O what a thynge had be than,
If they that be Englyshemen
Myght have ben furst of all
That there shuld have take possessyon![817]
Death, as might be expected, is placed upon the stage with a particular zeal and care, and meditations are dedicated to the dark future of man, and to the gnawing worm of the charnel house.[818]
Fearing the audience might go to sleep, or perhaps go away, the science and the austere philosophy taught in these plays were enlivened by tavern scenes, and by the gambols of a clown, fool, or buffoon, called Vice, armed, as Harlequin, with a wooden dagger. And often, such is human frailty, the beholders went, remembering nothing but the mad pranks of Vice. It was in their eyes the most important character in the play, and the part was accordingly entrusted to the best actor. Shakespeare had seen Vice still alive, and he commemorated his deeds in a song:
I am gone, sir,
And anon, sir,
I'll be with you again,
In a trice,
Like to the old Vice,
Your need to sustain,
Who, with dagger of lath,
In his rage and his wrath,
Cries, ah ha! to the devil.[819]
This character also found place on the French stage, where it was called the "Badin." Rabelais had the "Badin" in great esteem: "In this manner we see, among the jongleurs, when they arrange between them the cast of a play, the part of the Sot, or Badin, to be attributed to the cleverest and most experienced in their company."[820]
In the meanwhile, common ancestors of the various dramatic tribes, source and origin of many sorts of plays, the Mysteries, which had contributed to the formation of the tragical, romantic, allegorical, pastoral, and comic drama, were still in existence. Reformation had come, the people had adopted the new belief, but they could not give up the Mysteries. They continued to like Herod, Noah and his wife, and the tumultuous troup of devils, great and small, inhabiting hell-mouth. Prologues had been written in which excuses were offered on account of the traces of superstition to be detected in the plays, but conscience being thus set at rest, the plays were performed as before. The Protestant bishop of Chester prohibited the representation in 1572, but it took place all the same. The archbishop of York renewed the prohibition in 1575, but the Mysteries were performed again for four days; and some representations of them took place even later.[821] At York the inhabitants had no less reluctance about giving up their old drama; they were sorry to think that religious differences now existed between the town and its beloved tragedies. Converted to the new faith, the citizens would have liked to convert the plays too, and the margins of the manuscript bear witness to their efforts. But the task was a difficult one; they were at their wits' end, and appealed to men more learned than they. They decided that "the booke shalbe carried to my Lord Archebisshop and Mr. Deane to correcte, if that my Lord Archebisshop do well like theron," 1579.[822] My Lord Archbishop, wise and prudent, settled the question according to administrative precedent; he stored the book away somewhere, and the inhabitants were simply informed that the prohibition was maintained. The York plays thus died.
In France the Mysteries survived quite as late; but, on account of the radical effects of the Renaissance there, they had not the same influence on the future development of the drama. They continued to be represented in the sixteenth century, and the Parliament of Paris complained in 1542 of their too great popularity: parish priests, and even the chanters of the Holy Chapel, sang vespers at noon, a most unbecoming hour, and sang them "post haste," to see the sight. Six years later the performance of Mysteries was forbidden at Paris; but the cross and ladder, emblems of the "Confrères de la Passion," continued to be seen above the gates of the "Hôtel de Bourgogne," and the privilege of the Confrères, which dated three centuries back, was definitely abolished in the reign of Louis XIV., in December, 1676.[823] Molière had then been dead for three years.
In England, at the date when my Lord Archbishop stopped the representation at York,[824] the old religious dramas had produced all their fruit: they had kept alive the taste for stage plays, they left behind them authors, a public, and companies of players. Then was growing in years, in a little town by the side of the river Avon, the child who was to reach the highest summits of art. He followed on week-days the teaching of the grammar school; he saw on Sundays, painted on the wall of the Holy Cross Chapel, a paradise and hell similar to those in the Mysteries, angels of gold and black devils, and that immense mouth where the damned are parboiled, "où damnés sont boulus," as the poor old mother of Villon says in a ballad of her son's.[825]
At the date of the York prohibition, William Shakespeare was fifteen.