Chapter XII: Epilogue: Play

It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush! ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue, yet to good wine they do use bushes; and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue, nor cannot insinuate you on the behalf of a good play!

PAGEANT.

Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy,
This wide and universal theatre
Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
Wherein we play in.
II, 7, 138.

If you will see a pageant truly play’d.
III, 5, 55.

The general meaning of this word is simply a kind of dumb-show procession similar to our Lord Mayor’s Show. One of the earliest meanings of pageant referred to the stage, platform or scaffold on which such scenes were acted. It is a point of contention whether the pageant took its name from the structure or _vice versa_. In course of time, speaking parts were introduced, and then the word became to be applied indiscriminately to all kinds of plays, such as Mystery, Miracle, and Morality Plays, which had by the end of the sixteenth century become obsolete and antiquated.

In the York Miracle Cycle the Ordo Paginorum, the order of the pageants, is prefixed to the version of the plays. The Order consisted of different guilds, which took part in the plays represented on Corpus Christi day in the year 1415.

A subjoined quotation from Sir A. W. Ward’s English Dramatists would support the view that the pageant was provided with speaking parts of short duration. “Those pageants, in the generally accepted later and narrower use of the term, which consisted of moving shows devoid of either action or dialogue.” In a pageant given at Westminster Hall, before Henry VIII, an account is extant in which a dialogue is represented as taking place between the ladies and the ambassadors, also the sweet and harmonious saying of the Children. It will be observed that in these passages a germ of dialogue existed which in later years may have assumed such larger proportions as might justify these as being alluded to as plays.