Several of the characteristics of Mankynd are carried forward also in the moral "interlude," named, not for its hero Free Will, but for its Vice, Hyckescorner. It appears to have been written between 1497 and 1512. The upper limit of production is fixed by the reference to Newfoundland, and perhaps by the fact that in the same year Locher's translation of the Narrenschiff appeared; the lower limit by the mention of the ship Regent, which would not probably have been referred to as existing after 1512.[63] Indeed, the mention of the ship James may associate the lower limit with 1503, the date of the Scotch marriage. The tendency of this moral is distinctively didactic,—to denounce the folly that scoffs at religion,—but in quality it smacks more of comedy than any preceding play. Its value was long ago acknowledged by Dr. Percy. "Abating the moral and religious reflections and the like," says he, "the piece is of a comic cast, and contains a humorous display of some of the vices of the age. Indeed, the author has generally shown so little attention to the allegorical that we need only to substitute other names to his personages, and we have real characters and living manners." The plot is insignificant, but the situations are refreshingly humorous, and one of them, the setting of Pity in the stocks, is new. The local references are frequent, and the dialogue is more sprightly than even that of Nature. Hyckescorner is in many ways the model of another important play of which we shall soon have reason to speak, the Interlude of Youth.
While the plot of the New Interlude and Mery of the Nature of the Four Elements, calls for no special notice, it interests us because in purpose it is not moral, but scientific, and in conduct makes use of comic and commonplace means not previously availed of. The humour proceeds not simply from the jumble of oaths, nicknames, proverbs, gibes, bad puns, transparent jokes, mimicry, Sam Wellerisms, and nugae canorae of which the talk of most Vices consists, but from the cleverly managed verbal misunderstanding between the Vice and the Taverner, the irrelevant question, and the humorous employment of snatches and tags from popular songs. The introduction of a character representing a trade, such as that of the Taverner, who enumerates sixteen kinds of wine, and "by his face seems to love best drinking," is, of course, novel, but is not without precedent in the miracle plays. This interlude was printed in 1519 by its author, John Rastell, evidently soon after it was written.
When we consider that the Four Elements was written by a friend of Sir Thomas More, and that, like the plays of John Heywood, another of More's friends, it depends for much of its effect upon its gibes at womankind, we are, perhaps, assisted in realizing the extent to which the literary taste of the day still indulged in this primitive form of amusement, and the distance which was yet to be covered before comedy could safely avail itself of the feminine element as it is,—witty and practical, as well as tender,—and so prepare to fulfil its peculiar function as the conserver of society. For, until it recognizes that women constitute the social other-half, the comic spirit has not come into full possession of its possibilities; it has not produced comedy, for it has not given us a full and undistorted reflex of life. This is a fact so rarely considered that I cannot refrain from quoting Mr. George Meredith. "Comedy," he says, in his excellent essay on its Idea—"comedy lifts women to a station offering them free play for their wit, as they usually show it, when they have it, on the side of sound sense. The higher the comedy, the more prominent the part they enjoy in it.... The heroines of comedy are like women of the world, not necessarily heartless for being clear-witted: they seem so to the sentimentally reared only for the reason that they use their wits, and are not wandering vessels crying for a captain or a pilot. Comedy is an exhibition of their battle with men, and of men with them: and as the two, however divergent, both look on one object, namely, life, the gradual similarity of their impressions must bring them to some resemblance. The comic poet dares to show us men and women coming to this mutual likeness; he is for saying that, when they draw together in social life, their minds grow liker; just as the philosopher discerns the similarity of boy and girl, until the girl is marched away to the nursery." Of course, if the ways of man and maid in society ever grew to be exactly alike, comedy would die of inanition. Consequently, though I say that comedy requires for the sexes equality of social privilege, I do not mean identity. The synalœpha of the sexes—such as some extremists, political and pedagogical, project—would just as surely destroy comedy as in former days the inequality of the sexes dwarfed it. The sentimental and romantic give-and-take is as essential to society as the intellectual, and as essential to comedy as to society.
8. The Dramatic Contribution of the Older Morals
Before discussing the period of transition upon which comedy now enters, it will be advantageous to determine, if possible, what contributions to the methods of comedy should be credited distinctively to this moral or moral interlude during the years that preceded the change, that is, from 1380 to 1520. Certainly not the introduction of the separate play, as is frequently supposed, nor the substitution of immediate and familiar interests for those that were remote, nor of the invented plot for the traditional, and the significant for the spectacular. Though some of these features distinguish the evolution of the allegorical play, one and another of them is also to be recognized at as early a period, or earlier, in those forms of the drama, kindred and unrelated, that I have already described,—the miracle, the saint's play, the farce, and the secular festival play. I should say that, so far as the materials of drama are concerned, the advances peculiar to the allegorical play were, from the use of the scriptural dramatis persona, frequently instrumental and therefore wooden, to the use of the dynamic; and from the historical or traditional individual to the representative of a type. These are substitutions important to our subject, for, that the individual should come to the front is, as ten Brink has well said, a characteristic of tragedy, whereas in comedy it is the typical that is emphasized, to the end that in an example which is typical the follies of the age may be liberally, and at the same time impersonally, embodied and chastised. By virtue of its didactic purpose and its allegorical form, moreover, the moral play must ascribe to its dramatis personæ adequate motives of action. It therefore must and does make an attempt, even though rude, at the preservation of psychological probability in the analysis and development of these motives. Once the dramatic person has been labelled with the name of a quality, not as appraised from without and denoted by a patronymic common to dozens beside himself, but from within and specified by his ethonymic (if I may coin the word), he is no longer a chance acquaintance of the dramatist or the public, but the representative of an ethical family. In the moral play the characters stand for or against some convention,—educational, ethical, political, religious,—that is to say, social in the broadest sense. With the advent of such characters, therefore, the social drama receives an impulse. Its hero serves to justify or to satirize an institution; for that end he exists. And therefore in the handling of motives the moral makes a genuine advance in the direction of comedy, both critical and ideal.
We notice next that the author of this kind of drama finds it necessary to devise situations for exploiting the idiosyncrasies of his principal characters; and that, even though the characters be disguised as abstractions, the friction of what is dynamic with what is real results in something vivid and concrete. I do not mean to say that the dramatist has learned how to develop character, but how to display or manifest it. Skill in the portrayal of character in process of growth came but slowly, and with the passage of the allegorical play into the drama of real life. As to the portrayal of motives and emotions in their complexity, that is an art much more refined, to which the writers of the moral never attained, even though they enriched their abstractions with borrowings from theologians, philosophers, and poets, for in dealing with abstractions at all they were dealing with life at second hand. Indeed, complex characters can hardly be found in English drama before the various tentative dramatic species had merged themselves in the polytypic plays with which comedy, properly so called, made its appearance. The allegorical dramatists found also, like the writers of the later miracle and farce, that critical situations demanded plain language and unsophisticated manners; and if, in these respects, the realism of the moral excels that of the earlier miracle, it is perhaps because of the superior dynamic quality of the moral dramatis persona.
Mr. Courthope and other writers on the drama have conjectured that the improvement characteristic of the allegorical playwright was one to which he was driven of necessity, namely, the introduction, and consequently the invention, of a continuous plot. But there was nothing new in the invention of plot. The novelty, if any, was in the distinctively comic nature of the plot-movement most suitable to the purpose of this kind of drama. In tragedy, the movement must be economic of its ups and downs: once headed downward, it must plunge, with but one or two vain recovers, to the abyss. In comedy, on the other hand, though the movement is ultimately upward, the crises are more numerous; the oftener the individual stumbles without breaking his neck, and the more varied his discomfitures, so long as they are temporary, the better does he enjoy his ease in the cool of the day. Tragic effects may be intense and longer drawn out, but they must be few; in comedy, the effects are many, sudden, fleeting, kaleidoscopic. You can enjoy a long, delicious shudder, but not a long-spun joke, or a joke frequently repeated, or many jokes of the same kind. Hence the peculiar movement of the plot in comedy. Now, the novelty of the plot in the moral play, lay in the fact that the movement was of this oscillating, upward kind,—a kind unknown as a rule to the miracle, whose conditions were less fluid, and to the farce, which was too shallow and superficial. The heart of the 'moral' hero was a battleground; as in comedy, the interest was in the vicissitudes of the conflict and the certainty of peace. Though the purpose of the moral play was didactic and reformatory, its doctrine was optimistic and its end to encourage; and one of the distinctive contributions of the moral play to the English comedy was the movement suitable to these conditions, not the introduction of a continuous or connected plot. When Mr. Courthope further speaks of the moral plays as if they were the sole link of connection between the later miracle plays and the regular drama, and implies that the "morality" was unique in its introduction of a leading personage, who may be called the hero of the play, he is attributing to it qualities that existed in contemporary species of the dramatic kind. As to the statement that the moral play arose, as if a new kind of play, from some modification of the miracle play, on the one hand by secular and comic interests, and on the other by allegorical motives and materials, I think that sufficient has been elsewhere said in this article to show that secular and comic interests existed in the miracle play without altering its essence, both before and after the moral had come into prominence, and that allegorical motives and materials had developed themselves into the moral pageant and play before the miracle was visibly affected by them.
9. The Period of Transition: Farce and Romantic Interlude
The period of experimentation or transition, which may be said to extend from 1520 to 1553, is characterized especially by the gradual abandonment of allegorical machinery and abstract material. The forward movement is, of course, primarily due to the change from the mediæval attitude of mind to that of the renaissance, from artificial thought whose medium, the symbol, succeeded in concealing more than it expressed, to experience. Of the social and political conditions which prepared the way for the transition so far as English comedy is concerned or that shaped comedy once on its way, I cannot here speak, but the following would appear among purely literary antecedents: First, the French sotties and farces, the technical and satirical qualities of which were a stimulus to invention, not only in England, but in Italy and Germany; second, the disputations and debats, veritable whetstones of wit and a polish of words ad unguem; third, the collateral development of a farce interlude in England, composed in Latin and English, probably also in Norman French, but generally spontaneous, and wholly unforced; fourth, the adaptation to dramatic and satirical purposes of contes, fabliaux, novelle, and their English translations and congeners,—more especially the Chaucerian episode with its concrete characters and contemporary manners; fifth, the movement of native romance urged during the fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries by contact with Spanish and Italian ideals and their fictions of character, adventure, and intrigue; sixth, the discipline of Plautine and Terentian models, and of the Latin and vernacular comedies which imitated them, as well as of the Latin school plays which flourished in Holland and Germany during the latter half of the fifteenth century; and seventh, the examples set by Kirchmayer and other German controversialists in the attempted adaptation of the moral play to historical or quasi-historical conditions with a view to satirical ends.
The plays that call for consideration in this section and the next may be classified roughly as farces, romantic interludes, school interludes, and controversial morals. Each of these kinds reaches a culmination conformable to its nature, within the limits that I have chosen for the period; and each has its own place in the history of comedy. For it must not be supposed that, because a pastoral farce like the Mak did not develop into independent existence, or because moral interludes gradually exhausted their career towards the end of the sixteenth century, such species had no influence in maturing English comedy. The peculiar quality and charm of our comedy is that, deriving from sources not only distinct, but remote in literary habitat,—scriptural, allegorical, farcical, pastoral, romantic, classical, historical, or purely native and social,—it has not dissipated itself in a thousand streamlets, but has carried down deposits from each tributary at its best. In Love's Labor's Lost, Two Angry Women, As You Like It, Old Wives' Tale, Every Man in His Humour, we find, as in a miner's pan, 'colours' from vastly different soils.