Cui tulit hesterna gaudia nocte Venus.
While Luther was heroically fighting the great fight of reform in Germany, the foundation of religious reform was laid in France by John Calvin, a man equally sincere and zealous in the cause, but of a totally different temper, and he espoused doctrines and forms of church government which a Lutheran would not admit. Literary satire was used with great effect by the French Calvinists against their popish opponents, but they have left us few caricatures or burlesque engravings of any kind; at least, very few belonging to the earlier period of their history. Jaime, in his “Musée de Caricature,” has given a copy of a very rare plate, representing the pope struggling with Luther and Calvin, as his two assailants. Both are tearing the pope’s hair, but it is Calvin who is here armed with the Bible, with which he is striking at Luther, who is pulling him by the beard. The pope has his hands upon their heads. This scene takes place in the choir of a church, but I give here (cut No. 154) only the group of the three combatants, intended to represent how the two great opponents to papal corruptions were hostile at the same time to each other.
No. 154. Luther and Calvin.
CHAPTER XVI.
ORIGIN OF MEDIÆVAL FARCE AND MODERN COMEDY.—HROTSVITHA.—MEDIÆVAL NOTIONS OF TERENCE.—THE EARLY RELIGIOUS PLAYS.—MYSTERIES AND MIRACLE PLAYS.—THE FARCES.—THE DRAMA IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
There is still another branch of literature which, however it may have been modified, has descended to us from the middle ages. It has been remarked more than once in the course of this book, that the theatre of the Romans perished in the transition from the empire to the middle ages; but something in the shape of theatrical performances appears to be inseparable from society even in its most barbarous state, and we soon trace among the peoples who had settled upon the ruins of the empire of Rome an approach towards a drama. It is worthy of remark, too, that the mediæval drama originated exactly in the same way as that of ancient Greece, that is, from religious ceremonies.
Such was the ignorance of the ancient stage in the middle ages, that the meaning of the word comœdia was not understood. The Anglo-Saxon glossaries interpret the word by racu, a narrative, especially an epic recital, and this was the sense in which it was generally taken until late in the fourteenth or the fifteenth century. It is the sense in which it is used in the title of Dante’s great poem, the “Divina Commedia.” When the mediæval scholars became acquainted in manuscripts with the comedies of Terence, they considered them only as fine examples of a particular sort of literary composition, as metrical narratives in dialogue, and in this feeling they began to imitate them. One of the first of these mediæval imitators was a lady. There lived in the tenth century a maiden of Saxony, named Hrotsvitha—a rather unfortunate name for one of her sex, for it means simply “a loud noise of voices,” or, as she explains it herself, in her Latin, clamor validus. Hrotsvitha, as was common enough among the ladies of those days, had received a very learned education, and her Latin is very respectable. About the middle of the tenth century, she became a nun in the very aristocratic Benedictine abbey of Gandesheim, in Saxony, the abbesses of which were all princesses, and which had been founded only a century before. She wrote in Latin verse a short history of that religious house, but she is best known by seven pieces, which are called comedies (comœdiæ), and which consist simply of legends of saints, told dialogue-wise, some in verse and some in prose. As may be supposed, there is not much of real comedy in these compositions, although one of them, the Dulcitius, is treated in a style which approaches that of farce. It is the story of the martyrdom of the three virgin saints—Agape, Chione, and Irene—who excite the lust of the persecutor Dulcitius; and it may be remarked, that in this “comedy,” and in that of Callimachus and one or two of the others, the lady Hrotsvitha displays a knowledge of love-making and of the language of love, which was hardly to be expected from a holy nun.[79]
Hrotsvitha, in her preface, complains that, in spite of the general love for the reading of the Scriptures, and contempt for everything derived from ancient paganism, people still too often read the “fictions” of Terence, and thus, seduced by the beauties of his style, soiled their minds with the knowledge of the criminal acts which are described in his writings. A rather early manuscript has preserved a very curious fragment illustrative of the manner in which the comedies of the Romans were regarded by one class of people in the middle ages, and it has also a further meaning. Its form is that of a dialogue in Latin verse between Terence and a personage called in the original delusor, which was no doubt intended to express a performer of some kind, and may be probably considered as synonymous with jougleur. It is a contention between the new jouglerie of the middle ages and the old jouglerie of the schools, somewhat in the same style as the fabliau of “Les deux Troveors Ribauz,” described in a former chapter.[80] We are to suppose that the name of Terence has been in some way or other brought forward in laudatory terms, upon which the jougleur steps forward from among the spectators and expresses himself towards the Roman writer very contemptuously. Terence then makes his appearance to speak in his own defence, and the two go on abusing one another in no very measured language. Terence asks his assailant who he is? to which the other replies, “If you ask who I am, I reply, I am better than thee. Thou art old and broken with years; I am a tyro, full of vigour, and in the force of youth. You are but a barren trunk, while I am a good and fertile tree. If you hold your tongue, old fellow, it will be much better for you.”