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

by Unknown

It is, therefore, only with reservation that I can concur with what one of our most scientific and suggestive historians has said concerning the dramatic qualities of the English miracle play:[29] "In the mystery, not only were the subject and the idea unalterable, but the way in which the subject and idea affected each other was equally unchangeable. The power of expression was exceedingly defective. The idea in the finished work still seemed to be something strange and external—conception and execution did not correspond. It is only by a whole cycle that the subject could be exhausted, and this cycle was composed of the most heterogeneous elements, and is, in fact, a work of accident. The cycle play very seldom formed a unit or whole; it seldom contained anything that could be called a dramatic action. The spectators were therefore interested only in the matter. Only a few details made any æsthetic effect—such as character, situation, scenes; the whole was rarely or never dramatic." I will grant that, since the subject of the individual pageant was prescribed by tradition, and the solution of the dramatic problem already fixed, the author did not always penetrate the shell of his story and assimilate the conception. Consequently the execution has frequently the faults of the ready-made suit of clothes: it creases where it should fall free and breaks where it should embrace. As the writer is not expected to exercise his invention, the onlooker estimates the conduct of the fable as a spectacle, not as a revelation. Many of the miracles, therefore, lack the element of dramatic surprise, and almost none attempts anything in the way of character development. This is, in part, because, severally, the plays are squares of an historical chessboard, upon which the individual—king or pawn—is merely a piece; and even if the board be not historic, the squares are over strait for the gradual deploy of motive; many of these plays are scenes, consequently, and limited to single crises of an individual life. In other words, the character, if familiar, is regarded as an instrument toward a well-known end; if unfamiliar, as an apparition momentarily vivid. Slight opportunity exists for interplay of incident and character, for the production of conduct, in short, which is the resultant of character and a crisis. It must also be conceded that, since each play was the dear delight of its proprietary gild—and each rare performance thereof the chance that should grace these craftsmen ever or disgrace them quite—the effort of actor, if not always of playwright, was towards a speedy and startling effect, such as might be procured by the extraneous quality of the show, rather than by the story in itself or in its relation to the cycle.

But still we must be careful not to generalize from a play here and there to the quality of a cycle as a whole or to the common qualities of various cycles. When we say that the mysteries, that is, the scriptural miracles, possessed this, that, or the other merit or defect, to what area and what object does the remark apply? Do we refer to all the extant plays, or only to the one hundred and fifty plays in the five cycles that may be called complete? Do we draw the inference from a majority of all plays that might fall within the purview, or from the plays of one cycle, or from a majority of the plays in that cycle, or from a single striking example here or there in one or another cycle or fragmentary collection? Do we draw the inference from, or apply the conclusion indiscriminately to, later as well as earlier cycles and plays? A generalization from the Chester does not prima facie fit the Towneley, nor does a dramatic estimate of the Coventry characterize the isolated miracle morals of the Digby. Between the composition of the earliest and the latest of the Chester plays alone, centuries elapsed; centuries between the earliest Coventry and the earliest Digby; generations between Chester and Coventry plays upon the same subject, and generations more between the York and Newcastle. York includes some of the youngest pageants of the species and many of the oldest. Towneley is generally later than York; but it sometimes retains an original which York had long ago discarded for something more modern. Returning, therefore, to Professor ten Brink's generalization, we must submit that most of the defects which he lays at the door of the cyclic miracle were not inherent in the species, but incidental to the period. Some attach to the crudeness of the playwright, some to the simplicity of the audience; they no doubt attached to the collective "morals" of the fourteenth century, such as the Paternoster Play, and they would have characterized plays of any other species attempted under like conditions. The best miracle plays are as mature products of dramatic art as the best of the allegorical kind, except in one point only—the development of character. That "the subject and its idea should be unalterable" and their interrelation fixed, is by no means a peculiarity of the scriptural play, but a characteristic of period or place. If the reader will cast even a rapid glance by way of comparison over the French Corpus of mysteries and the English, he will observe that the scope of subjects possible to a religious cycle was amenable to widely different conditions of restriction, selection, and enlargement, and that the treatment of the same and similar subjects was infinitely varied. To illustrate at length would be a work of supererogation. Everybody knows that the French cycles have plays upon subjects, the Job, for instance, and Tobias and Esther,[30] not touched by the English,—at any rate when in their prime; and that the same subject or episode is frequently treated in a way dissimilar to the English. When we turn to details we note likewise the independence of the playwright: none of the English plays avails itself, for instance, of Adam's difficulty in swallowing the apple, though the incident figures both in Le Mistere de la Nativite and that of the Viel Testament; nor of the attractive possibilities of Reuben and Rachel's maid, Joseph and Potiphar's wife, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and many another conjunction known to all readers of the French religious play. And these discrepancies between national cycles hold true even where, as in the case of the Chester plays, the influence of the French mysteries of the thirteenth century and of the later collections is in other respects evident. Of the four English cycles, moreover, each does not select exactly the same subjects for its pageants as the others,—Balaam and his Ass, for instance, appear only in the Chester,—nor do all introduce the same incidents in the handling of a common subject.

Professor ten Brink is by no means alone in his estimate of the technical quality of the English scriptural miracle, but I must say that the estimate seems to me to be hardly up to the deserts of the species. The frequent absence of such refinements as the unities of time and place was of the essence both of play and period; but it was not of the essence of the miracle cycle that the expression should be defective, or that conception and execution should fail to correspond, or of the miracle play that it should be unable economically and adequately to develop a dramatic action and produce an artistic whole. It may be an insufficient argument to say that the plays of the Wakefield dramatist are anything but defective in expression. Let us, therefore, be somewhat more comprehensive in the scope of inquiry. I have gone carefully through the four English cycles with Professor ten Brink's censures in mind, and I conclude that at least twenty of the individual plays have central motive, consistent action, and well-rounded dramatic plot. Indeed I think a good case might be made for thirty. That would be to say that one-fifth of the miracles of the great cycles were artistic units in themselves, and must have interested their spectators, not alone by the materials displayed, but by a subject that meant something, and situations, scenes, and acting characters by which it was sometimes not at all unworthily presented. The inheritors of English literature will indeed carry away a false impression of the artistic achievements of their ancestors, if they believe that in spite of a development of five hundred years the miracle play was "rarely or never dramatic."

Even though the sacred and traditional character of the biblical narrative must have exercised a restraint upon the comic tendencies of the cyclic poet not likely to have existed in the case of the writers of saints' plays and single morals, still it is when he attempts the comic that the cyclic poet is most independent. For as soon as plays have passed into the hands of the gilds, the playwright puts himself most readily into sympathy with the literary consciousness as well as the untutored æsthetic taste of his public when he colours the spectacle, old or new, with what is preëminently popular and distinctively national. In the minster and out of it, all through the Christian year, the townsfolk of York and Chester had as much of ritual, of scriptural narrative, and tragic mystery as they wanted, and probably more; when the pageants were acted, they listened with simple credulity, no doubt, to the sacred history, and with a reverence that our age of illumination can neither emulate nor understand;—but with keenest expectation they awaited the invented episodes where tradition conformed itself to familiar life,—the impromptu sallies, the cloth-yard shafts of civic and domestic satire sped by well-known wags of town or gild. Of the appropriateness of these insertions, spectators made no question, and the dramatists themselves do not seem to have thought it necessary to apologize for æsthetic creed or practice. The objections thereto proceeded from the authorities of the church, but the very tenor and tone of them are a testimony to the importance attained by the comic element in the religious plays. It is principally the "bourdynge and japynge" which attended the "pleyinge of Goddis myraclys and werkes," that called forth the wrath of the sermon that I have already cited from the end of the fourteenth century.[31] And it was for similar reasons that Bishop Wedego ordered, in 1471, the suppression of both passion play and saints' plays within his continental diocese. In France, indeed, not only horse-play characterized the performance of the mysteries, but absolutely irrelevant farces invaded them, merely afin que le jeu soit moins fade et plus plaisans.

I have alluded to the distinctively national note that characterizes the comic contributions to the sacred plays, and I find that my opinion is confirmed by the examples cited by Klein and Creizenach. The French mystery poets, while they develop, like the English, the comic quality of the shepherd scenes, introduce the drinking and dicing element ad lib.,—and sometimes the drabbing; they make, moreover, a specialty of the humour of deformity, a characteristic which appears nowhere in the English plays. The Germans, in their turn, elaborate a humour peculiar to themselves,—elephantine, primitive, and personal. They seem to get most run out of reviling the idiosyncrasies of Jews, whose dress, appearance, manners, and speech they caricature,—even introducing Jewish dramatis personæ to sing gibberish, exploit cunning, and perform obscenities under the names of contemporary citizens of the hated race. In general a freer rein seems to have been given to the sacrilegious, grotesque, and obscene on the Continent than in England. In the Passion of A. Greban (before 1452), Herod orders Jesus into the garb of a fool; and in some of the German plays the judges dance about the cross upon which the Saviour hangs. Much of the ribaldry was of course impromptu, and on that account the more grotesque; as in the story related by Bebel of how a baker playing the part of Christ in the Processus Crucis bore the gibes of his tormentors with admirable composure, until one actor Jew insisted upon calling him a corn thief,—"Shut up," retorted the Christ, "or I'll come down and break your head with the cross." There is, of course, an occasional license in the English plays, such as the dance about the cross in the Coventry; but the excess of ribaldry, grotesquerie, and diablerie does not assault the imagination as in the continental mysteries.

4. The Contribution of Later "Marvels" and Early Secular Plays

The advance which remained to be made upon the quality of play presented in the miracle cycle before England could have an artistic comedy were threefold: first, from the collective to the single play; second, from the reproduction of traditional or accidental events to the selection of such as possessed significance and continuity; and third, from the employment of the remote in material and interest to the employment of the immediate and familiar.

To attribute to the allegorical play all improvements that were made in this transition is a mistake. Some steps in the right direction were already necessitated by the popular demand, and had been taken by the later miracle plays before the allegorical drama had itself passed out of the experimental stages,—by the Digby Magdalene, for instance. In that play, the dramatic management of a plot, invented and romantic rather than scriptural in its nature and interest, and the portrayal of commonplace events and characters side by side with the occasional allegory, are evidence not only of contemporary taste, but, as Mr. Courthope has said, of an artistic approach to the representation of fables of simple secular interest. The play, in fact, bears a close resemblance to and was apparently influenced by the popular life of St. Mary Magdalene which appeared in Caxton's translation of 1483 of the Golden Legend,—or perhaps by the French edition which Caxton follows, or the original of Voragine. In the St. Paul of the Digby collection we note a similar fusion of secular and legendary material, and an imaginative handling of the plot. Although the dramatist has buried his opportunities of psychological invention in the apostle's homily upon the deadly sins, he has at the same time crossed the border of the "moral play" rich with psychological opportunity. In the same direction of advance various steps had also been taken by other saints' plays, purely legendary, like the Sancta Katharina already mentioned, and by such a 'marvel' as the Sacrament Play, or Miracle of the Host, which we shall presently describe. A movement in advance had, moreover, been made by our early secular drama, which comprised, besides the farce interlude prepared by scholars for profane consumption, like the Interludium de Clerico et Puella, certain popular festival plays, for instance, the Hox Tuesday and Robin Hood, and plays of saints turned national heroes like St. George and St. Edward.

Concerning the plays of the miracles of saints I have already expressed the belief that, whether these workers of marvels got off with their lives or not, the representations in which they figured were, generally speaking, of the essence of comedy: the persistent optimism which in the end routs the spectres of temptation, persecution, and unbelief. This would hold, with even greater probability, of the purely legendary miracles, the nature of which is, of course, that of popular religious thought and faith in the Middle Ages, and is embalmed for us in the Golden Legend, in Eusebius and St. Jerome, and other writers from whom the legend was derived. In spite of their exceeding interest, these legendary saints' plays and pageants can be considered in this place only with brevity; but in order that the reader may better appreciate the variety of their subjects and the extent of the period over which they were acted, I subjoin a list of some that we know to have been presented.[32]

I have little doubt that the romantic combination of tragic, marvellous, and comic later noticeable upon the Elizabethan stage was in some degree due to the ancient and continuous dramatization of the irrational adventures, blood-curdling tortures, and dissonant emotions afforded by the legends of the saints. These 'marvels,' moreover, must, because of their early emancipation from ecclesiastical restraints and their adoption by the folk, have contributed to the development of the freely invented, surprising, and amusing fable which is congenial to comedy. That we have not more notices of them is owing, not to their insignificance nor to any disappearance before the advancing popularity of the craft cycles, for even the pageants of the saints still flourish in Aberdeen as late as 1531, and the plays elsewhere much later, but, as Ebert has already noted, to the fact that they were seldom presented with the magnificence and publicity of the cyclic miracles; but whenever a saint's play is taken up by a city or gild, it enjoys frequent official notice and maintains its dignity for years.