Part 4

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]