MIRACLES -INTERFERENCE OF THE GILDS THE CYCLIC IDEA
'THE HARROWING OF HELL' THE FOUR GREAT CYCLES-THEIR
INTERRELATION-THE COMIC AND ALLEGORICAL ELEMENTS THE
THE MORALITY — THREE TYPES: (A) THE
'PATERNOSTER,' 'CREED,' AND 'SACRAMENT' PLAYS; (B) THE
CASTELL OF PERSEVERANCE,' ETC.; (c) THIRD TYPE: ITS CHAR-
ACTERISTICS -THE TERM INTERLUDE

DIGBY MYSTERIES

- LATER INFLUENCES SKELTON'S PLAYS-THE CORNISH MIRACLES-THE DRAMA IN SCOTLAND EARLY REFERENCES CONSIDERATION OF DRAMATIC REMAINS OF DUNBAR AND LYNDSAY-THE 'DROICHIS PART OF THE PLAY'- -THE SATYRE OF THE THRIE ESTAITIS.'

THE early English drama, though it illustrates in many respects the same progression of the dramatic idea as Comparison the French, does not show the elasticity with the French. or the rapidity of that development. The process of secularisation is slower; it is not till the fourteenth century, and hardly even then, that the writers of the English Miracles show courage to break with the strict traditions of Biblical story. The English drama did not take so kindly to the comic, but

maintained, with one or two notable exceptions, a general tone of seriousness. Thus, while the allegorical style of the Morality soon became in the hands of the French players but a poor excuse for the humorous treatment of ordinary life, it never lost its didactic dulness in the northern drama. Characters like Rex Humanitas and Gude Counsell were so dear to their public as almost to exclude the more real figures like Pathelin or Phlipot. There is therefore some fitness in the fact that Scotland, which has shown the least dramatic bent of almost any nation, has produced, in Lyndsay's Satire of the Thrie Estaitis, the most complete, perhaps the best, single example of the early drama; and not the less fittingly in that form which is intrinsically the most undramatic. As a result of these limitations the early comedy of England does not stand in such close relationship to the Elizabethan comedy as the French comedy of the Sots and Basochiens does to the drama of Molière and his successors.

The term
Miracle.

The name 'Mystery' was not applied to the religious drama in England; it is an academic refinement as modern as Dodsley's time. The usual term throughout is 'Miracle' or 'Miracle Play' (the wife of Bath speaks generally of "playes of miracles"), whether it refer to an authorised spectacle in a Church, or "a syght of synne" in "weyis and grenys," as described in the fourteenth-century Handlyng Synne. In France, in the fifteenth century, there was something of the same comprehensive use of the word Mystère for all varieties

of the religious drama.

The Mystery triumphed

in England too, but the old-fashioned name, which had been adopted at the introduction of the foreign Miracles, continued to be used long after it had become technically inappropriate.

Early Miracles.

The English drama dates, in a literary sense, from the close of the thirteenth century, immediately after the institution, by Papal authority, of the Festival of Corpus Christi. Before that time all is conjecture. Of the Miracle of S. Katharine (Ludus de S. Katharina) played at Dunstable, c. 1110, as recorded by Matthew of Paris, we have no information; nor have we any details of the "repraesentationes miraculorum" which William Fitz-Stephen mentions as having been acted in London towards the close of that century. It would appear from a consideration of these and other stray facts that down to the dawn of the fourteenth century the religious drama in England was exotic, and was written and played by the clergy; and further, that such drama as was in vogue was entirely religious. Beyond a hint of the later Morality in the single plays of the Anglo-Norman Guillaume Herman (d. 1170) and Archbishop Langton,2 there is no suspicion of any dramatic quality in the dull tale of post-Conquest literature.

In the early decades of the fourteenth century— after the confirmation of the institution of the Festival of Corpus Christi by the Council of Vienne (1311)

1 Ante, p. 242, note.

2 See Dr Ward's Eng. Dram. Lit. (2nd edit.), i. 105, &c.

—the English drama begins to show secular tendencies, and at the same time to become more national in character. The secularisation is less pronounced than in France, and, for a considerable period, is rather confined to the matters of representation than expressive of any serious change in the literary mood. Interference The authorisation of the Corpus Christi of the Gilds. ceremonies was the direct cause of the interference of the Gilds, whose enthusiasm to take part in the spectacles may be said to have both made and unmade the early popular drama in England. So great was the demand by the crafts to have share in the presentation of the pageants that the episodes had to be cut and carved into small portions. Thus in the York plays the story of the Ark alone was entrusted to three crafts; the shipwrights saw to the making of the Ark, and the fishmongers (pessoners) and mariners, as experts in sea-matters, had charge of Noah and his company during their voyage on the waters.1 Adaptation of this kind, which varied at each festival, in each cycle, and in each town, naturally told against the literary quality of the plays, even though in some cases it stimulated the copying of foreign versions and gave occasional opportunities for original treatment; and when, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, a less diffuse condition prevailed, the popular taste had already begun to turn to the Moralities and later forms. The most important effect of this interference of the Gilds, against which the clerical monopolists

1 In the Chester Plays the matter of Noah is appropriately entrusted to the "water-leaders and drawers of Deey."

The cyclic idea.

protested more loudly and for a longer time than they did in France, was the elaboration of the idea of the cycle in the religious drama. This may be said to be the chief individual or national characteristic of that drama in England. Not only does the main body of the plays resolve itself into great cycles, like the four about to be mentioned, but the Miracles, which stand apart from these, are, in most cases, but the scattered fragments of other cycles. To this latter category belong such as the Grocers' Play at Norwich (Adam and Eve), Parfre's Candlemas Play, and the Newcastle Shipwrights' Play of The Building of the Ark. Though there are borrowings from the French, and though the ordering of the Chester series is obviously connected with the series of the Vieil Testament, the persistent elaboration in England of cyclic plays was the direct outcome of the enthusiasm of the Gilds. So we may say that the religious drama in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was more popular than in France, in the sense that it was more fully the expression of bourgeois vanity and love of display; but less popular than the French in the literary sense of opposition to the pious traditions The Harrowing of the Middle Ages. The Harrowing of Hell, which is our oldest vernacular drama, is an isolated example, and is presumably earlier than the period of the activity of the Gilds. Its subject is

of Hell.

1 See Dr Ward's Eng. Dram. Lit. (2nd edit.), i. 91, &c.

2 Ante, p. 254.

3 "Three extant manuscripts of it date from the reign of Edward II." (Pollard, Eng. Miracle Plays, xxi.) It extends to only 244 lines, and is printed in the appendix of Mr Pollard's volume.