A curious feature was the fashion in which the plays ran in cycles or groups, each of which became associated with some town. The earliest is the Chester play-cycle (1268–76), comprising twenty-four plays; others are the York, with forty-nine; the Townley, with thirty-two, acted at the fairs at Widkirk; and the Coventry, of which only one play survives. Each member of the play-series was connected in theme with the others, and the complete cycle illustrated Bible history in all its stages.
Each company of the guild, say the Barbers or the Wax-chandlers, took a unit of the series. Each unit was short, corresponding to an act of the modern drama. They were composed in a great variety of meters, from doggerel to complicated lyrical stanzas.
Each company having selected and rehearsed its play, the entire apparatus was enclosed in a huge vehicle called the pageant. The body of the vehicle was enclosed, and served as the dressing-and property-room; the top was an open-air stage. On the day of the festival, which at York and Coventry was Corpus Christi, the whole contrivance was pulled about the town, and performances were given at certain fixed points, of which the abbey was the chief. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare has caricatured many features of these artisans’ dramatic performances.
(f) The Interlude. The last predecessor of the drama proper was the interlude, which flourished about the middle of the sixteenth century. It had several distinguishing points: it was a short play that introduced real characters, usually of humble rank, such as citizens and friars; there was an absence of allegorical figures; there was much broad farcical humor, often coarse; and there were set scenes, a new feature in the English drama. It will be observed that the interlude was a great advance upon the morality-play. John Heywood, who lived in the latter half of the sixteenth century, was the most gifted writer of the interlude. The four P’s is one of his best. It is composed in doggerel verse, and describes a lying-match between a Pedlar, a Palmer, a Pardoner, and a Potycary. His Johan Johan has much sharp wit and many clever sayings.
(g) The Earliest Dramas. Our earliest dramas began to appear about 1550. Their immediate cause was the renewed study of the classical drama, especially the plays of Seneca (3 B.C.-A.D. 65), whose mannerisms were easily imitated by dramatic apprentices. The classical drama gave English drama its five acts, its set scenes, and many other features.
(1) Tragedies. The first tragedies had the Senecan stiffness of style, the conventional characters and plot, though in some cases they adopted the “dumb show,” an English feature. Gorboduc (1562), afterward called Ferrex and Porrex, written by Norton and Lord Buckhurst, was probably the earliest, and was acted at the Christmas revels of the Inner Temple. The meter was a wooden type of regular blank verse. Other plays of a similar character were Appius and Virginia (1563), of anonymous authorship; the Historie of Horestes (1567), also anonymous; Jocasta (1566); and Preston’s Cambises, King of Percia (1570). Hughes’s Misfortunes of King Arthur (1587) broke away from the classical theme, but, like the others, it was a servile imitation of classical models. Many of the plays, however, preserved a peculiarly English feature in the retention of the comic Vice.
(2) Histories. Along with the alien classical tragedy arose a healthier native breed of historical plays. These plays, the predecessors of the historical plays of Shakespeare, were dramatized forms of the early chronicles, and combined both tragic and comic elements. This union of tragedy and comedy was alien to the classical drama, and was the chief glory of the Elizabethan stage. Early historical plays were The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (before 1588), a mixture of rude verse and prose; The Troublesome Raigne of King John (before 1591); and The Chronicle History of King Leir (1594).
(3) Comedies. Though the comedies drew much upon Latin comedians, such as Plautus, and upon Italian models also, they were to a great extent the growth of the English mumming element. They were composed usually in mixed verse and prose, the humor was of a primitive character, but the best of them had verve and high good-humor, and they were distinguished by some worthy songs and ditties. Ralph Roister Doister (1551), by Nicholas Udall, is the earliest extant comedy. Its author was the headmaster of Eton, and the play seems to have been composed as a variant upon the Latin dramas that were the stock-in-trade of the schoolboy actors then common. Another comedy was Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1575), the authorship of which is in dispute. The plot is slight, but the humor, though the reverse of delicate, is abundant, and the play gives interesting glimpses of contemporary English life.
We add a small scene from an early comedy. It shows the doggerel verse and the uninspired style—the homely natural speech of the time.
Christian Custance Margerie Mumblecrust