particular, perhaps because it was so obviously cognate to beloved Terentian themes, became the parent of a copious dramatic literature, both in Christian Latin and in all the vernaculars. The central topics, the mysteries of the faith in creation, fall, and incarnation, and the life of Christ himself, were much more charily touched. This may have been due to a reprobation of the methods of the miracle-plays, which is itself traceable to more than one cause. Protestant reverence could hardly fail to reinforce the criticism of the leve aut histrionicum in the popular representations, which often made itself heard even amongst orthodox Churchmen. Luther is at one with Ludovicus Vives on the point.[1] And Protestantism had its own particular ground of quarrel with the miracle-plays, in that they were hardly dissociable from the Catholic doctrines of transubstantiation and the like, which their great feast-day of Corpus Christi had been specially invented to glorify. Certainly the decadence of the Corpus Christi play sets in pretty quickly after the middle of the sixteenth century, and in more than one instance the hand of the Protestant reformer is to be traced in the process.[2] It is of the Corpus Christi plays, as well as of the Hock-play at Coventry, that Robert Laneham is thinking when he regrets 'the zeal of certain theyr Preacherz: men very commendabl for their behauiour and learning, & sweet in their sermons, but sumwhat too sour in preaching awey theyr pastime'.[3] An exception to the normal temper of Protestantism in this respect is to be found in that fiery protagonist of the earlier English reformation, John Bale, amongst whose few extant plays are a Prophetae, a John Baptist, and a Temptation, while a list of his various dramatic experiments, which he has himself left upon record, indicates that they included a continuous New Testament cycle from the Presentation in the Temple to the Resurrection.[4]
It is, of course, in form only and not in spirit that Bale touched the ecclesiastical compilers of the Corpus Christi plays. The author of Kinge Johan and the translator of Pammachius is the typical English figure of that characteristic sixteenth-century movement whereby the drama, like every other form of literary expression, bound itself for a time to
- ↑ J. E. Gillet (M. L. A. xxxiv. 465), citing e.g. an utterance of 1530, 'Et ego non illibenter viderem gesta Christi in scholis puerorum ludis seu comoediis latine et germanice rite ac pure compositis repraesentari propter rei memoriam et affectum iunioribus augendum'.
- ↑ Mediaeval Stage, ii. 111.
- ↑ Robert Laneham's Letter (ed. Furnivall), 27.
- ↑ Mediaeval Stage, ii. 224, 446.
