Moralities and similar plays in England. 44. The mysteries founded upon scriptural or legendary histories, as well as the moralities, or allegorical dramas, which, though there might be an intermixture of human character with abstract personification, did not aim at that illusion which a possible fable affords, continued to amuse the English public. Nor were they confined, as perhaps they were before, to churches and monasteries. We find a company of players in the establishment of Richard III. while Duke of Gloucester; and in the subsequent reigns, especially under Henry VIII., this seems to have been one of the luxuries of the great. The frugal Henry VII. maintained two distinct sets of players; and his son was prodigally sumptuous in every sort of court-exhibition, bearing the general name of revels, and superintended by a high priest of jollity, styled the abbot of misrule. The dramatic allegories, or moral plays, found a place among them. It may be presumed that from their occasionality, or want of merit, far the greater part have perished.[804] Three or four, which we may place before 1550, are published in Hawkins’s Ancient Drama, and Dodsley’s Old Plays; one is extant, written by Skelton, the earliest of a known author.[805] A late writer, whose diligence seems to have almost exhausted our early dramatic history, has retrieved the names of a few more. The most ancient of these moral plays he traces to the reign of Henry VI. They became gradually more complicated, and approached nearer to a regular form. It may be observed that a line is not easily defined between the scriptural mysteries and the legitimate drama; the choice of the story, the succession of incidents, are those of tragedy; even the intermixture of buffoonery belongs to all our ancient stage; and it is only by the meanness of the sentiments and diction that we exclude the Candlemas-Day, which is one of the most perfect of the mysteries, or even those of the fifteenth century, from our tragic series.[806] Nor were the moralities, such as we find them in the reign of Henry VIII., at a prodigious distance from the regular stage; deviations from the original structure of these, as Mr. Collier has well observed, “by the relinquishment of abstract for individual character, paved the way, by a natural and easy gradation, for tragedy and comedy, the representations of real life and manners.”[807]
[804] Collier’s Annals of the Stage, i. 34, &c.
[805] Warton, iii. 188.
[806] Candlemas-Day, a mystery, on the murder of the Innocents, is published in Hawkins’s Early English Drama. It is by John Parffre, and may be referred to the first years of Henry VIII.
[807] Hist. of English Dramatic Poetry, ii. 260. This I quote by its proper title; but it is in fact the same work as the Annals of the Stage, so far as being incorporated, and sold together, renders it the same.
They are turned to religious satire. 45. The moralities were, in this age, distinguished by the constant introduction of a witty, mischievous, and profligate character, denominated the Vice. This seems originally to have been an allegorical representation of what the word denotes; but the vice gradually acquired a human individuality, in which he came very near to our well-known Punch. The devil was generally introduced in company with the vice, and had to endure many blows from him. But the moralities had another striking characteristic in this period. They had always been religious, but they now became theological. In the crisis of that great revolution then in progress, the stage was found a ready and impartial instrument for the old or the new faith. Luther and his wife were satirised in a Latin morality represented at Gray’s Inn in 1529. It was easy to turn the tables on the clergy. Sir David Lyndsay’s satire of the Three Estatis, a direct attack upon them, was played before James V. and his queen at Linlithgow in 1539;[808] and in 1543 an English statute was made, prohibiting all plays and interludes, which meddle with the interpretation of Scripture. In 1549, the council of Edward VI. put a stop by proclamation to all kinds of stage-plays.[809]
[808] Warton, iv. 23.
[809] Collier, i. 144.
Latin Plays. 46. Great indulgence, or a strong antiquarian prejudice, is required to discover much genius in these moralities and mysteries. There was, however, a class of dramatic productions that appealed to a more instructed audience. The custom of acting Latin plays prevailed in our universities at this time, as it did long afterwards. Whether it were older than the fifteenth century seems not to be proved; and the presumption is certainly against it. “In an original draught,” says Warton, “of the statutes of Trinity College at Cambridge, founded in 1456, one of the chapters is entitled, ‘De Præfecto ludorum qui imperator dicitur,’ under whose direction and authority Latin comedies and tragedies are to be exhibited in the hall at Christmas.”[810] It is probable that Christopherson’s tragedy of Jephthah, and another by Grimoald on John the Baptist, both older than the middle of the century, were written for academical representation. Nor was this confined to the universities. Nicolas Udal, head master of Eton, wrote several plays in Latin to be acted in the long nights of winter by his boys.[811] And if we had to stop here, it might seem an unnecessary minuteness to take notice of the diversions of schoolboys, especially as the same is recorded of other teachers besides Udal. But there is something more in this. |First English Comedy.| Udal has lately become known in a new and more brilliant light, as the father of English comedy. It was mentioned by Warton, but without any comment, that Nicolas Udal wrote some English plays to be represented by his scholars, a passage from one of which is quoted by Wilson in his Art of Logic dedicated to Edward VI.[812] It might have been conjectured, by the help of this quotation, that these plays were neither of the class of moralities or mysteries, nor mere translations from Plautus and Terence, as it would not have been unnatural at first to suppose. Within a few years, however, the comedy from which Wilson took his extract has been discovered. It was printed in 1565, but probably written not later than 1540. The title of this comedy is Ralph Roister Doister, a name uncouth enough, and from which we should expect a very barbarous farce. But Udal, an eminent scholar, knew how to preserve comic spirit and humour without degenerating into licentious buffoonery. Ralph Roister Doister, in spite of its title, is a play of some merit, though the wit may seem designed for the purpose of natural merriment rather than critical glory. We find in it, what is of no slight value, the earliest lively picture of London manners among the gallants and citizens, who furnished so much for the stage down to the civil wars. And perhaps there is no striking difference in this respect between the dramatic manners under Henry VIII. and James I. This comedy, for there seems no kind of reason why it should be refused that honourable name, is much superior to Gammar Gurton’s Needle, written twenty years afterwards, from which it has wrested a long-established precedence in our dramatic annals.[813]
[810] Hist. of Engl. Poetry, iii. 205.