[Footnote 46: It is almost amusing to be told that knowledge of the Scriptures was kept from the people at this time, before the Reformation, when these popular plays to which all the countryside flocked, and in which so many took part, were making them thoroughly familiar with all the details of Christ's life. There was much more than this, however, for connected with many of the Passion Plays were cycles of tableaux or presentations of special scenes in which, beginning with the Creation, the whole story of the Bible, and particularly those portions which are related to the coming of Christ, were set clearly before them. No better way of impressing upon the people the great truths of Christianity or the life of Christ as the central fact of the world's history could possibly have been imagined. The people were not encouraged to read difficult passages, which even the profoundest theologians find it hard to understand, to take their own meaning out of them and to argue about them, convicting everyone of heresy who did not agree with their interpretations of them, but they were taught the deep moral and religious significance of all the Old and New Testament. They learned the value of the Scriptures as literature as well as their quality as the underlying document of religion, but above all they were taught their relation to life. All this was so put before them that it came as an amusement and not a task, and from their earliest years they became familiar with the great thoughts underlying religion so as to secure its influence over them.]
Dodsley's collection of Old English Plays, which, in its [{489}] fourth edition as edited by W. Carew Hazlitt (London, 1874), contains a number of old plays little known, is particularly rich in material from this century of Columbus. The series of morality plays, "The Interlude of the Four Elements," "Everyman," "The Pardoner and the Friar," "The World and the Child," "Hick's Corner," "God's Promises," and the "Four P's," are typical examples. They all show the true dramatic spirit, and while lacking the theatrical technique of modern plays, are almost infinitely superior in their expression of the realities of human interest and their revelation of the depths of human sympathy to the presentation of superficialities which now pass for drama.
It was towards the end of Columbus' Century that the "Marriage of Witte and Science," which was not published until 1570, was written. This was marked off into five acts and the scenes designated, being the first play in which such an arrangement had been made. The modern dramatic mould was thus created. It is easy to understand that on the deep foundations, literary and technical, thus laid in the century before 1550, the great structure of the Elizabethan drama could be built up.
How much the appreciation for the morality plays has risen may be judged very well from some recent expressions with regard to them by students of the drama. Everyone is particularly loud in praise of "Everyman." In the introduction to "Everyman with other Interludes" in the Everyman series, the writer says that "to turn from Bayle's play (one of the later moralities, 'God's Promises') to the heart-breaking realities of 'Everyman' is like turning from a volume of law to the edifying sermons of one of the gospels." He adds:
"It was written, no doubt, like most of the plays in this volume, by a churchman; and he must have been a man of profound imagination and of the tenderest human soul conceivable. His ecclesiastical habit becomes clear enough before the end of the play, where he bids every man go and confess his sins. Like many of the more poignant scenes and passages in the miracle plays that follow it, this morality too leaves one exclaiming on how good a thing was the plain English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries."
It would be a mistake to think that only the serious side of life was portrayed in these old dramas. Quite the contrary, they were full of humor, and the writer of the Introduction to Everyman, already quoted, says in this regard: "In these religious and moral interludes, the dramatic colouring, however crude, is real and sincere. The humours of a broad folk-comedy break through the Scriptural web continually in the guild plays like those in which Noah the ship-builder, or the proverbial three shepherds, appear in the pageant. Noah's unwilling wife in the 'Chester Deluge,' and Mak's canny wife in the Wakefield's shepherd's play, where the sheep-stealing scenes reveal a born Yorkshire humorist, offer a pair of gossips not easy to match for rude comedy. Mak's wife, like the shepherd's in the same pastoral, utters proverbs with every other breath: 'A woman's avyse helpys at the last!' 'So long goys the pott to the water, at last comys it home broken!'
"'Now in hot, now in cold,
Full woeful is the household
That wants a woman!'
And her play upon the old north-country asseveration, 'I'll eat my bairn,'
"'If ever I you beguiled,
That I eat this child
That lies in this cradle,'