But the English peasantry had pleasures of less ambiguous propriety, and less likely to mislead our sympathies. The chroniclers have given us many accounts of the masques and plays which were acted in the court, or in the castles of the noblemen. Such pageants were but the most splendid expression of a taste which was national and universal. As in ancient Greece, generations before the rise of the great dramas of Athens, itinerant companies wandered from village to village, carrying their stage furniture in their little carts, and acted in their booths and tents the grand stories of the mythology; so in England the mystery players haunted the wakes and fairs, and in barns or taverns, taprooms, or in the farmhouse kitchen, played at saints and angels, and transacted on their petty stage the drama of the Christian faith. To us, who can measure the effect of such scenes only by the impression which they would now produce upon ourselves, these exhibitions can seem but unspeakably profane; they were not profane when tendered in simplicity, and received as they were given. They were no more profane than those quaint monastic illuminations which formed the germ of Italian art; and as out of the illuminations arose those paintings which remain unapproached and unapproachable in their excellence, so out of the mystery plays arose the English drama, represented in its final completeness by the creations of a poet who, it now begins to be supposed, stands alone among mankind. We allow ourselves to think of Shakspeare or of Raphael or of Phidias, as having accomplished their work by the power of their own individual genius; but greatness like theirs is never more than the highest degree of an excellence which prevails widely round it, and forms the environment in which it grows. No single mind in single contact with the facts of nature could have created out of itself a Pallas, a Madonna, or a Lear; such vast conceptions are the growth of ages, the creations of a nation's spirit; and artist and poet, filled full with the power of that spirit, have but given them form, and nothing more than form. Nor would the form itself have been attainable by any isolated talent. No genius can dispense with experience; the aberrations of power, unguided or ill-guided, are ever in proportion to its intensity, and life is not long enough to recover from inevitable mistakes. Noble conceptions already existing, and a noble school of execution which will launch mind and hand at once upon their true courses, are indispensable
to transcendent excellence; and Shakspeare's plays were as much the offspring of the long generations who had pioneered his road for him, as the discoveries of Newton were the offspring of those of Copernicus.
No great general ever arose out of a nation of cowards; no great statesman or philosopher out of a nation of fools; no great artist out of a nation of materialists; no great dramatist except when the drama was the passion of the people. Acting was the especial amusement of the English, from the palace to the village green. It was the result and expression of their power over themselves, and power over circumstances. They were troubled with no subjective speculations; no social problems vexed them with which they were unable to deal; and in the exuberance of vigour and spirits they were able, in the strict and literal sense of the word, to play with the materials of life. The mystery plays came first; next the popular legends; and then the great figures of English history came out upon the stage, or stories from Greek and Roman writers; or sometimes it was an extemporised allegory. Shakspeare himself has left us many pictures of the village drama. Doubtless he had seen many a Bottom in the old Warwickshire hamlets; many a Sir Nathaniel playing "Alissander," and finding himself "a little o'erparted." He had been with Snug the joiner, Quince the carpenter, and Flute the bellows-mender, when a boy we will not question, and acted with them, and written their parts for them; had gone up with them in the winter's evenings to the Lucy's Hall before the sad trouble with the deer-stealing; and afterwards, when he came to London and found his way into great society, he had not failed to see Polonius burlesquing Cæsar on the stage, as in his proper person Polonius burlesqued Sir William Cecil. The strolling players in Hamlet might be met at every country wake or festival; it was the direction in which the especial genius of the people delighted to revel. As I desire in this chapter not only to relate what were the habits of the people, but to illustrate them also, within such compass as I can allow myself, I shall transcribe out of Hall[71] a description of a play which was acted by the boys of St. Paul's School, in 1527, at Greenwich, adding some particulars, not mentioned by Hall, from another source.[72] It is a good instance of the fantastic splendour with which exhibitions of this kind were
got up, and it possesses also a melancholy interest of another kind, as showing how little the wisest among us can foresee our own actions, or assure ourselves that the convictions of to-day will alike be the convictions of to-morrow. The occasion was the despatch of a French embassy to England, when Europe was outraged by the Duke of Bourbon's capture of Rome, when the children of Francis I. were prisoners in Spain, and Henry, with the full energy of his fiery nature, was flinging himself into a quarrel with Charles V. as the champion of the Holy See.
At the conclusion of a magnificent supper "the king led the ambassadors into the great chamber of disguisings; and in the end of the same chamber was a fountain, and on one side was a hawthorne tree, all of silk, with white flowers, and on the other side was a mulberry tree full of fair berries, all of silk. On the top of the hawthorne were the arms of England, compassed with the collar of the order[73] of St. Michael, and in the top of the mulberry tree stood the arms of France within a garter. The fountain was all of white marble, graven and chased; the bases of the same were balls of gold, supported by ramping beasts wound in leaves of gold. In the first work were gargoylles of gold, fiercely faced with spouts running. The second receit of this fountain was environed with winged serpents, all of gold, which griped it; and on the summit of the same was a fair lady, out of whose breasts ran abundantly water of marvellous delicious savour. About this fountain were benches of rosemary, fretted in braydes laid on gold, all the sides set with roses, on branches as they were growing about this fountain. On the benches sate eight fair ladies in strange attire, and so richly apparelled in cloth of gold, embroidered and cut over silver, that I cannot express the cunning workmanship thereof. Then when the king and queen were set, there was played before them, by children, in the Latin tongue, a manner of tragedy, the effect whereof was that the pope was in captivity and the church brought under foot. Whereupon St. Peter appeared and put the cardinal (Wolsey) in authority to bring the pope to his liberty, and to set up the church again. And so the cardinal made intercession with the kings of England and France that they took part together, and by their means the pope was delivered. Then in came the French king's children, and complained to the cardinal how the emperour kept them as hostages, and would not come to reasonable point with their
father, whereupon they desired the cardinal to help for their deliverance; which wrought so with the king his master and the French king that he brought the emperour to a peace, and caused the two young princes to be delivered." So far Hall relates the scene, but there was more in the play than he remembered or cared to notice, and I am able to complete this curious picture of a pageant once really and truly a living spectacle in the old palace at Greenwich, by an inventory of the dresses worn by the boys and a list of the dramatis personæ.
The school-boys of St. Paul's were taken down the river with the master in six boats, at the cost of a shilling a boat—the cost of the dresses and the other expenses amounting in all to sixty-one shillings.
The characters were—
An orator in apparel of cloth of gold.
Religio, Ecclesia, Veritas, like three widows, in garments of silk, and suits of lawn and Cyprus.