A Literary History of the English People, from the Origins to the Renaissance

by J. J. Jusserand

While histrions and amusers give a foretaste of farce and comedy in castle halls, while romantic drama is foreshadowed in the "pas de Saladin" and the "Taking of Troy," and the pastoral drama begins with May games, other sources of the modern dramatic art were springing up in the shadow of the cloister and under the naves of churches.

The imitation of any action is a step towards drama. Conventional, liturgical, ritualistic as the imitation was, still there was an imitation in the ceremony of mass; and mass led to the religious drama, which was therefore, at starting, as conventional, liturgical, and ritualistic as could be. Its early beginning is to be sought for in the antiphoned parts of the service, and then it makes one with the service itself. In a similar manner, outside the Church lay drama had begun with the alternate chansons, debates, poetical altercations of the singers of facetious or love-songs. A great step was made when, at the principal feasts of the year, Easter and Christmas, the chanters, instead of giving their responses from their stalls, moved in the Church to recall the action commemorated on that day; additions were introduced into the received text of the service; religious drama begins then to have an existence of its own.

"'Tell us, shepherds, whom do you seek in this stable?—They will answer: 'Christ the Saviour, our Lord.'"[771]

Such is the starting-point; it dates from the tenth century; from this is derived the play of Shepherds, of which many versions have come down to us. One of them, followed in the cathedral of Rouen, gives a minute account of the performance as it was then acted in the midst of the religious service: "Be the crib established behind the altar, and be the image of the Blessed Mary placed there. First a child, from before the choir and on a raised platform, representing an angel, will announce the birth of the Saviour to five canons or their vicars of the second rank; the shepherds must come in by the great gate of the choir.... As they near the crib they sing the prose Pax in terris. Two priests of the first rank, wearing a dalmatic, will represent the midwives and stand by the crib."[772]

These adventitious ornaments were greatly appreciated, and from year to year they were increased and perfected. Verse replaced prose; the vulgar idiom replaced Latin; open air and the public square replaced the church nave and its subdued light. It was no longer necessary to have recourse to priests wearing a dalmatic in order to represent midwives; the feminine parts were performed by young boys dressed as women: this was coming much nearer nature, as near in fact as Shakespeare did, for he never saw any but boys play the part of his Juliet. There were even cases in which actual women were seen on the mediæval stage. Those ameliorations, so simple and obvious, summed up in a phrase, were the work of centuries, but the tide when once on the flow was the stronger for waiting. The drama left the church, because its increased importance had made it cumbersome there, because it was badly seen, and because having power it wanted freedom.

Easter was the occasion for ornaments and additions similar to those introduced into the Christmas service.[773] The ceremonies of Holy Week, which reproduced each incident in the drama of the Passion, lent themselves admirably to it. Additions following additions, the whole of the Old Testament ended by being grouped round and tied to the Christmas feast, and the whole of the New Testament round Easter. Both were closely connected, the scenes in the one being interpreted as symbols of the scenes in the other; complete cycles were thus formed, representing in two divisions the religious history of mankind from the Creation to Doomsday. Once severed from the church, these groups of plays often got also separated from the feast to which they owed their birth, and were represented at Whitsuntide, on Corpus Christi day, or on the occasion of some solemnity or other.

As the taste for such dramas was spreading, a variety of tragical subjects, not from the Bible, were turned into dialogues: first lives of saints, later, in France, some few subjects borrowed from history or romance: the story of Griselda, the raising of the siege at Orléans by Joan of Arc, &c.[774] The English adhered more exclusively to the Bible. Dramas drawn from the lives of saints were usually called Miracles; those derived from the Bible, Mysteries; but these appellations had nothing very definite about them, and were often used one for the other.

The religious drama was on the way to lose its purely liturgical character when the conquest of England had taken place. Under the reign of the Norman and Angevin kings, the taste for dramatic performances increased considerably; within the first century after Hastings we find them numerous and largely attended.

The oldest representation the memory of which has come down to us took place at the beginning of the twelfth century, and had for its subject the story of that St. Catherine of Alexandria whom the Emperor Maximinus caused to be beheaded after she had converted the fifty orators entrusted with the care of bringing her back to paganism by dint of their eloquence. The fifty orators received baptism, and were burnt alive.[775] The representation was managed by a Mancel of good family called Geoffrey, whom Richard, abbot of St. Albans, had asked to come from France to be the master of the Abbey school. But as he was late in starting, he found on his coming that the school had been given to another; in his leisure he caused to be represented at Dunstable a play, or miracle, of St. Catherine, "quendam ludum de Sancta Katerina quem miracula vulgariter appellamus." He borrowed from the sacristan at St. Albans the Abbey copes to dress his actors in; but the night following upon the performance, the fire consumed his house; all his books were burnt, and the copes too: "Wherefore, not knowing how to indemnify God and St. Albans, he offered his own person as a holocaust and took the habit in the monastery. This explains the zeal with which, having become abbot, he strove to enrich the convent with precious copes." For he became abbot, and died in 1146, after a reign of twenty-six years,[776] and Matthew Paris, to whom we owe those details, and whose taste for works of art is well known, gives a full enumeration of the splendid purple and gold vestments, adorned with precious stones, with which the Mancel Geoffrey enriched the treasury of the Abbey.[777]

A little later in the same century, Fitzstephen, who wrote under Henry II., mentions as a common occurrence the "representations of miracles" held in London.[778] In the following century, under Henry III., some were written in the English language.[779] During the fourteenth century, in the time of Chaucer, mysteries were at the height of their popularity; their heroes were familiar to all, and the sayings of the same became proverbs. Kings themselves journeyed in order to be present at the representations; Chaucer had seen them often, and the characters in his tales make frequent allusions to them; his drunken miller cries "in Pilates vois"; "Jolif Absolon" played the part of "king Herodes," and is it to be expected that an Alisoun could resist king Herodes? The Wife of Bath, dressed in her best garments, goes "to pleyes of miracles," and there tries to make acquaintances that may be turned into husbands when she wants them. "Hendy Nicholas" quotes to the credulous carpenter the example of Noah, whose wife would not go on board, and who regretted that he had not built a separate ship for "hir-self allone."