XXII. GUILD PLAYS AND PARISH PLAYS (continued)
The last chapter occupied itself mainly with the diffusion of the vernacular religious plays in England, with their organization, and with their part in municipal and village life. That study must be completed by at least the outline of another, dealing with the content and nature of the performances themselves. Here again it is variety rather than uniformity which requires attention; for the records and texts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries bear witness to the effective survival of all the diverse types of play, to which the evolution of the dramatic instinct gave birth in its progress from liturgical office to cosmic cycle.
The term of the evolution—the cosmic cycle itself—is represented by five complete texts, and one fragment sufficiently substantial to be ranked with these. There are the plays of the York and Chester crafts. The manuscript of the former dates from the middle of the fifteenth century; those of the latter from the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth: but in both cases it may be assumed that we possess the plays, with certain modifications, additions, and omissions, as they were given in the palmy days of their history. There are also, in a fifteenth-century manuscript, the so-called ‘Towneley’ plays, as to whose origin the most likely theory is that they are the craft-plays of Wakefield. There is the Ludus Coventriae, also of the fifteenth century, which has probably nothing to do with Coventry, but is either, as scholars generally hold, the text of a strolling company, or, as seems to me more probable, that of a stationary play at some town in the East Midlands not yet identified. If I am right, the Ludus Coventriae occupies a midway position between the three northern craft cycles, which are all processional plays, split up into a number of distinct pageants, and the fifth text, which is Cornish. This is probably of the fourteenth century, although extant in a fifteenth-century manuscript, and doubtless represents a stationary performance in one of the ‘rounds’ still to be seen about Cornwall. The fragment, also Cornish, is not a wholly independent play, but a sixteenth-century expansion of part of the earlier text.
A study of the table of incidents printed in an appendix will show the general scope of the cyclical plays[373]. My comments thereon must be few and brief. The four northerly cycles have a kernel of common matter, which corresponds very closely with just that dramatic stuff which was handled in the liturgical and the earliest vernacular dramas. It includes the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel; then the Annunciation and the group of scenes, from the Pastores to the Massacre of the Innocents, which went to make up the Stella; then the Passion in the narrower sense, centring in the planctus Mariae and extending from the Conspiracy of the Jews to the Descent from the Cross; then the Resurrection scenes, centring in the Quem quaeritis and ending with the Peregrini and Incredulity of Thomas; then the Ascension, the Pentecost, and finally the Iudicium or Doomsday. Almost equally invariable is something in the way of a Prophetae. But at York this is thrown into narrative instead of dramatic form; and at Chester the typical defile of prophets, each with his harangue, is deferred to almost the close of the cycle (Play xxiii), and in its usual place stand two independent episodes of Balaam and of Octavian and the Sibyl. Two other groups of scenes exhibit a larger measure of diversity between the four cycles. One is that drawn from the history of the Old Testament Fathers, out of which the Deluge and the Sacrifice of Isaac are the only incidents adopted by all four. The other is the series taken from the missionary life of Christ, where the only common scenes are the Raising of Lazarus and the Feast in the House of Simon the Leper, both of which can be traced back to the liturgical drama[374].
The principal source of the plays belonging to this common kernel is, of course, the biblical narrative, which is followed, so far as it goes, with considerable fidelity, the most remarkable divergence being that of the Ludus Coventriae, which merges the Last Supper with the scene in the House of Simon. But certain embroideries upon scripture, which found their way into the religious drama at an early stage of its evolution, are preserved and further elaborated. Thus each of the four cycles has its Harrowing of Hell, which links the later scenes with the earlier by introducing, as well as the devils, such personages as Adam and Eve, Enoch and Elijah, John the Baptist and others[375]. Similarly the Suspicion of Joseph and the obstetrices at the Virgin Birth finds a place in all four[376], as does the Healing of Longinus, the blind knight, by the blood-drops from the cross[377]. Other apocryphal or legendary elements are confined to one or more of the cycles[378]. The Chester plays, for example, have a marked development of the eschatological scenes. Not only is the Iudicium itself extremely long and elaborate, but it is preceded by two distinct plays, one a section of the split-up Prophetae ending with the Fifteen Signs, the other an Antichrist, in which, as in the Tegernsee Antichristus[379], Enoch and Elijah appear as disputants. The most legendary of the northerly cycles is without doubt the Ludus Coventriae. It has the legend of Veronica, which is only hinted at in the corresponding York play. And it has so long a series of scenes drawn from the legends of the Virgin as to make it probable that, like the Lincoln plays and another East Midland cycle of which a fragment is extant, it was performed not on Corpus Christi day but on that of St. Anne. Before the Annunciation it inserts the episodes of Joachim and Anne, Mary in the Temple, and the Betrothal of Mary. To the common episode of the Suspicion of Joseph it adds the Purgation of Mary. In the Resurrection scene is a purely legendary Apparition of Christ to the Virgin; while the Death, Burial, Assumption, and Coronation of Mary intervene between the Pentecost and the Iudicium. This matter from the after-history of the Virgin belongs also to the York plays, which add the Apparition to St. Thomas of India.
The Cornish plays, although in many respects they are parallel to those of the north, have yet some very marked features of their own. They have episodes of the miraculous Release of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea from Prison, and of the Death of Pilate and the Interview of Veronica with Tiberius[380]. But their most remarkable legendary addition is an elaborate treatment of the history of the Holy Rood, which provides the motives for the scenes dealing with Seth, Moses, David, Solomon, Maximilla, and the Bridge upon Cedron[381]. On the other hand the Cornish plays close with the Ascension and entirely omit the sub-cycle of the Nativity, passing direct, but for the Holy Rood matter, from the Sacrifice of Isaac to the Temptation.
It is not improbable that the majority of the Corpus Christi and other greater English plays reached the dimensions of a cosmic cycle. But in only a few cases is any definite evidence on the point available. Complete lists are preserved from Beverley and Norwich. The Beverley series seems to have been much on the scale of the four extant cycles. It extended in thirty-six pageants from the Fall of Lucifer to Doomsday. Like the Cornish cycle, it included the episode of Adam and Seth; and it presented an exceptional feature in the insertion of a play of the Children of Israel after the Flight into Egypt. The Norwich cycle, which began with the Creation and ended with Pentecost, was a short one of twelve pageants[382]. The small number is due, partly to the grouping of several episodes in a single play, partly to the omission of the Passion proper. The Resurrection followed immediately upon the Baptism. Of other plays, the chroniclers record that in 1391 the London performance covered both the Old and New Testament, that in 1409 it went from the Creation to the Day of Judgement, and that in 1411 it was ‘from the begynnyng of the worlde.’ The fragmentary indications of the records preserved show that the Chelmsford play stretched at least from the Creation to the Crucifixion, the Newcastle play at least from the Creation to the Burial of the Virgin[383], the Lincoln play at least from the Deluge to the Coronation of the Virgin. On the other hand the range of the Coventry plays can only be shown to have been from the Annunciation to Doomsday, although it may be by a mere accident that no Old Testament scenes are here to be identified[384].
Examples, though unfortunately no full texts, can also be traced of the separate Nativity and Easter cycles, the merging of which was the most important step in the formation of the complete Corpus Christi play. Both, if I read the evidence aright, existed at Aberdeen. There was a ‘Haliblude’ play on Corpus Christi day, which I conceive to have been essentially a Passion and Resurrection, and a play at Candlemas, which seems to have included, as well as the Purification, a Stella, a Presentation in the Temple, and something in the way of a Prophetae. There were performances of Passions in Reading in 1508, in Dublin in 1528, at Shrewsbury in 1567, and in London in 1557 and as late as between 1613 and 1622. I do not suppose that in any of these cases ‘Passion’ excludes ‘Resurrection.’ The New Romney town play, also, seems to have been a Passion in the wider sense. The records of Easter plays at Bath (1482), Leicester (1504-7), Morebath (1520-74), Reading (1507, 1533-5), and Kingston (1513-65), are too slight to bear much comment. They may relate to almost anything from a mere Latin Quem quaeritis to a full vernacular Passion and Resurrection.
One interesting text falls to be considered at this point. This is a fifteenth-century Burial and Resurrection of northern provenance. It is very lyrical in character, and apparently the author set out to write a ‘treyte’ to be read, and shortly after the beginning changed his mind and made a play of it. There are two scenes. The first is an elaborate planctus, ‘to be playede on gud-friday after-none.’ The second, intended for ‘Esterday after the resurrectione, In the morowe’ is a Quem quaeritis. An Ascension play was performed by the Holy Trinity guild at Sleaford in 1480. A ‘Christmasse play’ is recorded at Tintinhull in 1451. How much it included can hardly be guessed. But the Stella maintained its independent position, and is found at Yarmouth (1462-1512), Reading (1499, 1539), Leicester (1547), Canterbury (1503), Holbeach (1548), and Hascombe (1579)[385].
The plays just enumerated may be regarded as of precyclical types. But there are a few others which, although they occur independently, would have their more natural position in cycles of less or greater range. In some of these cases it is probable that the independence is only apparent, a mere matter of incomplete evidence. There are two fifteenth-century plays, both on the subject of Abraham and Isaac, one of which is preserved in the ‘Book of Brome’ from Suffolk, the other in a manuscript now at Dublin, but probably of South Midland provenance. It is of course not impossible that these represent isolated performances, but it is on the whole more likely that they are fragments of lost cycles. A third play, of Midland origin, preserved in the Digby manuscript, occupies an exceptional position. It deals with the Massacre of the Innocents and the Purification, and allusions in a prologue and epilogue make it clear that it belonged to a cycle in which it was preceded by a Pastores and a Magi, and followed by a Christ in the Temple. This cycle, however, was not played all at once, but a portion was given year by year on St. Anne’s day. One of the groups of plays brought together in the Ludus Coventriae was evidently intended for performance under similar conditions. It is probable that the ludus Filiorum Israelis of the Cambridge Corpus Christi guild about 1350, the Abraham and Isaac of the ‘schaft’ of St. Dunstan’s, Canterbury, between 1491 and 1520, and the Adam and Eve (1507) and ‘Cayme’s pageaunt’ (1512-5) of St. Lawrence’s, Reading, formed parts of Corpus Christi cycles given in those towns.
Isolated performances of plays picked out of a cycle, or upon subjects usually treated in a cycle, are, however, not unknown. One or more of the Chester plays occasionally formed part of the civic entertainment of a royal or noble personage. When Henry VII visited Winchester in 1486, the schoolboys of the two great abbeys of Hyde and St. Swithin’s gave a Christi Descensus ad Inferos before him at dinner. At York the acting of an ‘interlude of St. Thomas the Apostle’ on a St. Bartholomew’s eve towards the end of the reign of Henry VIII became the occasion for a papist demonstration. This might have been either the Incredulity of Thomas (Play xlii) or the Apparition of the Virgin to St. Thomas in India (Play xlvi) from the Corpus Christi cycle. At York, also, there was, in the hands of a Corpus Christi guild, a distinct play, frequently performed between 1446 and the Reformation, called the Creed play. This was apparently an expansion of a motive found in the Pentecost scene at Chester and probably at Coventry, but not at York itself, wherein, after the coming of the Holy Ghost, each of the apostles in turn enunciates one of the articles of the so-called Apostles’ creed. At Hull, where I find no trace of a cycle, the Trinity guild of sea-faring men had their play of Noah. At Lincoln, a play of Tobit, which does not actually, so far as I know, form part of the Old Testament section of any English cycle[386], was substituted for the regular Corpus Christi play after the Reformation. Naturally such exceptional performances became more common in the decadence of the religious drama[387]. Thus the very scratch series of plays shown before the earl of Kildare at Dublin, in the Christmas of 1528, included, besides other contributions both sacred and secular, an Adam and Eve by the tailors and a Joseph and Mary by the carpenters. The choice of these subjects was evidently motived by their appropriateness to the craft representing them. Similarly, when John Bale was bishop of Ossory in 1553, he had performed at the market-cross of Kilkenny, on the day of the proclamation of Queen Mary, a short fragment of a cycle consisting of a Prophetae, a Baptism, and a Temptation. One fancies that this strange protagonist of the Reformation must have had in his mind some quaint verbal analogy between ‘John Bale’ and ‘John Baptist,’ for he states that he also wrote a dramatic Vita D. Ioannis Baptistae in fourteen books. Nor is this the only example of the treatment of a subject, merely episodic in the Corpus Christi cycles, in a distinct and elaborate play. The invaluable Digby manuscript contains a similar expansion, from the East or West Midlands, of the story of Mary Magdalen. It follows the narrative of the Golden Legend, and introduces the familiar scenes of the Raising of Lazarus, the Feast in the House of Simon the Leper, the Quem quaeritis, and the Hortulanus, preceding these with episodes of the life of the Magdalen in gaudio, and following them with the Conversion of the King and Queen of Marseilles, and of Mary’s Life in the Wilderness and Death. As offshoots from the Corpus Christi cycle may also be regarded the Deaths of the Apostles played in the Dublin series of 1528, Thomas Ashton’s Julian the Apostate at Shrewsbury in 1565, and the Destruction of Jerusalem, written by John Smith in 1584 to take the place of the traditional plays at Coventry[388].
The Mary Magdalen and the rest of the group just described may be considered as standing halfway between the plays of and akin to the Corpus Christi cycle and those founded on the legends of saints. Of regular saint-plays there are unfortunately only two texts available from these islands. The Digby manuscript contains an East Midland Conversion of St. Paul, which, however, is almost wholly biblical and not legendary. It will be remembered that the subject was one known even to the liturgical drama[389]. There is also a Cornish play of St. Meriasek or Mereadocus, the patron saint of Camborne, written at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Other such plays are, however, upon record. It is perhaps curious that no mention should be found of any English parallel to either the Saint Nicholas plays or the Miracles de Nostre Dame of France. It can hardly be doubted that the former at least existed in connexion with the widespread revel of the Boy Bishop[390]. The most popular English saint for dramatic purposes appears to have been St. George. A play of St. George was maintained by the town of Lydd, and was probably copied by a neighbouring guild at New Romney. Another, on an elaborate scale, was given by a group of villages at Bassingbourne in 1511. These seem to have been genuine dramas, and not mere ‘ridings’ or folk-plays such as occur elsewhere[391]. A St. George play, described by Collier at Windsor in 1416, can be resolved into a cake. St. Thomas of Canterbury was only honoured with a dumb show in his own city, but there was a play upon him at King’s Lynn in 1385. Of quite a number of other saint-plays the barest notices exist. London had hers on St. Catherine; Windsor on St. Clotilda; Coventry on St. Catherine and St. Crytyan; Lincoln on St. Laurence, St. Susanna, St. Clara, and St. James; Shrewsbury on St. Feliciana and St. Sabina; Bethersden in Kent on St. Christina; Braintree in Essex on St. Swithin, St. Andrew, and St. Eustace. The Dublin shoemakers contributed a play on their patron saints Crispin and Crispinian to the Dublin festival of 1528. In London, the plays on the days of St. Lucy and St. Margaret at St. Margaret’s, Southwark, may have been on the stories of those saints; and during the Marian reaction a ‘goodly’ stage-play was given at St. Olave’s church on St. Olave’s day.
Quite unique, as dealing with a contemporary ‘miracle,’ is the play of the Blessed Sacrament, performed at one of the many places bearing the name of Croxton, in the latter half of the fifteenth century. According to the manuscript, the event upon which it was based, the marvellous conversion of a Jew who attempted an outrage upon a host, took place at Heraclea in Spain, in 1461. There is, curiously enough, a late French play, quite independent of the English one, upon an exactly parallel miracle assigned to Paris and the thirteenth century[392].
The variation in the types of English miracle-plays naturally implies some variation also in the manner of representation. The normal craft cycles of the greater towns were processional in character. They were not played throughout by a single body of actors and upon a single stage; but the action was divided into a number of independent scenes, to each of which was assigned its own group of performers and its own small movable stage or ‘pageant.’ And each scene was repeated at several ‘stations’ in different parts of the city, pageant succeeding pageant in regular order, with the general effect of a vast procession slowly unrolling itself along the streets[393]. This method of playing was convenient to the distribution of the leitourgia among the guilds, and was adopted in all those places, Chester, York, Beverley, and Coventry, from which our records happen to be the fullest. But it was not the primitive method and, as has been pointed out in a previous chapter, it probably arose from an attempt about the beginning of the fourteenth century to adapt the already existing miracle-plays to the distinctive feature of the festival of Corpus Christi. To this point it will be necessary to recur[394]. The processional play was rare outside England, and even in England it at no period became universal. Two at least of the great cycles that survive, the Cornish one and the Ludus Coventriae, as well as several smaller plays, can be clearly shown from internal evidence to have been intended for stationary performance. They do not naturally cleave asunder into distinct scenes. The same personages appear and reappear: the same properties and bits of scenery are left and returned to, often at considerable intervals. Moreover stationary performances are frequently implied by the records. At Lincoln, after the suppression of the old visus of St. Anne’s processional play, the corporation ordered the performance of a ‘standing’ play ‘of some story of the Bible.’ At Newcastle, although pageants of the plays went in the procession, the actual performance seems to have been given in a ‘stead.’ This arrangement is exactly parallel to that of the Florentine rappresentazioni on St. John’s day in 1454[395]. Elsewhere there was commonly enough no ‘pageant’ at all. The ‘standing’ plays may be traced at various removes from their original scene, the floor of the church[396]. Indeed, the examples of Braintree in 1523 and 1525, of Halstead in 1529, of Heybridge in 1532, seem to show that, quite apart from the survival of ritual plays proper, the miracle-play, even at the very moment of its extinction, had not been always and everywhere excluded from the church itself. The Beverley repraesentatio dominicae resurrectionis about 1220 had got as far as the churchyard. At Bungay in 1566 they played in the churchyard, and at Harling in 1452 ‘at the cherch gate.’ The latest of all the village plays, that of Hascombe in 1579, was at, but perhaps not in the church. The next step brought the plays to the market-place, which itself in many towns lay just outside the church door. At Louth the Corpus Christi play was in the ‘markit-stede,’ and so were some at least of the Reading plays. A neighbouring field might be convenient; the Bassingbourne play was in a ‘croft,’ that of Chelmsford in a ‘pightell.’ Certain places had a bit of waste ground traditionally devoted to the entertainment of the citizens. Such were the ‘Forbury’ at Reading and the ‘Quarry’ at Shrewsbury. The Aberdeen Haliblude play took place apud ly Wyndmylhill. Edinburgh constructed its ‘playfield’ in the Greenside at considerable cost in 1554, while in Cornwall permanent amphitheatres were in use. A writer contemporary with the later performances describes these as made of earth in open fields with an enclosed ‘playne’ of some fifty feet in diameter. If they are correctly identified with the ‘rounds’ of St. Just and Perranzabulo, these examples at least were much larger. The St. Just round is of stone, with seven tiers of seats, and measures 126 feet in diameter; the earthen one at Perranzabulo is 130 feet, and has a curious pit in the centre, joined to the edge by a trench. The disposition of these rounds at the time of performance can be studied in the diagrams reproduced from the fifteenth-century manuscript of the plays by Mr. Norris. Within a circular area is arranged a ring of eight spots which probably represent structures elevated above the general surface of the ‘playne.’ They have labels assigning them to the principal actors. Thus for the Origo Mundi the labels are Celum, Tortores, Infernum, Rex Pharao, Rex Dauid, Rex Sal[omon], Abraham, Ortus. From the stage directions it would appear that the raised portions were called pulpita or tenti, and by Jordan at a later date ‘rooms’; that the ‘playne’ was the platea; and that the action went on partly on the pulpita, partly on the platea between them. Except that it is circular instead of oblong, the scheme corresponds exactly to that of the continental plays shown in an earlier chapter to have been determined by the conditions of performance within a church[397]. Those plays also had their platea; and their domus, loca, or sedes answer to the pulpita and tenti of Cornwall. Judging by the somewhat scanty indications available, the disposition of other English ‘standing’ plays must have been on very similar lines. In some cases there is evidence that the level platea was replaced by a raised ‘platform,’ ‘scaffold,’ or ‘stage.’ Thus Chaucer’s ‘joly Absolon’ played Herod ‘on a scaffold hye[398].’ But the ‘stages’ or ‘scaffolds’ mentioned in accounts are sometimes merely for the spectators and sometimes equivalent to the loca of leading actors. In the Digby play of St. Mary Magdalen, a practicable ship moves about the platea. Possibly a similar bit of realism was used elsewhere for the ever popular ‘Noy schippe,’ and, if so, this may explain the pit and trench of the Perranzabulo ‘round[399].’
As to the ‘pageant’ or movable stage of the processional plays, a good deal of information is preserved. Dugdale describes it at Coventry as a ‘Theater ... very large and high, placed upon wheels’; Rogers at Chester as ‘a highe place made like a howse with ij rowmes, beinge open on yᵉ tope: the lower rowme they apparelled and dressed them selues; and in the higher rowme they played; and they stood vpon 6 (v.l. 4) wheeles.’ According to an inventory of 1565 the grocers’ pageant at Norwich was ‘a Howse of Waynskott paynted and buylded on a Carte wᵗ fowre whelys.’ It had a square top or canopy; on it were placed a gilt griffin and two large and eighty-three small vanes; and about it were hung three painted cloths. Similar adornments of the pageant were in use at Coventry. At York it bore the arms of the city or of the guild. M. Jusserand has unearthed from a Bodleian manuscript two fourteenth-century miniatures which apparently represent pageants. These have draperies covering the whole of the lower ‘room’ down to the ground and resemble nothing so much as the ambulant theatre of a Punch and Judy show[400]. The pageants were probably arranged so that the action might be visible from every side. The scenery would therefore be simple—a throne, a house. Certain plays, however, necessitate a divided scene, such as the inside and outside of a temple[401]. For the ‘hell,’ the traditional monstrous head on a lower level, with practicable chains and fire, was required[402]. The pageant used for the Flood scene was doubtless shaped like an ark. The ‘shipp’ belonging to the Trinity guild of Hull cost £5 8_s._ 4_d._ The ordinary pageant may have been less expensive. That of the Doom at York was made ‘of newe substanciale’ for seven marks, the old pageant and a free admission into the guild. At Lincoln three times as much was charged for housing the ship as for any other pageant.
The origin of the pageant is capable of a very easy explanation[403]. Like the edifizio of the Italian rappresentazioni, it is simply the raised locus, sedes, or domus of the stationary play put upon wheels. Just as the action of the stationary play took place partly on the various sedes, partly in the platea, so Coventry actors come and go to and from the pageant in the street. ‘Here Erode ragis in the pagond & in the strete also,’ says a stage direction. It should be observed that the plays at Coventry were exceptionally long, and that scaffolds seem to have been attached to the pageant proper in order to get sufficient space.
The number of ‘stations’ at which the plays were given varied in the different towns. At York there were from twelve to sixteen; at Beverley six; at Coventry not more than three or four can be identified. The many scenes and frequent repetitions naturally made the processional plays very lengthy affairs. At Chester they were spread over three days; at York they were got through in one, but playing began at half-past four in the morning. At Newcastle, on the other hand, the plays were in the afternoon. The banns of the Ludus Coventriae promise a performance ‘at vj of the belle,’ but whether in the morning or evening is not stated.
The normal occasion for the greater plays was the feast of Corpus Christi on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. A few exceptions are, however, to be noted. At Chester, Norwich, New Romney, and apparently Leicester, the date chosen was Whitsuntide. Yet at Chester the play is called the ‘Corpus Christi play’ in craft documents of the fifteenth century, and even in the municipal ‘White Book’ of the sixteenth; from which it must be inferred either that the term was used of all cyclical plays without regard to their date, or, more probably, that at Chester a performance originally given on Corpus Christi day had been for some reason transferred to Whitsuntide. The motive may have been a desire to avoid clashing between the plays and the great Corpus Christi procession in which the crafts everywhere took a prominent part. A difficulty arose on this score at York in 1426, and a Franciscan preacher, one William Melton, tried to induce the citizens to have the plays on the day before Corpus Christi. Ultimately the alternative was adopted of having the procession on the day after. At Lincoln the plays were on St. Anne’s day (July 26) and the last pageant was acted by the clergy in the nave of the cathedral. At Aberdeen there appear to have been two cycles, a processional Nativity at Candlemas and a Haliblude play on Windmill Hill at Corpus Christi.
The oversight of the actors was, as pointed out in the last chapter, an important element in the civic control of the craft-plays. The mention at York of a commission of ‘connyng, discrete and able players’ must not be taken to imply that these were in any sense professionals. All the actors received fees, on a scale proportionate to the dignity of their parts. Thus at Coventry one Fawston got 4_d._ ‘for hangyng Judas,’ and 4_d._ more ‘for coc croyng.’ The payment to the performer of God was 3_s._ 4_d._ A ‘sowle,’ whether ‘savyd’ or ‘dampnyd,’ got 20_d._, and a ‘worme of conscyence’ only 8_d._ At Hull, Noah was generally paid 1_s._, God and Noah’s wife a trifle less. But there is nothing to show that the performers were drawn from the minstrel class: they were probably, like ‘joly Absolon,’ members of the guilds undertaking the plays. The Chester men describe themselves in their banns as not ‘playeres of price’ but ‘Craftes men and meane men.’ The epilogue to the Conversion of St. Paul in the Digby manuscript similarly deprecates unkindly criticism of folk ‘lackyng lytturall scyens ... that of Retoryk haue non intellygens.’ A characteristic of the acting which greatly impressed the imagination of the audience seems to have been the rant and bombast put from very early times in the mouths of such royal or pseudo-royal personages as Herod and Pilate.[404] In the Chester plays fragments of French, as in a liturgical play fragments of gibberish[405], are used to enhance this effect. In the Cornish plays, as in the modern music hall, each performer at his first appearance displays himself in a preliminary strut about the stage. Hic pompabit Abraham, or Moses, or David, say the stage directions. As is usually the case with amateurs, the function of the prompter became an exceedingly important one. If the Cornish writer Richard Carew may be trusted, the local players did not learn their parts at all, but simply repeated them aloud after the whispers of the ‘ordinary[406].’ Probably this was exceptional; it certainly was not the practice at Beverley, where there is a record of an actor being fined quod nesciebat ludum suum. But it may be taken for granted that the ‘beryng of the boke,’ which is so frequently paid for in the accounts, was never a sinecure. Another functionary who occasionally appears is the stage-manager. In the later Cornish plays he is called the ‘conveyour.’ The great Chelmsford performance of 1562 was superintended by one Burles who was paid, with others, for ‘suing’ it, and who probably came from a distance, as he and his boy were boarded for three weeks.
The professional assistance of the minstrels, although not called in for the acting, was welcome for the music. This was a usual and a considerable item in the expenses. At the Chelmsford performance just mentioned the waits of Bristol and no less than forty other minstrels were employed. There is no sign of a musical accompaniment to the dialogue of the existing plays, which was spoken, and not, like that of their liturgical forerunners, chanted. But the York and Coventry texts contain some noted songs, and several plays have invitations to the minstrels to strike up at the conclusion or between the scenes. Minstrels are also found accompanying the proclaimers of the banns or preliminary announcements of plays. These banns seem to have been versified, like the plays themselves. They are often mentioned, and several copies exist. Those of Chester were proclaimed by the city crier on St. George’s day; those of the Croxton play and the Ludus Coventriae were carried round the country-side by vexillatores or banner-bearers. Minstrelsy was not the only form of lighter solace provided for the spectators of the plays. Two of those in the Digby manuscript were accompanied with dances. At Bungay a ‘vyce’ was paid ‘for his pastyme before the plaie, and after the plaie.’ There were ‘vices’ too at Chelmsford, and ‘fools,’ by which is meant the same thing[407], at Heybridge and New Romney. But these examples are taken from the decadence of the miracle-play, rather than from its heyday.
The accounts of the Bassingbourne play in 1511 include a payment to ‘the garnement man for garnements and propyrts and playbooks.’ This was an occasional and not an annual play, and apparently at the beginning of the sixteenth century such plays were sufficiently frequent to render the occupation of theatrical outfitter a possible one. Certainly those lucky parishes, such as Chelmsford or St. Peter’s, Oxford, which possessed a stock of ‘game gear,’ found a profit in letting it out to less favoured places. The guilds responsible for the greater plays naturally preserved their own costumes and properties from year to year, supplementing these where necessary by loans from the neighbouring gentry and clergy. The Middle Ages were not purists about anachronism, and what was good enough for an English bishop was good enough for Annas and Caiaphas. The hands of the craftsmen who acted were discreetly cased in the gloves, without which no ceremonial occasion was complete, and sometimes, at least, vizors or masks were worn. But, as a rule, the stage setting left a good deal to the imagination. The necessaries for the play of Paradise at Beverley in 1391 consisted of the ‘karre’ or pageant, eight hasps, eighteen staples, two vizors, a pair of wings for the angel, a fir-spar (the tree of knowledge), a worm (the serpent), two pairs of linen breeches, two pairs of shifts, and one sword. For a similar play the Norwich grocers possessed in 1565, besides the pageant and its fittings, sufficient ‘cotes and hosen’ for all the characters, that of the serpent being fitted with a tail, a ‘face’ and hair for the Father, hair for Adam and Eve, and—‘a Rybbe colleryd Red.’ A few other interesting details can be gathered from various records. At Canterbury the steeds of the Magi were made of hoops and laths and painted canvas. In the Doomsday scene at Coventry the ‘savyd’ and ‘dampnyd’ souls were distinguished by their white or black colour[408]. The hell mouth was provided with fire, a windlass, and a barrel for the earthquake. There were also three worlds to be set afire, one, it may be supposed, at each station. The stage directions to Jordan’s Cornish Creation of the World are full of curious information. The Father appears in a cloud and when he speaks out of heaven, ‘let ye levys open.’ Lucifer goes down to hell ‘apareled fowle wᵗʰ fyre about hem’ and the plain is filled with ‘every degre of devylls of lether and spirytis on cordis.’ In Paradise a fountain and ‘fyne flowers’ suddenly spring up, and a little later ‘let fyshe of dyuers sortis apeare & serten beastis.’ Lucifer becomes ‘a fyne serpent made wᵗʰ a virgyn face & yolowe heare upon her head.’ Adam and Eve departing from Paradise ‘shewe a spyndell and a dystaff.’ For the murder of Abel, according to old tradition, a ‘chawbone’ is needed[409], and for the ark, timber and tools, including ‘a mallet, a calkyn yren, ropes, masstes, pyche and tarr.’ I have not space to dwell further on these archaeological minutiae. One point, however, seems to deserve another word. Many writers have followed Warton in asserting that Adam and Eve were represented on the stage in actual nakedness[410]. The statement is chiefly based upon a too literal interpretation of the stage directions of the Chester plays[411]. There is a fine a priori improbability about it, and as a matter of fact there can be very little doubt that the parts were played, as they would have been on any other stage in any other period of the world’s history, except possibly at the Roman Floralia[412], in fleshings. Jordan is quite explicit. Adam and Eve are to be ‘aparlet in whytt lether,’ and although Jordan’s play is a late one, I think it may be taken for granted that white leather was sufficient to meet the exigencies even of mediaeval realism.
The accounts of miracle-plays frequently contain entries of payments for providing copies of the text used. When the stock of the Chelmsford play was dispersed in 1574, the copies were valued at £4. Such copies were naturally of more than one kind. There was the authoritative text kept for reference by the guild or other body of presenters. This is sometimes called the ‘play-book’ or ‘game-book.’ The Cornish term is ordinale, a derivative from the ordo of the liturgical drama[413]. That in use elsewhere is more commonly ‘original,’ which appears in a variety of quaint spellings[414]. In the great towns where plays were given by the crafts under the general supervision of the corporation, each craft held the ‘original’ of its own play, but approved transcripts of these were also in the hands of the corporation officers. At Chester this transcript was itself called the ‘original’; at York it was the registrum. Most of the extant manuscripts of plays appear to be of the nature of ‘originals.’ From York and probably from Wakefield we have registra. The Chester texts are, however, late transcripts due to the zeal of local antiquaries, perhaps in view of some frustrated revival. Specimens exist also of two other kinds of copy. There are single plays from both Chester and York which have all the appearance of having been folded up for the pocket of a prompter. And the nature of the ‘parts’ prepared for individual actors may be seen from the transition example edited by Professor Skeat from a manuscript found at Shrewsbury. They contained the actors’ own speeches, with the ‘cues’ or closing words of the preceding speeches which signalled to him that his turn was at hand[415].
Indications of the authorship of plays are very scanty. John Bale has preserved a list of his own plays, some at least of which were acted in mediaeval fashion. It may perhaps be assumed that Nicholas Udall, afterwards author of Ralph Roister Doister, wrote the play performed at Braintree in 1534, while he was vicar there. At Bassingbourne in 1511 one John Hobarde, ‘brotherhood priest,’ was paid ‘for the play-book.’ In this and in several of the following cases it is impossible to determine whether an author or merely a copying scribe is in question. The corporation of Beverley employed Master Thomas Bynham, a friar preacher, to write ‘banis’ for their plays in 1423. At Reading we find Mr. Laborne ‘reforming’ the Resurrection play about 1533. The later Cornish play of the Creation of the World was ‘wryten’ by William Jordan in 1611, and that of St. Meriasek by ‘dominus Hadton’ in 1504. At Bungay William Ellys was paid in 1558 ‘for the interlude and game-book[416],’ and Stephen Prewett, a priest at Norwich, for some labour about the matter of a game-book in 1526. This same Stephen Prewett had a fee from the Norwich grocers ‘for makyng of a new ballet’ in 1534. One of the extant Coventry plays was ‘nevly correcte’ and the other ‘nevly translate’ by Robert Croo in 1535. The name ‘Thomas Mawdycke’ and the date 1591 are written at the head of some songs belonging to the former. In 1566 Thomas Nycles set a song for the drapers. Robert Croo or Crowe seems to have made himself generally useful in connexion with the Coventry plays. In 1563 the smiths paid him for ‘ij leves of our pley boke.’ In 1557 he wrote the ‘boke’ for the drapers, and between 1556 and 1562 further assisted them by playing God, mending the ‘devell’s cottes,’ and supplying ‘iij worldys’ for burning and a hat for the Pharisee. A later Coventry playwright was John Smith of St. John’s College, Oxford, who wrote the ‘new play’ of the Destruction of Jerusalem in 1584 for a sum of £13 6_s._ 8_d._ The fifteenth-century Croxton play has the initials ‘R. C.’ One of the plays in the Digby manuscript ‘Ihon Parfre ded wryte.’ The three others have the initials ‘M. B.,’ and against the Poeta of the prologue to one of them a later hand has written in the margin ‘Myles Blomfylde.’ I repeat the caution that some at least of these names may be those of mere copyists. Miles Blomfield has been identified with a monk of Bury of that name. As he was born in 1525 he obviously was not the original author of the Digby plays, which are probably of the fifteenth century. A much greater monk of Bury, John Lydgate, has been claimed as the author of the Ludus Coventriae, but there does not seem to be any real evidence for this[417]. On the other hand I see no reason to doubt the old Chester tradition which connects the plays of that city with the name of Randulph Higden, author of the Polychronicon. The story is very fairly coherent, and the date (1328) which it assigns for the plays falls within the period of Higden’s monastic life at St. Werburgh’s abbey.
It must, of course, be borne in mind that the notion of authorship is only imperfectly applicable to the miracle-plays. The task of the playwrights was one less of original composition than of adaptation, of rewriting and rearranging existing texts so as to meet the needs of the particular performances in which they were interested. Obviously this was a process that could be carried out with more or with less individuality. There were slavish adapters and there were liberal adapters. But on the whole the literary problem of the plays lies in tracing the evolution of a form rather than in appreciating individual work. Even when written, the plays, if periodically performed, were subject to frequent revision, motived partly by the literary instinct for furbishing up, partly by changing conditions, such as the existence of a varying number of craft-guilds ready to undertake the responsibility for a scene[418]. Further alterations, on theological rather than literary grounds, were naturally called for at the Reformation. Thus Jordan’s Cornish Creation of the World is clearly based upon the older play printed by Mr. Norris. The book of the Norwich grocers contains two versions of their play of Paradise, the later of which, ‘newely renvid accordynge unto yᵉ Skrypture,’ was substituted for the earlier in 1565. The Towneley manuscript has two alternative versions of the Pastores. That of York has a fragmentary second version of the Coronation of the Virgin, and when read with the records affords much evidence of the dropping, insertion, and rearrangement of scenes, and of doctrinal revision during the sixteenth century. At Coventry the local annals mention ‘new playes’ in 1520, fifteen years before the existing texts were ‘nevly correcte’ and ‘translate’ by Robert Crowe.
The determination of the relations in which the plays stand towards one another is a field in which literary scholars, delayed by the want of trustworthy critical texts, are only just beginning to set foot. The question lies outside the scope of these pages. But I may call attention to Mr. Pollard’s analysis of the various strata in the Towneley plays[419], and to the studies by Professor Hohlfeld[420] and Professor Davidson[421] upon the greater cycles in general and especially upon the influence exercised by York over the Towneley and other plays, as excellent examples of what may be looked for. The Ludus Coventriae will afford a good subject for investigation, when the manuscript has been properly re-edited. It is evidently a patchwork cycle, roughly put together and in parts easy to break up into its constituent elements. The problem is not confined to English literature. The Chester tradition represents Higden’s work as an affair rather of translation than of anything else. It is not quite clear whether translation from the Latin or from the Norman-French is intended. In any case it is probable that the earlier English playwrights made use of French models, and certain parallels have already been traced between English plays and others to be found in the French collection known as the Viel Testament. Here, as elsewhere, the international solidarity of mediaeval literature is to be taken into account.
Two chapters back I defined the change which took place in the character of the religious drama of western Europe during the thirteenth century as being, to a large extent, a process of secularization. ‘Out of the hands of the clergy,’ I said, ‘in their naves and choirs, the drama passed to those of the laity in their market-places and guild-halls.’ And I pointed to the natural result of these altered conditions in ‘the reaction of the temper of the folk upon the handling of the plays, the broadening of their human as distinct from their religious aspect[422].’ A study of the texts and records of the fully developed miracle-play as it existed in these islands from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century can only confirm this view. I have indeed shown, I hope, in the course of this imperfect summary, that the variety of mediaeval theatrical organization was somewhat greater than a too exclusive attention to the craft-cycles of the great towns has always allowed scholars to recognize. But, with all qualifications and exceptions, it is none the less true that what began as a mere spectacle, devised by ecclesiastics for the edification of the laity, came in time to appeal to a deep-rooted native instinct of drama in the folk and to continue as an essentially popular thing, a ludus maintained by the people itself for its own inexhaustible wonder and delight[423]. Literary critics have laid stress upon the emergence of the rude humour of the folk, with its love of farce and realism, in somewhat quaint juxtaposition to the general subject-matter of the plays. I only desire to add here that the instinct which made the miracle-plays a joy to the mediaeval burgher is the same instinct which the more primitive peasant satisfied in a score of modes of rudimentary folk-drama[424]. The popularity and elaboration of the devil scenes in the plays is the most striking manifestation of this identity[425]. For your horned and blackened devil is the same personage, with the same vague tradition of the ancient heathen festival about him, whether he riots it through the cathedral aisles in the Feast of Fools, or hales the Fathers to limbo and harries the forward spectators in the market-place of Beverley or Wakefield.
One must not look for absolute breaches of continuity, even in a literary evolution. That the liturgical types of religious drama continued to exist side by side with their popular offshoots, that here the clergy continued to present plays, and in spite of a certain adverse current of ascetic feeling, to assist the lay guilds in divers ways, has already been there shown. It is to be added that the texts of the plays bear traces to the end of their liturgical origin. The music used is reminiscent of church melodies[426]. The dialogue at critical moments follows the traditional lines and occasionally even reverts to the actual Latin of the repraesentationes. More than one play—the Towneley Iuditium, the Croxton Sacrament, the Digby St. Mary Magdalen—closes with the Te Deum which habitually ended Matins when the dramatic interpolation of the office was over. And what are the Expositor of the Ludus Coventriae, the Doctor of the Brome play, or even Balaeus Prolocutor himself, but the lineal descendants, through the dramatized St. Augustine, of certain German plays and the appellatores or vocatores of the Prophetae, of the priest who read the pseudo-Augustinian Christmas lectio from which the Prophetae sprang? Survivals such as these impress upon the student the unity of the whole religious drama of the Middle Ages, from trope to Corpus Christi cycle.
XXIII. MORALITIES, PUPPET-PLAYS, AND PAGEANTS
[Bibliographical Note.—The English moralities are well treated from a literary point of view in the books by Ten Brink, Ward, Creizenach, Pollard, Collier, Klein, Symonds, Bates, Jusserand, and Courthope, named in the bibliographical note to Chapter xxi, and also in the Introduction to A. Brandl, Quellen des weltlichen Dramas in England vor Shakespeare (1898). Some texts not easily available elsewhere are given in the same book; others are in Dodsley’s A Select Collection of Old English Plays (ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1874-6), vol. i, and J. M. Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama (1897), vol. i. Extracts are given by Pollard. Lists both of popular moralities and of moral interludes will be found in Appendix X. The French plays of a similar type are dealt with by L. Petit de Julleville, La Comédie et les Mœurs en France au Moyen Âge (1886) and Répertoire du Théâtre comique en France au Moyen Âge (1886).—On puppet-plays, C. Magnin, Histoire des Marionnettes en Europe (1852), and A. Dieterich, Pulcinella (1897), may be consulted. The traditional text of the stock English play is printed, with illustrations by G. Cruikshank, in J. P. Collier, Punch and Judy (1870). English pageants at the Corpus Christi feast and at royal entries are discussed by C. Davidson, English Mystery Plays (1892), § xvii, and Sir J. B. Paul, in Scottish Review, xxx (1897), 217, and the corresponding French mystères mimés by L. Petit de Julleville, Les Mystères (1880).]
I have endeavoured to trace from its ritual origins the full development of that leading and characteristic type of mediaeval drama, the miracle-play. I now propose to deal, very briefly, with certain further outgrowths which, in the autumn of the Middle Ages, sprang from the miracle-play stock; and a final book will endeavour to bring together the scattered threads of this discursive inquiry, and to touch upon that transformation of the mediaeval into the humanist type of drama, which prepared the way for the great Elizabethan stage.
The miracle-play lent itself to modification in two directions: firstly, by an extension of its subject-matter; and secondly, by an adaptation of its themes and the methods to other forms of entertainment which, although mimetic, were not, in the full sense of the term, dramatic. There are a few plays upon record which were apparently represented after the traditional manner of miracles, but differ from these in that they treat subjects not religious, but secular. Extant examples must be sought in the relics, not of the English, but of the continental drama. The earliest is the French Estoire de Griselidis, a version of the story familiar in Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale, which was written and acted, according to the manuscript, in 1395[427]. Slightly later is a Dutch manuscript which contains, amongst other things, probably the répertoire of some compagnie joyeuse, three plays on the subjects respectively of Esmoreit, Gloriant of Brunswick, and Lanseloet and Sanderijn[428]. Both the French and Dutch plays belong to what may be called the wider circle of chivalric romance. An obvious link between such pieces and the ordinary miracle-play is to be found in those of the Miracles de Nostre Dame which, like Amis et Amiles or Robert le Diable, also handle topics of chivalric romance, but only such as are brought technically within the scope of the miracle-play by the intervention of the Virgin at some point of the action[429]. Similarly, another French play, dating from about 1439, on the subject, drawn not from romance but from contemporary history, of the Siege of Orleans, may be explained by the sanctity already attributed in the national imagination to Joan of Arc, who is naturally its leading figure[430]. But the usual range of subject was certainly departed from when Jacques Millet, a student at Orleans, compiled, between 1450 and 1452, an immense mystère in 30,000 lines on the Istoire de la destruction de Troye la grant[431]. In England, the few examples of the mingling of secular elements with the miracle-plays which present themselves during the sixteenth century can hardly be regarded as mediaeval[432]. The only theme which need be noticed here is that of King Robert of Sicily. A play on this hero, revived at the High Cross at Chester in 1529, is stated in a contemporary letter to have been originally written in the reign of Henry VII. But a still earlier ludus de Kyng Robert of Cesill is recorded in the Lincoln Annales under the year 1453.
Far more important than this slight secular extension of miracle-plays is another development in the direction of allegory, giving rise to the ‘moral plays’ or ‘moralities,’ as they came to be indifferently called[433], in which the characters are no longer scriptural or legendary persons, but wholly, or almost wholly, abstractions, and which, although still religious in intention, aim rather at ethical cultivation than the stablishing of faith. The earliest notices of morals are found about the end of the fourteenth century, at a time when the influence of the Roman de la Rose and other widely popular works was bringing every department of literature under the sway of allegory[434]. That the drama also should be touched with the spirit of the age was so inevitable as hardly to call for comment. But it will be interesting to point out some at least of the special channels through which the new tendency established itself. In the first place there is the twelfth-century Latin play of Antichristus. In a sense the whole content of this may be called allegorical, and the allegory becomes formal in such figures as Heresis and Ypocrisis, Iustitia and Misericordia, and in those of Ecclesia, Synagoga, and Gentilitas, suggested to the clerkly author by a well-known disputatio. The same theme recurs in more than one later play[435]. Secondly, there is the theme of the Reconciliation of the Heavenly Virtues, which is suggested by the words of the eighty-fifth Psalm: ‘Mercy and Truth are met together: Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other.’ This is treated in two unprinted and little known French plays, also of the twelfth century, which I have not as yet had occasion to mention and of which I borrow the following analysis from Dr. Ward: ‘These four virtues appear personified as four sisters, who meet together after the Fall of Man before the throne of God to conduct one of those disputations which were so much in accordance with the literary tastes of the age; Truth and Righteousness speak against the guilty Adam, while Mercy and Peace plead in his favour. Concord is restored among the four sisters by the promise of a Saviour, who shall atone to Divine Justice on behalf of man.’ One of these pieces is ascribed to the Anglo-Norman poet, Guillaume Herman (1127-70), the other to Stephen Langton, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury. They are generally spoken of as literary exercises, not intended for representation[436]. But it is obvious that they might very well find their places in miracle-play cycles, as links between the scenes dealing respectively with the Fall and the Redemption. Further, precisely such an episode, in precisely such a position, does occur, three hundred years later, in the English cycle known as the Ludus Coventriae. Nor is this the only allegorical element which distinguishes a certain part of this patchwork cycle from nearly all the other English plays[437]. It is not, perhaps, of great importance that in the Assumption scene the risen Christ receives the name of Sapientia, or that Contemplatio is the ‘exposytour in doctorys wede,’ by whom several other scenes are introduced. But there is a striking passage at the end of the Slaughter of the Innocents, where ‘Dethe, Goddys masangere,’ intervenes to make an end of the tyrannic Herod[438], and here, I think, may clearly be traced yet a third stream of allegorical tendency making its way into the drama from that singular danse macabre or ‘Dance of Death,’ which exercised so powerful a fascination on the art of the Middle Ages. Death hobnobbing with pope and king and clown, with lord and lady, with priest and merchant, with beggar and fool, the irony is familiar in many a long series of frescoes and engravings. Nor are cases lacking in which it was directly adapted for scenic representation. An alleged example at Paris in 1424 was probably only a painting. But in 1449 a certain jeu, histoire et moralité sur le fait de la danse macabre was acted before Philip the Good at Bruges, and a similar performance is recorded at Besançon in 1453[439].
The process of introducing abstractions into the miracle-plays themselves does not seem to have been carried very far. On the other hand, the moralities, if God and the Devil may be regarded as abstractions, admit of nothing else. Two at least of the motives just enumerated, the Dance of Death and the Reconciliation of the Heavenly Virtues, recur in them. But both are subordinate to a third, which may be called the Conflict of Vice and Virtue. This débat-like theme is of course familiar in every branch of allegorical literature. Prof. Creizenach traces one type of it, in which the conflict is conceived under the symbols of siege or battle, to the Psychomachia of Prudentius[440], and perhaps even further to the passage about the ‘whole armour of God’ in St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians[441]. For the purposes of the stage it is eminently suitable, both because it lends itself to many and various modes of representation, and because conflict is the very stuff out of which drama is wrought.
As the earliest notices of moralities are found in English records and as this particular development of the drama is thoroughly well represented in English texts, I may save space by confining my attention to these, merely noting as I pass the contemporary existence of precisely parallel records and texts on the continent and particularly in France[442]. The first English moralities seem to have been known as Paternoster plays. Such a play is mentioned by Wyclif about 1378 as existing at York, and at some date previous to 1389 a special guild Orationis Domini was founded in that city for its maintenance. The play, however, survived the guild, and was acted from time to time as a substitute for the ordinary Corpus Christi plays up to 1572. Similarly, at Beverley a Paternoster play was acted by the crafts, probably in emulation of that of York, in 1469, while a third is mentioned in Lincoln documents as played at various dates from 1397 to 1521. Although all these Paternoster plays are lost, their general character can be made clear. In that of York ‘all manner of vices and sins were held up to scorn and the virtues were held up to praise,’ while an incidental entry in a computus shows that one division of it was known as the ludus accidiae. The information to be derived from Beverley is even more explicit. There were eight pageants. One was assigned to ‘Vicious,’ probably a typical representative of frail humanity, the other seven to the seven deadly sins which beset him, ‘Pryde: Invy: Ire: Avaryce: Sleweth (or Accidie): Glotony: Luxuria.’ The Paternoster play seems, therefore, to have been in some fashion a dramatization of the struggle of the vices and the corresponding virtues for the soul of man, and the name given to it may be explained by the mediaeval notion that each clause of the Lord’s Prayer was of specific merit against one of the deadly sins[443]. Here then is one version of just that theme of the Conflict of Vice and Virtue noted as dominant in the moralities.
Of the half dozen extant English moralities which can with any plausibility be assigned to the fifteenth century, two are based upon a motive akin to that of the Dance of Death. These are the fragmentary Pride of Life, which is the earliest of the group, and Everyman, which is by far the finest[444]. In the former Death and Life contend for the soul of Rex Vivus, the representative of humanity, who is only saved from the fiends by the intervention of the Virgin. In the latter, God sends Death to summon Everyman, who finds to his dismay that of all his earthly friends only Good Deeds is willing to accompany him. The Conflict of Vice and Virtue is resumed in the moral of Mundus et Infans and in the three morals of the Macro manuscript, the Castle of Perseverance, Mind, Will and Understanding, and Mankind. In all four plays the representative of humanity, Infans or Humanum Genus or Anima or Mankind, is beset by the compulsion or swayed this way and that by the persuasion of allegorized good and bad qualities. At the end of the Castle of Perseverance the motive of the Reconciliation of the Heavenly Virtues is introduced in a scene closely resembling that of the Ludus Coventriae or the earlier essays of Guillaume Herman and Stephen Langton.
A somewhat unique position between miracle-play and morality is occupied by the Mary Magdalen drama contained in the Digby manuscript. The action of this, so far as it is scriptural or legendary, has already been summarized[445]; but it must now be added that the episodes of the secular life of the Magdalen in gaudio are conceived in a wholly allegorical vein. The ‘kyngs of the world and the flesch’ and the ‘prynse of dylles’ are introduced with the seven deadly sins and a good and a bad angel. The castle of Magdala, like the castle of Perseverance, is besieged. The Magdalen is led into a tavern by Luxuria and there betrayed by Curiosity, a gallant. We have to do less with a mystery beginning to show morality elements than with a deliberate combination effected by a writer familiar with both forms of drama.
The manner of presentation of the fifteenth-century moralities did not differ from that of the contemporary miracle-plays. The manuscript of the Castle of Perseverance contains a prologue delivered by vexillatores after the fashion of the Ludus Coventriae and the Croxton Sacrament. There is also, as in the Cornish mysteries published by Mr. Norris, a diagram showing a circular ‘place’ bounded by a ditch or fence, with a central ‘castel’ and five ‘skaffoldys’ for the principal performers. Under the castle is ‘Mankynde, is bed’ and near it ‘Coveytyse cepbord.’ The scaffolds are the now familiar loca or sedes. The scantier indications of more than one of the other moralities proper suggest that they also were performed in an outdoor ‘place’ with sedes, and a similar arrangement is pointed to by the stage directions of the Mary Magdalen. Nor could the moralities dispense with those attractions of devils and hell-fire which had been so popular in their predecessors. Belial, in the Castle of Perseverance, is to have gunpowder burning in pipes in his hands and ears and other convenient parts of his body; Anima, in Mind, Will and Understanding, has little devils running in and out beneath her skirts; and in Mary Magdalen, the ‘prynse of dylles’ enters in ‘a stage, and Helle ondyr-neth that stage.’ The later moralities, of which the sixteenth century affords several examples, were presented under somewhat different conditions, which will be discussed in another chapter[446]. Allusions to the ‘morals at Manningtree,’ however, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, suggest that moralities may have continued in out-of-the-way places to hold the open-air stage, just as miracle-plays here and there did, to a comparatively late date. Actual examples of the more popular type of morality from the sixteenth century are afforded by Skelton’s Magnificence and by Sir David Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, shown successively at Linlithgow in 1540, on the Castle-hill at Cupar of Fife in 1552, and in the Greenside at Edinburgh about 1554. This remarkable piece differs in many ways from the English moralities. The theme consists of the arraignment of the estates of the realm before Rex Humanitas. Various ‘vycis’ and allegorical personages appear and plead, and the action is enlivened by farcical interludes for the amusement of the vulgar, and wound up by a sermon of ‘Folie,’ which points rather to French than to English models[447]. The flight of time is also shown by the fact that the Satyre aims less at the moral edification with which the fifteenth-century plays contented themselves, than at the introduction of a sharp polemic against abuses in church and state. Skelton’s Magnificence had also, not improbably, some political bearing. To this matter also I return in another chapter[448].
Miracle-plays and moralities ranked amongst the most widespread and coloured elements, century after century, of burgher and even of village life. It is not surprising that their subjects and their methods exercised a powerful influence upon other manifestations of the mediaeval spirit. The share which their vivid and sensuous presentations of religious ideas had in shaping the conceptions of artists and handicraftsmen is a fascinating topic of far too wide a scope to be even touched upon here[449]. But a few pages must be devoted to indicating the nature of their overflow into various pseudo-dramatic, rather than strictly dramatic, forms of entertainment.
One of these is the puppet-show. It has been pointed out, in speaking of the liturgical drama, that the use of puppets to provide a figured representation of the mystery of the Nativity, seems to have preceded the use for the same purpose of living and speaking persons; and further, that the puppet-show, in the form of the ‘Christmas crib,’ has outlived the drama founded upon it, and is still in use in all Catholic countries[450]. An analogous custom is the laying of the crucifix in the ‘sepulchre’ during the Easter ceremonies, and there is one English example of a complete performance of a Resurrection play by ‘certain smalle puppets, representinge the Persons of Christe, the Watchmen, Marie and others.’ This is described by a seventeenth-century writer as taking place at Witney in Oxfordshire ‘in the dayes of ceremonial religion,’ and one of the watchmen, which made a clacking noise, was ‘comonly called Jack Snacker of Wytney[451].’ This points to the use of some simple mechanical device by which motion was imparted to some at least of the puppets. A similar contrivance was produced by Bishop Barlow to point a sermon against idolatry at Paul’s Cross in 1547 and was given afterwards to the boys to break into pieces[452]. More elaborate representations of miracle-plays by means of moving puppets or marionnettes make their appearance in all parts of Europe at a period when the regular dramatic performances of similar subjects were already becoming antiquated, nor can they be said to be even yet quite extinct[453]. Most of them belong to the repertory of the professional showmen, and it will be remembered that some form or other of marionnette seems to have been handed down continuously amongst the minstrel class from Roman times[454]. In England the puppet-shows were much in vogue at such places as Bartholomew Fair, where they became serious rivals of the living actors[455]. The earliest name for them was ‘motions[456].’ Italian players brought ‘an instrument of strange motions’ to London in 1574[457]. Autolycus, in The Winter’s Tale, amongst his other shifts for a living, ‘compassed a motion of the Prodigal Son[458].’ Ben Jonson, in Bartholomew Fair, introduces one Lanthorn Leatherhead, a puppet-showman, who presents in his booth a curious rigmarole of a motion in which Hero and Leander, Damon and Pythias, and Dionysius are all mixed up[459]. It would appear to have been customary for the showman, like his brethren of the modern Punch and Judy, to ‘interpret’ for the puppets by reciting a suitable dialogue as an accompaniment to their gestures[460]. The repertory of Lanthorn Leatherhead contained a large proportion of ‘motions’ on subjects borrowed from the miracle-play. Similar titles occur in the notices of later performances at Bartholomew Fair[461] and of those given by the popular London showman, Robert Powell, during the reign of Queen Anne[462]. In more recent times all other puppet-shows have been outdone by the unique vogue of Punch and Judy[463]. The derivation of these personages from the Pontius Pilate and Judas Iscariot of the miracle-plays is the merest philological whimsy. Punch is doubtless the Pulcinella[464], who makes his appearance about 1600 as a stock figure in the impromptu comedy of Naples. Under other names his traditions may, for all one knows, go back far beyond the miracle-plays to the fabulae Atellanae. But the particular drama in which alone he now takes the stage, although certainly not a miracle-play, follows closely upon the traditional lines of the moralities[465].
Another kind of religious dumb-show, at once more ancient and more important than that of the puppets, was presented by living persons in the ‘ridings’ or processions which formed an integral part of so many mediaeval festivals. Like the miracle-plays themselves, these tableaux reached their highest point of elaboration in connexion with the ceremonies of Corpus Christi day; and, in order to understand their relation to the regular dramas, it is necessary to return for a moment to the early history of the great feast. It has already been suggested that the processional character of the great English craft-cycles, with their movable pageants and their ‘stations,’ may be explained on the hypothesis, that the performances were at one time actually given during the ‘stations’ or pauses before temporary street altars of the Corpus Christi procession itself. The obvious inconveniences of such a custom, if it really existed, might not unnaturally lead to its modification. Except at Draguignan, where the dialogue was reduced to the briefest limits, no actual traces of it are left[466]. In England the difficulty seems to have been solved at Newcastle by sending the pageants round with the procession in the early morning and deferring the actual plays until the afternoon. At Coventry representatives of the dramatis personae appear to have ridden in the procession, the cumbrous pageants being left behind until they were needed. Herod, for instance, rode on behalf of the smiths. At other places, again, the separation between procession and play was even more complete. The crafts which produced the plays were as a rule also burdened by their ordinances with the duties of providing a light and of walking or riding in honour of the host; but the two ceremonies took place at different hours on the same day, and there was no external relation, so far as the evidence goes, between them. Even so there was still some clashing, and at York, after an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the clergy in 1426 to get the plays put off, the procession itself appears to have been transferred to the following day.
On the other hand the difficulty seems to have been met in certain towns by suppressing the plays and reducing them to dumb-show ‘pageants’ carried in the procession. Lists are extant of such pageants as they were assigned to the crafts at Dublin in 1498 and at Hereford in 1503, and although it is not of course impossible that there were to be plays later in the day, there is no proof that this was the case. For a similar procession of tableaux held in London, in the earlier part of the fifteenth century, a set of descriptive verses was written by John Lydgate, and the adoption of this method of ‘interpreting’ the dumb-show seems to put the possibility of a regular dramatic performance out of court[467]. There were pageants also in the Corpus Christi processions at Bungay and at Bury St. Edmunds, but the notices are too fragmentary to permit of more than a conjecture as to whether they were accompanied by plays. The tableaux shown at Dublin, Hereford, and London were of a continuous and cyclical character, although at Hereford St. Catherine, and at Dublin King Arthur, the Nine Worthies, and St. George’s dragon were tacked on at the tail of the procession[468]. A continental parallel is afforded by the twenty-eight remontrances, making a complete cycle from the Annunciation to the Last Judgement, shown at Béthune in 1549[469]. But elsewhere, both in England and abroad, the shows of the Corpus Christi procession were of a much less systematic character, and Dublin was not the only place where secular elements crept in[470]. At Coventry, in addition to the representative figures from the craft-plays, the guild of Corpus Christi and St. Nicholas, to which, as to special Corpus Christi guilds elsewhere, the general supervision of the procession fell, provided in 1539 a Mary and a Gabriel with the lily, Saints Catherine and Margaret, eight Virgins and twelve Apostles. The Coventry procession, it may be added, outlived the Corpus Christi feast. In the seventeenth century Godiva had been placed in it and became the most important feature. By the nineteenth century the wool-combers had a shepherd and shepherdess, their patron saint Bishop Blaize, and Jason with the Golden Fleece[471]. At the Shrewsbury ‘Show,’ which also until a recent date continued the tradition of an older Corpus Christi procession, Saints Crispin and Crispinian rode for the shoemakers. At Norwich the grocers sent the ‘griffin’ from the top of their pageant and a ‘tree’ which may have been the tree of knowledge from their Whitsun play of Paradise, but which was converted by festoons of fruit and spicery into an emblem of their trade[472].
Aberdeen seems to have been distinguished by having two great mimetic processions maintained by the guilds. The interpretation of the data is rather difficult, but apparently the ‘Haliblude’ play, which existed in 1440 and 1479, had given way by 1531 to a procession in which pageants of the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the Coronation of the Virgin were eked out by others of Saints Sebastian, Laurence, Stephen, Martin, Nicholas, John, and George. The other procession seems originally to have been introduced as an episode in a play of the Presentation in the Temple on Candlemas day. Its ‘personnes’ or ‘pageants’ are such as might furnish out the action of a short Nativity cycle, together with ‘honest squiares’ from each craft, ‘wodmen,’ and minstrels. But in this case also the play seems to have vanished early in the sixteenth century, while the procession certainly endured until a much later date.
There are no other English religious dumb-shows, outside those of Corpus Christi day, so elaborate as the Aberdeen Candlemas procession. On the same day at Beverley the guild of St. Mary carried a pageant of the Virgin and Child with Saints Joseph and Simon and two angels holding a great candlestick[473]. The guild of St. Helen, on the day of the Invention of the Cross (May 3), had a procession with a boy to represent the saint, and two men bearing a cross and a shovel[474]. The guild of St. William of Norwich paraded a knave-child between two men holding candles in honour of the youthful martyr[475]. In the Whitsuntide procession at Leicester walked the Virgin and Saint Martin, with the twelve Apostles[476]. More interesting is the pageant of St. Thomas the Martyr on December 29 at Canterbury, with the saint on a cart and knights played by children and an altar and a device of an angel and a ‘leder bag for the blode[477].’ Probably this list could be largely increased were it worth while[478]. The comparatively modern elements in the Corpus Christi pageantry of Coventry, Shrewsbury, and Dublin may be paralleled from the eighteenth-century festival of the Preston guild merchant on or near St. John Baptist’s day with its Crispin and Crispinian, Bishop Blaize, Adam and Eve, Vulcan, and so forth[479], or the nineteenth-century wool trade procession on St. Blasius’ day (February 3), at Bradford, in which once more Bishop Blaize, with the Jason and Medea of the Golden Fleece, appears[480]. It is noticeable how, as such functions grow more civic and less religious, the pageants tend to become distinctively emblematic of the trades concerned. The same feature is to be observed in the choice of subjects for the plays given by way of entertainment to the earl of Kildare at Dublin in 1528.
The dumb-show pageants, which in many cities glorified the ‘ridings’ on the day of St. George (April 23), have been described in an earlier chapter[481]. These ‘ridings,’ of curiously mingled religious and folk origin, stand midway between the processions just mentioned and such seasonal perambulations as the ‘shows’ and ‘watches’ of Midsummer. Even in the latter, elements borrowed from the pageants of the miracle-plays occasionally form an odd blend with the ‘giants’ and other figures of the ‘folk’ tradition[482]. The ‘wache and playe’ went together at Wymondham, and also apparently at Chelmsford, in the sixteenth century. At York we find the pageants of some of the crafts borrowed for a play, though apparently a classical and not a religious one, at the Midsummer show of 1585. At Chester, when the Whitsun plays were beginning to fall into desuetude, the crafts were regularly represented in the Midsummer show by some of their dramatis personae, who, however, rode without their pageants. The smiths sent ‘the Doctors and little God,’ the butchers sent ‘the divill in his fethers,’ the barbers sent Abraham and Isaac, the bricklayers sent Balaam and the Ass, and so forth. These with the giants, a dragon, a man in woman’s clothes, naked boys, morris-dancers and other folk elements, made up a singular cavalcade.
In London, pageants were provided for the Midsummer show by the guilds to which the lord mayor and sheriffs for the year belonged. Thus the drapers had a pageant of the Golden Fleece in 1522, and pageants of the Assumption and Saint Ursula in 1523[483]. To a modern imagination the type of civic pageantry is the annual procession at the installation of the lord mayor in November, known familiarly as the lord mayor’s show. This show was important enough from the middle of the sixteenth century, and the pens of many goodly poets, Peele, Dekker, Munday, Middleton, and others, were employed in its service[484]. But its history cannot be taken much further back, and it is exceedingly probable that when the Midsummer show came to an end in 1538, the pageants were transferred to the installation procession. The earliest clear notice is in 1540, when a pageant of the Assumption, perhaps that which had already figured at the Midsummer show of 1523, was used[485]. The ironmongers had a pageant when the lord mayor was chosen from their body in 1566. It was arranged by James Peele, father of the dramatist, and there were two ‘wodmen’ in it, but unfortunately it is not further described[486]. In 1568, Sir Thomas Roe, merchant tailor, had a pageant of John the Baptist[487]. William Smith, writing an account of city customs in 1575, mentions, as a regular feature of the procession, ‘the Pagent of Triumph richly decked, whereupon, by certain figures and writings, some matter touching Justice and the office of a Magistrate is represented[488].’ And about ten years later the series of printed ‘Devices’ of the pageants begins.
The influence of miracle-plays and moralities is also to be looked for in the municipal ‘shows’ of welcome provided at the state entries of royal and other illustrious visitors. A large number of these, chiefly at coronations, royal marriages and the like, are recorded in chronicles of London origin, and with the London examples in their chronological order I will briefly deal. The earlier features of such ceremonies include the riding of the mayor and corporation to meet the king at some place outside the gates, such as Blackheath, or, in the case of a coronation, at the Tower, and the escorting of him with joyous tripudium or carole to the palace of Westminster, the reading of loyal addresses and the giving of golden gifts, the decking of walls and balconies with costly robes and tapestries, the filling of the conduits with wine, white and red, in place of the accustomed water[489]. The first example of pageantry in the proper sense occurs about the middle of the thirteenth century, in certain ‘devices and marvels’ shown at the wedding of Henry III to Eleanor of Provence in 1236[490]. These are not described in detail; but when Edward I returned to London after the defeat of William Wallace at Falkirk in 1298, it is recorded by a chronicler, quoted in Stowe’s Annals, that the crafts made ‘great and solemne triumph’ and that the fishmongers in particular ‘amongst other pageantes and shewes’ had, as it was St. Magnus’s day, one of the saint accompanied by a thousand horsemen, and preceded by four gilded sturgeons, four salmons on horseback and ‘sixe and fourtie knights armed, riding on horses made like luces of the sea[491].’ It was the fishmongers again who on the birth of Edward III in 1313 went in a chorea to Westminster with an ingeniously contrived ship in full sail, and escorted the queen on her way to Eltham[492]. At the coronation of Richard II in 1377 an elaborate castle was put up at the head of Cheapside. On the four towers of this stood four white-robed damsels, who wafted golden leaves in the king’s face, dropped gilt models of coin upon him and his steed, and offered him wine from pipes laid on to the structure. Between the towers was a golden angel, which by a mechanical device bent forward and held out a crown as Richard drew near[493]. Similar stages, with a coelicus ordo of singers and boys and maidens offering wine and golden crowns, stood in Cheapside when Richard again rode through the city in 1392, in token of reconciliation with the rebellious Londoners. And at St. Paul’s was a youth enthroned amongst a triple circle of singing angels; and at Temple Bar St. John Baptist in the desert surrounded by all kinds of trees and a menagerie of strange beasts[494]. No similar details of pageantry are recorded at the coronations of Henry IV or Henry V. But when the latter king returned to London after the battle of Agincourt in 1415 there was a very fine show indeed. The procession came to the city from Eltham and Blackheath by way of London Bridge. Upon the tower masking the bridge stood two gigantic figures, one a man with an axe in his right hand and the city keys in his left, the other a woman in a scarlet mantle. Beyond this were two columns painted to resemble white marble and green jasper, on which were a lion and an antelope bearing the royal arms and banner. Over the foot of the bridge was a tower with a figure of St. George, and on a house hard by a number of boys representing the heavenly host, who sang the anthem Benedictus qui venit in nomine Dei. The tower upon the Cornhill conduit was decked with red and had on it a company of prophets, who sent a flight of sparrows and other birds fluttering round the king as he passed, while the prophets chanted Cantate Domino canticum novum. The tower of the great Cheapside conduit was green, and here were twelve Apostles and twelve Kings, Martyrs and Confessors of England, whose anthem was Benedic, anima, Domino, and who, even as Melchisedek received Abraham with bread and wine, offered the king thin wafers mixed with silver leaves, and a cup filled from the conduit pipes. On Cheapside, the cross was completely hidden by a great castle, in imitation white marble and green and red jasper, out of the door of which issued a bevy of virgins, with timbrel and dance and songs of ‘Nowell, Nowell,’ like unto the daughters of Israel who danced before David after the slaying of Goliath. On the castle stood boys feathered like angels, who sang Te Deum and flung down gold coins and boughs of laurel. Finally, on the tower of the little conduit near St. Paul’s, all blue as the sky, were more virgins who, as when Richard II was crowned, wafted golden leaves out of golden cups, while above were wrought angels in gold and colours, and an image of the sun enthroned[495]. The details of the reception of Henry and Catherine of France, six years later, are not preserved[496]. Nor are those of the London coronation of Henry VI in 1429. But there was a grand dumb-show at the Paris coronation in 1431[497], and it was perhaps in emulation of this that on his return to London in the following year the king was received with a splendour equal to that lavished on the victor of Agincourt. There is a contemporary account of the proceedings by John Carpenter, the town clerk of London[498]. As in 1415 a giant greeted the king at the foot of London Bridge. On the same ‘pageant[499]’ two antelopes upbore the arms of England and France. On the bridge stood a magnificent ‘fabric,’ occupied by Nature, Grace, and Fortune, who gave the king presents as he passed. To the right were the seven heavenly Virtues, who signified the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, by letting fly seven white doves. To the left, seven other virgins offered the regalia. Then all fourteen, clapping their hands and rejoicing in tripudia, broke into songs of welcome. In Cornhill was the Tabernacle of Lady Wisdom, set upon seven columns. Here stood Wisdom, and here the seven liberal Sciences were represented by Priscian, Aristotle, Tully, Boethius, Pythagoras, Euclid, and Albumazar. On the conduit was the Throne of Justice, on which sat a king surrounded by Truth, Mercy, and Clemency, with two Judges and eight Lawyers. In Cheapside was a Paradise with a grove full of all manner of foreign fruits, and three wells from which gushed out wine, served by Mercy, Grace, and Pity. Here the king was greeted by Enoch and Elijah[500]. At the cross was a castle of jasper with a Tree of Jesse, and another of the royal descent; and at St. Paul’s conduit a representation of the Trinity amongst a host of ministering angels. In 1445 Margaret of Anjou came to London to be crowned. Stowe records ‘a few only’ of the pageants. She entered by Southwark bridge foot where were Peace and Plenty. On the bridge was Noah’s ship; in Leadenhall, ‘madam Grace Chancelor de Dieu’; on the Tun in Cornhill, St. Margaret; on the conduit in Cheapside, the Wise and Foolish Virgins; at the Cross, the Heavenly Jerusalem; and at Paul’s Gate, the General Resurrection and Judgement[501].
The rapid kingings and unkingings of the wars of the Roses left little time and little heart for pageantries, but with the advent of Henry VII they begin again, and continue with growing splendour throughout the Tudor century. Space only permits a brief enumeration of the subjects chosen for set pageants on a few of the more important occasions. Singing angels and precious gifts, wells of wine and other minor delights may be taken for granted[502]. As to the details of Henry VII’s coronation in 1485 and marriage in 1486 the chroniclers are provokingly silent, and of the many ‘gentlemanlie pageants’ at the coronation of the queen in 1487 the only one specified is ‘a great redde dragon spouting flames of fyer into the Thames,’ from the ‘bachelors’ barge’ of the lord mayor’s company as she passed up the river from Greenwich to the Tower[503]. At the wedding of Prince Arthur to Katharine of Aragon in 1501, ‘vi goodly beutiful pageauntes’ lined the way from London Bridge to St. Paul’s. The contriver is said to have been none other than Bishop Foxe the great chancellor and the founder of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. The subject of the first pageant was the Trinity with Saints Ursula and Katharine; of the second, the Castle of Portcullis, with Policy, Nobleness, and Virtue; of the third, Raphael, the angel of marriage, with Alphonso, Job, and Boethius; of the fourth, the Sphere of the Sun; of the fifth, the Temple of God; and of the sixth, Honour with the seven Virtues[504]. As to Henry VIII’s coronation and marriage there is, once more, little recorded. In 1522 came Charles V, Emperor of Germany, to visit the king, and the city provided eleven pageants ‘very faire and excellent to behold[505].’ The ‘great red dragon’ of 1487 reappeared in 1533 when yet another queen, Anne Boleyn, came up from Greenwich to enjoy her brief triumph. It stood on a ‘foist’ near the lord mayor’s barge, and in another ‘foist’ was a mount, and on the mount Anne’s device, a falcon on a root of gold with white roses and red. The pageants for the progress by land on the following day were of children ‘apparelled like merchants,’ of Mount Parnassus, of the falcon and mount once more, with Saint Anne and her children, of the three Graces, of Pallas, Juno, Venus, and Mercury with the golden apple, of three ladies, and of the Cardinal Virtues[506]. The next great show was at the coronation of Edward VI in 1547, and included Valentine and Orson, Grace, Nature, Fortune and Charity, Sapience and the seven Liberal Sciences, Regality enthroned with Justice, Mercy and Truth, the Golden Fleece, Edward the Confessor and St. George, Truth, Faith, and Justice. There was also a cunning Spanish rope-dancer, who performed marvels on a cord stretched to the ground from the tower of St. George’s church in St. Paul’s churchyard[507]. Mary, in 1553, enjoyed an even more thrilling spectacle in ‘one Peter a Dutchman,’ who stood and waved a streamer on the weathercock of St. Paul’s steeple. She had eight pageants, of which three were contributed by the Genoese, Easterlings, and Florentines. The subjects are unknown, but that of the Florentines was in the form of a triple arch and had on the top a trumpeting angel in green, who moved his trumpet to the wonder of the crowd[508]. There were pageants again when Mary brought her Spanish husband to London in 1554. At the conduit in Gracechurch Street were painted the Nine Worthies. One of these was Henry VIII, who was represented as handing a bible to Edward; and the unfortunate painter was dubbed a knave and a rank traitor and villain by Bishop Gardiner, because the bible was not put in the hands of Mary[509]. At the coronation of Elizabeth in 1559, with which this list must close, it was Time and Truth who offered the English bible to the queen. The same pageant had representations of a Decayed Commonwealth and a Flourishing Commonwealth, while others figured the Union of York and Lancaster, the Seat of Worthy Governance, the Eight Beatitudes, and Deborah the Judge. At Temple Bar, those ancient palladia of London city, the giants Gotmagot and Corineus, once more made their appearance[510].
I do not wish to exaggerate the influence exercised by the miracle-plays and moralities over these London shows. London was not, in the Middle Ages, one of the most dramatic of English cities, and such plays as there were were not in the hands of those trade- and craft-guilds to whom the glorifying of the receptions naturally fell. The functions carried out by the fishmongers in 1298 and 1313 are much of the nature of masked ridings or ‘disguisings,’ and must be held to have a folk origin. The ship of 1313 suggests a ‘hobby ship[511].’ Throughout the shows draw notions from many heterogeneous sources. The giants afford yet another ‘folk’ element. The gifts of gold and wine and the speeches of welcome[512] need no explanation. Devices of heraldry are worked in. The choirs of boys and girls dressed as angels recall the choirs perched on the battlements of churches in such ecclesiastical ceremonies as the Palm Sunday procession[513]. The term ‘pageant’ (pagina), which first appears in this connexion in 1432 and is in regular use by the end of the century, is perhaps a loan from the plays, but the structures themselves appear to have arisen naturally out of attempts to decorate such obvious architectural features of the city as London Bridge, the prison known as the Tun, and the conduits which stood in Cornhill and Cheapside[514]. It is chiefly in the selection of themes for the more elaborate mimetic pageants that the reflection of the regular contemporary drama must be traced. Such scriptural subjects as John the Baptist of 1392 or the Prophets and Apostles of 1415 pretty obviously come from the miracle-plays. The groups of allegorical figures which greeted Henry VI in 1432 are in no less close a relation to the moralities, which were at that very moment beginning to outstrip the miracle-plays in popularity. And in the reign of Henry VII the humanist tendencies begin to suggest subjects for the pageants as well as to transform the drama itself.
Certainly one does not find in London or in any English city those mystères mimés or cyclical dumb-shows, with which the good people of Paris were wont to welcome kings, and which are clearly an adaptation of the ordinary miracle-play to the conditions of a royal entry with its scant time for long drawn-out dialogue. The earliest of these upon record was in 1313 when Philip IV entertained Edward II and Isabella. It is not quite clear whether this was a procession like the disguising called the procession du renard which accompanied it, or a stationary dumb-show on pageants. But there is no doubt about the moult piteux mystere de la Passion de Nostre Seigneur au vif given before Charles VI and Henry V after the treaty of Troyes in 1420, for this is said to have been on eschaffaulx and to have been modelled on the bas-reliefs around the choir of Notre-Dame. Very similar must have been the moult bel mystere du Vieil testament et du Nouvel which welcomed the duke of Bedford in 1424 and which fut fait sans parler ne sans signer, comme ce feussent ymaiges enlevez contre ung mur. Sans parler, again, was the mystère which stood on an eschaffault before the church of the Trinity when Henry VI was crowned, only a few weeks before the London reception already mentioned[515].
It may be added that in many provincial towns the pageants used at royal entries had a far closer affinity to the miracle-plays proper than was the case in London. The place most often honoured in this sort was Coventry. In 1456 came Queen Margaret and poor mad Henry VI. One John Wedurley of Leicester seems to have been employed to organize a magnificent entertainment. At Bablake gate, where stood a Jesse, the royal visitors were greeted by Isaiah and Jeremiah. Within the gate was a ‘pagent’ with Saint Edward the Confessor and St. John the Evangelist. On the conduit in Smithford Street were the four Cardinal Virtues. In the Cheaping were nine pageants for the Nine Worthies. At the cross there were angels, and wine flowed, and at another conduit hard by was St. Margaret ‘sleyng’ her dragon and a company of angels. The queen was so pleased that she returned next year for Corpus Christi day. It appears from the smiths’ accounts that the pageants used at the reception were those kept by the crafts for the plays. The smiths’ pageant was had out again in 1461, with Samson upon it, when Edward IV came after his coronation, and in 1474 when the young prince Edward came for St. George’s feast. The shows then represented King Richard II and his court, Patriarchs and Prophets, St. Edward the Confessor, the Three Kings of Cologne and St. George slaying the dragon. Prince Arthur, in 1498, saw the Nine Worthies, the Queen of Fortune, and, once more, Saint George. For Henry VIII and Katharine of Aragon in 1511 there were three pageants: on one the ninefold hierarchy of angels, on another ‘divers beautiful damsels,’ on the third ‘a goodly stage play.’ The mercers’ pageant ‘stood’ at the visit of the Princess Mary in 1525, and the tanners’, drapers’, smiths’, and weavers’ pageants at that of Queen Elizabeth in 1565. I do not know whether it is legitimate to infer that the subjects represented on these occasions were those of the Corpus Christi plays belonging to the crafts named[516].
York was visited by Richard III in 1483, and there were pageants, the details of which have not been preserved, as well as a performance of the Creed play[517]. It was also visited by Henry VII in 1486, and there exists a civic order prescribing the pageants for that occasion. The first of these was a most ingenious piece of symbolism. There was a heaven and beneath it ‘a world desolaite, full of treys and floures.’ Out of this sprang ‘a roiall, rich, rede rose’ and ‘an othre rich white rose,’ to whom all the other flowers did ‘lowte and evidently yeve suffrantie.’ Then appeared out of a cloud a crown over the roses, and then a city with citizens with ‘Ebrauk’ the founder, who offered the keys to the king. The other pageants represented Solomon and the six Henries, the Castle of David, and Our Lady. There were also devices by which a rain of rose-water and a hailstorm of comfits fell before the king[518]. During the same progress which took Henry to York, he also visited Worcester, where there were pageants and speeches, ‘whiche his Grace at that Tyme harde not’ but which should have represented Henry VI and a Ianitor ad Ianuam. Thence he went to Hereford, and was greeted by St. George, King Ethelbert, and Our Lady; thence to Gloucester, where the chronicler remarks with some surprise that ‘ther was no Pageant nor Speche ordeynede’; and finally to Bristol, where were King Bremmius, Prudence, Justice, ‘the Shipwrights Pageannt,’ without any speech, and a ‘Pageannte of an Olifaunte, with a Castell on his Bakk’ and ‘The Resurrection of our Lorde in the highest Tower of the same, with certeyne Imagerye smytyng Bellis, and all wente by Veights, merveolously wele done[519].’ In 1503 Henry VII’s daughter Margaret married James IV of Scotland, and was received into Edinburgh with pageants of the Judgement of Paris, the Annunciation, the Marriage of Joseph and Mary, and the Four Virtues[520]. Eight years later, in 1511, she visited Aberdeen, and the ‘pleasant padgeanes’ included Adam and Eve, the Salutation of the Virgin, the Magi, and the Bruce[521].
The facts brought together in the present chapter show how ‘pageant’ came to have its ordinary modern sense of a spectacular procession. How it was replaced by other terms in the sense of ‘play’ will be matter for the sequel. It may be added that the name is also given to the elaborate structures of carpenters’ and painters’ work used in the early Tudor masks[522]. These the masks probably took over from the processions and receptions. On the other hand, the receptions, by an elaboration of the spoken element, developed into the Elizabethan ‘Entertainments,’ which are often classified as a sub-variety of the mask itself. This action and reaction of one form of show upon another need not at this stage cause any surprise. A sixteenth-century synonym for ‘pageant’ is ‘triumph,’ which is doubtless a translation of the Italian trionfo, a name given to the edifizio by the early Renascence, in deliberate reminiscence of classical terminology[523].
IV. THE INTERLUDE
Patronage cannot kill art: even in kings’ palaces the sudden flower blooms serene.
MODERN PLAY.
XXIV. PLAYERS OF INTERLUDES
[Bibliographical Note.—The Annals of the Stage in J. P. Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry (new ed. 1879), although ill arranged and by no means trustworthy, now become of value. They may be supplemented from the full notices of Tudor spectacula in E. Hall, The Union of Lancaster and York, 1548, ed. 1809, and from the various calendars of State papers, of which J. S. Brewer and J. Gairdner, Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII (1862-1903), including the Revels Accounts and the Kings Books of Payments, is the most important. Some useful documents are in W. C. Hazlitt, The English Drama and Stage (1869). The French facts are given by L. Petit de Julleville, Les Comédiens en France au Moyen Âge (1889).]
The closing section of this essay may fitly be introduced by a brief retrospect of the conclusions already arrived at. The investigation, however it may have lingered by the way, has not been altogether without its logos or rational framework. The first book began with a study of the conditions under which the degenerate stage of the Roman Empire ceased to exist. The most important of these were the indifference of the barbarians and the direct hostility of the Church. A fairly clean sweep was made. Scarcely a thread of dramatic tradition is to be traced amongst the many and diverse forms of entertainment provided by mediaeval minstrelsy. But the very existence of minstrelsy, itself a singular blend of Latin and barbaric elements, is a proof of the enduring desire of the western European peoples for something in the nature of spectacula. In the strength of this the minstrels braved the ban of the Church, and finally won their way to at least a partial measure of toleration from their hereditary foes. In the second book it was shown that the instinct for spectacula had its definitely dramatic side. The ludi of the folk, based upon ancient observances of a forgotten natural religion, and surviving side by side with minstrelsy, broke out at point after point into mimesis. Amongst the villages they developed into dramatic May-games and dramatic sword-dances: in their bourgeois forms they overran city and cathedral with the mimicries of the Feast of Fools and the Boy Bishop; they gave birth to a special type of drama in the mask; and they further enriched Tudor revels with the characteristic figures of the domestic fool or jester and the lord of misrule. Upon the folk ludi, as upon the spectacula of the minstrels, the Church looked doubtfully. But the mimetic instinct was irresistible, and in the end it was neither minstrels nor folk, but the Church itself, which did most for its satisfaction. The subject of the third book is a remarkable growth of drama within the heart of the ecclesiastical liturgy, which began in the tenth century, and became, consciously or unconsciously, a powerful counterpoise to the attraction of ludi and spectacula. So popular, indeed, did it prove that it broke the bonds of ecclesiastical control; and about the thirteenth century a process of laicization set in, which culminated during the fourteenth in the great Corpus Christi cycles of the municipal guilds. The subject-matter, however, remained religious to the end, an end which, in spite of the marked critical attitude adopted by the austerer schools of churchmen, did not arrive until that attitude was confirmed by successive waves of Lollard and Protestant sentiment. Nor was the system substantially affected by certain innovations of the fifteenth century, a tendency to substitute mere spectacular pageantry for the spoken drama, and a tendency to add to the visible presentment of the scriptural history an allegorical exposition of theological and moral doctrine.
It is the object of the present book briefly to record the rise, also in the fifteenth century, of new dramatic conditions which, after existing for a while side by side with those of mediaevalism, were destined ultimately to become a substitute for these and to lead up directly to the magic stage of Shakespeare. The change to be sketched is primarily a social rather than a literary one. The drama which had already migrated from the church to the market-place, was to migrate still further, to the banqueting-hall. And having passed from the hands of the clergy to those of the folk, it was now to pass, after an interval of a thousand years, not immediately but ultimately, into those of a professional class of actors. Simultaneously it was to put off its exclusively religious character, and enter upon a new heritage of interests and methods, beneath the revivifying breath of humanism.
A characteristic note of the new phase is the rise of the term interludium or ‘interlude.’ This we have already come across in the title of that fragmentary Interludium de Clerico et Puella which alone amongst English documents seemed to bear witness to a scanty dramatic element in the repertory of minstrelsy[524]. The primary meaning of the name is a matter of some perplexity. The learned editors of the New English Dictionary define it as ‘a dramatic or mimic representation, usually of a light or humorous character, such as was commonly introduced between the acts of the long mystery-plays or moralities, or exhibited as part of an elaborate entertainment.’ Another recognized authority, Dr. Ward, says[525]: ‘It seems to have been applied to plays performed by professional actors from the time of Edward IV onwards. Its origin is doubtless to be found in the fact that such plays were occasionally performed in the intervals of banquets and entertainments, which of course would have been out of the question in the case of religious plays proper.’ I cannot say that I find either of these explanations at all satisfactory. In the first place, none of the limitations of sense which they suggest are really borne out by the history of the word. So far as its rare use in the fourteenth century goes, it is not confined to professional plays and it does not exclude religious plays. The Interludium de Clerico et Puella is, no doubt, a farce, and something of the same sort appears to be in the mind of Huchown, or whoever else was the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, when he speaks of laughter and song as a substitute for ‘enterludez’ at Christmas[526]. But on the other hand, Robert Mannyng of Brunne, at the very beginning of the century, classes ‘entyrludes’ with ‘somour games’ and other forbidden delights of the folk[527], while the Wyclifite author of the Tretise on Miriclis at its close, definitely uses ‘entirlodies’ as a name for the religious plays which he is condemning[528]. In the fifteenth century, again, although ‘interlude’ is of course not one of the commonest terms for a miracle-play, yet I find it used for performances probably of the miracle-play type at New Romney in 1426 and at Harling in 1452, while the jurats of the former place paid in 1463 for ‘the play of the interlude of our Lord’s Passion[529].’ The term, then, appears to be equally applicable to every kind of drama known to the Middle Ages. As to its philological derivation, both the New English Dictionary and Dr. Ward treat it as a ludus performed in the intervals of (inter) something else, although they do not agree as to what that something else was. For the performance of farces ‘between the acts of the long miracle-plays’ there is no English evidence whatever[530]. The farcical episodes which find a place in the Towneley plays and elsewhere are in no way structurally differentiated from the rest of the text. There are some French examples of combined performances of farces and miracles, but they do not go far enough back to explain the origin of the word[531]. A certain support is no doubt given to the theory of the New English Dictionary by the ‘mirry interludes’ inserted in Sir David Lyndsay’s morality Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaits, but, once more, it is difficult to elucidate a term which appears at the beginning of the fourteenth century from an isolated use in the middle of the sixteenth. Dr. Ward’s hypothesis is perhaps rather more plausible. No doubt plays were performed at court and elsewhere between the banquet and the ‘void’ or cup of spiced drink which followed later in the evening, and possibly also between the courses of the banquet itself[532]. But this fact would not differentiate dramatic ludi from other forms of minstrelsy coming in the same intervals, and the fact that miracle-plays are called interludes, quite as early as anything else, remains to be accounted for. I am inclined myself to think that the force of inter in the combination has been misunderstood, and that an interludium is not a ludus in the intervals of something else, but a ludus carried on between (inter) two or more performers; in fact, a ludus in dialogue. The term would then apply primarily to any kind of dramatic performance whatever.
In any case it is clear that while ‘interlude’ was only a subordinate name for plays of the miracle-type, it was the normal name, varied chiefly by ‘play’ and ‘disguising,’ for plays given in the banqueting-halls of the great[533]. These begin to claim attention during the fifteenth century. Dr. Ward’s statement that religious plays could not have been the subject of such performances does not bear the test of comparison with the facts. A miracle of St. Clotilda was played before Henry the Sixth at Windsor Castle in 1429, a Christi Descensus ad Inferos before Henry the Seventh during dinner at Winchester in 1486; nor is it probable that the play performed by the boys of Maxstoke Priory in the hall of Lord Clinton at Candlemas, 1430, was other than religious in character[534]. The records of the miracle-plays themselves show that they were often carried far from home. There was much coming and going amongst the villages and little towns round about Lydd and New Romney from 1399 to 1508. One at least of the existing texts, that of the Croxton Sacrament, appears to be intended for the use of a travelling troupe, and that such troupes showed their plays not only in market-places and on village greens but also in the houses of individual patrons, is suggested by entries of payments to players of this and that locality in more than one computus[535]. Thus Maxstoke Priory, between 1422 and 1461, entertained lusores[536] from Nuneaton, Coventry, Daventry, and Coleshill; while Henry the Seventh, between 1492 and 1509, gave largess, either at court or abroad, to ‘pleyers’ from Essex, Wimborne Minster, Wycombe, London, and Kingston. The accounts of the last-named place record an ordinary parochial play in the very year of the royal ‘almasse.’
It is obvious that this practice of travelling must have brought the local players into rivalry with those hereditary gentlemen of the road, the minstrels. Possibly they had something to do with provoking that querelosa insinuatio against the rudes agricolae et artifices diversarum misterarum which led to the formation of the royal guild of minstrels in 1469. If so, the measure does not seem to have been wholly successful in suppressing them. But the minstrels had a better move to make. Their own profession had fallen, with the emergence of the trouvère and the spread of printing, upon evil days. And here were the scanty remnants of their audiences being filched from them by unskilled rustics who had hit upon just the one form of literary entertainment which, unlike poetry and romance in general, could not dispense with the living interpreter[537]. What could they do better than develop a neglected side of their own art and become players themselves? So there appear in the computi, side by side with the local lusores, others whose methods and status are precisely those of minstrels[538]. The generosity of Henry the Sixth at the Christmas of 1427 is called forth equally by the entreludes of the jeweis de Abyndon and the jeuues et entreludes of Jakke Travail et ses compaignons. By 1464 ‘players in their enterludes’ were sufficiently recognized to be included with minstrels in the exceptions of the Act of Apparel[539]. Like other minstrels, the players put themselves under the protection of nobles and persons of honour. The earliest upon record are those of Henry Bourchier, earl of Essex, and those of Richard, duke of Gloucester, afterwards Richard the Third. Both companies were rewarded by Lord Howard in 1482. The earls of Northumberland, Oxford, Derby, and Shrewsbury, and Lord Arundel, all had their players before the end of the century[540]. The regulations of the Northumberland Household Book, as well as entries in many computi, show that by the reign of Henry the Eighth the practice was widespread[541]. Naturally it received a stimulus when a body of players came to form a regular part of the royal household. Whether Richard the Third retained his company in his service during his brief reign is not upon record. But Henry the Seventh had four lusores regis, alias, in lingua Anglicana, les pleyars of the Kyngs enterluds at least as early as 1494. These men received an annual fee of five marks apiece, together with special rewards when they played before the king. When their services were not required at court, they took to the road, just as did the minstrels, ioculator, and ursarius of the royal establishment. In 1503 they were sent, under their leader John English, in the train of Margaret of Scotland to her wedding with James the Fourth at Edinburgh, and here they ‘did their devoir’ before the Scottish court[542]. Henry the Eighth increased their number to eight, and they can be traced on the books of the royal household through the reigns of Edward the Sixth and Mary, and well into that of Elizabeth[543].
The new conditions under which plays were now given naturally reacted upon the structure of the plays themselves. The many scenes of the long cyclical miracles, with their multitudinous performers, must be replaced by something more easy of representation. The typical interlude deals with a short episode in about a thousand lines, and could be handled in the hour or so which the lord might reasonably be expected to spare from his horse and his hounds[544]. Economy in travelling and the inconvenience of crowding the hall both went to put a limit on the number of actors. Four men and a boy, probably in apprenticeship to one of them, for the women’s parts, may be taken as a normal troupe. In many of the extant interludes the list of dramatis personae is accompanied by an indication as to how, by the doubling of parts, the caste may be brought within reasonable compass[545]. The simplest of scenic apparatus and a few boards on trestles for a stage had of course to suffice. But some sort of a stage there probably was, as a rule, although doubtless the players were prepared, if necessary, to perform, like masquers, on the floor in front of the screen, or at best upon the dais where the lord sat at meals[546]. The pleasure-loving monks of Durham seem as far back as 1465 to have built at their cell of Finchale a special player-chamber for the purposes of such entertainments[547]. Henry the Eighth, too, in 1527 had a ‘banket-house’ or ‘place of plesyer,’ called the ‘Long house,’ built in the tiltyard at Greenwich, and decorated by none other than Hans Holbein[548]. But this was designed rather for a special type of disguising, half masque half interlude, and set out with the elaborate pageants which the king loved, than for ordinary plays. A similar banqueting-house ‘like a theatre’ had been set up at Calais in 1520, but unfortunately burnt down before it could be used[549]. Another characteristic of the interlude is the prayer for the sovereign and sometimes the estates of the realm with which it concludes, and which often helps to fix the date of representation of the extant texts[550].
Like the minstrels, the interlude players found a welcome not only in the halls of the great, but amongst the bourgeois and the village folk. In the towns they would give their first performance before the municipality in the guildhall and take a reward[551]. Then they would find a profitable pitch in the courtyard of some old-fashioned inn, with its convenient range of outside galleries[552]. It is, however, rather surprising to find that Exeter, like Paris itself[553], had its regular theatre as early as 1348, more than two centuries before anything of the kind is heard of in London. This fact emerges from two mandates of Bishop Grandisson; one, already quoted in the previous volume, directed against the secta or ordo, probably a société joyeuse, of Brothelyngham[554], the other inhibiting a satirical performance designed by the youth of the city, in disparagement of the trade and mystery of the cloth-dressers. In both cases the ‘theatre’ of the city was to be the locality of the revels[555]. Much later, in 1538, but still well in anticipation of London, the corporation of Yarmouth appear to have built a ‘game-house’ upon the garden of the recently surrendered priory[556].
In the villages the players probably had to content themselves with a stage upon the green; unless indeed they could make good a footing in the church. This they sometimes did by way of inheritance from the local actors of miracles. For while the great craft-cycles long remained unaffected by the professional competition and ultimately came to their end through quite different causes, it was otherwise in the smaller places. If the parson and the churchwardens wanted a miracle in honour of their patron saint and could readily hire the services of a body of trained actors, they were not likely to put themselves to the trouble of drilling bookless rustics in their parts. And so the companies got into the churches for the purpose of playing religious interludes, but, if the diatribes of Elizabethan Puritans may be trusted, remained there to play secular ones[557]. The rulers of the Church condemned the abuse[558], but it proved difficult to abolish, and even in 1602 the authorities of Syston in Leicestershire had to buy players off from performing in the church[559].
Even where the old local plays survived they were probably more or less assimilated to the interlude type. It was certainly so with those written by John Bale and played at Kilkenny. It was probably so with the play of Placidas or St. Eustace given at Braintree in 1534, if, as is most likely, it was written by Nicholas Udall, who was vicar of Braintree at the time. And when we find the wardens of Bungay Holy Trinity in 1558 paying fourpence for an ‘interlude and game-booke’ and two shillings for writing out the parts, the conjecture seems obvious that what they had done was to obtain a copy of one of the printed interludes which by that time the London stationers had issued in some numbers. On the other hand the example of the travelling companies sometimes stirred up the folk, with the help, no doubt, of Holophernes the schoolmaster, to attempt performances of secular as well as religious plays on their own account. The rendering of Pyramus and Thisbe by the mechanicals of Athens, which is Stratford-upon-Avon, is the classical instance. But in Shropshire the folk are said to have gone on playing debased versions of Dr. Faustus and other Elizabethan masterpieces, upon out-of-door stages, until quite an incredibly late date[560].
I return to the atmosphere of courts. It must not be supposed that, under the early Tudors, the professional players had a monopoly of interludes. On the contrary, throughout nearly the whole of the sixteenth century, it remained doubtful whether the future of the drama was to rest in professional or amateur hands. The question was not settled until the genius of Marlowe and of Shakespeare came to the help of the players. Under the pleasure-loving Henries accomplishment in the arts of social diversion was as likely a road to preferment as another. Sir Thomas More won a reputation as a page by his skill in improvising a scene[561]. John Kite stepped almost straight from the boards to the bishopric of Armagh. His performances, not perhaps without some scandal to churchmen, were given when he was subdean of the Chapel Royal[562]. This ancient establishment, with its thirty-two gentlemen and its school of children, proved itself the most serious rival of the regular company. Both gentlemen and children, sometimes together and sometimes separately, took part in the performances, the records of which begin in 1506[563]. The rather exceptional nature of the repertory will be considered presently. Few noblemen, of course, kept a chapel on the scale of the royal one. But that of the earl of Northumberland was of considerable size, and was accustomed about 1523 to give, not only a Resurrection play at Easter and a Nativity play at Christmas, but also a play on the night of Shrove-Tuesday. The functionary to whom it looked for a supply of interludes was the almoner[564].
The gentlemen of the Inns of Courts were always ready to follow in the wake of courtly fashion. Their interludes were famous and important in the days of Elizabeth, but, although Lincoln’s Inn entertained external lusores in 1494 and 1498[565], Gray’s Inn is the only one in which amateur performances are recorded before 1556. A ‘disguising’ or ‘plaie’ by one John Roo was shown here in 1526, and got the actors into trouble with Wolsey, who found, or thought that he found, in it reflections on his own administration[566]. All ‘comedies called enterludes’ were stopped by an order of the bench in 1550, except during times of solemn Christmas[567]. In 1556 an elaborate piece for performance by all the Inns was in preparation by William Baldwin[568].
There were interludes, moreover, at universities and in schools. The earliest I have noted are at Magdalen College, Oxford, where they occur pretty frequently from 1486 onwards. They were given in the hall at Christmas, and overlap in point of time the performances of the Quem quaeritis in the chapel[569]. There was a play at Cardinal’s College in 1530[570]. Nicholas Grimald’s Christus Redivivus was given at Brasenose about 1542. Possibly his Archipropheta was similarly given about 1546 at Christ Church, of which he had then become a member. Beyond these I do not know of any other Oxford representations before 1558. But in 1512 the University granted one Edward Watson a degree in grammar on condition of his composing a comedy[571]. At Cambridge the pioneer college was St. John’s, where the Plutus of Aristophanes was given in Greek in 1536[572]. Christ’s College is noteworthy for a performance of the antipapal Pammachius in 1545[573], and also for a series of plays under the management of one William Stevenson in 1550-3, amongst which it is exceedingly probable that Gammer Gurton’s Needle was included[574]. Most of these university plays were however, probably, in Latin. The Elizabethan statutes of Trinity College[575] and Queens’ College[576] both provide for plays, and in both cases the performances really date back to the reign of Henry VIII. At Trinity John Dee seems to have produced the Pax of Aristophanes, with an ingenious contrivance for the flight of the Scarabaeus to Zeus, shortly upon his appointment as an original fellow in 1546[577].
The Westminster Latin play cannot be clearly shown to be pre-Elizabethan[578], and the Westminster dramatic tradition is, therefore, less old than that of either Eton or St. Paul’s. Professor Hales has, indeed, made it seem plausible that Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister dates from his Westminster (?1553-6) and not his Eton mastership (1534-41). But the Eton plays can be traced back to 1525-6[579], and were a recognized institution when Malim wrote his Consuetudinary about 1561[580]. In 1538 the Eton boys played, under Udall, before Cromwell[581]. A decade earlier, in 1527, John Ritwise had brought the boys of Colet’s new foundation at St. Paul’s to court. They acted an anti-Lutheran play before Henry and probably also the Menaechmi before Wolsey. Certainly they acted the Phormio before him in the following year[582]. The dramatic history of this school is a little difficult to disentangle from that of its near neighbour, the song-school of St. Paul’s cathedral[583]. The song-school probably provided the children whom Heywood brought before the princess Mary in 1538[584] and to court in 1553. But some doubt has been cast upon the bona fides of the account which Warton gives of further performances by them before the princess Elizabeth at Hatfield in 1554[585]. Plays, either in English or in Latin, of which Bale preserves a list, were also acted in the private school set up in 1538 by one Ralph Radclif in the surrendered Carmelite convent of Hitchin[586].
It will be seen that the non-professional dramatic activities of England, outside the miracle-plays, although of some importance in the sixteenth century, came late and hardly extended beyond courtly and scholastic circles. There is nothing corresponding to the plentiful production of farces by amateur associations of every kind which characterized fifteenth-century France. Besides the scholars and the Basoche, which corresponded roughly to the Inns of Court, but was infinitely more lively and fertile, there were the Enfants sans Soucis in Paris, and in the province a host of puys and sociétés joyeuses. All of these played both morals and farces, particularly the latter, for which they claimed a very free licence of satirical comment[587]. As a result, although salaried joueurs de personnages begin to make their appearance in the account books of the nobles as early as 1392-3[588], the professional actors were unable to hold their own against the unequal competition, and do not really become of importance until quite the end of the sixteenth century[589]. In England it was otherwise. The early suppression of the Feast of Fools and the strict control kept over the Boy Bishop afforded no starting-point for sociétés joyeuses, while the late development of English as a literary language did not lend itself to the formation of puys. We hear indeed of satirical performances by the guild of Brothelyngham at Exeter in 1348, and again by the filii civitatis in 1352[590], but Bishop Grandisson apparently succeeded in checking this development which, so far as the information at present available goes, does not seem to have permanently established itself either at Exeter or elsewhere.