Representative English Comedies, v. 1. From the beginnings to Shakespeare

by Unknown

2. The Miracle Cycles in their Relation to Comedy

Miracle plays and 'marvels,' morals too as we soon shall see, were a propædeutic to comedy rather than tragedy. For the theme of these dramas is, in a word, Christian: the career of the individual as an integral part of the social organism, of the religious whole. So also, their aim: the welfare of the social individual. They do not exist for the purpose of portraying immoderate self-assertion and the vengeance that rides after, but rather the beauty of holiness or the comfort of contrition. Herod, Judas, and Antichrist are foils, not heroes. The hero of the miracle seals his salvation by accepting the spiritual ideal of the community. These plays contribute in a positive manner to the maintenance of the social organism. The tragedies of life and literature, on the other hand, proceed from secular histories, histories of personages liable to disaster because of excessive peculiarity,—of person or position. Whether the rank of the tragic hero be elevated or mean, he is unique: his desire is overweening, his frailty irremediable, or his passion unrestrained,—his peril unavoidable; and in his ruin not the principal only, but seconds and bystanders, are involved. Tragedy, then, is the drama of Cain, of the individual in opposition to the social, political, divine; its occasion is an upheaval of the social organism.

While the dramatic tone of the miracle cycle is determined by the conservative character of Christianity in general, the nature of the several plays is modified by the relation of each to one or other of the supreme crises in the career of our Lord. The plays leading up to, and revolving about, the Nativity, are of happy ending, and were doubtless regarded, by authors and spectators, as we regard comedy. The murder of Abel, at first sombre, gradually passes into the comedy of the grotesque. The massacre of the innocents emphasizes, not the weeping of a Rachel, but the joyous escape of the Virgin and the Child. In all such stories the horrible is kept in the background or used by way of suspense before the happy outcome, or frequently as material for mirth. Upon the sweet and joyous character of the pageants of Joseph and Mary and the Child it is unnecessary to dwell. They are of the very essence of comedy. The plays surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection are, on the other hand, specimens of the serious drama, the tragedy averted. It would hardly be correct to say tragedy; for the drama of the cross is a triumph. In no cycle does the consummatum est close the pageant of the Crucifixion; the actors announce, and the spectators believe, that this is "goddis Sone," whom within three days they shall again behold, though he has been "nayled on a tree unworthilye to die." By this consideration, without doubt, the horror of the buffeting and the scourging, the solemnity of the passion, the inhuman cruelty—but not the awe—of the Crucifixion, were mitigated for the spectators. Otherwise, mediæval as they were, they could have taken but little pleasure in the realism with which their fellows presented the history of the Sacrifice.

To indulge in a comprehensive discussion of the beginnings of comedy in England would be pleasant, but I find that I cannot compel the materials into the limits at my command. Accordingly, since the miracle cycles (to which Dodsley, following the French, gave the convenient, but un-English and somewhat misleading, name of 'mysteries') have been more frequently and generously treated by historians than those other miracles, non-scriptural, which I would call 'marvels,' and the no less important popular festival plays and early farces, and 'morals' or moral and 'mery' interludes, it seems that, in favour of the latter, I should defer much that might be said about the cycles until a more spacious occasion.

The manuscript of the York plays appears to have been made about 1430-40; that of the Wakefield, or so-called Towneley, toward the end of the same century; the larger part of the N-town, or so-called Coventry, in 1468; and the manuscripts of the Chester between 1591 and 1607. The last are, however, based upon a text of the beginning of the fifteenth or the end of the fourteenth century; and there is good reason to believe that some of the plays were in existence during the first half of the fourteenth. A tradition, suspicious but not yet wholly discredited, assigns their composition to the period 1267-76. The York cycle, according to Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith, was composed between 1340 and 1350. As to the Towneley plays, Mr. Pollard decides that they were built in at least three distinct stages, covering a period of which the limits were perhaps 1360 and 1410. While the composition of the so-called Coventry (apparently acted by strolling players) may in general be assigned to the first half of the fifteenth century, some parts give evidence of earlier date. The authenticated dates of the representation of miracles in Coventry, 1392-1591, I prefer to attribute not to this N-town cycle, but to the Coventry Gild plays, two of which still exist.[14] They possess no special importance for our present purpose. The Newcastle Shipwrights' Play is the much battered survivor of a cycle that was in existence in 1426. The Ms. of the three Digby plays of interest to us is assigned by Dr. Furnivall to the latter half of the fifteenth century. The subject of the first of them, the Killing of the Children, is of early dramatic use, and the treatment of the poltroon knight corresponds suggestively with Warton's account of the Christmas play given by the English bishops at the Council of Constance in 1417. The two Norwich pageants which survive are by no means naïve: they were touched up, if not written, during the second third of the sixteenth century.

Other cycle plays which might be enumerated must be omitted, with the exception of the Cornish. These were written in Cymric, apparently somewhat before 1300. They are suggestive to the historian of comedy particularly because they yield no faintest glimmer of a smile, save at their exquisite credulity and unconsciousness of art. They are a noble instance of the sustained seriousness of the scriptural cycle in its early, if not its original, popular stage, and, also, of that familiar handling of the sacred that prepares the way for the liberty of the comic.

In approaching the English miracle plays we notice that, as in the Cornish, the earliest secular form of the older cycles was principally, if not entirely, serious. Reasons which I cannot stay to enumerate prove that comic plays in the older cycles are not of the original series, and that humorous passages in plays of the older series are of later interpolation. Now, so far as the direct effect upon the comedy of Heywood, Greene, and Shakespeare is concerned, it may appear to some of no particular importance in what order the cycles in general were composed or the plays within the cycles. But the Tudor dramatists did not make their art, they worked with what they found, and they found a dramatic medium of expression to which centuries and countless influences had contributed. An extended study of the beginnings of English comedy should determine, so far as possible, the relative priority, not only of cycles, but of the comic passages within the cycles: what each composition has contributed to the enfranchisement of the comic spirit and the development of the technical factors of the art; to what extent each has expressed or modified the realistic, satirical, romantic, or humorous view of life, and in what ways each has reflected the temper of its time, the manners and the mind of the people that wrote, acted, and witnessed. If I arrange the plays that bear upon the development of comedy according to my conclusions regarding priority of composition, the order, broadly stated for our present rapid survey, is as follows: first, the Cornish and the Old Testament portions of the Chester and Coventry; then the productions of the second and third periods of the York, and, closely following these, the crowning efforts of the Towneley; then the New Testament plays of the Chester and Coventry; and, finally, the surviving portions of the cycles of Digby and Newcastle. This order, which is roughly historical, has the advantage, as I perceive after testing it, of presenting a not unnatural sequence of the æsthetic values or interests essential to comedy: first, as a full discussion would reveal, the humour of the incidental; then of the essential or real, and, gradually, of the satirical in something like their order of appearance within the cycles; afterwards, the accession of the romantic, the wonderful, the allegorical, the mock-ideal; and, finally, of the scenic and sensational.

Of the significant lack of humour in the Cornish plays I have already spoken. I find, though I may not stay to illustrate, a livelier observation and a superior faculty of characterization and construction in the early comic art of Chester than in that of Coventry, but in both a cruder sense of the humour of incident than in the other English cycles. In the York cycle there are fewer situations that may be called purely comic than in the Chester, and none of these occurs in the oldest plays of the series; but for its other contributions to dramatic art and its relation to the remarkable productions of the Wakefield or Towneley school of comedy it deserves special attention. A comparative study of its versification, phraseology and dramatic technique, leads me to the conclusion that the original didactic kernel of the York cycle was enlarged and enriched during two well-defined periods, which may be termed the middle and the later, and that there was at least one playwright in each of these periods or schools who distinctly made for the development of English comedy. Of the middle period, to which belong Cain, Noah, and the Shepherds' Plays, the playwright or playwrights are characterized by an unsophisticated humour; the distinctive playwright of the later or realistic period is marked by his observation of life, his reproduction of manners, his dialogue, and the plasticity of his technique. That the later school or period, to which belongs a group of half a dozen plays[15] gathering about The Dream of Pilate's Wife, and The Trial before Herod, was, moreover, influenced by the manner of its predecessor is indicated by the fact that of its two most efficient stanzaic forms one, namely that used in The Conspiracy, is anticipated (though in simpler iambic beat) by that of Noah, the typical play of the middle, that is the first comic, school,[16] while the other, of which the variants are found in The Mortificacio and The Second Trial, has its germ more probably in The Cayme of that same school than in any other of the middle or of the earlier plays.[17] With these two stanzaic forms the later group, so far as we may conclude from the mutilated condition of the surviving plays, seems to experiment; and the second of them, that of the Mortificacio, may be regarded as the final and distinctive outcome of York versification. To the leading playwrights of each of these schools,—the former the best humorist, the latter the best realist, of the York drama,—to these anonymous composers of the most facile and vivid portions of the York cycle our comedy owes a still further debt; for from them it would appear that a poet of undoubted genius derived something of his inspiration and much of his method and technique—our first great comic dramatist, the Playwright of Wakefield.

We know that Wakefield actors sometimes played in the Corpus Christi plays of York, and it was only natural that the smaller town should borrow from the dramatic riches of its metropolitan neighbour. We are, therefore, not surprised to find in the Wakefield cycle a number of plays which have been taken bodily from the York cycle.[18] None of these is in the distinctive stanzaic form of which we have just spoken; but imbedded in certain other Wakefield plays[19] that in other respects show marks of derivation from earlier and discarded portions of the York cycle, we find occasional affiliated forms of the distinctive later York strophe evidently in a transitional period of its development. We find, furthermore, passages in this transitional York strophe side by side with Wakefield stanzas which display the strophe in a more highly artistic technique than anything found in the York.[20] The writer of the perfected York-Wakefield stanza, such as appears in the Towneley plays, must have, consciously or unconsciously, been influenced by the middle and later York schools of dramatic composition. This fully developed outcome of the distinctive York stanza of the later school is found in the guise of a nine-line stanza in certain Towneley plays which we see reason for attributing to a Wakefield genius, and which we shall presently consider. Suffice it in this place to say that of the Wakefield stanza the first four lines, when resolved, according to their internal rhymes, into separate verses, run thus: abababab². If to this we add the cauda, our stanza runs abababab²c¹ddd²c². Sometimes, indeed, a three-accented line occurs among the first eight, showing the more plainly that this thirteen-line stanza of Wakefield (though set down in nine lines) is a variant or derivative of the thirteen-line York XXXVI.,—ababbcbc³d¹eee²d³. And that in itself is, as I have already said, a refinement upon the fourteen-line stanza of the earlier comic school of York, as used in the Noah. Whether the rapid beat and frequently recurring rhyme of the Wakefield are a conscious elaboration of the York or a happy find or accident, the stanzaic result is an accurate index to the superiority in spirit and style achieved over their congeners of York by these comedies of Wakefield.

Now, the contiguity of what is undoubtedly borrowed from the York with what is imitated from it and what is elaborated upon it, is strong proof of a conscious relation between these Wakefield productions and those of York; and since the work of the poet, especially the provincial poet, was in those days (though verse forms, like air, are free to all) likely to be cast in a fixed mould—his favourite metrical and strophaic medium, there is at any rate a possibility that the plays and portions of plays in the Wakefield cycle, written in this fully developed and distinctive stanza, were the work of one man. When we examine the contents of the plays and their style, we find that the possibility becomes more than a probability, practically a certainty; and that being so, I can hardly deem it an accident that the most dramatic portions of the Wakefield cycle show so close an external resemblance to the best comic and realistic portions of the York. It is, then, with something of the interest in an individual, not a theory, that one may segregate the plays and bits of plays bearing this metrical stamp, look for the personality behind them, and attempt to discover the relation of the Wakefield group of comedies to its forerunners of York.

The Wakefield cycle is still in flux when its distinctive poet-humorist takes it in hand. Insertions in his nine-line stanza are found in one[21] of the five plays derived from the York cycle. Of the two plays which show a general resemblance to a corresponding York, one[22] is in this stanza, and to the other[23] a dozen of the stanzas are prefixed. The Fflagellacio (XXII.), the second half of which is an imitation, sometimes loose, sometimes literal, of York XXXIV. (Christ Led up to Calvary), opens with twenty-three of these stanzas,—nearly the whole of the original part. One of them, No. 25, is, by the way, based upon stanza 2 of that part of York XXXIV. which is not taken over by the Wakefield play. In the Wakefield Ascension (XXIX.), which adapts, but in no slavish manner, a few passages from the York (XLIII.), we find two of this playwright's nine-line stanzas;[24] and in the Wakefield Crucifixion (XXIII.), which has some slight reminiscence of York XXXV. and XXXVI., we find one. In that part of the Wakefield less directly, or not at all, connected with the York cycle, four whole plays,[25] the Processus Noe, the two Shepherds' Plays, and the Buffeting, and occasional portions of other plays[26] are written in this stanza. This contribution in the nine-line stanza amounts to approximately one-fourth of the cycle; and, allowing for modifications due to oral and scribal transmission, is of one language and phraseology. Not merely the identity of stanza and diction, however, leads one to suspect an identity of authorship; but the prevalence in all these passages, and not in others, of spiritual characteristics in approximately the same combination,—realistic and humorous qualities singularly suitable to the development of a vigorous national comedy. "If any one," says Mr. Pollard, "will read these plays together, I think he cannot fail to feel that they are all the work of the same writer, and that this writer deserves to be ranked—if only we knew his name!—at least as high as Langland, and as an exponent of a rather boisterous kind of humour had no equal in his own day." And, speaking of the Mactacio Abel, where we lack the evidence of identity of metre, this authority continues, "The extraordinary youthfulness of the play and the character of its humour make it difficult to dissociate it from the work of the author of the Shepherds' Plays, and I cannot doubt that this, also, at least in part, must be added to his credit."[27]

To this conclusion I had come before reading Mr. Pollard's significant introduction to the Towneley Plays; and I may say that I had suspected the Wakefield master in the Processus Talentorum as well; for though, with the exception of some insertions, the stanzaic form of that pageant is not his favourite, the humour, dramatic method, and phraseology of the whole are distinctly reminiscent of him. In the revising and editing of the Wakefield cycle as he found it this playwright was brought into touch with the York schools of comic and realistic composition. What he derived from them and what he added may be gathered from a comparative view of the related portions of these cycles. That, however, I must defer until another time. The best of his plays are of course the Noe and the Secunda Pastorum; the latter a product of dramatic genius. It stands out English and alone, with its homespun philosophy and indigenous figures,—Mak and Gyll and the Shepherds,—its comic business, its glow, its sometimes subtle irony, its ludicrous colloquies, its rural life and manners, its naïve and wholesome reverence: with these qualities it stands apart from other plays of cycles foreign or native, and in its dramatic anticipations, postponements, and surprises is our earliest masterpiece of comic drama. A similar dramatic excellence characterizes all this poet's plays, as well as the insertions made by him in other plays. But he is no more remarkable for his dramatic power than for his sensitive observation and his satire.

Of the realism of his art much might be said. To be sure, we cannot accredit to him the grim photography of certain plays—the preparations for the crucifixion, for instance, which are the counterpart of scenes in the York. But the Buffeting proves his power in this direction, and parts of the Scourging—each a genre picture on a background of horrors. Of conversations caught from the lip those in the second and fourth scenes of the Processus Noe are his, and those between the shepherds in Prima and Secunda Pastorum,—all of them unique. So also the description of the dinners in these Shepherds' Plays: the boar's brawn, cow's foot, sow's shank, blood puddings, ox-tail, swine's jaw, the good pie, "all a hare but the loins," goose's leg, pork, partridge, tart for a lord, calf's liver "scored with the verjuice," and good ale of Ely to wash things down. What more seasonable than the afterthought of collecting the broken meats for the poor? what more naïve than the night-spell in the name of the Crucified just preceding the angelic announcement of his birth? what more typical of unquestioning faith than the reverence of these "Sely Shepherds" before the Saviour Child, the simplicity and acceptability of their rustic gifts? This is the fresh and sympathetic handling of a well-worn theme. But the Wakefield poet is no sentimentalist: his anger burns as sudden as his pity. Otherwhere genially ironical, it is in his revision of the Judicium that he displays his full power as a satirist. Here his hatred of oppression, his scorn of vice and self-love, his contempt of sharp and shady practice in kirk or court, upon the bench, behind the counter, or by the hearth are welded into one and brought to edge and point. He strikes hard when he will, but he has the comic sense and spares to slay. We may hear him chuckling, this Chaucerian "professor of holy pageantry," as he pricks the bubble of fashion, lampoons Lollard and "kyrkchaterar" alike, and parodies the latinity of his age. When his demons speak the syllables leap in rhythmic haste, the rhymes beat a tattoo, and the stanzas hurtle by. Manners, morals, folly, and loose living are writ large and pinned to the caitiff. But the poet behind the satire is ever the same, sound in his domestic, social, political philosophy, constant in his sympathy with the poor and in godly fear.

Though there are comic scenes of some excellence in the later Chester and so-called Coventry plays, they add little to the variety of the Wakefield. I would, however, call attention to a few other comparatively modern, but, generally speaking, contemporaneous, characteristics of these and the remaining cycles: the foreshadowing of the chivalrous-romantic in the Joseph and Mary plays of York, Wakefield, and especially Coventry; of the melodramatic in the wonder and mediæval magic of the York and Chester cycles, and again especially in the Coventry; of the allegorical in the Coventry, and of the burlesque in all cycles when Pride rides for a fall or Cunning is caught in his own snare.

In respect of the sensational, the older cycles are surpassed by the surviving plays of Newcastle and Digby; so also in the increasing complexity of motive and interest. These Digby plays were acted, probably one by one in some midland village from year to year during the latter half of the fifteenth century, and maybe somewhat earlier. They are of interest, not only because they emphasize the sensational element, but because they stand half-way, if not in time, at any rate in spirit and method, between the miracles that we have so far discussed and the moral plays of which we shall presently treat. The Digby Killing of the Children of Israel lends a decided impetus to the progress of the comic and secular tendencies of the drama. The Herod brags as usual, but he is artistically surpassed in his metier by a certain miles gloriosus, the descendant of Bumbommachides and Sir Launscler Depe, and himself the forerunner of Thersites and Roister Doister, and countless aspirants for knighthood, whose valour "begynnes to fayle and waxeth feynt" under the distaff of an angry wife. Such is the Watkyn of this Digby play. Both here and in the Conversion of St. Paul, the joyous element has been enhanced, as Dr. Furnivall points out, by the introduction of dancing and music. In the Conversion the charm supplied by the ammoniac Billingsgate of Saul's servant and the ostler adds thrills galore. Saul, "goodly besene in the best wyse, like an aunterous knyth," the thunder and lightning, the persecutor felled to earth, "godhed speking from hevyn," the Holy Ghost, the "dyvel with thunder and fyre" sitting cool upon a "chayre in hell, another devyll with a fyeryng, cryeng and roryng,"—the warning angel, Saul's escape,—there is sign enough of invention here. To be sure, these seductions are counterbalanced by a didactic on the Seven Deadly Sins, worthy of a preceding or contemporary moral drama; but that was part of the bargain. The spectacular plays of this group, especially the Mary Magdalene, comic and didactic by turns, denote a further advance in a still different direction. They portray character in process of formation: the rejection of former habits and motives, and the adoption of new, the resulting change of conduct, and the growth of personality. From this point of view Mary Magdalene is a figure of as rare distinction in the history of romantic comedy as the Virgin Mary,—perhaps even of greater importance. Interesting as the sensational elements of the play may have been, and novel—the vital novelty here is that of character growing from within. Wonderful as the career of the virgin mother was,—an essential propædeutic to that woman worship which characterizes a broad realm of Christian romance,—her career could never have awakened the peculiar interest, dramatic and humane, that was stirred by the legend so often dramatized of the wayward, tempted, falling, but finally redeemed and sainted Mary of Magdala.

With regard to the transitional character of the Digby plays, it has been maintained that this particular play, combining materials of the biblical miracle and the saint's play or marvel, approaches more nearly than any other of the group to the morals and moral interludes, because of the prominence of the Sensual Sins in the dramatic career of the Magdalene. Professor Cushman, in his excellent thesis on The Devil and the Vice, even asserts that the downfall of the heroine, as the result of sensual temptation which is the office of seven personified deadly sins "arayyd lyke vij dylf," is a special 'development' of this play. I can hardly go so far: the church of the Middle Ages, Caxton's Golden Legend of 1483, and Voragine's of 1270-90 had already amalgamated the biblical narratives of the Mary of seven devils, Mary of Bethany, and the woman who was a sinner. In fact, the suggestion of the 'device,' if such was necessary, is contained in seven consecutive lines of Caxton's Life of the Magdalene. This biblical and legendary play is, however, undoubtedly well on the way toward the drama of the conflict of good and evil for possession of the human soul. And this appears, as the author just cited has pointed out, when we consider a later work on the same subject, called a Moral Interlude, by Lewis Wager. Although the Seven Deadly Sins no longer figure as such, their place is here supplied by four characters,—Infidelitie the Vice, and his associates, Pride of Life, Cupiditie, and Carnal Concupiscence,—who, arrayed like gallants, instruct the Magdalene in their several follies, and are themselves all "children of Sathan." These later Vices are nothing other than selected Deadly Sins,—the Pride, the Covetyse, and the Lechery of the earlier miracle play.