Mrs. H. Then she was in Blackpool till yesterday, that’s certain.
Chris. Ay!
Mrs. H. Well, it’s a mystery.
Chris. (Shaking his head.) Or summat worse.
Mrs. H. Eh? You don’t think that, eh?
Chris. I don’t know what to think.
Mrs. H. Nor me neither.
(They sit silent for a time. There is a rumble of thunder, far away. After it has died away, a knock is heard at the front door. They turn and look at each other. Mrs. Hawthorn rises and goes out in silence. In a few moments, Fanny Hawthorn comes in, followed by Mrs. Hawthorn.)[5]
What usually keeps a writer from passing to well characterized dialogue from dialogue merely clear as to essential facts is that he is so bound to his facts that he sees rather than feels the scene. The chief trouble with the dialogue of the John Brown play was an attempt to keep so close to historical accounts of the particular incident that sympathetic imagination was benumbed. One constantly meets this fault in the earlier Miracle Plays before writers had come to understand that audiences care more for the human being in the situation than for the situation itself, and that only by representing a situation not for itself but as felt by the people involved can it be made fully interesting. At the left is a speech of Mary in The Crucifixion of the York Cycle; at the right is her speech in the Hegge or so-called Coventry Plays.