Whatever may be true of the authorship of the Assembly of Ladies and the Flower and the Leaf, there were women writers in England in the middle ages. Juliana of Norwich wrote her Revelations of Divine Love before 1400. The much discussed Dame Juliana Berners, the supposed compiler of the treatise on hunting in the Book of St Albans, may be mythical, though there is no reason why a woman should not have written such a book; and a shadowy figure that disappears entirely in the sunlight is the supposed authoress of the Nut Brown Maid, for if language is capable of definite meaning, the last stanza declares unequivocally that the poem is the work of a man. But there is a poem warning young women against entering a nunnery which may be by a woman, and there is an interesting entry among the records of New Romney for 1463-1464, “Paid to Agnes Forde for the play of the Interlude of our Lord’s Passion, 6s. 8d.,” which is apparently the earliest mention of a woman dramatist in England. Finally, Margaret, countess of Richmond, the mother of Henry VII., not only aided scholars and encouraged writers, but herself translated the (spurious) fourth book of St Thomas à Kempis’s Imitatio Christi. Another Margaret, the duchess of Burgundy, it will be remembered, encouraged Caxton in his translation and printing. Women seem, indeed, to have been especially lovers of books and patrons of writers, and Skelton, if we may believe his Garland of Laurel, was surrounded by a bevy of ladies comparable to a modern literary club; Erasmus’s Suffragette Convention may correspond to no reality, but the Learned Lady arguing against the Monk for the usefulness and pleasure derived from books was not an unknown type. Women were capable of many things in the middle ages. English records show them to have been physicians, churchwardens, justices of the peace and sheriffs, and, according to a satirist, they were also priests.
The most original and powerful poetry of the 15th century was composed in popular forms for the ear of the common people and was apparently written without conscious artistic purpose. Three classes of productions deserve special attention,—songs and carols, popular ballads and certain dramatic compositions. The songs and carols belong to a species which may have existed in England before the Norman Conquest, but which certainly was greatly modified by the musical and lyric forms of France. The best of them are the direct and simple if not entirely artless expressions of personal emotion, and even when they contain, as they sometimes do, the description of a person, a situation, or an event, they deal with these things so subjectively, confine themselves so closely to the rendering of the emotional effect upon the singer, that they lose none of their directness or simplicity. Some of them deal with secular subjects, some with religious, and some are curious and delightful blendings of religious worship and aspiration with earthly tenderness for the embodiments of helpless infancy and protecting motherhood which gave Christianity so much of its power over the affections and imagination of the middle ages. Even those which begin as mere expressions of joy in the Yule-tide eating and drinking and merriment catch at moments hints of higher joys, of finer emotions, and lift singer and hearer above the noise and stir of earth. Hundreds of songs written and sung in the 15th century must have perished; many, no doubt, lived only a single season and were never even written down; but chance has preserved enough of them to make us wonder at the age which could produce such masterpieces of tantalizing simplicity.
The lyrics which describe a situation form a logical, if not a real transition to those which narrate an episode or an event. The most famous of the latter, the Nut Brown Maid, has often been called a ballad, and “lyrical ballad” it is in the sense established by Coleridge and Wordsworth, but its affinities are rather with the song or carol than with the folk-ballad, and, like Henryson’s charming Robin and Malkin, it is certainly the work of a man of culture and of conscious artistic purpose and methods. Unaccompanied, as it is, by any other work of the same author, this poem, with its remarkable technical merits, is an even more astonishing literary phenomenon than the famous single sonnet of Blanco White. It can hardly be doubted that the author learned his technique from the songs and carols.
The folk-ballad, like the song or carol, belongs in some form to immemorial antiquity. It is doubtless a mistake to suppose that any ballad has been preserved to us that is a purely communal product, a confection of the common knowledge, traditions and emotions of the community wrought by subconscious processes into a song that finds chance but inevitable utterance through one or more individuals as the whole commune moves in its molecular dance. But it is equally a mistake to argue that ballads are essentially metrical romances in a state of decay. Both the matter and the manner of most of the best ballads forbid such a supposition, and it can hardly be doubted that in some of the folk-ballads of the 15th century are preserved not only traditions of dateless antiquity, but formal elements and technical processes that actually are derived from communal song and dance. By the 15th century, however, communal habits and processes of composition had ceased, and the traditional elements, formulae and technique had become merely conventional aids and guides for the individual singer. Ancient as they were, conventional as, in a sense, they also were, they exercised none of the deadening, benumbing influence of ordinary conventions. They furnished, one may say, a vibrant framework of emotional expression, each tone of which moved the hearers all the more powerfully because it had sung to them so many old, unhappy, far-off things, so many battles and treacheries and sudden griefs; a framework which the individual singer needed only to fill out with the simplest statement of the event which had stirred his own imagination and passions to produce, not a work of art, but a song of universal appeal. Not a work of art, because there are scarcely half a dozen ballads that are really works of art, and the greatest ballads are not among these. There is scarcely one that is free from excrescences, from dulness, from trivialities, from additions that would spoil their greatest situations and their greatest lines, were it not that we resolutely shut our ears and our eyes, as we should, to all but their greatest moments. But at their best moments the best ballads have an almost incomparable power, and to a people sick, as we are, of the ordinary, the usual, the very trivialities and impertinences of the ballads only help to define and emphasize these best moments. In histories of English literature the ballads have been so commonly discussed in connexion with their rediscovery in the 18th century, that we are apt to forget that some of the very best were demonstrably composed in the 15th and that many others of uncertain date probably belong to the same time.
Along with the genuine ballads dealing with a recent event or a traditional theme there were ballads in which earlier romances are retold in ballad style. This was doubtless inevitable in view of the increasing epic tendency of the ballad and the interest still felt in metrical romances, but it should not mislead us into regarding the genuine folk-ballad as an out-growth of the metrical romance.
Besides the ordinary epic or narrative ballad, the 15th century produced ballads in dramatic form, or, perhaps it were better to say, dramatized some of its epic ballads. How commonly this was done we do not know, but the scanty records of the period indicate that it was a widespread custom, though only three plays of this character (all concerning Robin Hood) have come down to us. These plays had, however, no further independent development, but merely furnished elements of incident and atmosphere to later plays of a more highly organized type. With these ballad plays may also be mentioned the Christmas plays (usually of St George) and the sword-dance plays, which also flourished in the 15th century, but survive for us only as obscure elements in the masques and plays of Ben Jonson and in such modern rustic performances as Thomas Hardy has so charmingly described in The Return of the Native.
The additions which the 15th century made to the ancient cycles of Scripture plays, the so-called Mysteries, are another instance of a literary effort which spent itself in vain (see [Drama]). The most notable of these are, of course, the world renowned comic scenes in the Towneley (or Wakefield) Plays, in the pageants of Cain, of Noah and of the Shepherds. In none of these is the 15th century writer responsible for the original comic intention; in the pageants of Cain and of the Shepherds fragments of the work of a 14th century writer still remain to prove the earlier existence of the comic conception, and that it was traditional in the Noah pageant we know from the testimony of Chaucer’s Miller; but none the less the 15th century writer was a comic dramatist of original power and of a skill in the development of both character and situation previously unexampled in England. The inability of Lydgate to develop a comic conception is strikingly displayed if one compares his Pageant for Presentation before the King at Hereford with the work of this unknown artist. But in our admiration for this man and his famous episode of Mak and the fictitious infant, we are apt to forget the equally fine, though very different qualities shown in some of the later pageants of the York Plays. Such, for example, is the final pageant, that of the Last Judgment, a drama of slow and majestic movement, to be sure, but with a large and fine conception of the great situation, and a noble and dignified elocution not inadequate to the theme.
The Abraham and Isaac play of the Brome MS., extant as a separate play and perhaps so performed, which has been so greatly admired for its cumulative pathos, also belongs demonstrably to this century. It is not, as has been supposed, an intermediate stage between French plays and the Chester Abraham and Isaac, but is derived directly from the latter by processes which comparison of the two easily reveals. Scripture plays of a type entirely different from the well-known cyclic mysteries, apparently confined to the Passion and Resurrection and the related events, become known to us for the first time in the records of this century. Such plays seem to have been confined to the towns of the south, and, as both their location and their structure suggest, may have been borrowed from France. In any event, the records show that they flourished greatly and that new versions were made from time to time.
Another form of the medieval drama, the Morality Play, had its origin in the 15th century,—or else very late in the 14th. The earliest known examples of it in England date from about 1420. These are the Castle of Perseverance and the Pride of Life. Others belonging to the century are Mind, Will and Understanding, Mankind and Medwall’s Nature. There are also parts of two pageants in the Ludus Coventriae (c. 1460) that are commonly classed as Moralities, and these, together with the existence of a few personified abstractions in other plays, have led some critics to suppose that the Morality was derived from the Mystery by the gradual introduction of personified abstractions in the place of real persons. But the two kinds of plays are fundamentally different, different in subject and in technique; and no replacement of real persons by personifications can change a Mystery into a Morality. Moreover, the Morality features in Mysteries are later than the origin of the Morality itself and are due to the influence of the latter. The Morality Play is merely a dramatized allegory, and derives its characters and its peculiar technique from the application of the dramatic method to the allegory, the favourite literary form of the middle ages. None of the 15th century Moralities is literature of the first rank, though both the Castle of Perseverance and Pride of Life contain passages ringing with a passionate sincerity that communicates itself to the hearer or reader. But it was not until the beginning of the 16th century that a Morality of permanent human interest appeared in Everyman, which, after all, is a translation from the Dutch, as is clearly proved by the fact that in the two prayers near the end of the play the Dutch has complicated but regular stanzas, whereas the English has only irregularly rhymed passages.
Besides the Mysteries and Moralities, the 15th century had also Miracle Plays, properly so called, dealing with the lives, martyrdoms and miracles of saints. As we know these only from records of their performance or their mere existence—no texts have been preserved to us, except the very curious Play of the Sacrament—it is impossible to speak of their literary or dramatic qualities. The Miracle Play as a form was, of course, not confined to the 15th century. Notwithstanding the assertions of historians of literature that it died out in England soon after its introduction at the beginning of the 12th century, its existence can be demonstrated from c. 1110 to the time of Shakespeare. But records seem to indicate that it flourished especially during this period of supposed barrenness.