Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse

by Unknown

That the worthy Lydgate and Hoccleve, without any of Chaucer's good luck, failed to tread in his footsteps, is thus hardly surprising. They took from him as much of his machinery as they could carry, wrote in his metres with the aid of ears sadly confused by the rapidly weakening pronunciation of final -e and -es, and began the attempt, pursued all through the century, to make up by magniloquence what they lacked in poetry. This attempt was not confined to England. In France also there was the same invasion of long words, and it took our fair neighbour much longer to get rid of them. As the fifteenth century progressed and its successor began, it became more and more the object of the poetaster to end his lines with sounding polysyllables, and verse not written in this style was regarded as uncourtly and undignified. When we once realise that this particular experiment in language was one which had to be made, and that our fifteenth-century poets made it with all their might, we can understand how Hawes could hail Lydgate as 'the most dulcet spring of famous rhetoric' (this new poetry being essentially rhetorical); how Skelton, after condescendingly praising Chaucer for the 'pleasant, easy and plain' terms in which he wrote, hastened to explain that Lydgate's efforts were 'after a higher rate'; and how the same Skelton thought it necessary in his Phylyp Sparowe to make his 'young maid' excuse herself for her ignorance of 'polished terms' and 'English words elect.' Every one in these days was searching anxiously for the right word, which is indeed the most proper object of every versifier's search. Unluckily, they only looked for it among polysyllables.

It will be gathered by this time that I hold no brief for what we must call the court poetry of the fifteenth century, that is to say, the compositions by which poets from Lydgate to Skelton sought to ingratiate themselves with noble patrons and to prove their title to immortality. When they were off their guard they wrote much better. The reminiscences of the gay days of his youth stirred Hoccleve's muse to unwonted vivacity. In the London Lick-penny Lydgate, if Lydgate's it be, wrote humorous satire with success. Skelton himself, though in his (much too respectfully spoken of) play Magnificence he could flounder with the worst of his predecessors, in his light and railing rhymes was nimble enough, and ranged easily from vigorous invective of Wolsey to pretty panegyrics of fair ladies. Now and again also these good souls ceased their search for polysyllables, looked at some fair face or pleasant landscape, and came near to a natural description. Now and again, too, when they were on their knees (it is only in prayers intended for other people that long words seem appropriate), they got down to a phrase of simple beauty. And meanwhile in the country in general, we may be sure, many simple rhymesters were keeping up old traditions; and if some diligent student would begin gleaning from the earlier miscellanies with the industry and insight by which Mr. A.H. Bullen extracted so rich a harvest from the Elizabethan song-books, surely he also would not go unrewarded. That the touch which we find in the religious poems of an earlier date in the Vernon MS. had not been wholly lost is witnessed by some favourite lines of mine from a book called Speculum Christiani, printed by Machlinia about 1485, and sometimes attributed to John Wotton—

'Mary mother, well thou be!
Mary mother, think on me;
Maiden and mother was never none
Together, Lady, save thee alone.
Sweet Lady, maiden clean,
Shield me from ill, shame and teen;
Out of sin, Lady, shield thou me.
And out of debt for charity.
Lady, for thy joyés five,
Get me grace in this live,
To know and keep over all thing,
Christian faith and God's bidding.
And truely win all that I need
To me and mine clothe and feed.
Help me, Lady, and all mine;
Shield me, Lady, from hell pine;
Shield me, Lady, from villainy
And from all wicked company.'

By the side of this religious verse is there any need to quote more than a stanza from the Nut Brown Maid just to remind us what the secular poets could do?

'Be it right or wrong, these men among, on women do complain,
Affirming this, how that it is a labour spent in vain
To love them well; for never a del they love a man again;
For let a man do what he can their favour to attain,
Yet if a new to them pursue their first true lover than
Laboureth for nought and from her thought he is a banished man.'

To say that English poetry was dead when verse like this was being written is absurd. It was not dead, but banished from court.

We may well grumble at the mischance which has preserved to us such quantities of the verse of men like Lydgate and Hawes, with which, despite all the blandishments of their editors, a not unwise world refuses to concern itself, and on the other hand has permitted to perish, or scattered seemingly beyond retrieving, the humbler poetry which has much greater worth. In the Robin Hood Ballads which Professor Arber has printed from an edition by Wynkyn de Worde we have at least one piece of salvage. It must be owned, indeed, that to claim a ballad as the product of any one century is rather rash, and that in some form or another this cycle was probably in existence before Chaucer died. The 'Ballad of Otterburn,' again, is founded on an incident of border war which took place in 1388 when Chaucer had just begun work on the Canterbury Tales, and this also belongs to fourteenth-century tradition. But both the one and the other, and still more certainly 'Chevy Chace,' must be reckoned in their present form to the credit of our period, and form a notable reinforcement to it, though we must regret that the early transcribers and printers took so little trouble to preserve a correct text.

Christmas carols again, as likely to be handed down from mouth to mouth in the same way as ballads, can be assigned neither to any single author nor to any precise year or even decade of composition. But the charming examples which I have picked out from a number transcribed by Professor Flügel from a Balliol College manuscript of the middle of the sixteenth century, may all safely be attributed to a date earlier than 1500, though perhaps not very much earlier, and in their simple tenderness and mirth they are in strong contrast to the pretentious poetry of the court.[3]

As with the ballads and carols, so with miracle-plays: the fact that they were handed down from one generation to another, and in each generation revised, altered, and added to, makes assignment of dates almost impossible. The play of the Shearmen and Tailors from the Coventry Gilds cycle,[4] here printed, survived in a transcript dated 1534, and it is probable that it was then copied out for the sake of combining what must originally have been four or five different plays into one. Some of these plays in their separate form may have been first written in the fourteenth century; they appear to have been added to in the fifteenth, and (as we have seen) assumed their final form in the sixteenth. The whole of the pseudo-Coventry cycle,[5] in like manner, seems to have been revised and largely written when it was last transcribed in 1468. But the supreme example of fifteenth-century addition to an older cycle is that of the Wakefield Plays, which early in the century were taken in hand by a dramatist of extraordinary ability, whose traceable contributions amount to over three thousand lines, distributed among at least six, or quite probably as many as nine different plays, of which five are homogeneous and entirely from his hand. Among these five are the well-known Prima and Secunda Pastorum, the two Shepherds' Plays with which the history of English comedy begins. The humours of the two shepherds who meet on the moor and come to blows over the grazing of an imaginary flock of sheep are good; the humours of the Secunda Pastorum, of Mak the sheep-stealer, his clever wife Gyll, the sheep that was passed off as a baby, and Mak's well-deserved blanketing,—these surely are not only good, but as good, of their kind, as they well can be. That I have not printed this second Shepherds' Play here is due partly to its being easily accessible in the Early English Text Society's edition, but chiefly to the serious obstacles its northern dialect presents to any attempt at transcribing it in modern English. The play of the Shearmen and Tailors of Coventry, on the other hand, as I have noted in my preface, cries aloud for such transcription. The fact, moreover, that in its present conglomerate condition, it gives the whole history of the Divine Infancy from the Annunciation to the Flight into Egypt makes it very representative, even the humour of the Miracle Plays being exemplified, though poorly and incongruously, in the attack of the mothers of the Innocents on Herod's knights. The different sections of the play, the work no doubt of different authors, have varying values, that of the Prophets, never very successfully handled, being much the weakest. On the other hand, in the simple gifts of the shepherds to the Holy Child we have a very fair representation of one of the stock incidents of a Nativity Play in which free scope was given to whatever tender and playful fancy the dramatist possessed. It should be said that during the fifteenth century the popularity of these plays increased enormously, records of their performance being found in all parts of England, including Cornwall and Wales, where they were acted in the vernacular.

Starting not very much later than the Miracle Plays, since we hear of them at York in the middle of the fourteenth century, the Moralities also increased greatly in popularity during our period, offering ample opportunity for the allegorising and personifying tendency which was one of its most prominent, and in many respects most baneful, characteristics. Several plays of this kind of undoubted English origin have come down to us from the fifteenth century itself, and are well worth study. Chiefly because of the interest which has been aroused by its recent performance, I have preferred to give that of The Summoning of Everyman, which, while presenting much less variety than such plays as The Castle of Perseverance, or Mind, Will, and Understanding, has the merit of being in very easy English, short, impressive, and homogeneous. It is these latter merits, quite as much as the evidence which can be obtained by comparing the two texts, that offer the best reason for acquiescing in the verdict that the Dutch play of Elckerlijk, attributed to Petrus Dorlandus, a theological writer of Diest, who died in 1507, has a better claim than our English version to be considered the original. Strict adherence to propriety of form was not a characteristic of the dramatic literature of this period, and had the play been of native origin its uniform seriousness of tone would almost assuredly have been broken by some humorous, or semi-humorous, episodes. While the two plays, with the exception of the Prologue, which is not found in the Dutch, agree speech by speech from beginning to end, the English version is not a slavish translation; indeed, the ease and happiness of the diction, and the freedom with which it moves, give it, until the Dutch text is examined, the tone of an original work, and the translator must have been a man of no small ability to achieve such a success. It should be said that the oldest Dutch edition now extant appears to have been printed about 1495; but the play may have been written some years before this, though hardly as early as 'about 1477,' the date Professor Logeman proposes, if the author was only born in 1454, for it does not read like the work of a very young man. Professor Logeman was, perhaps, influenced in proposing this date by a desire to get in front of the critics of English literature (including ten Brink), who have assigned the English play to the reign of Edward IV., i.e. not later than 1483. As in the Miracle Plays, so in the Moralities, an original purely didactic purpose was gradually influenced by a desire to render the didacticism more palatable to a popular audience by the introduction of humorous incidents. The complete absence of these from Everyman naturally caused critics to assign it the earliest possible date, so long as it was regarded as an original work. But there is nothing in the language which precludes it from having been written immediately after 1495, when we know that a Dutch edition was in print, and in judging it as a translation we may be content to assign it to the end of the fifteenth century. It is worth noting that at that date there must already have been considerable literary intercourse between England and Holland, and that several popular English books had already been printed at Antwerp for the English market.