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

by Unknown

If the writers of saints' plays, with their attempt to satisfy the yearning for ideal freedom which is natural in all times and places, took, in their fictions of the religious-marvellous, a step towards what may be called romantic comedy,—a step no less important, though nowadays often unnoticed, was taken toward the comedy of ridicule, satire, and burlesque, at a date quite as remote, by the contrivers of religious parodies. It is curious, though not at all unnatural, that some of the earliest efforts at comic entertainment should proceed from the revolt against ecclesiastical formality and constraint. I cannot in this place do more than remind the reader of the antiquity of three of the most notable of these dramatic travesties: the Feast of Fools, the election of the Boy Bishop, and the Feast of the Ass. The first of these was celebrated on the Continent as early as 1182, one may say with reasonable certainty, 990. It is indeed more than a conjecture that the Feasts of Fools and the Ass inherited the license of the Roman Saturnalia, the season and spirit of which were assimilated by the Christian Feast of the Nativity. Whether adopted by the church in its effort to conciliate paganism, or tolerated for reasons of secular policy, these mock-religious festivals were soon the Frankenstein of Christianity; and it was doubtless against them rather than the seductions of the sacred drama that most of the ecclesiastical prohibitions of the Middle Ages were aimed. With its necessary comic accessories, the Feast of Fools was well established in England before 1226, and it was still flourishing in 1390 when Courtney forbade its performance in London. "The vicars," he said, "and clerks dressed like laymen, laughed, shouted, and acted plays which they commonly and fitly called the Feast of Fools." They travestied the dignitaries of the church, they turned the service inside out, put obscenity for sanctity and blasphemy for prayer. While it does not appear that in England, as on the Continent,[13] the procession of the Boy Bishop was attended with frivolity or profanity, it was certainly celebrated with mummings and plays of suitable kind, not altogether serious. This ceremony dates as far back as St. Nicholas day, 1229, and was still to the fore in 1556. The Feast of the Ass appears to have been recognized by the church as early as the Feast of Fools. I do not know when it was introduced into England, but it was played upon Palm Sunday as late as the middle of the sixteenth century. In France it had been notoriously wanton since the beginning of the thirteenth; and it could not exist anywhere without promoting the spirit of burlesque and farce. Although the initial purpose of these festivals was to satirize the hierarchy and ecclesiastical convention, they applied themselves after they had been repudiated by the church to the ridicule of social folly in general; and, according to the descriptions of Warton, Douce, Hone, Klein, Petit de Julleville, and others, they came to be a vivid interpreter of the popular consciousness, a most potent educator of critical insight and dramatic instinct, an incitement to artistic even though naïve productivity. In France, indeed, the Fraternities of Fools produced national satirists and dramatic professionals in one. In England, if they did nothing else, they helped to stimulate a taste for realistic and satiric drama.

2. The Miracle Cycles in their Relation to Comedy

Miracle plays and 'marvels,' morals too as we soon shall see, were a propædeutic to comedy rather than tragedy. For the theme of these dramas is, in a word, Christian: the career of the individual as an integral part of the social organism, of the religious whole. So also, their aim: the welfare of the social individual. They do not exist for the purpose of portraying immoderate self-assertion and the vengeance that rides after, but rather the beauty of holiness or the comfort of contrition. Herod, Judas, and Antichrist are foils, not heroes. The hero of the miracle seals his salvation by accepting the spiritual ideal of the community. These plays contribute in a positive manner to the maintenance of the social organism. The tragedies of life and literature, on the other hand, proceed from secular histories, histories of personages liable to disaster because of excessive peculiarity,—of person or position. Whether the rank of the tragic hero be elevated or mean, he is unique: his desire is overweening, his frailty irremediable, or his passion unrestrained,—his peril unavoidable; and in his ruin not the principal only, but seconds and bystanders, are involved. Tragedy, then, is the drama of Cain, of the individual in opposition to the social, political, divine; its occasion is an upheaval of the social organism.

While the dramatic tone of the miracle cycle is determined by the conservative character of Christianity in general, the nature of the several plays is modified by the relation of each to one or other of the supreme crises in the career of our Lord. The plays leading up to, and revolving about, the Nativity, are of happy ending, and were doubtless regarded, by authors and spectators, as we regard comedy. The murder of Abel, at first sombre, gradually passes into the comedy of the grotesque. The massacre of the innocents emphasizes, not the weeping of a Rachel, but the joyous escape of the Virgin and the Child. In all such stories the horrible is kept in the background or used by way of suspense before the happy outcome, or frequently as material for mirth. Upon the sweet and joyous character of the pageants of Joseph and Mary and the Child it is unnecessary to dwell. They are of the very essence of comedy. The plays surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection are, on the other hand, specimens of the serious drama, the tragedy averted. It would hardly be correct to say tragedy; for the drama of the cross is a triumph. In no cycle does the consummatum est close the pageant of the Crucifixion; the actors announce, and the spectators believe, that this is "goddis Sone," whom within three days they shall again behold, though he has been "nayled on a tree unworthilye to die." By this consideration, without doubt, the horror of the buffeting and the scourging, the solemnity of the passion, the inhuman cruelty—but not the awe—of the Crucifixion, were mitigated for the spectators. Otherwise, mediæval as they were, they could have taken but little pleasure in the realism with which their fellows presented the history of the Sacrifice.

To indulge in a comprehensive discussion of the beginnings of comedy in England would be pleasant, but I find that I cannot compel the materials into the limits at my command. Accordingly, since the miracle cycles (to which Dodsley, following the French, gave the convenient, but un-English and somewhat misleading, name of 'mysteries') have been more frequently and generously treated by historians than those other miracles, non-scriptural, which I would call 'marvels,' and the no less important popular festival plays and early farces, and 'morals' or moral and 'mery' interludes, it seems that, in favour of the latter, I should defer much that might be said about the cycles until a more spacious occasion.

The manuscript of the York plays appears to have been made about 1430-40; that of the Wakefield, or so-called Towneley, toward the end of the same century; the larger part of the N-town, or so-called Coventry, in 1468; and the manuscripts of the Chester between 1591 and 1607. The last are, however, based upon a text of the beginning of the fifteenth or the end of the fourteenth century; and there is good reason to believe that some of the plays were in existence during the first half of the fourteenth. A tradition, suspicious but not yet wholly discredited, assigns their composition to the period 1267-76. The York cycle, according to Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith, was composed between 1340 and 1350. As to the Towneley plays, Mr. Pollard decides that they were built in at least three distinct stages, covering a period of which the limits were perhaps 1360 and 1410. While the composition of the so-called Coventry (apparently acted by strolling players) may in general be assigned to the first half of the fifteenth century, some parts give evidence of earlier date. The authenticated dates of the representation of miracles in Coventry, 1392-1591, I prefer to attribute not to this N-town cycle, but to the Coventry Gild plays, two of which still exist.[14] They possess no special importance for our present purpose. The Newcastle Shipwrights' Play is the much battered survivor of a cycle that was in existence in 1426. The Ms. of the three Digby plays of interest to us is assigned by Dr. Furnivall to the latter half of the fifteenth century. The subject of the first of them, the Killing of the Children, is of early dramatic use, and the treatment of the poltroon knight corresponds suggestively with Warton's account of the Christmas play given by the English bishops at the Council of Constance in 1417. The two Norwich pageants which survive are by no means naïve: they were touched up, if not written, during the second third of the sixteenth century.

Other cycle plays which might be enumerated must be omitted, with the exception of the Cornish. These were written in Cymric, apparently somewhat before 1300. They are suggestive to the historian of comedy particularly because they yield no faintest glimmer of a smile, save at their exquisite credulity and unconsciousness of art. They are a noble instance of the sustained seriousness of the scriptural cycle in its early, if not its original, popular stage, and, also, of that familiar handling of the sacred that prepares the way for the liberty of the comic.

In approaching the English miracle plays we notice that, as in the Cornish, the earliest secular form of the older cycles was principally, if not entirely, serious. Reasons which I cannot stay to enumerate prove that comic plays in the older cycles are not of the original series, and that humorous passages in plays of the older series are of later interpolation. Now, so far as the direct effect upon the comedy of Heywood, Greene, and Shakespeare is concerned, it may appear to some of no particular importance in what order the cycles in general were composed or the plays within the cycles. But the Tudor dramatists did not make their art, they worked with what they found, and they found a dramatic medium of expression to which centuries and countless influences had contributed. An extended study of the beginnings of English comedy should determine, so far as possible, the relative priority, not only of cycles, but of the comic passages within the cycles: what each composition has contributed to the enfranchisement of the comic spirit and the development of the technical factors of the art; to what extent each has expressed or modified the realistic, satirical, romantic, or humorous view of life, and in what ways each has reflected the temper of its time, the manners and the mind of the people that wrote, acted, and witnessed. If I arrange the plays that bear upon the development of comedy according to my conclusions regarding priority of composition, the order, broadly stated for our present rapid survey, is as follows: first, the Cornish and the Old Testament portions of the Chester and Coventry; then the productions of the second and third periods of the York, and, closely following these, the crowning efforts of the Towneley; then the New Testament plays of the Chester and Coventry; and, finally, the surviving portions of the cycles of Digby and Newcastle. This order, which is roughly historical, has the advantage, as I perceive after testing it, of presenting a not unnatural sequence of the æsthetic values or interests essential to comedy: first, as a full discussion would reveal, the humour of the incidental; then of the essential or real, and, gradually, of the satirical in something like their order of appearance within the cycles; afterwards, the accession of the romantic, the wonderful, the allegorical, the mock-ideal; and, finally, of the scenic and sensational.

Of the significant lack of humour in the Cornish plays I have already spoken. I find, though I may not stay to illustrate, a livelier observation and a superior faculty of characterization and construction in the early comic art of Chester than in that of Coventry, but in both a cruder sense of the humour of incident than in the other English cycles. In the York cycle there are fewer situations that may be called purely comic than in the Chester, and none of these occurs in the oldest plays of the series; but for its other contributions to dramatic art and its relation to the remarkable productions of the Wakefield or Towneley school of comedy it deserves special attention. A comparative study of its versification, phraseology and dramatic technique, leads me to the conclusion that the original didactic kernel of the York cycle was enlarged and enriched during two well-defined periods, which may be termed the middle and the later, and that there was at least one playwright in each of these periods or schools who distinctly made for the development of English comedy. Of the middle period, to which belong Cain, Noah, and the Shepherds' Plays, the playwright or playwrights are characterized by an unsophisticated humour; the distinctive playwright of the later or realistic period is marked by his observation of life, his reproduction of manners, his dialogue, and the plasticity of his technique. That the later school or period, to which belongs a group of half a dozen plays[15] gathering about The Dream of Pilate's Wife, and The Trial before Herod, was, moreover, influenced by the manner of its predecessor is indicated by the fact that of its two most efficient stanzaic forms one, namely that used in The Conspiracy, is anticipated (though in simpler iambic beat) by that of Noah, the typical play of the middle, that is the first comic, school,[16] while the other, of which the variants are found in The Mortificacio and The Second Trial, has its germ more probably in The Cayme of that same school than in any other of the middle or of the earlier plays.[17] With these two stanzaic forms the later group, so far as we may conclude from the mutilated condition of the surviving plays, seems to experiment; and the second of them, that of the Mortificacio, may be regarded as the final and distinctive outcome of York versification. To the leading playwrights of each of these schools,—the former the best humorist, the latter the best realist, of the York drama,—to these anonymous composers of the most facile and vivid portions of the York cycle our comedy owes a still further debt; for from them it would appear that a poet of undoubted genius derived something of his inspiration and much of his method and technique—our first great comic dramatist, the Playwright of Wakefield.

We know that Wakefield actors sometimes played in the Corpus Christi plays of York, and it was only natural that the smaller town should borrow from the dramatic riches of its metropolitan neighbour. We are, therefore, not surprised to find in the Wakefield cycle a number of plays which have been taken bodily from the York cycle.[18] None of these is in the distinctive stanzaic form of which we have just spoken; but imbedded in certain other Wakefield plays[19] that in other respects show marks of derivation from earlier and discarded portions of the York cycle, we find occasional affiliated forms of the distinctive later York strophe evidently in a transitional period of its development. We find, furthermore, passages in this transitional York strophe side by side with Wakefield stanzas which display the strophe in a more highly artistic technique than anything found in the York.[20] The writer of the perfected York-Wakefield stanza, such as appears in the Towneley plays, must have, consciously or unconsciously, been influenced by the middle and later York schools of dramatic composition. This fully developed outcome of the distinctive York stanza of the later school is found in the guise of a nine-line stanza in certain Towneley plays which we see reason for attributing to a Wakefield genius, and which we shall presently consider. Suffice it in this place to say that of the Wakefield stanza the first four lines, when resolved, according to their internal rhymes, into separate verses, run thus: abababab². If to this we add the cauda, our stanza runs abababab²c¹ddd²c². Sometimes, indeed, a three-accented line occurs among the first eight, showing the more plainly that this thirteen-line stanza of Wakefield (though set down in nine lines) is a variant or derivative of the thirteen-line York XXXVI.,—ababbcbc³d¹eee²d³. And that in itself is, as I have already said, a refinement upon the fourteen-line stanza of the earlier comic school of York, as used in the Noah. Whether the rapid beat and frequently recurring rhyme of the Wakefield are a conscious elaboration of the York or a happy find or accident, the stanzaic result is an accurate index to the superiority in spirit and style achieved over their congeners of York by these comedies of Wakefield.