Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/435

MBDIZ3VAL.] DRAMA 415 the individual plays in these collections were doubtless founded on French originals ; others are taken direct from Scripture, from the apocryphal gospels, or from the legends of the saints. Their characteristic feature is the combina tion of a whole series of plays into one collective whole, ex hibiting the entire course of Bible history from the creation to the day of judgment. For this combination it is unnecessary to suppose that they were generally indebted to foreign examples, though there are several remarkable coincidences between the Chester plays and the French Mystere du Vieil Testament. inner "The manner of these plays," we read in a description of those their at Chester, dating from the close of the 16th century, "were: rfor- Every company had his pageant, which pageants were a high scaffold tnce. with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels. In the lower they apparelled themselves, and in the higher room they played, being all open at the top, that all beholders might hear and see them. The places where they played them was in every street. They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first pageant was played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the mayor, and so to every street, and so every street had a pageant playing before them at one time till all the pageants appointed for the day were played ; and when one pageant was near ended, word was brought from street to street, that so they might come in place thei eof, ex ceedingly orderly, and all the streets have their pageants afore them all at one time playing together; to see which plays was great resort, and also scaffolds and stages made in the streets in those places where they determined to play their pageants." Each play, then, was performed by the representative of a particular trade or company, after whom it was called the fishers , glovers , etc., pageant ; while a general prologue was spoken by a herald. As a rule the movable stage sufficed for the action, though we find horsemen riding up to the scaffold, and Herod instructed to " rage in the pagond and in the strete also." There is no probability that the stage was, as in France, divided into three platforms with a dark cavern at the side of the lowest, appropriated respectively to the Heavenly Father and His angels, to saints and glorified men, to mere men, and to souls in hell. But the last-named locality was frequently displayed in the English miracles, with or without fire in its mouth. The costumes were in part conventional, divine and saintly personages being distinguished by gilt hair and beards, Herod being clad as a Saracen, the demons wearing hideous heads, the souls black and white coats according to their kind, and the angels gold skins and wings. mracter Doubtless these performances abounded in what seem to these us ludicrous features, and though their main purpose was serious, they were not in England at least intended to bo devoid of fun. But many of these features are in truth only homely and naif, and the simplicity of feeling they exhibit is at times not without its pathos. The occasional excessive grossness is due to an absence of refinement of taste rather than to an obliquity of moral sentiment. In this, as in other respects, the Coventry Plays, which were possibly written by clerical hands, show an advance upon the others. In the same plays is already to be observed an element of abstract figures, which connects them with a different species of the mediaeval drama. Loralities. The moralities corresponded to the love for moral allegory which manifests itself in so many periods of our literature, and which, while dominating the whole field of medieval literature, was nowhere more assiduously and effectively cultivated than in England. It is necessary to bear this in mind, in order to understand what to us seems r.o strange, the popularity of the moral-plays, which indeed never equalled that of the miracles, but sufficed to maintain the former species till it received a fresh impulse from the con nection established between it and the " new learning," together with the new political and religious ideas and questions, of the Reformation age. Moreover, a specially popular element was supplied to these plays, which in manner of representation differed in no essential point The D< from the miracles, in a character borrowed from the latter, and tni and, in the moralities, usually provided with a companion e> whose task it was to lighten the weight of such abstractions as Sapience and Justice. These were the Devil and his attendant the Vice, of whom the latter seems to have been of native origin, and, as he was usually dressed in a fool s habit, was probably suggested by the familiar custom of keeping an attendant fool at court or in great houses. The Vice had many aliases (Shift, Ambidexter, Sin, Fraud, Iniquity, &c.), but his usual duty is to torment and teaze the Devil his master for the edification and diversion of the audience. He was gradually blended with the domestic fool, who survived in the regular drama. The earlier English moralities 1 from the reign of Henry Groups VI. to that of Henry VII. usually allegorize the conflict En o lis l between good and evil in the mind and life of man, with- " out any side-intention of theological controversy ; such also is still essentially the purpose of the morality we possess by Henry VIII. s poet, the witty Skelton, 2 and even of another, perhaps the most perfect example of its class, which in date is already later than the Reformation. But if such theology as Every-Man teaches is the orthodox doctrine of Rome, its successor, R. Wever s Lusty Juventus, breathes the spirit of the dogmatic reformation of the reign of Edward VI. Theological controversy largely occupies the moralities of the earlier part of Elizabeth s reign, and connects itself with political feeling in a famous morality, 3 Sir David Lyndsay s Satire of the Three Hstaitis, written on the other side of the border, where such efforts as the religious drama proper had made had been extinguished by the Reforma tion. Only a single English political morality proper remains to us, which belongs to the .beginning of the reign of Elizabeth. 4 Yet another series connects itself with the ideas of the Renaissance rather than the Reformation, treating of intellectual progress rather than of moral con duct ; 5 this extends from the reign of Henry VIII. to that of his younger daughter. The transition from the morality to the regular drama in Transi England was effected on the one hand by the intermixture rom * of historical personages with abstractions as in Bishop to t j ie Bale s Kyncj Johan (c. 1548) which easily led ovei to the regula Chronicle History; on the other by the introduction of drama types of real life by the side of abstract figures. This latter tendency, of which instances occur in earlier plays, is observable in several of Uie 16th century moralities ; but before most of these were written, a further step in advance had been taken by a man of genius, John Hey wood (d. 1565), whose interludes 1 were short farces in the French Heywi manner, dealing entirely with real very real men and women. Orthodox and conservative, he had at the same time a keen eye for the vices as well as the folies of his age, and not the least for those of the clerical profession. Other writers, such as T. Ingeland, 8 took the same direction ; and the allegory of abstractions was thus undermined on the stage, very much as in didactic literature the ground had been cut from under its feet by the Skip of Foolcs. Thus the interludes a name which had been used for the moralities themselves from an early date facilitated the advent of comedy, without having superseded the earlier form. Both moralities and miracle-plays survived into the Elizabethan age, after the regular drama had already begun its course. . l The Castle oj Perseverance; Medwall, Nature; The World and the Child; Ilycke-Scorner, &c. - Jfagnyfycence. 3 New Custome; N. Woodes, The Conflict of Conscience, &c. 4 Albyon Knight. 5 Rastell, Nature of the Four Elements; Bedford, Wit and Science; The Marriage of Wit and Science. 6 Jack Juggler; Tom Tiler and his Wife, kc.

1 The Four P s, &c. 8 T he Disobedient Child.