil for possession of the human soul. And this appears, as the author just cited has pointed out, when we consider a later work on the same subject, called a Moral Interlude, by Lewis Wager. Although the Seven Deadly Sins no longer figure as such, their place is here supplied by four characters,—Infidelitie the Vice, and his associates, Pride of Life, Cupiditie, and Carnal Concupiscence,—who, arrayed like gallants, instruct the Magdalene in their several follies, and are themselves all "children of Sathan." These later Vices are nothing other than selected Deadly Sins,—the Pride, the Covetyse, and the Lechery of the earlier miracle play.

3. The Dramatic Value of the English Miracle Plays

Taken as a whole, the craft cycle possesses the significance, continuity, and finality requisite to dramatic art; taken in its parts or pageants, however, it presents to the modern reader the appearance of a mosaic, an historical panel picture, or stereopticon show. I set down these words, "the modern reader," because I do not believe that the audience of contemporaries was aware of any break in the sequence of the collective spectacle. This histrionic presentment of the biblical narrative lacked neither motive nor method to the generations of the ages of belief. For them the history of the world was thus unrolled in episodes the opposite of disconnected,—each a hint or sign or sample, a type or antitype of the scheme of salvation, which was itself import and impulse of all history. No serious scene, but was confirmation or prophecy. Characters, institutions, and events of the Old-Testament drama had their raison d'être not only in themselves but in the New Testament antitype which each in turn prefigured. No profound theological training was needed to comprehend each symbol and its significance, to esteem all as centring in the Person of history, in the sacrifice and atonement. And still it is largely because historians have failed to appreciate the scriptural training of our ancestors that they have unfairly emphasized the episodic nature of the miracle cycles, at any rate of the English.

The integral quality of the English cycle is infinitely superior to that of the French; and the separate plays are more frequently artistic units. This is due, among other things, to facts long ago pointed out by Ebert.[28] The smaller stage in England, which in turn restricted the scope of the play, made it impossible to split up the action into two or more parallel movements, such as frequently occupied the stage in France. The scene, moreover, was in England limited to earth, save when the plot expressly required the presentation of heaven or hell. It very rarely required all three at once. The conduct of the English play is therefore less dependent upon the supernatural, and the persons bear a closer resemblance to actual human beings. Neither plot nor character is distracted by the irresponsible intrusion of devils, whereas these, idling about the French stage, frequently turned the action into horse-play,—if the fool (likewise absent from the English miracle) had not already turned it into a farce out of all relation to the fable. The comic element in the English play had to exist by virtue of its relation to the main action or not at all. It was therefore compelled to conquer its position within the artistic bounds of the drama. The comic scenes of the English miracle should accordingly be regarded, not as interruptions, nor independent episodes, but as harmonious counterpoint or dramatic relief. Those who have witnessed in recent times the reproduction of the Secunda Pastorum at one of the American universities bear testimony to the propriety and charm, as well as the dramatic effect, with which the foreground of the sheep-stealing fades into the radiant picture of the nativity. The pastoral atmosphere is already shot with a prophetic gleam, the fulfilment is, therefore, no shock or contrast, but a transfiguration—an epiphany. I do not forget that a less humorous analogue of the Shepherds' Play exists in such French mysteries as that of the Conception, but I call attention to the fact that by devices, technical sometimes, sometimes naïve, elaborated through the centuries in response to the demands of a popular æsthetic consciousness, the cycles, preëminently in England, acquired a delicacy and variety of colour, an horizon, and an atmosphere, not only as wholes, but in the parts contributing to the whole.

It is, therefore, only with reservation that I can concur with what one of our most scientific and suggestive historians has said concerning the dramatic qualities of the English miracle play:[29] "In the mystery, not only were the subject and the idea unalterable, but the way in which the subject and idea affected each other was equally unchangeable. The power of expression was exceedingly defective. The idea in the finished work still seemed to be something strange and external—conception and execution did not correspond. It is only by a whole cycle that the subject could be exhausted, and this cycle was composed of the most heterogeneous elements, and is, in fact, a work of accident. The cycle play very seldom formed a unit or whole; it seldom contained anything that could be called a dramatic action. The spectators were therefore interested only in the matter. Only a few details made any æsthetic effect—such as character, situation, scenes; the whole was rarely or never dramatic." I will grant that, since the subject of the individual pageant was prescribed by tradition, and the solution of the dramatic problem already fixed, the author did not always penetrate the shell of his story and assimilate the conception. Consequently the execution has frequently the faults of the ready-made suit of clothes: it creases where it should fall free and breaks where it should embrace. As the writer is not expected to exercise his invention, the onlooker estimates the conduct of the fable as a spectacle, not as a revelation. Many of the miracles, therefore, lack the element of dramatic surprise, and almost none attempts anything in the way of character development. This is, in part, because, severally, the plays are squares of an historical chessboard, upon which the individual—king or pawn—is merely a piece; and even if the board be not historic, the squares are over strait for the gradual deploy of motive; many of these plays are scenes, consequently, and limited to single crises of an individual life. In other words, the character, if familiar, is regarded as an instrument toward a well-known end; if unfamiliar, as an apparition momentarily vivid. Slight opportunity exists for interplay of incident and character, for the production of conduct, in short, which is the resultant of character and a crisis. It must also be conceded that, since each play was the dear delight of its proprietary gild—and each rare performance thereof the chance that should grace these craftsmen ever or disgrace them quite—the effort of actor, if not always of playwright, was towards a speedy and startling effect, such as might be procured by the extraneous quality of the show, rather than by the story in itself or in its relation to the cycle.

But still we must be careful not to generalize from a play here and there to the quality of a cycle as a whole or to the common qualities of various cycles. When we say that the mysteries, that is, the scriptural miracles, possessed this, that, or the other merit or defect, to what area and what object does the remark apply? Do we refer to all the extant plays, or only to the one hundred and fifty plays in the five cycles that may be called complete? Do we draw the inference from a majority of all plays that might fall within the purview, or from the plays of one cycle, or from a majority of the plays in that cycle, or from a single striking example here or there in one or another cycle or fragmentary collection? Do we draw the inference from, or apply the conclusion indiscriminately to, later as well as earlier cycles and plays? A generalization from the Chester does not prima facie fit the Towneley, nor does a dramatic estimate of the Coventry characterize the isolated miracle morals of the Digby. Between the composition of the earliest and the latest of the Chester plays alone, centuries elapsed; centuries between the earliest Coventry and the earliest Digby; generations between Chester and Coventry plays upon the same subject, and generations more between the York and Newcastle. York includes some of the youngest pageants of the species and many of the oldest. Towneley is generally later than York; but it sometimes retains an original which York had long ago discarded for something more modern. Returning, therefore, to Professor ten Brink's generalization, we must submit that most of the defects which he lays at the door of the cyclic miracle were not inherent in the species, but incidental to the period. Some attach to the crudeness of the playwright, some to the simplicity of the audience; they no doubt attached to the collective "morals" of the fourteenth century, such as the Paternoster Play, and they would have characterized plays of any other species attempted under like conditions. The best miracle plays are as mature products of dramatic art as the best of the allegorical kind, except in one point only—the development of character. That "the subject and its idea should be unalterable" and their interrelation fixed, is by no means a peculiarity of the scriptural play, but a characteristic of period or place. If the reader will cast even a rapid glance by way of comparison over the French Corpus of mysteries and the English, he will observe that the scope of subjects possible to a religious cycle was amenable to widely different conditions of restriction, selection, and enlargement, and that the treatment of the same and similar subjects was infinitely varied. To illustrate at length would be a work of supererogation. Everybody knows that the French cycles have plays upon subjects, the Job, for instance, and Tobias and Esther,[30] not touched by the English,—at any rate when in their prime; and that the same subject or episode is frequently treated in a way dissimilar to the English. When we turn to details we note likewise the independence of the playwright: none of the English plays avails itself, for instance, of Adam's difficulty in swallowing the apple, though the incident figures both in Le Mistere de la Nativite and that of the Viel Testament; nor of the attractive possibilities of Reuben and Rachel's maid, Joseph and Potiphar's wife, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and many another conjunction known to all readers of the French religious play. And these discrepancies between national cycles hold true even where, as in the case of the Chester plays, the influence of the French mysteries of the thirteenth century and of the later collections is in other respects evident. Of the four English cycles, moreover, each does not select exactly the same subjects for its pageants as the others,—Balaam and his Ass, for instance, appear only in the Chester,—nor do all introduce the same incidents in the handling of a common subject.

Professor ten Brink is by no means alone in his estimate of the technical quality of the English scriptural miracle, but I must say that the estimate seems to me to be hardly up to the deserts of the species. The frequent absence of such refinements as the unities of time and place was of the essence both of play and period; but it was not of the essence of the miracle cycle that the expression should be defective, or that conception and execution should fail to correspond, or of the miracle play that it should be unable economically and adequately to develop a dramatic action and produce an artistic whole. It may be an insufficient argument to say that the plays of the Wakefield dramatist are anything but defective in expression. Let us, therefore, be somewhat more comprehensive in the scope of inquiry. I have gone carefully through the four English cycles with Professor ten Brink's censures in mind, and I conclude that at least twenty of the individual plays have central motive, consistent action, and well-rounded dramatic plot. Indeed I think a good case might be made for thirty. That would be to say that one-fifth of the miracles of the great cycles were artistic units in themselves, and must have interested their spectators, not alone by the materials displayed, but by a subject that meant something, and situations, scenes, and acting characters by which it was sometimes not at all unworthily presented. The inheritors of English literature will indeed carry away a false impression of the artistic achievements of their ancestors, if they believe that in spite of a development of five hundred years the miracle play was "rarely or never dramatic."

Even though the sacred and traditional character of the biblical narrative must have exercised a restraint upon the comic tendencies of the cyclic poet not likely to have existed in the case of the writers of saints' plays and single morals, still it is when he attempts the comic that the cyclic poet is most independent. For as soon as plays have passed into the hands of the gilds, the playwright puts himself most readily into sympathy with the literary consciousness as well as the untutored æsthetic taste of his public when he colours the spectacle, old or new, with what is preëminently popular and distinctively national. In the minster and out of it, all through the Christian year, the townsfolk of York and Chester had as much of ritual, of scriptural narrative, and tragic mystery as they wanted, and probably more; when the pageants were acted, they listened with simple credulity, no doubt, to the sacred history, and with a reverence that our age of illumination can neither emulate nor understand;—but with keenest expectation they awaited the invented episodes where tradition conformed itself to familiar life,—the impromptu sallies, the cloth-yard shafts of civic and domestic satire sped by well-known wags of town or gild. Of the appropriateness of these insertions, spectators made no question, and the dramatists themselves do not seem to have thought it necessary to apologize for æsthetic creed or practice. The objections thereto proceeded from the authorities of the church, but the very tenor and tone of them are a testimony to the importance attained by the comic element in the religious plays. It is principally the "bourdynge and japynge" which attended the "pleyinge of Goddis myraclys and werkes," that called forth the wrath of the sermon that I have already cited from the end of the fourteenth century.[31] And it was for similar reasons that Bishop Wedego ordered, in 1471, the suppression of both passion play and saints' plays within his continental diocese. In France, indeed, not only horse-play characterized the performance of the mysteries, but absolutely irrelevant farces invaded them, merely afin que le jeu soit moins fade et plus plaisans.

I have alluded to the distinctively national note that characterizes the comic contributions to the sacred plays, and I find that my opinion is confirmed by the examples cited by Klein and Creizenach. The French mystery poets, while they develop, like the English, the comic quality of the shepherd scenes, introduce the drinking and dicing element ad lib.,—and sometimes the drabbing; they make, moreover, a specialty of the humour of deformity, a characteristic which appears nowhere in the English plays. The Germans, in their turn, elaborate a humour peculiar to themselves,—elephantine, primitive, and personal. They seem to get most run out of reviling the idiosyncrasies of Jews, whose dress, appearance, manners, and speech they caricature,—even introducing Jewish dramatis personæ to sing gibberish, exploit cunning, and perform obscenities under the names of contemporary citizens of the hated race. In general a freer rein seems to have been given to the sacrilegious, grotesque, and obscene on the Continent than in England. In the Passion of A. Greban (before 1452), Herod orders Jesus into the garb of a fool; and in some of the German plays the judges dance about the cross upon which the Saviour hangs. Much of the ribaldry was of course impromptu, and on that account the more grotesque; as in the story related by Bebel of how a baker playing the part of Christ in the Processus Crucis bore the gibes of his tormentors with admirable composure, until one actor Jew insisted upon calling him a corn thief,—"Shut up," retorted the Christ, "or I'll come down and break your head with the cross." There is, of course, an occasional license in the English plays, such as the dance about the cross in the Coventry; but the excess of ribaldry, grotesquerie, and diablerie does not assault the imagination as in the continental mysteries.

4. The Contribution of Later "Marvels" and Early Secular Plays

The advance which remained to be made upon the quality of play presented in the miracle cycle before England could have an artistic comedy were threefold: first, from the collective to the single play; second, from the reproduction of traditional or accidental events to the selection of such as possessed significance and continuity; and third, from the employment of the remote in material and interest to the employment of the immediate and familiar.

To attribute to the allegorical play all improvements that were made in this transition is a mistake. Some steps in the right direction were already necessitated by the popular demand, and had been taken by the later miracle plays before the allegorical drama had itself passed out of the experimental stages,—by the Digby Magdalene, for instance. In that play, the dramatic management of a plot, invented and romantic rather than scriptural in its nature and interest, and the portrayal of commonplace events and characters side by side with the occasional allegory, are evidence not only of contemporary taste, but, as Mr. Courthope has said, of an artistic approach to the representation of fables of simple secular interest. The play, in fact, bears a close resemblance to and was apparently influenced by the popular life of St. Mary Magdalene which appeared in Caxton's translation of 1483 of the Golden Legend,—or perhaps by the French edition which Caxton follows, or the original of Voragine. In the St. Paul of the Digby collection we note a similar fusion of secular and legendary material, and an imaginative handling of the plot. Although the dramatist has buried his opportunities of psychological invention in the apostle's homily upon the deadly sins, he has at the same time crossed the border of the "moral play" rich with psychological opportunity. In the same direction of advance various steps had also been taken by other saints' plays, purely legendary, like the Sancta Katharina already mentioned, and by such a 'marvel' as the Sacrament Play, or Miracle of the Host, which we shall presently describe. A movement in advance had, moreover, been made by our early secular drama, which comprised, besides the farce interlude prepared by scholars for profane consumption, like the Interludium de Clerico et Puella, certain popular festival plays, for instance, the Hox Tuesday and Robin Hood, and plays of saints turned national heroes like St. George and St. Edward.

Concerning the plays of the miracles of saints I have already expressed the belief that, whether these workers of marvels got off with their lives or not, the representations in which they figured were, generally speaking, of the essence of comedy: the persistent optimism which in the end routs the spectres of temptation, persecution, and unbelief. This would hold, with even greater probability, of the purely legendary miracles, the nature of which is, of course, that of popular religious thought and faith in the Middle Ages, and is embalmed for us in the Golden Legend, in Eusebius and St. Jerome, and other writers from whom the legend was derived. In spite of their exceeding interest, these legendary saints' plays and pageants can be considered in this place only with brevity; but in order that the reader may better appreciate the variety of their subjects and the extent of the period over which they were acted, I subjoin a list of some that we know to have been presented.[32]

I have little doubt that the romantic combination of tragic, marvellous, and comic later noticeable upon the Elizabethan stage was in some degree due to the ancient and continuous dramatization of the irrational adventures, blood-curdling tortures, and dissonant emotions afforded by the legends of the saints. These 'marvels,' moreover, must, because of their early emancipation from ecclesiastical restraints and their adoption by the folk, have contributed to the development of the freely invented, surprising, and amusing fable which is congenial to comedy. That we have not more notices of them is owing, not to their insignificance nor to any disappearance before the advancing popularity of the craft cycles, for even the pageants of the saints still flourish in Aberdeen as late as 1531, and the plays elsewhere much later, but, as Ebert has already noted, to the fact that they were seldom presented with the magnificence and publicity of the cyclic miracles; but whenever a saint's play is taken up by a city or gild, it enjoys frequent official notice and maintains its dignity for years.

Passing to the marvel or miracle of the Host, we notice that only one in our language has survived. This Play of the Blyssyd Sacrament bears the name of one of the East Midland Croxtons, and it was composed between 1461 and 1500. Although some critics have a low opinion of the play, I venture to say that it is one of the most important in the early history of English comedy. The subject, the desecration by Jews of a wonder-working Wafer and the discomfiture and ultimate conversion of the offenders, is popular in the legend of the later Middle Ages.[33] With ours a Dutch Sacrament Play, written about the year 1500 by Smeken and acted in Breda, naturally calls for comparison; but, though the latter exhibits the miraculous power of the Host and has a certain diabolic humour, it lacks altogether the realism, the popular reproduction of Jewish malignity, and the effective close of the Croxton. The Croxton avails itself of the possibilities of the subject. The idea has a significance; the plot possesses legitimate motive, due proportions, unity ethical and æsthetic; and the conclusion is happy. The mood, by turns serious and comic, and the dramatis personæ, various and well-characterized, combine to furnish a most diverting drama of the wonderful, horrible, elevated, and commonplace. Colle's announcement of his master the leech, "a man off alle syence," who "syttyth with sum tapstere in the spence," is excellently ironical; and Master Brundych himself, like the doctor in the St. George plays, must have furnished a figure exactly suited to the popular taste. Nor is the realism confined to the intentionally comic scenes; but it is as vividly successful in the corruption of Aristorius by Jonathas and in the futile and richly avenged efforts of the Jews to torture the Host. Here certainly was a play adapted to meet the demands of its time,—exhibiting closer affiliation with the folk than with church or patron or school, acted perhaps by strolling players, an unforced product of the artistic consciousness; a play which, though it dealt with a sacred subject, still focussed itself in a single plot, discarded all material, sacred or historical, not available for its purpose, completed an alliance with the natural and the familiar, and emphasized the comic realities of life. No miracle, cyclic or individual, no allegorical drama, and no secular play of the same or previous date excels the Croxton in dramatic concept and constructive skill. Without the mediation offered by such Croxton plays, the English drama would have had "old" bridging the space between miracles, marvels, and morals of the earlier time and the comedy of Shakespeare.

The consideration of our early farce interludes may be conveniently postponed for the present in favour of the more popular plays, or shows, with which our forefathers celebrated festival occasions. Of the pageants in honour of royal entries, to which reference has already been made, it is impossible to say more here than that, developing gradually into dramatic spectacles, and at the same time retaining their symbolic character, they must have contributed to the taste for allegorical plays, the moral, and the moral interlude. If we turn to the secular shows presented on regular festivals, such as May-day, Hox Tuesday, and the Eve of St. John and St. Peter, while we may at once conclude that they were less efficient as dramas than some of which we have spoken, such as the Sacrament play, they have the advantage, from our present point of view, of indicating more directly the nature of popular demand and the primitive conditions of popular art. Indeed, Dodsley regards the mummers who commonly acted them as the earliest genuine comedians of England. Of such disguisings, masks, and mummeries there is evidence in the Wardrobe Accounts of 1389, according to which a company of twenty-one men was disguised as the Ancient Order of the Coif for a play before the king at Christmas; and of other mummings—not satiric nor in mockery of church ritual, but genial—we have mention in Stow and citations in Warton and Collier that take us to the first half of the fourteenth century. They doubtless existed much earlier, though I do not think that they anticipated the parodies of sacred rites or the ecclesiastical saints' plays.

Naturally a much-loved figure in festival games was Robin Hood, and that some kind of drama was made out of the ballads surrounding him is proved by a Ms. fragment of 1475 or earlier of Robin Hood and the Knight, and a play of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar with a portion of Robin Hood and the Potter, printed by Copland, in 1550, as "very proper to be played in May-games."[34] These May-games occurred not only in May, but June, and gave employment to St. George and the Dragon, the Nine Worthies (at whom Shakespeare poked run in Love's Labour's Lost), the morris-dance, with its Lords and Ladies of the May, giant, hobby-horse, and sometimes devils, as well as to Robin and Little John, Maid Marian, and Friar Tuck; and they were popular through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perhaps even earlier. If we may trust old Fenn's editing, Sir John Paston wrote in 1473 of a man whom he had kept for three years to play "Seynt Jorge and Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Nottingham." There may be even earlier mention of such plays. For, with all deference to the best of authorities, Professor Child, I cannot but think that when Bower wrote, between 1441 and 1447, of the popular "comedies and tragedies" of Robertus Hode et Litill Johanne, he had reference to acted plays, since he took pains to specify in his account of them the mimi, as well as the bardani who chanted them. These entertainments, he says, were then more popular than any other, and it is only natural to suppose that they had existed long before his time. The earliest mention of Robin in England is in Piers Plowman, 1377, and then as the subject of a ballad; but, as Warton long ago pointed out, pastoral plays of Robin et Marion had been given in France upon festival occasions before the end of the thirteenth century. Although there appears to be no similarity between the incidents of Adam de la Halle's comic opera of 1283 upon Robin and his Marion and the English stories, and although we are ignorant of the nature of the spring game, or play, of the same title, which was already an annual function in Anjou, in 1392, the principal characters and conditions of life in the two series are sufficiently similar to suggest a connection by derivation or common source. If such connection exist, it is not impossible that some kind of Robin pageant or play was known in England earlier than we ordinarily think. The ballad plays, at any rate, had attained popularity long before an artistic level was reached by the allegorical drama, and while yet the craft cycles were in their prime. Stow, in respect of Mayings, which he leads us to believe were common in the reign of Henry VI., says that the citizens of London "did fetch in May-poles with divers warlike shows, with good archers, morris-dancers, and other devices for pastime all the day long; and towards the evening they had stage-plays and bonfires in the streets." Robin Hood and his archers are the heart of a Maying devised under Henry VII. in 1505 and for Henry VIII. in 1516; and the archers of the Maying in the time of Henry VI. are suggestive of the Robin Hood as an accepted figure for some kind of pageant in the middle of the fifteenth century, when Bower was writing of "comedies and tragedies," mentioned above. The pageants and probably the plays of Robin Hood are still alive in the seventeenth century and later. Their dramatic quality was of a very primitive sort, but the plot, wherever existent, displayed sequence of motive and effect. The popular dramatist had, as in the Sacrament play and saints' plays, learned how to magnify a hero by making him the pivot of the action, how to interest the spectators in the affairs and manners of their own class, how to produce a comic effect by means of dialogue, as well as by the humour of the situation. But he knew nothing of the development of character, and in that respect, without doubt, was inferior to the contemporary author of the moral play.

Passing the Hox Tuesday play, of which we cannot be sure that it was anything more than a crude and entirely serious representation of the historic massacre which it commemorated, and of which no adequate account survives, we may turn with profit to the most popular and long-lived of English festival dramas, the St. George play. Of this Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that numerous versions are used in the north of England, and that they are doubtless a degraded form of an old "mystery."[35] Of course, he means legendary miracle or saint's play. Ward more accurately describes this rural drama as a combination of miracle and processional pageant. As the latter, it appears frequently to have formed part of a mumming or disguising, and was early associated with the morris-dance of May-day or Christmas. | Collier, Hist., vol. I., p. 29. | The first indubitable mention of a St. George pageant is in 1416, and would appear to refer to a "splendid dumb show" rather than a play, which, as Caxton tells us, was presented for the entertainment of Emperor Sigismund of Almayne when he "brought and gave the heart of St. George for a great and precious relique to King Harry the fifth." It is, however, more than probable that the soldier saint had figured in saints' plays, and in popular play and pageant, long before this time. He had been honoured in the eastern church even in the fourth century, and in England there had been churches and monasteries devoted to him before the Norman invasion. On account of his fabled services in the crusade he was already the patron of individual knights, and orders of chivalry and even of kingdoms, when Edward III., in the years 1348-50, built the chapel in his honour at Windsor, confirmed him as the saint and champion of England and instituted the order that still bears his name. It is likely, indeed, that the ludi exhibited before the same monarch at Christmas, 1348, were to some extent of St. George, for we read that the dragon figured extensively in them.[36] And it would appear that when, in 1415, the 23d April, St. George's Day, was "made a major double feast and ordered to be observed the same as Christmas day, all labour ceasing," his play was no new thing. From that time on, at any rate, the procession of St. George was one of the "pastimes yearly used," of which Stow tells us that they were celebrated "with disguisings, masks, and mummeries." Gilds were organized in his name, and the ceremony of 'Riding the George' spread over England. When Henry V. visited Paris, in 1420, he was appropriately welcomed with a St. George show, and the saint appears again in a pageant of 1474 performed at Coventry in honour of young Prince Edward. We have already mentioned Sir John Paston's reference to the play in 1473. A long-winded and serious German dramatization of the legend exists in an Augsburg manuscript of the end of the same century. In all probability the expensive miracle play of the saint that was acted in the croft or field at Bassingbourne in Cambridgeshire, in 1511, was of the same didactic kind, but enlivened by impromptus of the villagers who took part. St. George and the dragon were features of the May-games at London, evidently in procession, as late as 1559. There appears in Warburton's list a play of St. George for England, by Wentworth Smith, of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and in the latter part of that century, a droll called St. George and the Dragon was by way of being acted at Bartholomew Fair. The play seems from an early date to have been performed on the occasion of other festivals besides that of the Saint himself.

The versions of the play best known of recent years are the Oxfordshire, acted during the eighteenth century and taken down from an old performer in 1853, and the Lutterworth (Leicestershire) Christmas play, acted as late as 1863.[37] Professor Child, in his Ballads, mentions another, which was regularly acted on All Souls' Day at a village a few miles from Chester. I would call attention, in addition, to four others of interest; the Derbyshire Christmas play,[38] acted by mummers as late as 1849, which is fuller than any other and appears to me to retain traces of a fifteenth-century original; the two Bassingham (Lincoln) Christmas plays,[39] 1823, and the Shetland play from a 1788 Ms., recounted in Scott's novel of The Pirate. The last three make the connection between the St. George play proper and the sword play, which was undoubtedly common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and of which the Revesby version of 1779 is still extant.[40]

The following is the outline of the Derbyshire play: Enter Prologue, who is apparently the same as "noble soldier," "Slasher," or "Jack," to clear a way for St. Gay.—Enter St. Gay, announcing himself with proper bombast, pretending that "from England's ground he sprung and came," and stating his purpose, which is to find King George.—Enter King George, "in search of his enemy," St. Gay, who as "a stranger, exposed and in danger," calls upon Slasher for help.—With loud words Slasher threatens King George, who in his turn boasts of "close escapes," giants and dragons subdued, and the King of Egypt's daughter won.—They fight, and Slasher "tumbles down and dies."—Enter Doctor, who has "travelled" imaginatively and can "fetch any dead man to life again." He begins with Slasher, who signalizes his recovery by summoning the "Black Prince of Paradise, black Morocco king," to renew the fray.—"Here am I," cries that hero; it was I who "slew those seven Turks," and it is I who now will "jam King George's giblets full of holes, And in those holes put pebble stones!" George doubts the Black Prince's ability, even though he be a "champion's squire,"—they are about to fight, when Prologue intervenes with "Peace and Quietness is the best," and "Enter in, owld Beelzebub!" That personage on entering turns out to be, in dress, a kind of Devil and Vice combined, in spirit a kind of Father Christmas summoning all to drink.—This queer jumble is worth more space than I can afford it. Just a word or two in passing. St. Gay is given up by Halliwell-Phillipps as an "addition to the calendar not noticed elsewhere." But one observes that his squire is a foreigner, as his name and garb both proclaim,[41] and that he is the squire of a champion. This limits us to the three foreign champions of Christendom, and from St. Gay's second speech we discover, not only that he is San Diego of Spain, but (unless I am gravely mistaken) that some author of the various generations of authors of this play had acquaintance with Caxton's Golden Legend of 1483, where, in the Life of St. James the More, we find the original, in oddly similar terms, of one altogether unintelligible phrase used by this English makeshift for a Spanish champion.[42] Further not very definite but suggestive similarities with the Life of St. George add to the presumption that the Caxton translation of the Legenda Aurea underlies portions of this folk play. Of course a play of the martyrdom of St. George may have existed earlier still, but if, as would seem to be the case, Voragine invented the dragon, that monster cannot have played a part before 1270-90; it does not play a part even in the South English Legendary of 1285, but is prominent in Caxton's narrative.

With the play just described the Lutterworth is identical in some seven or eight passages, and save that there is no Black Prince, and that a Turkish Champion takes the place of St. Gay, the principal characters are the same. The introduction of Beelzebub and a clown, with remarks appropriate to each, would, however, indicate that this part of the play is earlier than the amalgamated Beelzebub-clown of the Derbyshire. Both plays preserve reminiscences of the crusades. As to the Oxfordshire, I can say only that it is a rigmarole from history, legend, and nursery tale, culminating in the destruction of the dragon (or Old Nick) and the appearance of Father Christmas. The Bassingham plays present the stock characters, but little of the original story. They add elements of scandal and love, however,—the former in connection with Dame Jane, who tries to fasten the paternity of her child on a "Father's Eldest Son, And heir of all his land"; and the latter in connection with a Fair Lady, who is wooed by Eldest Son, Farming Man, Lawyer, Old Man, and refuses them all, in the end apparently to accept the Fool. This part of the story is a link between the St. George plays and the sword-dance plays, as is also the Shetland, where St. George himself sustains the part of principal dancer. In the Revesby sword-dance play, acted in 1779 by morris-dancers, the Fair Lady of the Bassingham reappears as Cicely to refuse Pepper-breeches, "My father's eldest son, And heir of all his land," Ginger-breeches, Blue-breeches, the Knight of Lee, and Pickle Herring, the Lord of Pool, in favour of Rafe the Fool. Though the phraseology of the Bassingham and Revesby is occasionally the same, the latter is utterly removed from the St. George original save in the mention of dragon and worm which accompany the morris-dancers. How far back the Revesby sword-dance play may date I do not know. The dance was common on the continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a similar performance with a fool in the middle is recorded as taking place in Ulm in 1551. The name of the merry-andrew, Pickle Herring, may possibly take us back to the first quarter of the sixteenth century. For, as is well known, it is the usual designation for the clown in the 1620 collection of plays acted by the so-called English comedians in Germany. According to Creizenach,[43] the character was introduced by Robert Reynolds, who was perhaps himself the Robert Pickelhäring mentioned in connection with an entertainment given at Torgau in 1627. Floegel and Ebeling speak of "der alte Pickelhering aus der Moralititäten des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts," as if he were the "old Vice"; but surely without justification. I know of no mention of Pickle Herring before 1620, and since he still held the stage in Löwen's Prinz Pickelhering, about the middle of the eighteenth century, it is not impossible that the character was borrowed by the English sword play at a comparatively recent date. The continuance of the Devil and his relation to the clown in these plays are a subject of historical interest, but it would be a mistake to say, as Halliwell-Phillipps has said of the Beelzebub, that either of them is "a genuine descendant of the Vice."

Perhaps I should not have stayed to make these remarks, but they will, I hope, direct attention to a phenomenon unique in the history of English drama. The St. George play is an example of how a legendary miracle, sacred in its origin, may pass into a folk drama of a national hero, and that again degenerate into a mumming or dance; and how this, oblivious of the original plot and finally of all fable, may first transform the saintly hero into a performer in a sword dance, as in the Shetland play, and then, as in the Revesby, eliminate even him and substitute a fool. Both literary career and literary indignity of this kind have been escaped by the other national saint of England, Edward the Confessor. In earlier days he figured in frequent pageants, records of which are preserved, for instance, in the Old Leet Book of Coventry, of the years 1456 and 1471, but he readily gave way to St. George and disappeared from the dramatic horizon.

5. The Devil and the Vice

The nexus between the comic qualities of the miracle plays and those of the morals cannot well be made without some discussion of the rôles of the Devil and the Vice. The treatise which I have before cited,[44] and which appears to me fairly conclusive, shows that the Devil of the English stage is originally a creation, not of folk mythology, but of theology. He is concrete, to be sure, in accordance with scriptural and legendary tradition, but in the 'mysteries' his character is almost entirely serious, not ludicrous, as appears to be vulgarly reported. The association of the genuinely comic or satirical with the conception of the Devil is first evident in later representations of that character, and then only in the case of lesser denizens of the lower world. The humorous scene in the Chester Harrowing between the demons and the alewife abandoned in hell is, for instance, as Dr. Deimling has said, a late interpolation. The Wakefield dramatist's contribution to the Judicium, of Tutivillus and his ilk, is about the only diabolic humour in the miracles; and that the satirical speech of the Coventry demon in the Conspiracy was a still later borrowing from Tutivillus, I have but little doubt. To credit the Devils of the earliest miracles with a tendency and an ability to criticise manners and morals would be just as wrong as to attribute to them a buffoonery which accrues only at a later date. Of the Mephistophelian style, more serious than Chaucer's and more satirical than Langland's, we have no historical trace before the witty Devil of Wakefield—or his maker. The humour of the miracle Devils shows itself in bombastic, grotesque, or abusive language, rather than in anything of comic utterance or incident. The uproarious laughter caused, according to tradition, by this character cannot, therefore, have depended upon the lines of the dramatist, except in so far as those consist of threats, objurgation, profanity, and the like. There is little in the asides of the printed page, or in the rare addresses of the Devil to his audience, or the deportation of souls to hell[45] to account for amusement. Rewfyn,[46] Rybald, and Tutivillus are the only humorous devil-names in the five cycles of which we have been speaking; and of the shouting and fireworks in which we are told the infernal spirits were wont to indulge, we find scarcely any mention except in the plays concerning the fall of the angels and the harrowing of hell. That the merriment of the crowd was provoked by the appearance and antics of the Devil—that is to say, by the improvisation of the actor—and his raids upon the spectators is natural to infer. The dramatists themselves did not provide for close association between the spirits of hell and living men. The Devil addresses the audience but seldom, and then, perhaps, to threaten with his club. In fact, the Devil of the old miracles, as we usually conceive him, is an anachronism created by certain historians of the drama; the buffoon roaring, pyrotechnic, and familiar, springs into prominence only with the Digby plays, and is but slowly developed in the moral plays and interludes. Though the aspiring angels of the York and Chester plays "go down" in actual fact, and the Lucifer of the former cycle complains of heat and smoke, there is no mention of hell-mouth in the account-books before 1557, nor in the stage directions of the Digby[47] before we reach the Digby Paul and Magdalene Mss. of about 1480-90; and even then the entries appear to be the insertions of some later hand. In these plays the flames of hell-mouth, the fireworks, and thunder are distinctive accessories of the Devil's presence. Still, it is not in a miracle play after all, but in a moral—the Castell of Perseverance (about 1400)—that the first stage direction of this nature is found. In the transitional miracle morals, Paul, Wisdom, Magdalene, the Devil by his own account as well as by stage direction "rores and cries." He was abusive in the Castell of Perseverance; but in the later morals or moral interludes he "rores and cries" for mere fun—in the Lusty Juventus, for instance, the Disobedient Child, and All for Money.