Part 5

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_.

Concerning the Devil even of this later birth, many false conceptions, due to insufficient research, have obtained currency. It is commonly imagined that he was the mainspring of the play, that he came into close contact with human beings, that he represented phases of human character, that he was a comical figure,--jester, or "roister," or butt,--and that he held some fixed relation to the Vice, who was "his constant attendant," says Malone. But the Devil was the principal personage only in the earliest of the morals that survive, he rarely associated with mankind, and he assumed the human rôle, such as that of judge or sailor, only once or twice.[48] In the moral plays not more than four or five comic Devils are extant--the Titivillus of _Mankynd_, the Beelzebub of the _Nigromansir_, the Lucifer of _Like wil to Like_, and the Devil of _All for Money_; and the last of these is the only roysterer of the lot, one of the very few to serve as butt for the Vice. Such jokes as that of the Devil taking "a shrewd boy with him" from the audience in _Wisdom_ are interpolations, and it is only after the moral has passed its zenith that, as in _Like wil to Like_ and the early comedy _Friar Bacon_, the Devil carries off the Vice-clown. As early as 1486-1500 the moral play, _Nature_,--called, when printed in 1538, a goodly interlude,--dispenses with the Devil altogether, and from that time on the character appears only in some half-dozen extant plays of the kind and its derivatives, and is subordinate. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, however, the Devil is revived, and in comedies of concrete life and character he frequently swaggers as a blusterer or comic personage: in _Grim the Collier_, for instance, in the _Knack to know a Knave_, and _Histrio-Mastix_, as well as seventeenth-century plays like _The Devil is in It_ and _The Devil is an Ass_. I have said that his office in the genuine moral was not comic, neither was it satirical. It consisted largely in directing or commissioning his agents, the Vices. Professor Cushman, who makes this statement, further points out that this conception of the Devil did not develop in any popular sense, nor gain in variety in the English moral plays; but that the case is altogether dissimilar in the German and French drama of the same period, where the devils are not only numerous, but carefully differenced as representatives of the various foibles of mankind,--a rôle which was assumed in England, as we shall presently see, by the Vice.

Between the detached, and sometimes serious, Devil of the cycles and the Vice of the moral plays, ever present, dominant and comical, concrete in manifold person and guise, a middle or transitional position is occupied by the fiend of the later miracle and the demon of the earlier moral. Examples of the former are Tutivillus and his humorous associates in the Wakefield _Judicium_, Lord Lucifer of the Coventry _Council_ (who, like the Vice, euphemizes his attendant Deadly Sins), the Prynse of Dylles of the _Magdalene_, and the sailor devil of the Newcastle play; examples of the latter are the gunpowder Belial of _Perseverance_, the intriguing Lucifer of _Wisdom_, now in "devely aray," anon as a "prowde galaunt," the farcical and efficient Titivillus of _Mankynd_, and Beelzebub, the judge and buffoon of the _Nigromansir_. But though the demon of the morals bears some relation to his predecessor of the miracles, he is not borrowed from the miracles. He grows out of a common tradition.

Just as the Devil persists in spite of lapse and change through miracle play, moral, and interlude into Elizabethan comedy, so the Vice, though he did not obtain so early a footing upon the stage. There are previsions of him in the later miracles and earlier morals; he flourished in the morals of the middle period and the moral interludes, and there are traces of him in the regular comedy. He disappeared only in deference to the differentiated humours, follies, or vices of social life, of which no controlling Folly or Vice may be regarded as the sole incarnation,--for in the culture of them each of us indulges a genius of his own.

The term Vice is not used as the designation of a stock dramatic character till the appearance of Heywood's _Play of the Wether_ and _Play of Love_, before or about 1532. It is next employed in _Respublica_, 1553, and _Jacke Jugeler_, 1553-61. These and similar notices of that period, however, occur only on title-pages of plays or in lists or stage directions. The earliest mention of the Vice in the text of a play is found in _King Darius_, 1565. It is not until 1567, with the _Horestes_, that we find the designation "used consistently throughout, in the title, the list of players and the rubric."[49] But whether the generic name of Vice was introduced by the authors of these plays, or, as is more likely, by the actors, it was a well-known designation of a stock figure, especially in the moral drama from 1530 onward; and from that time was used by publishers to advance the interest of certain plays. Since, however, the idea of the Vice seems to be inseparable from that of the moral play, the character had achieved a prominence long before it was listed as a generic designation. Collier defines the moral, or moral interlude, as "A drama the characters of which are allegorical, abstract, or symbolical, and the style of which is intended to convey a lesson for the better conduct of human life." And the differencing quality of the moral is, as Mr. Pollard has said, "the contest between the personified powers of good and evil for the possession of a human soul. As the allegorical representatives of the good were the Seven Cardinal Virtues, so the representatives of the evil were the Seven Deadly Sins and their master the Devil." From these Seven Deadly Sins or Vices, the Vice _par excellence_ of the morals and interludes is without doubt descended. With the opinion of Ward and Douce, however, that he is proved to be of native English origin, I cannot unreservedly concur; nor with a statement in the thesis to which I have already referred, that the Germans and French had no Vice, but used instead the "differentiated" devil. Idleness, a Vice, though not so called, appears in the French _Bien-Avisé et Mal-Avisé_ (_c._ 1439), about as early as any Vice appears in English drama; and the four confederates of the Devil in _L'Homme Pêcheur_, Desperation, etc., perform the office, though they have not the designation, of Vice. The Hypocrisie and Simonie of Gringoire's attack upon _L'Homme Obstiné_ (Julius II.), about 1512, are as true representatives of the Vice as are the corresponding figures in _The Nigromansir_, _Thrie Estatis_, _Kyng Johan_, _Respublica_ and _Conflict of Conscience_.

To understand the relations between the Vice and the moral play one should turn, if there were opportunity, to the manifold representations of the World, the Flesh, the Devil, the Seven Deadly Sins and similar allegorical figures in mediæval literature of other kinds than the dramatic. It must suffice here, however, to consider the relation of these characters to each other in the later miracles and the earlier moral plays. In the pageants of the _Play of Paternoster_ the Seven Deadly Sins are represented. About the same time, in the Wakefield cycle, they are already written on the rolls of the Doomsday Demon, and discussed "in especiall" by Tutivillus. In the Coventry _Council of the Jews_ they are new-named by their Lord Lucifer (after the manner of the later Vice), Pride as Honesty, Wrath as Manhood, Covetousness as Wisdom, and so on. It is through the Seven Deadly Sins that the Belial of St. Paul (Digby) "raynes"; and the Saint himself[50] preaches against them in general and in several, calling them not only mortal sins, but, as if the terms were synonymous, Vices and Folly. In the _Mary Magdalene_ they are not only personified, but, further, classified as attendants upon their respective kings--Pride and Covetyse, ministers of the World; Lechery, Gluttony, and Sloth, of the Flesh; Wrath and Envy, of the Devil,--and as such they are sent into action. This distinction by classes is interesting because it shows that from a very early date the Vice was regarded as the servant, not of the Devil alone, but of the World and the Flesh as well. And it will be noticed later that, while the minor Vices of the moral interludes frequently bear the names of specific sins, the leading Vice is still likely to be called by a name which sums up all the specific sins of just one of these three satrapies of the Flesh, the World, the Devil,--Sensuality for the first, Hypocrisy or Avarice for the second, and Sedition or Riot for the third,--when he is not indicated by some synonym of Evil in general, such as Folly, Sin, Iniquity, Inclination, or Infidelity. Gradually the minor Vices pass into dramatic insignificance as compared with their principal representative, who becomes the Vice in chief. The morals before 1500 or thereabouts had one or more of the following figures: Devil, the World, the Flesh; and their representatives, the Vice and minor Vices or Deadly Sins. Of these plays--_Perseverance_, _Mankynd_, _Mary Magdalene_, _Wisdom_, _Nature_, and _Everyman_,--all but the last three display the complete aggregation: _Wisdom_ stars with only a Devil, _Nature_ lacks a Devil, and _Everyman_ lacks both Devil and principal Vice. The morals of the middle period, 1500 to 1560, generally eliminate the Devil and concentrate the sins, temptations, and mischiefs in the Vice, sometimes with, sometimes without, his foils, the minor Vices. In the _Castell of Perseverance_, about 1400, the Deadly Sins are "children of the Devil"; in _The World and Child_, about 1506, they are expressly summed up in one Vice,--Folly; in _Lusty Juventus_, _Like wil to Like_, and several other moral interludes after 1550, the Vice parades as son or grandson to the Devil; and finally, about 1578, while each of the minor Vices represents "one sin particularly," the Vice himself embodies "all sins generally."

It must be sufficiently evident by this time that the derivation of this name, in spite of a half-dozen misleading conjectures, is no other than that which is obvious. I notice, however, that Mr. Pollard regards the etymology from _vitium_ as still doubtful, "because in one of the earliest instances in which the Vice is specifically mentioned by name, he plays the part of Mery Report, who is a jester pure and simple, without any connection with any of the Deadly Sins." But the Vice or Folly had been known for two or three centuries in allegorical and satirical literature, and for a century and a half in the religious drama before 1530, and the designation had acquired a supplementary and degraded connotation when used in the _Wether_, _Jacke Jugeler_, etc., as a player's term or means of advertisement. About his function and habits, also, various misconceptions have gathered. I have, for instance, referred to Malone's statement that he was a constant attendant upon the Devil. Nothing could be more misleading. The Devil appears in at least two morals unattended by a Vice of any kind,[51] and the Vice appears in twenty-five or thirty without a Devil. They appear together in but eight[52] that I know of; and in only four[53] can the Vice be said to "attend." That he eggs the demons on to twit or torment the Devil, I cannot discover in more than two plays,--_Like wil to Like_, and _All for Money_. Since the days of Harsnet and Ben Jonson it has been reported that the Vice of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made a practice of riding to hell on the Devil's back. But I have already pointed out that he does this in only one play before 1580. The same _Like wil to Like_ is the only play in which he specifically "belabours the fiend." I know of no other in which that merriment was even likely to occur. In fact most of these attributions belong, not to the Vice of the morals and interludes, but to one of the later substitutes for him, the Vice-clown, such as Miles in _Friar Bacon_, or Iniquity in _The Devil is an Ass_.