Part 8

Of much greater value, however, in the history of the acted drama, and of closer bearing upon the English comedy, were the representations of Plautus and Terence, first in the Latin and ultimately in the vernacular, which marked the last quarter of the fifteenth century in the courts of northern Italy. These in turn were but stepping-stones towards such dramatic dialogues as the _Timone_ of Bojardo, 1494, and the still more significant experiments of Ariosto and Bibbiena--the first romantic comedies in prose and in the native tongue. The authors of the _Suppositi_ (acted in 1509) and the _Calandria_ (written in 1508, but not presented till six years later) derive much from Roman sources, but in general these comedies and their like were original. Their influence upon our own plays of romantic intrigue will presently appear. So, likewise, will that of a Spanish work, of even earlier date, the dramatic novel of _Calisto and Melibœa_; for this tragic production of Cota and De Rojas is the source of our first English romantic drama. The connection between other forms of Italian drama, the _Commedia dell'arte_, the pastoral drama, etc., and the later stage in western Europe has been ably discussed by Klein, Moland, Symonds, and Ward; and to them I must refer the reader of this more summary account.

The decade that saw the first of Heywood's virile plays was probably that which welcomed to England the ebullient, un-English passions of a dramatic species destined to develop the native stock in a far different manner. "A new commodye in englyshe, in maner of an enterlude," ordinarily called _Calisto and Melibœa_, is the earliest romantic play of intrigue in our language. It was "caused to be printed" by that excellent promoter of the dramatic art, John Rastell, about 1530, and was written--perhaps by him--not long before. The appellation "commodye" had been used during the same decade with reference to the English translation of the _Andria_ (about 1520-29); it is here used for the first time on the title-page of an English play. And this interesting interlude may, indeed, well be called both English and comedy; for though it derives from romance sources (the Spanish dramatic composition by Fernando de Rojas, before 1500), and is affected by the Italian, it does not follow exactly the plot of its original; and though it is "reduced to the proportions of an interlude," it treats of an idea not farcical, but significant, and it develops the motives of real characters, by way of action, passion, and intrigue, to a happy conclusion within the realm of convention and common sense. It is, indeed, a comedy, perhaps our first well-rounded comedy, though in miniature. The _Secunda Pastorum_ it excels in singleness of aim; the _Pardoner and Frere_ and the _Johan_, in meaning for life. It excels all preceding interludes in the fulfilment of the purpose, now for the first time announced in English drama, "to shew and to describe as well the bewte and good propertes of women as theyr vyces and evyll condicions." For the first time since plays became secular, women are introduced, not as the objects of scurrility and ridicule, but as dramatic material of an æsthetic, moral, and intellectual value equal to that of men. What the author of _Johan_ did for the amusing and real action desirable in a comedy, the author of this play did for vital characterization and passion. Melibœa is the first heroine of our romantic comedy; she is so fair that for her lover there is "no such sovereign in heaven, though she be in earth." She is, if the play was written before the _Play of Love_, our earliest heroine "loved, not loving." She is a woman and pitiful and to be wooed; frail and repentant; but then indignant and not to be won. Calisto is, likewise, our first lover in despair. This element of woman worship--not worship of the Blessed Virgin or traditional interest in the Magdalene or any other saint--is no slight contribution to the material of comedy. The intrigue of the play,--the foils of character and action, the go-betweens, the plot within plot introduced by Celestina, her realistic account of Sempronio's character, her device of the "girdle," the mysterious agency of the dream,--no better indication of romantic tendency can be detected until we reach Redford's play of _Wit and Science_, of which presently. But first, and that we may keep in mind the parallelism of dramatic tendencies in this momentous first half of the sixteenth century, let us turn to another stream, that of the school interludes and the classical influence.

=10. The Period of Transition: School Interlude and Controversial Moral=

During the fifteenth century, and the early sixteenth, influences of importance to English comedy proceed not from the literature of Italy and Spain alone. In northern Europe additions most significant to the history of the type were making. To the crop of French _sotties_, _moralités_, and _farces_ I have already referred. The German Reuchlin in 1498 put forth a roaring Latin comedy called the _Henno_, which, in modern Terentian style, embodied the chicaneries of Pathelin. About the same time the Germans began to make the acquaintance, through translations in their own tongue, of highly flavoured Italian Latin plays like the _Poliscene_ and the _Philogenia;_ while those of them who cared not for such things were favoured with a recrudescence of the Christian Terence school. In 1507 the young humanist, Kilian Reuter, in imitation of the nun of Gandersheim, produced in Latin his pious comedy depicting the passion of St. Dorothea. In Holland, meanwhile, were springing into existence the Latin prototypes of more than one of our own didactic interludes; for in the _comedia sacra_ the attempt was made to combine the intrigue of the Italian university play with the moral of the prodigal son and the technique of the Terentian drama. The more important of these plays of the prodigal son, in respect of influence upon English comedy, are the _Asotus_ of Macropedius, written before 1529, and his _Rebelles_, 1535, the _Acolastus_ of Gnapheus, 1529, and the _Studentes_ of Stymmelius, 1549. The most dramatic of them are the second and third as mentioned. The _Acolastus_, indeed, translated into English by Palsgrave in 1540, exerted a long-enduring influence upon our drama. To the same period belong also a species of biblical comedies dealing with heroes, like the _Joseph_ of the Dutch Jesuit, Crocus, 1535, and the _Susanna_, _Judith_, _Eli_, _Ruth_, _Job_, _Solomon_, _Goliath_, etc., of Macropedius, the Swiss Sixt Birck, and others; and another kind of play that occupied itself with prototypes of the Roman Antichrist,--Haman, Judas, and the like. The former may be called the idyllic or heroic miracle, the latter the polemic. And of the latter the most influential development was the controversial interlude, _Pammachius_, written by the German Protestant Naogeorgos (Kirchmayer) and dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury. By 1545 this play, in which the Pope figures as the Antichrist, had not only been acted at Cambridge in the original, but translated into English by our own John Bale; and, as we shall presently see, it was, somewhere between 1540 and 1548, imitated by him in one of the most vigorous of our controversial dramas.[65]

Of the cultivation of the drama in Latin in England I have already made mention in treating of the saints' plays and the Terentian drama of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Other indications of a Latin drama occur, although infrequently. William Fitzstephen, who speaks of the _ludus_ given by Geoffrey's boys at Dunstable, tells us, also, that it was customary on feast days for masters of schools to hold festival meetings in the churches, when the pupils contested, not only in disputations, but also with Fescennine license in satirical verses touching "the faults of school-fellows or perhaps of greater people"; a practice which could only with difficulty escape development into a rude Aristophanic comedy. We have mention also of perquisites for a _comœdia_ in one of the Cambridge colleges as early as 1386, evidently of the Latin type, and of the presentation of a goodly comedy of Plautus at court in 1520. Between 1522 and 1532 the Master of St. Paul's produced a Latin school drama of _Dido_ before Wolsey, and according to Collier's supposition,[66] the same John Ritwyse was the author of the satiric interlude, in Latin and French, of Luther and his wife, which was acted for the delectation of the not yet reformed Henry and his foreign guests in 1527. Of the nature of this play, unfortunately lost, some conception may be gathered from the still surviving list of its characters (allegorical, religious, and contemporary), from the analogous _Ludus ludentem Luderum ludens_, 1530, and the somewhat more recent and most scurrilous _Monachopornomachia_, both by Germans. Before 1530 and apparently with a view to acting, the _Andria_ had been turned into English,[67] and by 1535 at least two Latin comedies of moral-mythological character had been written by Artour of Cambridge, and one, the _Piscator_, by Hoker of Oxford.[68] We have word of a dramatic pageant in English and Latin to which Udall contributed in 1532; in 1534 he issued a book of selections entitled _Flowers of Terence_. In 1540 Palsgrave had introduced the prodigal son drama from Germany; and by 1545 Bale had followed suit with a Latin play of Antichrist. During the same period Udall was producing his _plures comœdiæ_, now lost, and that other schoolmaster-dramatist, Radcliffe of Hitchin, was writing _spectacula simul jucunda et honesta_ for his boys to present,--heroic miracles of the type affected by Macropedius, and a romantic comedy of _Griselda_, probably all in Latin, but unfortunately all vanished.

The importance of the English school drama has been well presented by Professor Herford and Dr. Ward, but there is something in the name that leads the ordinary reader to underrate the _genus_. A word or so by way of classification may be of assistance. These interludes fall naturally into four kinds. Those that ridicule folly, vain pretension, and conceit, or Mirth plays,--plays after the model of Plautus, mock-heroic, or purely diverting, like the _Thersytes_. Those that are pedagogical in tendency, directed against idleness and ignorance, or Wit plays. They began with Rastell's _Four Elements_, and reached their highest mark in the _Contract between Witt and Wisdome_. Those that portray the conflict with the excesses and lusts of the flesh, or Youth plays. They consist of such productions as _Mankynd_, _Nature_, _Hyckescorner_, and reach their climax, about 1554, in the _Interlude of Youth_. The school drama includes, in the last place, a series corrective of parental indulgence and filial disobedience, aptly called Prodigal Son plays. These are patterned upon Terence, but follow the manner of Dutch school plays like the _Acolastus_ or of the still earlier French _moralités_, _Bien-Avisé et Mal-Avisé_, _L'Homme pêcheur_, and _Les Enfants de Maintenant_. They make more or less use of the scriptural motif and are sometimes tragical. In the period under consideration their best representatives are the _Nice Wanton_ and the _Disobedient Child_. From the point of view of comedy the first of these kinds, the Mirth play, occupies a place by itself; for, though it may sometimes intend to teach, it always aims at, and achieves, laughter. To the three remaining kinds, we must for convenience, join, however, another which, though not of the school species, is primarily didactic,--I mean the controversial interlude. This includes Bale's _King Johan_, Wever's _Lusty Juventus_, and the _Respublica_.

In the Mirth play, _Thersytes_, the influence of Plautus is evident,--a school play, to be sure, but written with a view to amusement or rollicking satire rather than instruction. Acted in 1537, this "enterlude" has for its hero a "ruffler forth of the Greke lande" whose "crakying" stands half-way between the classical Pyrgopolinices and Thraso and the modern Roister Doister. For all its academic flavour, the burlesque is coarse and crude, but still genuinely humorous. It deserves notice, in especial, for the variety of its contents, chivalric, romantic, popular, scriptural as well as Greek and Latin; also for its artistic exhibition of the braggart,--the leisurely proceeding of his discomfiture, the subordination of other characters to that end; and for its mastery of technical devices,--concealment, magic, the play upon the word, and that hunting of the word and letter which was so soon to drive conversation out of its wits. As an interlude of foreign origin, the _Thersytes_ has a place in the development of the comic element somewhat analogous to that of the _Calisto_ in the development of the romantic. As far as the quality of mirth is concerned it might be classed with _Roister Doister_ and _Jacke Jugeler_; but those plays are much more highly developed in form and spirit, and must be reserved for consideration with the polytypic, and early regular, comedy.

The remaining classes of interlude are manifestly didactic; those of Wit and Youth derive, however, more directly from native sources, while those of the Prodigal Son have close affiliation with the Christian Terence of the continental humanists.

Redford's _Wyt and Science_, composed probably between 1541 and 1547, is, in form and intent, like _Lusty Juventus_ and other survivals of the moral interlude. It differs, however, in company with the _Four Elements_ and other Wit plays, in substituting a scientific for a religious purpose; and it adds a feature not to be found in earlier kinds of moral, a chivalrous ideal of love and adventure, academic, to be sure, but unmistakable. This appears in the wooing of Lady Science by Wyt, and his encounter with the tyrant or fiend Tediousness "for my dere hartes sake to wynne my spurres;" in the hero's inconstancy, defeat, and subsequent success, and in the dramatic employment of romantic instruments and tokens, such as the magic glass and the sword of comfort; also in the love songs. All of these and similar features of which the sources are not entirely continental make for the development of a romantic and humanistic drama. It may be worth noticing, moreover, that the fiend of the play is neither Vice nor Devil. He seems to be a cross between the Devil of the miracles and a monster of native as well as scriptural ancestry (an early draft of Giant Despair), who figures in a modernization of this play, _The Marriage of Witte and Science_. In chronological sequence the next of the Wit plays is the _Contract of a Marrige betweene Wit and Wisdome_ (not _Wit and Science_, as Professor Brandl has it). This was probably written about the same time as the _Lusty Juventus_. The mention of the King's most "royal majestie" and the appearance of the Vice Idleness as a priest would point to a date earlier than 1553, while the resemblance to Redford's play, though by no means close, indicates posteriority to that much cruder production. The division into acts and scenes is, on the other hand, less elaborate than that obtaining in the latest play of this series, _The Marriage of Witte and Science_. The _Contract_ is altogether the most meritorious of those academic predecessors of the drama of the Prodigal Son which introduce the indulgent mother as a motive force. While the conception is formal and didactic, the action avails itself, like Redford's play, of the romantic element involved in the perilous adventure for love. The _Contract_, moreover, startles the sober atmosphere of the moral interlude by a rapidity of movement, a combination of plots major and minor, a diversity of subordinate characters and incidents altogether unprecedented. The racy and natural wit, the equivoque, the actual, even if vulgar, humanity of the scenes from low life, and the skill with which the Mother Bees, the Dols and Lobs, Snatches and Catches, the Constable, and the thoroughly rustic Vice with his actual resemblance to Diccon the Bedlem, are dovetailed into the action,--these properties make this a very commendable predecessor, not only of _Gammer Gurton_, but of certain plays of Dekker and Jonson where similar features obtain. With the _Contract_, the interlude of this kind attains its climax. _The Marriage of Witte and Science_, which is a revision of Redford's play of similar name, must also be mentioned here, although it is a postliminious specimen of the type. Not licensed until 1569-70, and, according to Fleay, acted as _Wit and Will_, 1567-78,[69] it adds nothing vital to the plot or characters of its model. Still, in literary and dramatic handling, it is an example of the perfection to which the moral play could come. Collier, indeed, has said that it was the first play of its kind regularly divided into acts and scenes with indication of the same: but that is not true, for the _Respublica_ of 1553 has five acts and the proper arrangement in scenes; and so have other plays of 1553 or earlier, though of different kind, like the _Jacob and Esau_.

If now we pass to the Youth plays, we shall find in the _Interlude of Youth_ (about 1554) the culmination of dramatic efforts to portray the sowing of wild oats,--efforts avowedly moral in purpose, but with a reminiscent smack of the lips and a fellow-feeling for the scapegrace. The _Interlude of Youth_ is characterized neither by the unbridled merriment of the _Miles Gloriosus_ type nor by the depth or pathos of dramas portraying solicitous parents and prodigal sons; but it paves the way for 'tragical' comedies of this latter class, and is infinitely more dramatic, because more human, than the pedagogical onslaughts upon idleness, irksomeness, ignorance, and the like of which we have just treated. It has, perhaps, not been noticed that the _Interlude of Youth_ holds about the same relation to _Hyckescorner_ in matter of motive and treatment that _Hyckescorner_ holds to the _Four Elements_ and _Mankynd_,--indeed, a closer relation, for in many details of character, device, situation, as well as by literal transference of language, it borrows from _Hyckescorner_. This as indicating the descent of the species is in itself interesting. But the present play generally improves upon all that it derives. In addition, the vivid conversation, shrewd and waggish wit, local colouring, atmosphere of taverns, dicing, cards, and worse iniquities, justify, I think, the statement that it is at once the most realistic, amusing, and graceful specimen of its kind. It is, at any rate, as artistic as a didactic interlude could permit itself to be.

One cannot consider the so-called Prodigal Son interludes, without observing that the theme itself supplies an opportunity for the enlargement of dramatic endeavour. For these productions are directed as much against parental indulgence as against filial disobedience. The "Preaty Interlude called _Nice Wanton_," printed in 1560, was written before the death of Edward VI. Though it may have derived suggestions from the _Rebelles_[70] of Macropedius, 1535, it is of its own originality and dramatic merit, in my opinion, the best of its class in English at the time of writing. While it presents a mixture of scriptural, classical, and moral elements, it is essentially a modern production. The allegorical lingers only in the character of Worldly Shame. If this be eliminated, there remains a play with realistic, romantic, and ideal qualities, an air of probability, and a plot well conceived and excellently completed. Iniquity, or Baily errand, is a concrete Vice, working by actual and possible methods. The unfortunate heroine and the well-contrasted pairs of mothers and sons are manifest not only by their deeds but by the opinions of those who know them. The plot, in other words, grows out of the characters; it is full of incident, and it falls naturally into acts, which have been elaborated in various and dramatically interesting scenes. The movements, on the one hand toward a catastrophe, on the other toward the triumph of right living, are conducted with skilful suspense, surprise, discovery, and revolution, and are well interwoven. The conversations and songs are racy or sober according to the conditions; the combination of æsthetic qualities, comic, tragic, and pathetic, is an agreeable advance upon the inartistic extremes afforded by most of the contemporary interludes of moral intent. The next of these plays, the "pretie and mery new interlude called _The Disobedient Child_, by Thomas Ingeland, late Student at Cambridge," was acted, Mr. Fleay thinks, before Elizabeth in March, 1560-61. Though it was not published till 1564, it was certainly, like the _Nice Wanton_, written before 1553. The purpose is serious and the conclusion almost tragic, but the play contributes to the comedy of domestic satire. If the main characters were but indicated by name, like those below stairs, Blanche and Long-Tongue, this picturesque and wholly dramatic interlude would have attracted more notice than has been vouchsafed it. Its literary merits, verse, poetic feeling and expression, and its natural dialogue entitle it to high consideration; its decidedly novel dramatic qualities, even though they bear a general resemblance to the _Studentes_[71] of Stymmelius, rank it with the _Nice Wanton_ as one of the most vigorous of our early representatives of the dramatic actualities of family life.

For reasons which I have already indicated, the controversial plays of the period between 1520 and 1553 may be considered here. The first of these in chronological order is Bale's _King Johan_, about 1540-47, with later insertions in the author's hand. Its relation to Lyndsay's satire of the _Thrie Estatis_ is well known; and Professor Herford[72] has indicated its indebtedness also to the _Pammachius_ and the Protestant version of the antichrist legend. It is a dramatic satire on the abuses of the church, its riches, orders, brotherhoods, confessionals, simony, free thought, mummery (judaistic and pagan), Latin ritual, hagiolatry, and papal supremacy. Few more excellent embodiments of the Vice have been preserved than the Sedycyon of this play, who in every estate of the clergy plays a part, sometimes monk, sometimes nun, or canon, or chapter-house monk, or Sir John, or the parson, or the bishop, or the friar, or the purgatory priest and every man's wife's desire:--

"Yea, to go farder, sumtyme I am a cardynall; Yea, sumtyme a pope and than am I lord over all, Both in hevyn and erthe and also in purgatory, And do weare iij crownes whan I am in my glorye."