Representative English Comedies, v. 1. From the beginnings to Shakespeare

by Unknown

6. The Relation between Miracle, Moral, and Interlude

An unfortunate misapprehension has obtained currency to the effect that there was a deliberate transition, chronological and logical, from the miracle cycle to the "morality," and thence to a something entirely different, called the interlude; and it is supposed that definite advances in the development of comedy were made pari passu with this transition. It is even said, by one of the most genial and learned of English scholars, who of course was not intending anything by way of scientific accuracy, at the time, that "in the progress of the drama, Moralities followed Mysteries, and were succeeded by Interludes. When folk tired of Religion on the Stage they took to the inculcation of morality and prudence; and when this bored them they set up Fun."[60] But the moral play[61] was rather a younger contemporary and complement of the miracle than a follower, or a substitute for it. Moreover, allegory in the acted drama commanded the attention of the public contemporaneously with the scriptural plays of the later fourteenth century; in literature it had occupied attention long before. People, therefore, did not wait until they were tired of religion upon the stage, before taking to the inculcation of morality; nor could they have hoped to escape religion by any such substitute. Moral plays, like plays which were originally liturgical, aimed at religious instruction. But as the scriptural-liturgical illustrated the forms of the church service and its narrative content, the moral illustrated the sermon and the creed. The former dealt with history and ritual, the latter with doctrine; the former made the religious truth concrete in scriptural figures and events, the latter brought it home to the individual by allegorical means. The historical course of the drama was not from the scriptural play to the allegorical, but from the collective miracle and collective moral, practically contemporary, to the individual miracle and individual moral. The dramatic quality of the moral was, as we shall presently remark, not the same as that of the miracle, but it neither supplanted nor fully supplemented that of the miracle.

The distinction between 'morality' and 'interlude' has likewise been unduly and illogically emphasized. The former term may properly be said to indicate the content and aim of a drama; the latter, its garb and occasion; but the essential characters of the moral play, the human hero and the representatives of good and evil contending for his soul, may be common to interlude and 'morality' alike, and both terms may with justice refer to the same drama. After 1500 the rôle of hero is, to be sure, sometimes filled by an historical character, or by one or mere concrete personages representative of a type; but it must not be supposed that the play possessing such a hero is therefore to be called an interlude, for similar heroes are to be found in the morals before 1500. Nor should the statement be accepted that morals are distinguished from interludes by the presence in the former of both Devil and Vice; for several interludes of a later date have both Devil and Vice, while some of the earlier morals, written before 1500, have but one or the other of these characters, or neither.[62] The attempt to characterize the moral by its professed didactic intent, and the interlude by the lack thereof or the profession of mirth, is equally unavailing; for that manifest moral, the Pride of Life, one of the earliest extant, makes explicit promise in its prologue "of mirth and eke of kare" from "this our game"; while Mankynd, a moral of 1461 to 1485, which advertises no amusement, is as full of it as any late interlude. On the other hand, several plays written after 1568, calling themselves "comedies or enterludes," and promising brevity and mirth, are tedious. But, for the advertisement, sub-title, or specification of the play we must of course hold the publisher, and not the author, generally responsible. The common belief that 'moralities' were succeeded by 'interludes' is probably due in large part to the fact that 'interlude' has been used in England at different periods for entirely different kinds of entertainment, some of which, notably that to which Collier in 1831 restricted the term,—the play after the style of Heywood,—were of later production than the moral. But other kinds of 'interlude' date back to 1300, and precede the first mention of the moral play; while later kinds include the moral, and finally are synonymous with any humorous and popular performance. Collier's restriction of the term was, therefore, unfortunate. It interpreted a genus as a species; for, although the interlude was originally any short entertainment, occupying the pauses between graver negotiations of the palate or intellect, it had, in the course of its history, acquired a significance almost as broad as 'drama' itself. The interlude was of various form and content and covered many species. As farce, the interlude anticipated moral plays; as allegorical drama, it absorbed them; and as comedy, it is their younger contemporary. It is not merely the play after the style of John Heywood. It is long or short; religious, moral, pedagogic, political, or doctrinal; scriptural, allegorical, or profane; classical or native; imaginative or reproductive of the commonplace; stupid or humorous; satirical or purely comic. It seems to me, therefore, unwise to perpetuate a distinction between moral plays and interludes which was not recognized by those who wrote and heard the plays in question.

The reduction of the number of actors, the abbreviation of the play, the concentration of the plot, wherever these exist in the later morals or moral interludes, are not evidence of a change of kind, but merely of a natural evolution through a period of some two hundred years. When ten Brink says that the interlude was the species best adapted to further the development of dramatic art, we must understand by interlude the individual, as opposed to the collective drama,—or the occasional performance by professionals for the delectation, and sometimes at the order, of private persons or parties, as opposed to expository or perfunctory plays, plays manipulated by crafts, or associated with times, places, and ends external to art. The improvement in scope and elasticity which marks the individual play is due to various causes: to patronage, which prefers amusement to instruction, and the work of artists to that of journeymen; to the development accordingly of a bread-and-butter profession of acting, with its accompanying stimuli of necessity and opportunity. Poetic invention, dramatic constructiveness and style, are sometimes spurred by hunger; they are always responsive to the appreciation of the cultivated, and maybe to the reward.

7. The Older Morals in their Relation to Comedy

The remaining dramas within the compass of this survey may be considered in the following order: first, the older morals and moral interludes, between the years 1400 and 1520; second, various experiments of native and foreign, classical and romantic, origin which distinguish a period of transition extending approximately from 1520 to 1553; and, third, some nine or ten plays of prime importance which succeed these and unite, in one way or another, qualities of structure and aim hitherto distinctive of separate dramatic kinds. The period during which these plays, which I shall venture to call polytypic, were produced, roughly coincides with the years 1545 to 1566, and among these plays are the first English comedies really worthy of the name. We must then notice a group of rudimentary survivals, some of which, falling between 1550 and 1570, illustrate simply an artificial adaptation of the 'moral' species, while other few, appearing between 1553 and 1580, are a persistent flowering of the decadent stock, fruitless in kind but genuine in comic quality. We shall finally pass in brief review the crude romantic plays of morals or intrigue or popular tradition written between 1570 and 1590. And if it were not for lack of space, we should also glance at the satirical comedies which appeared when Shakespeare was beginning and Greene was ceasing; but, so far as possible, I must omit all subjects to which any consideration has elsewhere been accorded in this volume.

A sympathetic examination of the older morals—those that were produced before 1520—will reveal, even though the period is comparatively early, a twofold character of composition. We find, on the one hand, plays interpretative of ideals of life, constructive in character, relying upon the fundamentally allegorical, and making principally for a didactic end. We find, on the other hand, plays that deal with the actual have a critical aim, reproduce appearances and manners, and tend toward the amusing and satirical.

Of the half-dozen morals that made for the development of constructive or interpretative comedy, one of the earliest (about 1400) and most important was the Castell of Perseverance. In the quality of its dramatic devices it sustains a close relation to the Digby Magdalene,—the siege of the Castell by the Seven Deadly Sins, and their repulse under the roses which the Virtues have discharged. It also makes use of characters already prominent in the eleventh Coventry play, the Pax and Misericordia, who there, as here, intercede for mankind. Collier calls this a well-constructed and much varied allegory, and says with good reason that its completeness indicates predecessors in the same kind. It is itself an early treatment of a fruitful theme, variously handled in later plays like Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and in narratives like The Holy War. Though the abstractions are not of a highly dramatic character, still one or two of them,—for instance Detractio, the Vice, who is a cousin of the Coventry Backbiter, and of Invidia, "who dwellyth in Abbeys ofte," foreshadow the comedy of manners and satire, that is to say, the comedy of criticism. Other morals or moral interludes of the constructive kind, which I must forbear to describe, even though they contributed in one way or another to the improvement of dramatic consciousness or skill, are the Pride of Life, of antiquity perhaps as high as the preceding; the Wisdom that is Christ, 1480-1490, a comedy in the mediæval sense, insomuch as it portrays the ultimate triumph of a hero in his contest with temptation; Mundus et Infans, printed 1522, but written perhaps by the beginning of the century, which, beside giving us a vivid satirical picture of low life, makes a twofold contribution to the technique of comedy,—an iteration of crises in plot, and a sequence of changes in the character of the hero; Skelton's Magnyfycence, 1515-1523, significant for "vigour and vivacity of diction," and his Nigromansir, written somewhat earlier, which, though now lost, appears by Warton's account to have contributed, by its attack upon ecclesiastical abuses, to the beginnings of satirical comedy; the Moralle Play of the Somonynge of Everyman, printed before 1531, but of uncertain date of composition,—a tragedy to be sure, but "one of the most perfect allegories ever formed." All these, even when not purposively comic or even entertaining, assist the dramatic presentation of an imaginative ideal; occasionally also, though less directly, they contribute to dramatic satire and the portrayal of manners.

Of moral plays written before 1520 that contributed to the comedy of real life and critical intent we still have three or four. Mankynd—somewhere between 1461 and 1485—is of prime importance to the comedy of the actual, for practically its only claim to consideration as an allegorical or didactic production is that it maintains the plan and purpose of the moral play. Its dramatic tendency is altogether away from the abstract. In spite of its stereotyped Mercie and Myscheff, its minor Vices, and its Devil, it is a somewhat coarse but amusing portrayal of the manners of contemporary ne'er-do-weels. Attach no more meaning to the names Newgyse, Nowadays, and Nowte than the chuckling audience did, or change them to Huntyngton of Sanston, Thuolay of Hanston, and Pycharde of Trumpyngton, and you perceive at once that the individuality, conversation, and behaviour of these characters, and even of the hero, when he is not "holyer than ever was ony of his kyn," are hardly less natural and concrete than those of Englishmen immortalized by Heywood, Udall, and William Stevenson. The plot, to be sure, is dramatically futile, the incidents farcical, the merriment anything but refined; but there are few merrier successors of the Wakefield Tutivillus than his namesake here, who, coming "invysybull," cometh for all that "with his legges under him" and "no lede on his helys" to inform the sanctimonious hero that "a schorte preyere thyrlyth hewyn" and the audience that "the Devil is dead." Like the devil-judge of the Nigromansir and the devil-sailor of the Shipwrights' Play, he has shaken off his biblical conventions (if he ever had any), he associates familiarly with characters of all kinds, and is marked by his grotesque devices as a wilful worker of confusion, the marplot of the play. The dog-Latin of the Vice Myscheff stands half-way between that of the Wakefield plays and that of Roister Doister and Thersytes; and the Sam Wellerisms of Newgyse are a fine advance in the reproduction of the vulgar. His "Beware! quod the goode-wyff, when sche smot of here husbondes hede," and his "Quod the Devill to the frerys," and other gayeties perilous to quote—there is something Rabelaisian in all this. So Nowte and Nowadays, with their racy idioms, their variegated oaths, and "allectuose ways," are to the manner born, neither new nor old; they are of the picaresque drama that finds a welcome in every age and land. It is worth while to notice also the parallelism of crudity and progress in the technical devices of the action: on the one hand, the exchange of garments by which a change of motive is symbolized, a ruse that only gradually yields to the manifestation of character by means of action; and on the other hand, the legitimate and dramatic parody of a scene in court.

The concrete element so noteworthy in Mankynd is further developed in the "Goodly Interlude of Nature, compylyde by" Archbishop Morton's chaplain, Henry Medwall, between 1486 and 1500. This author must have possessed a remarkably vivid imagination, or have enjoyed a closer acquaintance than might be expected of one of his cloth with the seamy side of London; for there are few racier or more realistic bits of description in our early literature than the account given by Sensuality of Fleyng Kat and Margery, of the perversion of the hero by the latter, and of her retirement when deserted to that house of "Strayt Religyon at the Grene Freres hereby," where "all is open as a gose eye." Though the plot is not remarkable, nor the mechanism of it, for almost the only device availed of is that of feigned names, still the author's insight into the conditions of low life, his common sense, his proverbial philosophy, his humorous exhibition of the morals of the day, and his stray and sudden shafts at the foibles of his own religious class, would alone suffice to attract attention to this work. And even more remarkable than this in the history of comedy is Medwall's literary style: his versification excellent and varied, his conversations witty, idiomatic, and facile. Indeed, he is so far beyond the ordinary convention that he writes the first bit of prose to be found in our drama.