The woman moans more pitifully than ever:
Wife. Outt, thefys, fro my barne! negh hym not thore.
Mak. Wyst ye how she had farne, youre hartys wold be sore.
Ye do wrang, I you warne, that thus commys before
To a woman that has farne, bot I say no more.
Wife. A my medylle!
I pray God so mylde,
If ever I you begyld,
That I ete this chylde
That lyges in this credylle.
The shepherds, deafened by the noise, look none the less about the house, but find nothing. Their host is not yet, however, at the end of his trouble.
Tertius Pastor. Mak, with youre lefe, let me gyf youre barne
Bot six pence.
Mak. Nay, do way, he slepys.
Pastor. Me thynk he pepys.
Mak. When he wakyns he wepys;
I pray you go hence.
Pastor. Gyf me lefe hym to kys, and lyft up the clowth.
What the deville is this? he has a long snowte!
And the fraud is discovered; it was the sheep. From oaths they were coming to blows, when on a sudden, amid the stars, angels are seen, and their song is heard in the night: Glory to God, peace to earth! the world is rejuvenated.... Anger disappears, hatreds are effaced, and the rough shepherds of England take, with penitent heart, the road to Bethlehem.
IV.
The fourteenth century saw the religious drama at its height in England; the fifteenth saw its decay; the sixteenth its death. The form under which it was best liked was the form of Mysteries, based upon the Bible. The dramatising of the lives of saints and miracles of the Virgin was much less popular in England than in France. In the latter country enormous collections of such plays have been preserved[814]; in the other the examples of this kind are very few; the Bible was the main source from which the English dramatists drew their inspiration. As we have seen, however, they did not forbear from adding scenes and characters with nothing evangelical in them; these scenes contributed, with the interludes and the facetious dialogues of the jongleurs, to the formation of comedy. Little by little, comedy took shape, and it will be found existing as a separate branch of dramatic art at the time of the Renaissance.
In the same period another sort of drama was to flourish, the origin of which was as old as the fourteenth century, namely, Moralities. These plays consisted in pious treatises and ethical books turned into dramas, as Mysteries offered a dramatisation of Scriptures. Psychology was there carried to the extreme, a peculiar sort of psychology, elementary and excessive at the same time, and very different from the delicate art in favour to-day. Individuals disappeared; they were replaced by abstractions, and these abstractions represented only a single quality or defect. Sins and virtues fought together and tried to draw mankind to them, which stood doubtful, as Hercules "at the starting point of a double road;" in this way, again, was manifested the fondness felt in the Middle Ages for allegories and symbols. The "Roman de la Rose" in France, "Piers Plowman" in England, the immense popularity in all Europe of the Consolation of Boethius, had already been manifestations of those same tendencies. In these works, already, dialogue was abundant, in the "Roman de la Rose" especially, where an immense space is occupied by conversations between the Lover and Fals-Semblant.[815] The names of the speakers are inscribed in the margin, as if it were a real play. When he admitted into his collection of tales the dialogued story of Melibeus and Prudence, Chaucer came very near to Moralities, for the work he produced was neither a treatise nor a tale, nor a drama, but had something of the three; a few changes would have been enough to make of it a Morality, which might have been called the Debate of Wisdom and Mankind.
Abstractions had been allowed a place in the Mysteries so far back as the fourteenth century; death figures in the Woodkirk collection; in "Mary Magdalene" (fifteenth century) many abstract personages are mixed with the others: the Seven Deadly Sins, Mundus, the King of the Flesh, Sensuality, &c.; the same thing happens in the so-called Coventry collection.
This sort of drama, for us unendurable, gradually separated from Mysteries; it reached its greatest development under the early Tudors. The authors of Moralities strove to write plays not merely amusing, as farces, then also in great favour, but plays with a useful and practical aim. By means of now unreadable dramas, virtues, religion, morals, sciences were taught: the Catholic faith was derided by Protestants, and the Reformation by Catholics.[816] The discovery, then quite new, of America was discoursed about, and great regret was expressed at its being not due to an Englishman: