Passing to the marvel or miracle of the Host, we notice that only one in our language has survived. This Play of the Blyssyd Sacrament bears the name of one of the East Midland Croxtons, and it was composed between 1461 and 1500. Although some critics have a low opinion of the play, I venture to say that it is one of the most important in the early history of English comedy. The subject, the desecration by Jews of a wonder-working Wafer and the discomfiture and ultimate conversion of the offenders, is popular in the legend of the later Middle Ages.[33] With ours a Dutch Sacrament Play, written about the year 1500 by Smeken and acted in Breda, naturally calls for comparison; but, though the latter exhibits the miraculous power of the Host and has a certain diabolic humour, it lacks altogether the realism, the popular reproduction of Jewish malignity, and the effective close of the Croxton. The Croxton avails itself of the possibilities of the subject. The idea has a significance; the plot possesses legitimate motive, due proportions, unity ethical and æsthetic; and the conclusion is happy. The mood, by turns serious and comic, and the dramatis personæ, various and well-characterized, combine to furnish a most diverting drama of the wonderful, horrible, elevated, and commonplace. Colle's announcement of his master the leech, "a man off alle syence," who "syttyth with sum tapstere in the spence," is excellently ironical; and Master Brundych himself, like the doctor in the St. George plays, must have furnished a figure exactly suited to the popular taste. Nor is the realism confined to the intentionally comic scenes; but it is as vividly successful in the corruption of Aristorius by Jonathas and in the futile and richly avenged efforts of the Jews to torture the Host. Here certainly was a play adapted to meet the demands of its time,—exhibiting closer affiliation with the folk than with church or patron or school, acted perhaps by strolling players, an unforced product of the artistic consciousness; a play which, though it dealt with a sacred subject, still focussed itself in a single plot, discarded all material, sacred or historical, not available for its purpose, completed an alliance with the natural and the familiar, and emphasized the comic realities of life. No miracle, cyclic or individual, no allegorical drama, and no secular play of the same or previous date excels the Croxton in dramatic concept and constructive skill. Without the mediation offered by such Croxton plays, the English drama would have had "old" bridging the space between miracles, marvels, and morals of the earlier time and the comedy of Shakespeare.
The consideration of our early farce interludes may be conveniently postponed for the present in favour of the more popular plays, or shows, with which our forefathers celebrated festival occasions. Of the pageants in honour of royal entries, to which reference has already been made, it is impossible to say more here than that, developing gradually into dramatic spectacles, and at the same time retaining their symbolic character, they must have contributed to the taste for allegorical plays, the moral, and the moral interlude. If we turn to the secular shows presented on regular festivals, such as May-day, Hox Tuesday, and the Eve of St. John and St. Peter, while we may at once conclude that they were less efficient as dramas than some of which we have spoken, such as the Sacrament play, they have the advantage, from our present point of view, of indicating more directly the nature of popular demand and the primitive conditions of popular art. Indeed, Dodsley regards the mummers who commonly acted them as the earliest genuine comedians of England. Of such disguisings, masks, and mummeries there is evidence in the Wardrobe Accounts of 1389, according to which a company of twenty-one men was disguised as the Ancient Order of the Coif for a play before the king at Christmas; and of other mummings—not satiric nor in mockery of church ritual, but genial—we have mention in Stow and citations in Warton and Collier that take us to the first half of the fourteenth century. They doubtless existed much earlier, though I do not think that they anticipated the parodies of sacred rites or the ecclesiastical saints' plays.
Naturally a much-loved figure in festival games was Robin Hood, and that some kind of drama was made out of the ballads surrounding him is proved by a Ms. fragment of 1475 or earlier of Robin Hood and the Knight, and a play of Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar with a portion of Robin Hood and the Potter, printed by Copland, in 1550, as "very proper to be played in May-games."[34] These May-games occurred not only in May, but June, and gave employment to St. George and the Dragon, the Nine Worthies (at whom Shakespeare poked run in Love's Labour's Lost), the morris-dance, with its Lords and Ladies of the May, giant, hobby-horse, and sometimes devils, as well as to Robin and Little John, Maid Marian, and Friar Tuck; and they were popular through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, perhaps even earlier. If we may trust old Fenn's editing, Sir John Paston wrote in 1473 of a man whom he had kept for three years to play "Seynt Jorge and Robyn Hod and the Shryff off Nottingham." There may be even earlier mention of such plays. For, with all deference to the best of authorities, Professor Child, I cannot but think that when Bower wrote, between 1441 and 1447, of the popular "comedies and tragedies" of Robertus Hode et Litill Johanne, he had reference to acted plays, since he took pains to specify in his account of them the mimi, as well as the bardani who chanted them. These entertainments, he says, were then more popular than any other, and it is only natural to suppose that they had existed long before his time. The earliest mention of Robin in England is in Piers Plowman, 1377, and then as the subject of a ballad; but, as Warton long ago pointed out, pastoral plays of Robin et Marion had been given in France upon festival occasions before the end of the thirteenth century. Although there appears to be no similarity between the incidents of Adam de la Halle's comic opera of 1283 upon Robin and his Marion and the English stories, and although we are ignorant of the nature of the spring game, or play, of the same title, which was already an annual function in Anjou, in 1392, the principal characters and conditions of life in the two series are sufficiently similar to suggest a connection by derivation or common source. If such connection exist, it is not impossible that some kind of Robin pageant or play was known in England earlier than we ordinarily think. The ballad plays, at any rate, had attained popularity long before an artistic level was reached by the allegorical drama, and while yet the craft cycles were in their prime. Stow, in respect of Mayings, which he leads us to believe were common in the reign of Henry VI., says that the citizens of London "did fetch in May-poles with divers warlike shows, with good archers, morris-dancers, and other devices for pastime all the day long; and towards the evening they had stage-plays and bonfires in the streets." Robin Hood and his archers are the heart of a Maying devised under Henry VII. in 1505 and for Henry VIII. in 1516; and the archers of the Maying in the time of Henry VI. are suggestive of the Robin Hood as an accepted figure for some kind of pageant in the middle of the fifteenth century, when Bower was writing of "comedies and tragedies," mentioned above. The pageants and probably the plays of Robin Hood are still alive in the seventeenth century and later. Their dramatic quality was of a very primitive sort, but the plot, wherever existent, displayed sequence of motive and effect. The popular dramatist had, as in the Sacrament play and saints' plays, learned how to magnify a hero by making him the pivot of the action, how to interest the spectators in the affairs and manners of their own class, how to produce a comic effect by means of dialogue, as well as by the humour of the situation. But he knew nothing of the development of character, and in that respect, without doubt, was inferior to the contemporary author of the moral play.
Passing the Hox Tuesday play, of which we cannot be sure that it was anything more than a crude and entirely serious representation of the historic massacre which it commemorated, and of which no adequate account survives, we may turn with profit to the most popular and long-lived of English festival dramas, the St. George play. Of this Mr. Halliwell-Phillipps says that numerous versions are used in the north of England, and that they are doubtless a degraded form of an old "mystery."[35] Of course, he means legendary miracle or saint's play. Ward more accurately describes this rural drama as a combination of miracle and processional pageant. As the latter, it appears frequently to have formed part of a mumming or disguising, and was early associated with the morris-dance of May-day or Christmas. | Collier, Hist., vol. I., p. 29. | The first indubitable mention of a St. George pageant is in 1416, and would appear to refer to a "splendid dumb show" rather than a play, which, as Caxton tells us, was presented for the entertainment of Emperor Sigismund of Almayne when he "brought and gave the heart of St. George for a great and precious relique to King Harry the fifth." It is, however, more than probable that the soldier saint had figured in saints' plays, and in popular play and pageant, long before this time. He had been honoured in the eastern church even in the fourth century, and in England there had been churches and monasteries devoted to him before the Norman invasion. On account of his fabled services in the crusade he was already the patron of individual knights, and orders of chivalry and even of kingdoms, when Edward III., in the years 1348-50, built the chapel in his honour at Windsor, confirmed him as the saint and champion of England and instituted the order that still bears his name. It is likely, indeed, that the ludi exhibited before the same monarch at Christmas, 1348, were to some extent of St. George, for we read that the dragon figured extensively in them.[36] And it would appear that when, in 1415, the 23d April, St. George's Day, was "made a major double feast and ordered to be observed the same as Christmas day, all labour ceasing," his play was no new thing. From that time on, at any rate, the procession of St. George was one of the "pastimes yearly used," of which Stow tells us that they were celebrated "with disguisings, masks, and mummeries." Gilds were organized in his name, and the ceremony of 'Riding the George' spread over England. When Henry V. visited Paris, in 1420, he was appropriately welcomed with a St. George show, and the saint appears again in a pageant of 1474 performed at Coventry in honour of young Prince Edward. We have already mentioned Sir John Paston's reference to the play in 1473. A long-winded and serious German dramatization of the legend exists in an Augsburg manuscript of the end of the same century. In all probability the expensive miracle play of the saint that was acted in the croft or field at Bassingbourne in Cambridgeshire, in 1511, was of the same didactic kind, but enlivened by impromptus of the villagers who took part. St. George and the dragon were features of the May-games at London, evidently in procession, as late as 1559. There appears in Warburton's list a play of St. George for England, by Wentworth Smith, of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and in the latter part of that century, a droll called St. George and the Dragon was by way of being acted at Bartholomew Fair. The play seems from an early date to have been performed on the occasion of other festivals besides that of the Saint himself.
The versions of the play best known of recent years are the Oxfordshire, acted during the eighteenth century and taken down from an old performer in 1853, and the Lutterworth (Leicestershire) Christmas play, acted as late as 1863.[37] Professor Child, in his Ballads, mentions another, which was regularly acted on All Souls' Day at a village a few miles from Chester. I would call attention, in addition, to four others of interest; the Derbyshire Christmas play,[38] acted by mummers as late as 1849, which is fuller than any other and appears to me to retain traces of a fifteenth-century original; the two Bassingham (Lincoln) Christmas plays,[39] 1823, and the Shetland play from a 1788 Ms., recounted in Scott's novel of The Pirate. The last three make the connection between the St. George play proper and the sword play, which was undoubtedly common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and of which the Revesby version of 1779 is still extant.[40]
The following is the outline of the Derbyshire play: Enter Prologue, who is apparently the same as "noble soldier," "Slasher," or "Jack," to clear a way for St. Gay.—Enter St. Gay, announcing himself with proper bombast, pretending that "from England's ground he sprung and came," and stating his purpose, which is to find King George.—Enter King George, "in search of his enemy," St. Gay, who as "a stranger, exposed and in danger," calls upon Slasher for help.—With loud words Slasher threatens King George, who in his turn boasts of "close escapes," giants and dragons subdued, and the King of Egypt's daughter won.—They fight, and Slasher "tumbles down and dies."—Enter Doctor, who has "travelled" imaginatively and can "fetch any dead man to life again." He begins with Slasher, who signalizes his recovery by summoning the "Black Prince of Paradise, black Morocco king," to renew the fray.—"Here am I," cries that hero; it was I who "slew those seven Turks," and it is I who now will "jam King George's giblets full of holes, And in those holes put pebble stones!" George doubts the Black Prince's ability, even though he be a "champion's squire,"—they are about to fight, when Prologue intervenes with "Peace and Quietness is the best," and "Enter in, owld Beelzebub!" That personage on entering turns out to be, in dress, a kind of Devil and Vice combined, in spirit a kind of Father Christmas summoning all to drink.—This queer jumble is worth more space than I can afford it. Just a word or two in passing. St. Gay is given up by Halliwell-Phillipps as an "addition to the calendar not noticed elsewhere." But one observes that his squire is a foreigner, as his name and garb both proclaim,[41] and that he is the squire of a champion. This limits us to the three foreign champions of Christendom, and from St. Gay's second speech we discover, not only that he is San Diego of Spain, but (unless I am gravely mistaken) that some author of the various generations of authors of this play had acquaintance with Caxton's Golden Legend of 1483, where, in the Life of St. James the More, we find the original, in oddly similar terms, of one altogether unintelligible phrase used by this English makeshift for a Spanish champion.[42] Further not very definite but suggestive similarities with the Life of St. George add to the presumption that the Caxton translation of the Legenda Aurea underlies portions of this folk play. Of course a play of the martyrdom of St. George may have existed earlier still, but if, as would seem to be the case, Voragine invented the dragon, that monster cannot have played a part before 1270-90; it does not play a part even in the South English Legendary of 1285, but is prominent in Caxton's narrative.
With the play just described the Lutterworth is identical in some seven or eight passages, and save that there is no Black Prince, and that a Turkish Champion takes the place of St. Gay, the principal characters are the same. The introduction of Beelzebub and a clown, with remarks appropriate to each, would, however, indicate that this part of the play is earlier than the amalgamated Beelzebub-clown of the Derbyshire. Both plays preserve reminiscences of the crusades. As to the Oxfordshire, I can say only that it is a rigmarole from history, legend, and nursery tale, culminating in the destruction of the dragon (or Old Nick) and the appearance of Father Christmas. The Bassingham plays present the stock characters, but little of the original story. They add elements of scandal and love, however,—the former in connection with Dame Jane, who tries to fasten the paternity of her child on a "Father's Eldest Son, And heir of all his land"; and the latter in connection with a Fair Lady, who is wooed by Eldest Son, Farming Man, Lawyer, Old Man, and refuses them all, in the end apparently to accept the Fool. This part of the story is a link between the St. George plays and the sword-dance plays, as is also the Shetland, where St. George himself sustains the part of principal dancer. In the Revesby sword-dance play, acted in 1779 by morris-dancers, the Fair Lady of the Bassingham reappears as Cicely to refuse Pepper-breeches, "My father's eldest son, And heir of all his land," Ginger-breeches, Blue-breeches, the Knight of Lee, and Pickle Herring, the Lord of Pool, in favour of Rafe the Fool. Though the phraseology of the Bassingham and Revesby is occasionally the same, the latter is utterly removed from the St. George original save in the mention of dragon and worm which accompany the morris-dancers. How far back the Revesby sword-dance play may date I do not know. The dance was common on the continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and a similar performance with a fool in the middle is recorded as taking place in Ulm in 1551. The name of the merry-andrew, Pickle Herring, may possibly take us back to the first quarter of the sixteenth century. For, as is well known, it is the usual designation for the clown in the 1620 collection of plays acted by the so-called English comedians in Germany. According to Creizenach,[43] the character was introduced by Robert Reynolds, who was perhaps himself the Robert Pickelhäring mentioned in connection with an entertainment given at Torgau in 1627. Floegel and Ebeling speak of "der alte Pickelhering aus der Moralititäten des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts," as if he were the "old Vice"; but surely without justification. I know of no mention of Pickle Herring before 1620, and since he still held the stage in Löwen's Prinz Pickelhering, about the middle of the eighteenth century, it is not impossible that the character was borrowed by the English sword play at a comparatively recent date. The continuance of the Devil and his relation to the clown in these plays are a subject of historical interest, but it would be a mistake to say, as Halliwell-Phillipps has said of the Beelzebub, that either of them is "a genuine descendant of the Vice."
Perhaps I should not have stayed to make these remarks, but they will, I hope, direct attention to a phenomenon unique in the history of English drama. The St. George play is an example of how a legendary miracle, sacred in its origin, may pass into a folk drama of a national hero, and that again degenerate into a mumming or dance; and how this, oblivious of the original plot and finally of all fable, may first transform the saintly hero into a performer in a sword dance, as in the Shetland play, and then, as in the Revesby, eliminate even him and substitute a fool. Both literary career and literary indignity of this kind have been escaped by the other national saint of England, Edward the Confessor. In earlier days he figured in frequent pageants, records of which are preserved, for instance, in the Old Leet Book of Coventry, of the years 1456 and 1471, but he readily gave way to St. George and disappeared from the dramatic horizon.
5. The Devil and the Vice
The nexus between the comic qualities of the miracle plays and those of the morals cannot well be made without some discussion of the rôles of the Devil and the Vice. The treatise which I have before cited,[44] and which appears to me fairly conclusive, shows that the Devil of the English stage is originally a creation, not of folk mythology, but of theology. He is concrete, to be sure, in accordance with scriptural and legendary tradition, but in the 'mysteries' his character is almost entirely serious, not ludicrous, as appears to be vulgarly reported. The association of the genuinely comic or satirical with the conception of the Devil is first evident in later representations of that character, and then only in the case of lesser denizens of the lower world. The humorous scene in the Chester Harrowing between the demons and the alewife abandoned in hell is, for instance, as Dr. Deimling has said, a late interpolation. The Wakefield dramatist's contribution to the Judicium, of Tutivillus and his ilk, is about the only diabolic humour in the miracles; and that the satirical speech of the Coventry demon in the Conspiracy was a still later borrowing from Tutivillus, I have but little doubt. To credit the Devils of the earliest miracles with a tendency and an ability to criticise manners and morals would be just as wrong as to attribute to them a buffoonery which accrues only at a later date. Of the Mephistophelian style, more serious than Chaucer's and more satirical than Langland's, we have no historical trace before the witty Devil of Wakefield—or his maker. The humour of the miracle Devils shows itself in bombastic, grotesque, or abusive language, rather than in anything of comic utterance or incident. The uproarious laughter caused, according to tradition, by this character cannot, therefore, have depended upon the lines of the dramatist, except in so far as those consist of threats, objurgation, profanity, and the like. There is little in the asides of the printed page, or in the rare addresses of the Devil to his audience, or the deportation of souls to hell[45] to account for amusement. Rewfyn,[46] Rybald, and Tutivillus are the only humorous devil-names in the five cycles of which we have been speaking; and of the shouting and fireworks in which we are told the infernal spirits were wont to indulge, we find scarcely any mention except in the plays concerning the fall of the angels and the harrowing of hell. That the merriment of the crowd was provoked by the appearance and antics of the Devil—that is to say, by the improvisation of the actor—and his raids upon the spectators is natural to infer. The dramatists themselves did not provide for close association between the spirits of hell and living men. The Devil addresses the audience but seldom, and then, perhaps, to threaten with his club. In fact, the Devil of the old miracles, as we usually conceive him, is an anachronism created by certain historians of the drama; the buffoon roaring, pyrotechnic, and familiar, springs into prominence only with the Digby plays, and is but slowly developed in the moral plays and interludes. Though the aspiring angels of the York and Chester plays "go down" in actual fact, and the Lucifer of the former cycle complains of heat and smoke, there is no mention of hell-mouth in the account-books before 1557, nor in the stage directions of the Digby[47] before we reach the Digby Paul and Magdalene Mss. of about 1480-90; and even then the entries appear to be the insertions of some later hand. In these plays the flames of hell-mouth, the fireworks, and thunder are distinctive accessories of the Devil's presence. Still, it is not in a miracle play after all, but in a moral—the Castell of Perseverance (about 1400)—that the first stage direction of this nature is found. In the transitional miracle morals, Paul, Wisdom, Magdalene, the Devil by his own account as well as by stage direction "rores and cries." He was abusive in the Castell of Perseverance; but in the later morals or moral interludes he "rores and cries" for mere fun—in the Lusty Juventus, for instance, the Disobedient Child, and All for Money.