Chapter X: SHAKESPEARE AS A COMIC DRAMATIST. Edward Dowden (2)

The integral quality of the English cycle is infinitely superior to that of the French; and the separate plays are more frequently artistic units. This is due, among other things, to facts long ago pointed out by Ebert.[28] The smaller stage in England, which in turn restricted the scope of the play, made it impossible to split up the action into two or more parallel movements, such as frequently occupied the stage in France. The scene, moreover, was in England limited to earth, save when the plot expressly required the presentation of heaven or hell. It very rarely required all three at once. The conduct of the English play is therefore less dependent upon the supernatural, and the persons bear a closer resemblance to actual human beings. Neither plot nor character is distracted by the irresponsible intrusion of devils, whereas these, idling about the French stage, frequently turned the action into horse-play,--if the fool (likewise absent from the English miracle) had not already turned it into a farce out of all relation to the fable. The comic element in the English play had to exist by virtue of its relation to the main action or not at all. It was therefore compelled to conquer its position within the artistic bounds of the drama. The comic scenes of the English miracle should accordingly be regarded, not as interruptions, nor independent episodes, but as harmonious counterpoint or dramatic relief. Those who have witnessed in recent times the reproduction of the _Secunda Pastorum_ at one of the American universities bear testimony to the propriety and charm, as well as the dramatic effect, with which the foreground of the sheep-stealing fades into the radiant picture of the nativity. The pastoral atmosphere is already shot with a prophetic gleam, the fulfilment is, therefore, no shock or contrast, but a transfiguration--an epiphany. I do not forget that a less humorous analogue of the _Shepherds' Play_ exists in such French mysteries as that of the _Conception_, but I call attention to the fact that by devices, technical sometimes, sometimes naïve, elaborated through the centuries in response to the demands of a popular æsthetic consciousness, the cycles, preëminently in England, acquired a delicacy and variety of colour, an horizon, and an atmosphere, not only as wholes, but in the parts contributing to the whole.

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.

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_.

Concerning the Devil even of this later birth, many false conceptions, due to insufficient research, have obtained currency. It is commonly imagined that he was the mainspring of the play, that he came into close contact with human beings, that he represented phases of human character, that he was a comical figure,--jester, or "roister," or butt,--and that he held some fixed relation to the Vice, who was "his constant attendant," says Malone. But the Devil was the principal personage only in the earliest of the morals that survive, he rarely associated with mankind, and he assumed the human rôle, such as that of judge or sailor, only once or twice.[48] In the moral plays not more than four or five comic Devils are extant--the Titivillus of _Mankynd_, the Beelzebub of the _Nigromansir_, the Lucifer of _Like wil to Like_, and the Devil of _All for Money_; and the last of these is the only roysterer of the lot, one of the very few to serve as butt for the Vice. Such jokes as that of the Devil taking "a shrewd boy with him" from the audience in _Wisdom_ are interpolations, and it is only after the moral has passed its zenith that, as in _Like wil to Like_ and the early comedy _Friar Bacon_, the Devil carries off the Vice-clown. As early as 1486-1500 the moral play, _Nature_,--called, when printed in 1538, a goodly interlude,--dispenses with the Devil altogether, and from that time on the character appears only in some half-dozen extant plays of the kind and its derivatives, and is subordinate. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, however, the Devil is revived, and in comedies of concrete life and character he frequently swaggers as a blusterer or comic personage: in _Grim the Collier_, for instance, in the _Knack to know a Knave_, and _Histrio-Mastix_, as well as seventeenth-century plays like _The Devil is in It_ and _The Devil is an Ass_. I have said that his office in the genuine moral was not comic, neither was it satirical. It consisted largely in directing or commissioning his agents, the Vices. Professor Cushman, who makes this statement, further points out that this conception of the Devil did not develop in any popular sense, nor gain in variety in the English moral plays; but that the case is altogether dissimilar in the German and French drama of the same period, where the devils are not only numerous, but carefully differenced as representatives of the various foibles of mankind,--a rôle which was assumed in England, as we shall presently see, by the Vice.

Between the detached, and sometimes serious, Devil of the cycles and the Vice of the moral plays, ever present, dominant and comical, concrete in manifold person and guise, a middle or transitional position is occupied by the fiend of the later miracle and the demon of the earlier moral. Examples of the former are Tutivillus and his humorous associates in the Wakefield _Judicium_, Lord Lucifer of the Coventry _Council_ (who, like the Vice, euphemizes his attendant Deadly Sins), the Prynse of Dylles of the _Magdalene_, and the sailor devil of the Newcastle play; examples of the latter are the gunpowder Belial of _Perseverance_, the intriguing Lucifer of _Wisdom_, now in "devely aray," anon as a "prowde galaunt," the farcical and efficient Titivillus of _Mankynd_, and Beelzebub, the judge and buffoon of the _Nigromansir_. But though the demon of the morals bears some relation to his predecessor of the miracles, he is not borrowed from the miracles. He grows out of a common tradition.

Just as the Devil persists in spite of lapse and change through miracle play, moral, and interlude into Elizabethan comedy, so the Vice, though he did not obtain so early a footing upon the stage. There are previsions of him in the later miracles and earlier morals; he flourished in the morals of the middle period and the moral interludes, and there are traces of him in the regular comedy. He disappeared only in deference to the differentiated humours, follies, or vices of social life, of which no controlling Folly or Vice may be regarded as the sole incarnation,--for in the culture of them each of us indulges a genius of his own.

The term Vice is not used as the designation of a stock dramatic character till the appearance of Heywood's _Play of the Wether_ and _Play of Love_, before or about 1532. It is next employed in _Respublica_, 1553, and _Jacke Jugeler_, 1553-61. These and similar notices of that period, however, occur only on title-pages of plays or in lists or stage directions. The earliest mention of the Vice in the text of a play is found in _King Darius_, 1565. It is not until 1567, with the _Horestes_, that we find the designation "used consistently throughout, in the title, the list of players and the rubric."[49] But whether the generic name of Vice was introduced by the authors of these plays, or, as is more likely, by the actors, it was a well-known designation of a stock figure, especially in the moral drama from 1530 onward; and from that time was used by publishers to advance the interest of certain plays. Since, however, the idea of the Vice seems to be inseparable from that of the moral play, the character had achieved a prominence long before it was listed as a generic designation. Collier defines the moral, or moral interlude, as "A drama the characters of which are allegorical, abstract, or symbolical, and the style of which is intended to convey a lesson for the better conduct of human life." And the differencing quality of the moral is, as Mr. Pollard has said, "the contest between the personified powers of good and evil for the possession of a human soul. As the allegorical representatives of the good were the Seven Cardinal Virtues, so the representatives of the evil were the Seven Deadly Sins and their master the Devil." From these Seven Deadly Sins or Vices, the Vice _par excellence_ of the morals and interludes is without doubt descended. With the opinion of Ward and Douce, however, that he is proved to be of native English origin, I cannot unreservedly concur; nor with a statement in the thesis to which I have already referred, that the Germans and French had no Vice, but used instead the "differentiated" devil. Idleness, a Vice, though not so called, appears in the French _Bien-Avisé et Mal-Avisé_ (_c._ 1439), about as early as any Vice appears in English drama; and the four confederates of the Devil in _L'Homme Pêcheur_, Desperation, etc., perform the office, though they have not the designation, of Vice. The Hypocrisie and Simonie of Gringoire's attack upon _L'Homme Obstiné_ (Julius II.), about 1512, are as true representatives of the Vice as are the corresponding figures in _The Nigromansir_, _Thrie Estatis_, _Kyng Johan_, _Respublica_ and _Conflict of Conscience_.