OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4
GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA
CAPE TOWN SALISBURY NAIROBI IBADAN ACCRA
KUALA LUMPUR HONG KONG
FIRST EDITION 1903
REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY IN GREAT BRITAIN
BY LOWE & BRYDONE, PRINTERS, LTD., LONDON
FROM SHEETS OF THE FIRST EDITION
1925, 1948, 1954, 1963
To N. C.
PREFACE
Some years ago I was thinking of a little book, which now may or may not ever get itself finished, about Shakespeare and the conditions, literary and dramatic, under which Shakespeare wrote. My proper task would have begun with the middle of the sixteenth century. But it seemed natural to put first some short account of the origins of play-acting in England and of its development during the Middle Ages. Unfortunately it soon became apparent that the basis for such a narrative was wanting. The history of the mediaeval theatre had never, from an English point of view, been written. The initial chapter of Collier’s Annals of the Stage is even less adequate than is usual with this slovenly and dishonest antiquary. It is with some satisfaction that, in spite of the barrier set up by an incorrect reference, I have resolved one dramatic representation elaborately described by Collier into a soteltie or sweetmeat. More scholarly writers, such as Dr. A. W. Ward, while dealing excellently with the mediaeval drama as literature, have shown themselves but little curious about the social and economic facts upon which the mediaeval drama rested. Yet from a study of such facts, I am sure, any literary history, which does not confine itself solely to the analysis of genius, must make a start.
An attempt of my own to fill the gap has grown into these two volumes, which have, I fear, been unduly swelled by the inclusion of new interests as, from time to time, they took hold upon me; an interest, for example, in the light-hearted and coloured life of those poverelli of letters, the minstrel folk; a very deep interest in the track across the ages of certain customs and symbols of rural gaiety which bear with them the inheritance of a remote and ancestral heathenism. I can only hope that this disproportionate treatment of parts has not wholly destroyed the unity of purpose at which, after all, I aimed. If I may venture to define for myself the formula of my work, I would say that it endeavours to state and explain the pre-existing conditions which, by the latter half of the sixteenth century, made the great Shakespearean stage possible. The story is one of a sudden dissolution and a slow upbuilding. I have arranged the material in four Books. The First Book shows how the organization of the Graeco-Roman theatre broke down before the onslaught of Christianity and the indifference of barbarism, and how the actors became wandering minstrels, merging with the gleemen of their Teutonic conquerors, entertaining all classes of mediaeval society with spectacula in which the dramatic element was of the slightest, and in the end, after long endurance, coming to a practical compromise with the hostility of the Church. In the Second Book I pass to spectacula of another type, which also had to struggle against ecclesiastical disfavour, and which also made their ultimate peace with all but the most austere forms of the dominant religion. These are the ludi of the village feasts, bearing witness, not only to their origin in heathen ritual, but also, by their constant tendency to break out into primitive forms of drama, to the deep-rooted mimetic instinct of the folk. The Third Book is a study of the process by which the Church itself, through the introduction of dramatic elements into its liturgy, came to make its own appeal to this same mimetic instinct; and of that by which, from such beginnings, grew up the great popular religious drama of the miracle-plays, with its offshoots in the moralities and the dramatic pageants. The Fourth and final Book deals summarily with the transformation of the mediaeval stage, on the literary side under the influence of humanism, on the social and economic side by the emergence from amongst the ruins of minstrelsy of a new class of professional players, in whose hands the theatre was destined to recover a stable organization upon lines which had been departed from since the days of Tertullian.
I am very conscious of the manifold imperfections of these volumes. They are the work, not of a professed student, but of one who only plays at scholarship in the rare intervals of a busy administrative life. They owe much to the long-suffering officials of the British Museum and the London Library, and more recently to the aid and encouragement of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press and their accomplished staff. The literary side of the mediaeval drama, about which much remains to be said, I have almost wholly neglected. I shall not, I hope, be accused of attaching too much importance in the first volume to the vague and uncertain results of folk-lore research. One cannot be always giving expression to the minuter shades of probability. But in any investigation the validity of the inferences must be relative to the nature of the subject-matter; and, whether I qualify it in words or not, I do not, of course, make a statement about the intention, say, of primitive sacrifice, with the same confidence which attaches to one about matters of historic record. The burden of my notes and appendices sometimes appears to me intolerable. My excuse is that I wanted to collect, once for all, as many facts with as precise references as possible. These may, perhaps, have a value independent of any conclusions which I have founded upon them. And even now I do not suppose that I have been either exhaustive or accurate. The remorseless ideal of the historian’s duties laid down in the Introduction aux Études Historiques of MM. Langlois and Seignobos floats before me like an accusing spirit. I know how very far I am from having reached that austere standard of scientific completeness. To begin with, I had not the necessary training. Oxford, my most kindly nurse, maintained in my day no École des Chartes, and I had to discover the rules of method as I went along. But the greater difficulty has been the want of leisure and the spacious life. Shades of Duke Humphrey’s library, how often, as I jostled for my turn at the crowded catalogue-shelves of the British Museum, have I not envied those whose lot it is to tread your ample corridors and to bend over your yellowing folios! Amongst such happy scholars, the canons of Clio may claim implicit obedience. A silent company, they ‘class’ their documents and ‘try’ their sources from morn to eve, disturbed in the pleasant ways of research only by the green flicker of leaves in the Exeter garden, or by the statutory inconvenience of a terminal lecture.—
‘Tanagra! think not I forget!’