Part 7

The concrete element so noteworthy in Mankynd is further developed in the "_Goodly Interlude of Nature_, compylyde by" Archbishop Morton's chaplain, Henry Medwall, between 1486 and 1500. This author must have possessed a remarkably vivid imagination, or have enjoyed a closer acquaintance than might be expected of one of his cloth with the seamy side of London; for there are few racier or more realistic bits of description in our early literature than the account given by Sensuality of Fleyng Kat and Margery, of the perversion of the hero by the latter, and of her retirement when deserted to that house of "Strayt Religyon at the Grene Freres hereby," where "all is open as a gose eye." Though the plot is not remarkable, nor the mechanism of it, for almost the only device availed of is that of feigned names, still the author's insight into the conditions of low life, his common sense, his proverbial philosophy, his humorous exhibition of the morals of the day, and his stray and sudden shafts at the foibles of his own religious class, would alone suffice to attract attention to this work. And even more remarkable than this in the history of comedy is Medwall's literary style: his versification excellent and varied, his conversations witty, idiomatic, and facile. Indeed, he is so far beyond the ordinary convention that he writes the first bit of prose to be found in our drama.

Several of the characteristics of _Mankynd_ are carried forward also in the moral "interlude," named, not for its hero Free Will, but for its Vice, _Hyckescorner_. It appears to have been written between 1497 and 1512. The upper limit of production is fixed by the reference to Newfoundland, and perhaps by the fact that in the same year Locher's translation of the _Narrenschiff_ appeared; the lower limit by the mention of the ship _Regent_, which would not probably have been referred to as existing after 1512.[63] Indeed, the mention of the ship _James_ may associate the lower limit with 1503, the date of the Scotch marriage. The tendency of this moral is distinctively didactic,--to denounce the folly that scoffs at religion,--but in quality it smacks more of comedy than any preceding play. Its value was long ago acknowledged by Dr. Percy. "Abating the moral and religious reflections and the like," says he, "the piece is of a comic cast, and contains a humorous display of some of the vices of the age. Indeed, the author has generally shown so little attention to the allegorical that we need only to substitute other names to his personages, and we have real characters and living manners." The plot is insignificant, but the situations are refreshingly humorous, and one of them, the setting of Pity in the stocks, is new. The local references are frequent, and the dialogue is more sprightly than even that of _Nature_. _Hyckescorner_ is in many ways the model of another important play of which we shall soon have reason to speak, the _Interlude of Youth_.

While the plot of the _New Interlude and Mery of the Nature of the Four Elements_, calls for no special notice, it interests us because in purpose it is not moral, but scientific, and in conduct makes use of comic and commonplace means not previously availed of. The humour proceeds not simply from the jumble of oaths, nicknames, proverbs, gibes, bad puns, transparent jokes, mimicry, Sam Wellerisms, and _nugae canorae_ of which the talk of most Vices consists, but from the cleverly managed verbal misunderstanding between the Vice and the Taverner, the irrelevant question, and the humorous employment of snatches and tags from popular songs. The introduction of a character representing a trade, such as that of the Taverner, who enumerates sixteen kinds of wine, and "by his face seems to love best drinking," is, of course, novel, but is not without precedent in the miracle plays. This interlude was printed in 1519 by its author, John Rastell, evidently soon after it was written.

When we consider that the _Four Elements_ was written by a friend of Sir Thomas More, and that, like the plays of John Heywood, another of More's friends, it depends for much of its effect upon its gibes at womankind, we are, perhaps, assisted in realizing the extent to which the literary taste of the day still indulged in this primitive form of amusement, and the distance which was yet to be covered before comedy could safely avail itself of the feminine element as it is,--witty and practical, as well as tender,--and so prepare to fulfil its peculiar function as the conserver of society. For, until it recognizes that women constitute the social other-half, the comic spirit has not come into full possession of its possibilities; it has not produced comedy, for it has not given us a full and undistorted reflex of life. This is a fact so rarely considered that I cannot refrain from quoting Mr. George Meredith. "Comedy," he says, in his excellent essay on its _Idea_--"comedy lifts women to a station offering them free play for their wit, as they usually show it, when they have it, on the side of sound sense. The higher the comedy, the more prominent the part they enjoy in it.... The heroines of comedy are like women of the world, not necessarily heartless for being clear-witted: they seem so to the sentimentally reared only for the reason that they use their wits, and are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or a pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with men, and of men with them: and as the two, however divergent, both look on one object, namely, life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring them to some resemblance. The comic poet dares to show us men and women coming to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that, when they draw together in social life, their minds grow liker; just as the philosopher discerns the similarity of boy and girl, until the girl is marched away to the nursery." Of course, if the ways of man and maid in society ever grew to be exactly alike, comedy would die of inanition. Consequently, though I say that comedy requires for the sexes equality of social privilege, I do not mean identity. The _synalœpha_ of the sexes--such as some extremists, political and pedagogical, project--would just as surely destroy comedy as in former days the inequality of the sexes dwarfed it. The sentimental and romantic give-and-take is as essential to society as the intellectual, and as essential to comedy as to society.

=8. The Dramatic Contribution of the Older Morals=

Before discussing the period of transition upon which comedy now enters, it will be advantageous to determine, if possible, what contributions to the methods of comedy should be credited distinctively to this moral or moral interlude during the years that preceded the change, that is, from 1380 to 1520. Certainly not the introduction of the separate play, as is frequently supposed, nor the substitution of immediate and familiar interests for those that were remote, nor of the invented plot for the traditional, and the significant for the spectacular. Though some of these features distinguish the evolution of the allegorical play, one and another of them is also to be recognized at as early a period, or earlier, in those forms of the drama, kindred and unrelated, that I have already described,--the miracle, the saint's play, the farce, and the secular festival play. I should say that, so far as the materials of drama are concerned, the advances peculiar to the allegorical play were, from the use of the scriptural _dramatis persona_, frequently instrumental and therefore wooden, to the use of the dynamic; and from the historical or traditional individual to the representative of a type. These are substitutions important to our subject, for, that the individual should come to the front is, as ten Brink has well said, a characteristic of tragedy, whereas in comedy it is the typical that is emphasized, to the end that in an example which is typical the follies of the age may be liberally, and at the same time impersonally, embodied and chastised. By virtue of its didactic purpose and its allegorical form, moreover, the moral play must ascribe to its _dramatis personæ_ adequate motives of action. It therefore must and does make an attempt, even though rude, at the preservation of psychological probability in the analysis and development of these motives. Once the dramatic person has been labelled with the name of a quality, not as appraised from without and denoted by a patronymic common to dozens beside himself, but from within and specified by his ethonymic (if I may coin the word), he is no longer a chance acquaintance of the dramatist or the public, but the representative of an ethical family. In the moral play the characters stand for or against some convention,--educational, ethical, political, religious,--that is to say, social in the broadest sense. With the advent of such characters, therefore, the social drama receives an impulse. Its hero serves to justify or to satirize an institution; for that end he exists. And therefore in the handling of motives the moral makes a genuine advance in the direction of comedy, both critical and ideal.

We notice next that the author of this kind of drama finds it necessary to devise situations for exploiting the idiosyncrasies of his principal characters; and that, even though the characters be disguised as abstractions, the friction of what is dynamic with what is real results in something vivid and concrete. I do not mean to say that the dramatist has learned how to develop character, but how to display or manifest it. Skill in the portrayal of character in process of growth came but slowly, and with the passage of the allegorical play into the drama of real life. As to the portrayal of motives and emotions in their complexity, that is an art much more refined, to which the writers of the moral never attained, even though they enriched their abstractions with borrowings from theologians, philosophers, and poets, for in dealing with abstractions at all they were dealing with life at second hand. Indeed, complex characters can hardly be found in English drama before the various tentative dramatic species had merged themselves in the polytypic plays with which comedy, properly so called, made its appearance. The allegorical dramatists found also, like the writers of the later miracle and farce, that critical situations demanded plain language and unsophisticated manners; and if, in these respects, the realism of the moral excels that of the earlier miracle, it is perhaps because of the superior dynamic quality of the moral _dramatis persona_.

Mr. Courthope and other writers on the drama have conjectured that the improvement characteristic of the allegorical playwright was one to which he was driven of necessity, namely, the introduction, and consequently the invention, of a continuous plot. But there was nothing new in the invention of plot. The novelty, if any, was in the distinctively comic nature of the plot-movement most suitable to the purpose of this kind of drama. In tragedy, the movement must be economic of its ups and downs: once headed downward, it must plunge, with but one or two vain recovers, to the abyss. In comedy, on the other hand, though the movement is ultimately upward, the crises are more numerous; the oftener the individual stumbles without breaking his neck, and the more varied his discomfitures, so long as they are temporary, the better does he enjoy his ease in the cool of the day. Tragic effects may be intense and longer drawn out, but they must be few; in comedy, the effects are many, sudden, fleeting, kaleidoscopic. You can enjoy a long, delicious shudder, but not a long-spun joke, or a joke frequently repeated, or many jokes of the same kind. Hence the peculiar movement of the plot in comedy. Now, the novelty of the plot in the moral play, lay in the fact that the movement was of this oscillating, upward kind,--a kind unknown as a rule to the miracle, whose conditions were less fluid, and to the farce, which was too shallow and superficial. The heart of the 'moral' hero was a battleground; as in comedy, the interest was in the vicissitudes of the conflict and the certainty of peace. Though the purpose of the moral play was didactic and reformatory, its doctrine was optimistic and its end to encourage; and one of the distinctive contributions of the moral play to the English comedy was the movement suitable to these conditions, not the introduction of a continuous or connected plot. When Mr. Courthope further speaks of the moral plays as if they were the sole link of connection between the later miracle plays and the regular drama, and implies that the "morality" was unique in its introduction of a leading personage, who may be called the hero of the play, he is attributing to it qualities that existed in contemporary species of the dramatic kind. As to the statement that the moral play arose, as if a new kind of play, from some modification of the miracle play, on the one hand by secular and comic interests, and on the other by allegorical motives and materials, I think that sufficient has been elsewhere said in this article to show that secular and comic interests existed in the miracle play without altering its essence, both before and after the moral had come into prominence, and that allegorical motives and materials had developed themselves into the moral pageant and play before the miracle was visibly affected by them.

=9. The Period of Transition: Farce and Romantic Interlude=

The period of experimentation or transition, which may be said to extend from 1520 to 1553, is characterized especially by the gradual abandonment of allegorical machinery and abstract material. The forward movement is, of course, primarily due to the change from the mediæval attitude of mind to that of the renaissance, from artificial thought whose medium, the symbol, succeeded in concealing more than it expressed, to experience. Of the social and political conditions which prepared the way for the transition so far as English comedy is concerned or that shaped comedy once on its way, I cannot here speak, but the following would appear among purely literary antecedents: First, the French _sotties_ and _farces_, the technical and satirical qualities of which were a stimulus to invention, not only in England, but in Italy and Germany; second, the _disputations_ and _debats_, veritable whetstones of wit and a polish of words _ad unguem;_ third, the collateral development of a farce interlude in England, composed in Latin and English, probably also in Norman French, but generally spontaneous, and wholly unforced; fourth, the adaptation to dramatic and satirical purposes of _contes_, _fabliaux_, _novelle_, and their English translations and congeners,--more especially the Chaucerian episode with its concrete characters and contemporary manners; fifth, the movement of native romance urged during the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries by contact with Spanish and Italian ideals and their fictions of character, adventure, and intrigue; sixth, the discipline of Plautine and Terentian models, and of the Latin and vernacular comedies which imitated them, as well as of the Latin school plays which flourished in Holland and Germany during the latter half of the fifteenth century; and seventh, the examples set by Kirchmayer and other German controversialists in the attempted adaptation of the moral play to historical or quasi-historical conditions with a view to satirical ends.

The plays that call for consideration in this section and the next may be classified roughly as farces, romantic interludes, school interludes, and controversial morals. Each of these kinds reaches a culmination conformable to its nature, within the limits that I have chosen for the period; and each has its own place in the history of comedy. For it must not be supposed that, because a pastoral farce like the _Mak_ did not develop into independent existence, or because moral interludes gradually exhausted their career towards the end of the sixteenth century, such species had no influence in maturing English comedy. The peculiar quality and charm of our comedy is that, deriving from sources not only distinct, but remote in literary habitat,--scriptural, allegorical, farcical, pastoral, romantic, classical, historical, or purely native and social,--it has not dissipated itself in a thousand streamlets, but has carried down deposits from each tributary at its best. In _Love's Labor's Lost_, _Two Angry Women_, _As You Like It_, _Old Wives' Tale_, _Every Man in His Humour_, we find, as in a miner's pan, 'colours' from vastly different soils.

Of the indebtedness of comedy to the parody of religious festivals I have already spoken, and I have little doubt that at later periods English comedy continued to draw devices, if not inspiration, from performances whose occasion was a revolt against the straitness of religion. One, at least, of the interludes of John Heywood is closely similar to the French _Farce de Pernet_, and that such farces were, in motive, first a gloss upon the lessons of the divine service, then a diversion, and finally a factor in the extra-ecclesiastical Feast of Fools, any reader of Petit de Julleville will readily concede. It is impossible that the comic features and comic characters of the farces acted by the _clercs de la Basoche_, such as that of the immortal _Maître Pathelin_, should not have affected the dramatic invention of contemporary and succeeding Englishmen, conversant as many of them were with the literature and society of France. And a like effect might naturally be expected to have been exercised by the _sotties_ of the contemporary _enfants sans souci_; for, through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, drama of that kind convulsed the sides of merrymakers south of the Channel. Such were the occasion and motive of farces and _sotties_. So far as they employed the plot of domestic intrigue for their purposes of satire, I have little doubt that they drew freely upon the Latin elegiac comedies of which I have already spoken as the favourite dramatic species of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The _Farce de Pernet_ has connection with more than one of those imitations of Terentian intrigue. It has, also, like many of its kind and of elegiac comedies as well, a kinship with one and another popular tale. The church, then, seems to have furnished the opportunity for these farces, and for some as an object of satire the motive; the _contes_ and _fabliaux_ of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries furnished much of the material; Latin comedy, its mediæval and renaissance successors, cannot have failed to influence the form.

It will be, of course, recalled that as early as the _Mak_ of the Towneley plays, a farce which is not unworthy of comparison with _Maître Pathelin_, the English _Interludium de Clerico et Puella_, probably of the thirteenth century, also indicated an acquaintance with the technique of the farce species. Undoubtedly such interludes were a common feature at entertainments of various kinds, and had matured in the ordinary course into fixed form. But they were frequently extemporaneous, were written for fleeting occasions, and might readily be lost. I am inclined therefore, to look upon the dramatized anecdotes assigned to Heywood as lucky survivals of a form which, since it had been long cultivated both in England and France, may have attained to a degree of excellence before he took it up. The resemblance of these farces to the French is often such that, as M. Jusserand says, one cannot but question whether Heywood had not some of the old French dramas of the type in his hands. Since Mr. Pollard has discussed the question in this volume, it is unnecessary for me to pursue it farther. In any case, it is to the honour of Heywood that he brought to focus the characteristic qualities of the Chaucerian episode, the farce and the dramatic debate. "This I write," says he, "not to teach, but to touch." In his work, accordingly, we find narratives of single and independent interest, if not exactly plot, and an adaptation of that which is abstract to purposes of amusement. We find characters with motive, and sometimes personality, contemporary manners, witty dialogue, satire; and in at least the _Play of Love_, an adumbration of the sentimental, dare we say romantic, possibilities of comedy, to be realized when it should have thrown allegory and scholasticism to the winds. The Laundress in the _Wether_ envisages fleetingly the straits of life and the recompense; and in the _Play of Love_, the personification of various phases of that passion is a kind of glass through which we darkly divine the motives of many later comedies. There is, however, with the single exception of the Vice's trick in _Love_, no action which can be called dramatic in Heywood's undoubted plays; for, as Mr. Pollard reminds us, the _Pardoner_ and _Johan_, although they avail themselves of "business" in order to develop a plot, have not the significance of comedy proper.

To understand the nature of the movements that follow we must recur, though with the utmost brevity, to the history of later Latin comedy. The comic recitals of the twelfth century and thereabout were succeeded by the comedy of the Italian humanists, still in Latin, but dramatic in form and apparently in intent, which, though it availed itself, like the elegiac school, of the outworn situations and devices of scabrous amours, contributed considerably to the enrichment of the romantic strain by the passion with which it invested its material, sometimes, also, to the cause of realism by its unconscious, though often repulsive, accuracy of detail. Although Plautus is to some extent cultivated, the Terentian model was still the favourite with youthful imitators until study of the older poet was revived by the recovery of the twelve lost plays and their introduction to Roman circles in 1427. The _Philologia_ of Petrarch's earlier years is accordingly fashioned in the style of Terence, and is even reported, for it is unfortunately lost, to have surpassed its classical forbears. Written about 1331, it was the first product of the new dramatic school, and was succeeded by a numerous train of ambitious effusions,--university plays we might call most of them,--a few witty, some sentimental, many libidinous, all very young, and still all, or nearly all, cleverly and regularly constructed. It concerns us here but to mention the _Paulus_ of Vergerio, which Creizenach dates 1370, Aretino's _Poliscene_, about 1390, Alberti's _Philodoxeos_, 1418, Ugolino's _Philogena_, some time before 1437, and Piccolomini's _Crisis_, 1444.[64] Of these erotic comedies,--pornographic were perhaps a more fitting term,--the most popular seems to have been the _Philogena_; the most eminent, according to Creizenach (but I don't see why), the _Crisis_. The _Paulus_ pretends to aim at the improvement of youth; one might for a moment imagine that it was intended to be a prodigal son play. But in none of these plays is there either punishment or repentance. In fact the unaffected verve with which they display the wantonness of life is not the least of their contributions to comedy. The _Poliscene_ is notable for its modernity of manners and of morals. The sole instance among these plays, so far as I can ascertain, of noble sentiment and harmless plot is the _Philodoxeos_. The use of abstract names for the characters lends it, indeed, somewhat the appearance of a moral interlude.