Heywood's "Thersites" (the impudent orator in the "Iliad") was written about 1537, to make mirth for the birth feast of the Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VI. Thersites asks Mulciber (Hephæstus) to make him a helmet (sallet) as he made the arms of Achilles. This enables Mulciber to vent many puns on salad; they look like the very first puns ever devised, and occupy two pages. The pun seems to have been a novelty in Tudor England. Thersites is a rough-hewn predecessor of Shakespeare's Pistol. There is much mockery of sacred relics and some buffoonery by way of action. Telemachus brings a letter from Ulysses (such a thing, said J. J. Rousseau, very foolishly, would have been useful in the "Odyssey") and Miles, the Knight, ends all with a pious speech.
In early Tudor England the drama had sunk many fathoms below the level of the Miracle Plays, such as that of the Shepherds. The rise of the drama, under Elizabeth, is a kind of miracle, like the sculpture of Phidias appearing after the rude art of the artists who worked at Athens before the victories of Marathon and Salamis.
In "Jack Juggler," however, we find the influence of Roman comedy faintly dawning, for the play is Plautus's comedy of "Amphitryon," "without Amphitryon," the hero, and with the mischievous and much-beaten Jack Juggler as the source of the fun.
The infant drama had wandered out of Biblical and allegorical subjects into touch with actual ancient Roman comedy, and, with Bale's "King John," was preluding to Shakespeare's Chronicle Plays. In the dawn of the Reformation, disputants on both sides addressed the people in Interludes, just as to-day a person "with a purpose" puts it into a novel, in place of writing a sober and reasonable treatise which would not be read. Among the plays with a purpose none is more absurd than the "King John" of John Bale (1495-1563). Bale, whose best work is a kind of history of English literature in Latin, was a fiery hot gospeller; he had to leave the country under Mary Tudor. In "King John" that profane and licentious but astute prince appears as a kind of Protestant martyr. Attacked by Stephen Langton, he says that the Church hates him because he does not found abbeys, and is in favour of an open Bible. So he is poisoned by the wicked priests!
In the interests of History no less than of her Church, Queen Mary issued proclamations against plays with a Protestant purpose, while Elizabeth was equally severe against Catholic Interludes.
We must think of these Interludes, whether moral, religious, scientific, or amusing, being played from the reign of Henry VIII till the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. Till 1575 or 1576 there were no theatre-houses; stages were erected in halls of palaces, castles, colleges, and in open spaces of towns. The King or Queen had Interlude players in their service, as they had musicians. Companies calling themselves "the Servants," and wearing the liveries of nobles and gentlemen, strolled about the country, protected by their more or less nominal masters, and supporting themselves by their skill in their profession. The "children," that is the boys, of various schools, especially of St. Paul's, acted under the managership of their teachers. The undergraduates of the Universities also acted, at first in Latin, before Queen Elizabeth, who did not conceal her distaste for what did not amuse her. The language of the plays was cast into all sorts of rhyming measures, and "the Vice" or lively buffoon of the Interludes was the germ of the Shakespearean Clown. There was abundance both of writers and players, but the plays had little merit as literature.
Ralph Roister Doister.
Among the unforgotten of these dwellers on the threshold of the Elizabethan drama is "Ralph Roister Doister," by Nicholas Udall (1505-1556) (of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, later headmaster of Eton, and next of Westminster; he died in the reign of Mary Tudor). The Vice, so to speak, or clever buffooning parasite, of the piece is Matthew Merrygreek, who in a long rhyming prologue describes his own way of life and his intention to befool the braggart Ralph Roister Doister. Ralph enters melancholy, he is in love: he has met the lady at supper, but forgets her name. She is rich (says Matthew), a widow, and betrothed to another man. Ralph is a fatuous ass, like Malvolio, and thinks all women in love with him. Merrygreek fools him to the top of his bent, and presents the lady with a forged love-letter from Ralph, who is drubbed by the maid-servants and generally disgraced, while the true love of the heroine returns from a voyage to be happy with her. There is plenty of noise, singing, and beating, and some intrigue in the case of the genuine wooer and his suspicious jealousy.
Gammer Gurton's Needle.
The equally renowned "Gammer Gurton's Needle," was acted sixteen years after "Ralph Roister Doister," at Christ's College, Cambridge. It is usually attributed to John Still (born 1543) a member of Christ's, Master of Arts in 1565, and later Master of that College, Vice-Chancellor of the University, and finally Bishop of Bath and Wells (died 1608). As Vice-Chancellor, Still was a stickler for Latin plays at Cambridge, which were more educational but not so popular as dramas in English. The plot turns on the loss of a needle by old Gammer Gurton, the suspicion, raised by a wag, that another old woman has stolen it; the search for the needle; combats about the needle, and the final discovery of that implement in the seat of a man's breeches. A sturdy beggar, Diccon, is "the Vice," and sets Gammer Gurton and another gammer to a scolding match. Hodge, a servant, with his broad dialect, and insistent demand for the needle, that a large and unseemly hole which ventilates his breeches may instantly be patched, has perhaps the most comic part, and when somebody slaps Hodge and drives the needle (which had stuck in his breeches), into a safe part of his person, the joy of a Cambridge audience knew no limits. The play is thoroughly rustic, the language is of an amazing breadth, and no doubt the drama made abundant mirth among the Cantab wits. Members of the sister University, where poets have been rare in comparison with these glories of Cambridge, need not covet Still, unless he wrote the famous drinking song in the Second Act, "Back and Side go bare, go bare!"