Amenities of Literature Part 29

One of the most striking productions of this earnest Reformer, for its freedom, was his address to the a.s.sembled Parliament. The t.i.tle is expressive--"An Information and Pet.i.tion against the _Oppressors of the Commoners of this Realm_. Compiled and imprinted for this only purpose, that among them that have to do in the Parliament, some G.o.dly-minded men may hereat take occasion to speak more in the matter than the author was able to write." Crowley too modestly alludes to any deficiencies of his own; his "information" is ample, and doubtless conveyed to the ear of those "who had to do in the Parliament," what must have startled the oldest senator.

Who are "the oppressors of the poor commoners?" All the orders in society! the clergy--the laity--and, above all, "the Possessioners!"

This term, "the Possessioners," was a popular circulating coinage struck in the Mint of our reformer--and probably included much more than meets our ear. Every land-owner, every proprietor, was a "Possessioner."

Whether in an orderly primitive commonwealth there should be any "Possessioners," might be a debateable point in a parliament composed of "the poor Commons" themselves, with our Robin for their speaker. But however this might be, "the Possessioners of this realm," as he calls them, "could only be reformed by G.o.d working in their hearts, as he did in the primitive church, when the _Possessioners_ were contented and very willing _to sell their possessions, and give the price thereof to be common to all the faithful believers_." This seems perfectly intelligible, but our reformer judged it required some explanation--as thus:--"He would not have any to take him as though he went about to make all things common." Doubtless, there were some propagators of this new revelation of a primitive Christian community, and as little doubt that Robin himself was one; for he adds, "If the Possessioners know how they ought to bestow their possessions," and he had already instructed them, in that case "he doubted not _it should not need to have all things made common_." Such was the logic of this primitive radical reformer. A bland compromise, and a st.u.r.dy menace! This "grievance" of the "Possessioners" might be reformed, till poverty itself became a test of patriotism. They had yet to learn that to impoverish the rich is not to enrich the poor.

At that day they were bewildered in their notions of property, and their standards of value; they had neither discovered the sources nor the progress of the wealth of a nation. They murmured at importation, for which they seemed to pay the penalties, and looked on exportation as a conveyance of the national property to the foreigner. They fixed the prices at which all consumable articles were to be sold; the farmer's garner was inspected; the landlords who became graziers were denounced; forestallers and regraters haunted the privy councils of the king; the markets were never better supplied; and the people wondered why every article was dearer. About this time the prices of all commodities, both in France and England, had gradually risen. The enterprise of commerce was probably working on larger capitals. As expenses increased, the landlords held that they were ent.i.tled to higher rents. In Crowley's denunciations, "G.o.d's plague" is invoked against all "lease-mongers, pilling and polling the poor commoner." The Parliament of Henry the Eighth had legalized the interest of money at ten per cent.; Robin would have this "sinful act" repealed: loans should be gratuitous by the admonition in Luke, "Do ye lend, looking for no gain thereof." In this manner he applies the text against usury. They seemed to have no notion that he who bought ever intended to sell. This rude political economist proposed that all property should be kept stationary. No one should have a better portion than he was born to. Where then was to be found the portion of "the poor commoner" not born to any? or him whose loss of fortune was to be repaired by industry and enterprise? Prices advanced; double rents! double t.i.thes! Our radical preacher attacks his brother ecclesiastics. "We can neither come into the world, nor remain in it, nor go out of it, but they must have a fleece! Let it be lawful to perform all their ministries by ourselves; we can lay an honest man in his grave without a set of carrion-crows scenting their prey." The splendour of the ancient landed aristocracy and the prodigal luxury of the ecclesiastics more forcibly struck their minds than those silent arts of enlarged traffic which were perpetuating the wealth of the nation, and producing its concomitant evils.

While the people were thus agitated, divided, and distracted, the same state of disorder was shaking the more intelligent cla.s.ses of society.

Our mutable governments during four successive reigns gave rise to incidents which had not occurred in the annals of any other people. With the higher orders it was not only a conflict of the old and the new religions; public disputations were frequent, creeds were yet to be drawn from school-divinity, the artificial logic of syllogisms and metaphysical disputations held before mixed audiences, where the appellant, when his memory or his ac.u.men failed him, was disconcerted by the respondent; but when the secular arm was called in, alternately as each faction predominated, and the lives and properties of men were to be the result of these opinions, then men knew not what to think, nor how to act. What had served as argument and axiom within a few years, a state proclamation condemned as false and erroneous. A dereliction of principle spread as the general infection of the times, and in despair many became utterly indifferent to the event of affairs to which they could apply no other remedy than to fall in with the new course, whatever that might be.

The history of the universities exhibits this mutable picture of the nation. There were learned doctors who, under Henry the Eighth, abjured their papacy--under Edward vacillated, not knowing which side to lean on--under Mary recanted--and under Elizabeth again abjured. Many an apostate on both sides seemed converted into zealous penitents; persecutors of the friends with whom they had consorted, and deniers of the very opinions which they had so earnestly propagated. The facility with which some ill.u.s.trious names are recorded to have given way to the pressure of events seems almost incredible; but, for the honour of human nature, on either side there were some who were neither so tractable nor so infirm.

The heads of houses stood for antiquity, with all its sacred rust of time; they looked on reform with a suspicious eye, while every man in his place marked his eager ejector on the watch. Under Edward the Sixth, Dr. Richard Smith, a potent scholastic, stood forth the stern advocate of the ancient order of things. However, to preserve his professors.h.i.+p, this doctor recanted of "his popish errors;" shortly afterwards he declared that it was no recantation, but a retractation signifying nothing: to make the doctor somewhat more intelligible, and a rumour spreading that "Dr. Smith was treading in his old steps," he was again enforced to read his recantation, with an acknowledgment that "his distinction was frivolous, both terms signifying the same thing." He did not recant the professors.h.i.+p till Cranmer invited Peter Martyr from Germany to the chair of the disguised Romanist. The political Jesuit attended even the lectures of his obtrusive rival, took notes with a fair countenance, till suddenly burst the latent explosion. An armed party menaced the life of Peter Martyr, and a theological challenge was sent from the late professor to hold a disputation on "the real presence." Peter Martyr protested against the barbarous and ambiguous terms of the scholastic logic, and would only consent to explain the mystery of the sacrament by the terms of _carnaliter_ and _corporaliter_; for the Scriptures, in describing the Supper, mention the flesh and the body, not the matter and substance. He would, however, indulge them to accept the terms of _realiter_ and _substantialiter_.

There was "a great hubbub" at Oxford on this most eventful issue. The popish party and the reformers were alike hurried and busied; books and arguments were heaped together; the meanest citizen took his stand. The reforming visitors of Edward arrived; all met, all but Dr. Smith, who had flown to Scotland, on his way to Louvain. However, he had left his able deputies, who were deep in the lore in which it appears Peter Martyr required frequent aid to get on. Both the adverse parties triumphed; that is usual in these logomachies; but the Romanists account for the success of the Reformed by the circ.u.mstance that their judges were Reformers.

Such abstruse subjects connected with religious a.s.sociations, and maintained or refuted by the triumph or the levity of some haughty polemic, produced the most irreverent feelings among the vulgar. As the Reformation was then to be predominant, the common talk of the populace was diversified by rhymes and ballads; and it was held, at least by the wits, that there was "no real presence," since Dr. Smith had not dared to show himself. The papistical sacrament was familiarly called "Jack in the Box," "Worm's meat," and other ludicrous terms, one of which has descended to us in the term which jugglers use of _hocus pocus_. This familiar phrase, Anthony Wood informs us, originated in derision of the words, "Hoc est corpus," slovenly p.r.o.nounced by the mumbling priest in delivering the emblem as a reality. As opprobrious words with the populace indicate their furious acts, scandalous scenes soon followed.

The censers were s.n.a.t.c.hed from the hands of the officiating priests; ma.s.s-books were flung at their heads; all red-lettered and illuminated volumes were chopped in pieces by hatchets: nor was this done always by the populace, but by students, who in their youth and their reform knew of no better means to testify their new loyalty to the visitors of Edward. One of the more ludicrous scenes among so many shameful ones, was a funereal exhibition of the schoolmen. Peter Lombard, "the master of sentences," accompanied by Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, carried on biers, were tumbled into bonfires!

Five years after these memorable scenes, the same drama was to be repeated, performed by a different company of actors. Religion a.s.sumed a new face; that which had hardly been established was blasted by the name of heresy. All who had flourished under Edward were now called in question. The ancient tenants now ejected the newcomers, and affronted them by the same means they had themselves been affronted. No one at first knew how affairs were to turn out; some still clung to the reform; others were reverting to the old system. There were in fact for some time two religions at once in the university. The Common Prayer-book in English was, however, but faintly read, while the Ma.s.s was loudly chanted. Jewel's letter to the Queen was cautiously worded. This zealous reformer, in an unhappy moment, had yielded to his fears, and subscribed a recantation, which he soon after abjured before a Protestant congregation in Germany. When Peter Martyr heard the little bell ring to Ma.s.s, he sighed, and said, "that bell would destroy all the sound doctrine in the college." Gardiner gave him a safe-conduct homewards, which saved Peter Martyr from the insolent triumph of his rival, the scholastic Dr. Smith, and the Spanish friars with whom Mary supplied his place.

But the Marians also burned books, as likewise men!

The funeral of the schoolmen carried on their biers was too recent to be forgotten; and in return, all Bibles in English, and all the commentators on the Bible in the vernacular idiom, and which, we are told, "for their number seemed almost infinite," were thrown together in the market-place; and the lighted pyre proclaimed to Oxford the ominous flames of superst.i.tion, which consumed, not long after, opposite to Baliol College, the great unfortunate victims of reformation. There Latimer and Ridley bowed their spirits in the fires, while Cranmer, from the top of the Bocardo, witnessed the immolation, praying to G.o.d to strengthen them, and felt in antic.i.p.ation his own coming fate. Then followed expulsions and emigrations. We have a long list of names. Five years afterwards, such was the rapid change of scenery, these fugitives returned to re-possess themselves of their seats, and were again and finally the ejectors under Elizabeth.

The history of this mutable period is remarkably shown in the singular incident of Catherine, the wife of Peter Martyr, and St. Frideswide.

Peter Martyr, when celibacy was the indispensable virtue of an ecclesiastic, brought his wife into his college, and also his bawling children. This spirit of reform was an abhorrence to the conscience and the quiet of the monks. A brothel, a prost.i.tute, and a race of b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, formed, according to the old inmates, the residence of the family of the reformer. The wife of Martyr died, and was interred near the relics of St. Frideswide. In the Marian days, it was resolved that the departed female should be condemned for heresy, and, since the corpse lay not distant from "that religious virgin, St. Frideswide," it should be disinterred; and the Dean of Christ Church had the remains of Martyr's wife dug up and buried in the dunghill of his stable. Five years after, when Elizabeth reigned, the fate of the disturbed bones of the wife of Martyr was recollected, and, by command, with patience and ingenuity, the sub-dean collected from the dunghill the bones which time had disjointed, and placed them in a coffin in the cathedral till they should be reburied with greater solemnity. A search was at the same time made by the sub-dean for the bones of St. Frideswide, which were not found where they had reposed for centuries. They had been hidden by some relic-adoring Catholic, to save them from the profane hands of the triumphant heretics of Edward the Sixth. In the obscurest part of the church, after much seeking, two silken bags were discovered, which had carefully preserved the relics of St. Frideswide. The sub-dean, who seems to have been at once a Romanist and a Reformer, considered that these bones of Peter Martyr's wife and the female saint should receive equal honours. He put them in the same coffin, and they were re-interred together. This incident provoked some scoffs from the witless, and some grave comments from those who stood more in awe of the corpse of the saint than of the sinner. Thus they were buried and coupled together; and a scholar, whether a divine or a philosopher his ambiguous style will not a.s.sure us, inscribed this epitaph:--

_Hic jacet Religio c.u.m Superst.i.tione._

Did the profound writer insinuate a wish that in one grave should lie mingled together Religion with Superst.i.tion? or that they are still as inseparable as the bones of the wife of Peter Martyr with the bones of St. Frideswide? Or did he mean nothing more than the idle ant.i.thesis of a scholar's pen?

At this uncertain crisis of the alliance between Church and State, the history of our English Bible exhibits a singular picture of the Church, which, from courting the favour of the great, gradually grew into its own strength, and rested on its own independence. We perceive it first attracting the royal eye, and afterwards securing the patronage of ministers. This phenomenon is observable in the Bible commanded to be printed by Edward the Sixth. There we view his majesty's portrait printed and illumined in red. Under Elizabeth, in the same Bible, omitting only the Papistic fish-days, we are surprised by the two portraits of the Earl of Leicester, placed before the Book of Joshua, and Cecil Lord Burleigh, adorning the Psalms. This is the first edition of the Bishops' Bible. But subsequently, in 1574, we discover that the portraits of the royal favourites are both withdrawn, and a map of the Holy Land subst.i.tuted, while the arms of Archbishop Parker seem to have been let into the vacancy which Lord Burleigh erst so gloriously occupied. The map of the Holy Land unquestionably is more appropriate than the portraits of the two statesmen; but the arms of the archbishop introduced into the Scriptures indicate a more egotistic spirit in the good prelate than, perhaps, becomes the saintly humility of the pastor.

The whole is an exhibition of that worldliness which in its first weakness is uncertain of the favour of the higher powers, but which cannot conceal its triumph in its full-grown strength; the great ecclesiastic, no longer collecting portraits of ministers, stamps his own arms on the sacred volume, to ratify his own power!

FOOTNOTES:

[1] It will be found in the additional ma.n.u.scripts at the British Museum.

[2] See an article on Psalms in vol. ii. of "Curiosities of Literature."--ED.

PRIMITIVE DRAMAS.

Scriptural dramas, composed by the ecclesiastics, furnished the nations of Europe with the only drama they possessed during many centuries.

Voltaire ingeniously suggested, that GREGORY of n.a.z.ianzen, to wean the Christians of Constantinople from the dramas of Greece and Rome, composed sacred dramas; _The Pa.s.sion of Christ_ afforded one of the deepest interest. This remarkable transition might have occurred to this father of the Church, from the circ.u.mstance that the ancient Greek tragedy had originally formed a religious spectacle; and the choruses were turned into Christian hymns. Warton considered this fact as a new discovery in the obscure annals of the earliest drama.[1] The temples of the idols were for ever to be closed, for true religion and triumphant faith could show the miraculous Being who, blending the celestial with the human nature, was no longer the empty fable of the poet. The gross simplicity of the inventors, and the undisturbed faith of the people, perceived nothing profane in the representation of an awful mystery by a familiar play. Christian or Pagan, the populace remains the same, and must be amused; the invention of scriptural plays would keep alive their religious faith, and sacred dramas would be a happy subst.i.tute for those of which they were denied evermore to be spectators.

This attempt to christianise the drama did not produce an immediate effect; but the Roman dramatic art could not fail to degenerate with the Roman empire; and the actors themselves were but the descendants of the mimi, a race of infamous buffoons, objects of the horror and the excommunication of the primitive fathers.[2]

In the obscurity of the medieval period, the origin of these sacred dramas in Europe is lost. They are only incidentally noticed by those who had yet no notions of the drama. But though in England their remains are found at a much earlier period than in any other country, this seems to have been a mere accident from the utter neglect, or rather ignorance, of other nations of the origin of their own early drama; for these scriptural plays, judging by those which we possess, seem struck in the same mint, and are worked out of a common stock, and their appearance we can hardly doubt was coeval. Monks were the writers or inventors, and a general communication was kept up with Rome throughout every European realm. The subjects and the personages of these biblical dramas are treated with the same inartificial arrangement, and when translated it would be difficult to distinguish between a French, a Flemish, or an English mystery; and in their progressive state, branching out into three distinct cla.s.ses, they pa.s.sed in all countries through the same mutations.

It has been conjectured that they were first introduced into Italy, from its intercourse with the metropolis of the Greek Empire; but when we have recourse to its literary recorder, we gather nothing but ambiguity.

Tiraboschi is dubious whether the early Italian mysteries exhibited in the year 1264 were anything more than a dumb show, or the processional display of a religious pageant. Decided, on system, not to approve of such familiar exhibitions of sacred themes, the Jesuit has cautiously noticed two companies who evidently had performed a mystery, or miracle-play. In that piece there is a direction that "An angel and the virgin _sing_;" but our learned Jesuit will not venture even to surmise that "the virgin and the angel" _acted_ their parts, but merely chanted a poem.[3] The literary antiquary Signorelli inclines to fix the uncertain date of the first sacred drama so late as in 1445.[4] In France these early scriptural exhibitions were so little comprehended, that Le Grand D'Aussy, in his pretension that his nation possessed the drama in the thirteenth century, derives the origin of their mysteries from such pieces as the three fabliaux which he has given, as the earliest dramas.[5] So little conversant in his day--not a distant one--were the French antiquaries with a subject which has of late become familiar to their tastes. We learn nothing positive of their "Mysteries"

till their "Confraerie de la Pa.s.sion" was incorporated in 1402.

The earliest of these representations necessarily would be in Latin,[6]

and performed in monasteries by the ecclesiastics themselves, on festival days; in this state, how could they have been designed for the people? Aware of this difficulty, and convinced that these holy plays were in their origin intended for popular instruction and recreation, it has been conjectured that the Latin mystery was accompanied by a pantomimic show, for the benefit of the people; but an impatient concourse could be little affected by the action of the performers, almost as incomprehensible as the language was unintelligible. The people, a great animal only to be fondled in one way, as usual, worked out their own wants; they taught learned clerks the only method by which they were to be amused, by having the same thing after their own fas.h.i.+on, and to be comprehended in their own language; and the day at last arrived when even the people themselves would be actors. In the obscurity of the medieval period, the literary antiquary has often to feel his way in the darkness, till among uncertain things he fancies that he grasps the palpable. We are not furnished with precise dates, but some natural circ.u.mstances may account for the introduction of the mysteries in the _vernacular idiom_. About the eighth century, merchants carried on their trades in the great fairs, and to attract the people together, jugglers, minstrels, and buffoons were well paid, and the populace flocked. Such a mult.i.tudinous concourse appears to have created alarm among their great lords; and the ecclesiastics in vain proscribed these licentious revelries. It would be nothing more than a stroke of their accustomed policy if we imagine that, seeing the people were eager after such public entertainments, the monks should take them into their own hands; and offering a far more imposing exhibition than even the tricks of jugglers, combining piety with merriment, at once awe and delight the people by their scriptural histories and the legends of saints, in the language common to them all, thus enticing them from profane mummeries. It was a revolution in the history of the people, who, without education, seemed to grow learned in the mysteries and to be witnesses of miracles!

This account is not incongruous with another probably not less true, and which indeed has been received as indisputable among the more ancient literary historians of France, and is well known by the verses of Boileau in his "Art of Poetry." Palmers and Pilgrims--the one returning from the East, bearing in their caps the hallowed palm-branch of Palestine, and the other from some distant shrine, their chaplets and cloaks covered with the many-coloured scallops--taking their stand in thoroughfares, and leaning on their staffs, while their pendent relics and images attracted the gazer, would win an audience from among the people. These venerable itinerants or semi-saints recited their sacred narratives in verse or even in prose; they had sojourned amid "the holy places," which they described; they had their adventures to tell, serious or comic; and that many of these have entered into the great body of ROMANCE, and were caught up by the Trouveres, we can easily imagine. These strollers excited the piety and contributed to the amus.e.m.e.nt of their simple auditors, who, in the course of time, occasionally provided for these actors a stage on a green in the vicinage of their town; thus an audience of burghers and clowns, and no critics, was first formed. The ecclesiastics adopted performances so certain of popular attraction, and became the sole authors of these inartificial dramas, as they were of romances and chronicles. They had but one object, and knew to treat it only in one way. They imagined that they were instructing the people by initiating them into scriptural history, the only history then known, and by keeping the sources of popular recreation in their own hands, they looked for their success in the degree they excited their terror or their piety, and not less their ribald merriment; and for the people the profane drollery and the familiar dialogue were as consistent with their feelings as the articles of their creed, for which they would have died, as well as laughed at.

These primeval dramas are not inconsiderable objects in the philosophy of literary history. In England,[7] and probably throughout Europe, they long kept their standing; they linger in Italy, and still possess devout Spain. Not long since at Seville they had their mysteries adapted to the seasons--the Crucifixion for Good Friday, and the Nativity for Christmas, and the Creation whenever they chose; and a recent editor of the plays of Cervantes a.s.sures us, that these _Autos Sacramentales_ still form a source of amus.e.m.e.nt and edification to the pilgrims at the Shrine of St. Jago de Compostella, which it seems still receives such visitors.[8]

These scriptural plays were known in England before 1119; they formed public performances in the metropolis in 1180. They were then confined to the monasteries, and when the audience required the s.p.a.ce, they were exhibited in churches, and sometimes even in cemeteries. So true it is that the first theatres were churches and the first actors churchmen.

Some reprobated the sight of the priestly character, or the "fols clers," "mad clerks," in their grotesque disguisings; if they were sanctioned by one pope, they were condemned by another. The clergy, except on some rare occasion, when exhibiting before royalty or n.o.bility,[9] were at length not reluctant to yield their places to a new race of performers. In the metropolis they never lost their control over these representations, for they consigned them to the care of their inferior brethren, the parish clerks; but in provincial towns it was not long ere the people themselves discovered that they, with some little a.s.sistance from the neighbouring monasteries, were competent to take them into their own hands. The honest members of guilds or corporations, of mechanics and tradesmen, formed themselves into brotherhoods of actors, ambitious of displaying their mimetic faculty to their townsfolk. The play had now become the people's play, and the scale of the representation widened at every point; it was to be acted in an open plain, and it was to extend sometimes through eight days.[10] Such was the concourse of spectators, and indeed the performers were themselves a crowd. All were anxious to show themselves in some part, and such a play might require nearly a hundred personages. In a miracle-play, the whole life of a saint, from the cradle to martyrdom, was displayed in the same piece; the youth, the middle-age, and the caducity of the eminent personage required to be enacted by three different actors, so that there were the first, the second, and the third Jacob, to emulate one another, and provoke bickerings; townsfolk when acting, it appears, being querulously jealous. Something of scenical illusion was contrived, and what in the style of the green-room is termed "properties"[11] was attempted, by the description we find in the directions to the actors, and by the mischances which occurred to the unpractised performers by their clumsy machinery. Their mode of representation was so much alike, that the same sort of ludicrous accidents have come down to us relative to our native mysteries, as occurred in those of France. Bishop Percy has quoted a malicious trick played by the Flemish Owl-gla.s.s, the buffoon of the times, among his neighbours in one of these mysteries;[12] a Judas had nearly hanged himself, and the cross had nearly realised a crucifixion. Among these unlucky attempts they gilded over the face to represent the Eternal Father; the honest burgher, nearly suffocated, never appeared again; and the next day it was announced that for the future the Deity should lie "covered by a cloud."

A scaffold was built up of three or more divisions for "the stage-play:"

Paradise opened at the top, the world moved in the centre, and the yawning throat of an immeasurable dragon, as the devils run in and out, showed the bottomless pit; and whenever the protruding wings of that infernal monster approached, "and fanned" the near spectators, the terror was real.

These mysteries abound with a licentiousness to which the rude simplicity of the age was innocently insensible; a ludicrous turn is often given to the solemn incidents of holy writ; and the legend of a saint opened an unbounded scope to their mother-wit. The usual remark of the people when they had been pleased with a performance was, "To-day the mystery was very fine and devout; and the devils played most pleasantly."[13] The devils were the buffoons, and compliment one another with the most atrocious t.i.tles. The spectators, who shed tears at the torturous crucifixion, would listen with delight to the volume of reciprocal abuse voided by Satan and the Satanic, whose very names, at any other time or place, would have paralysed the intellect. This strange mixture of religious and ludicrous emotions attests that the authors and the spectators were in the childhood of society, satisfied that they were good Christians. Such were the earliest attempts of our dramatic representations; but men must tread with naked feet before they put on the sock and buskin.

Several of these annual exhibitions in provincial towns have descended to us, as those of the Chester Whitsun-plays, and others in great towns.

Originally, doubtless, written in Latin, they soon submitted to the Norman rule, vigilant to practise every means to diffuse the _French_ language; but in this state they could not deeply delight the great body of the Saxon people.[14] The monk, Ralph Higden, under the influence of that national spirit which had been evinced by some former native monks, directed his efforts to the relief of his countrymen. Thrice he journeyed to Rome to obtain the permission of his holiness to translate these holy plays into the vernacular _English_ for the people.[15] Three journeys to Rome indicate some difficulty about the propriety of this mode of edifying the populace, of which indeed there were conflicting opinions. But the time was favourable; the youthful monarch on the throne, our third Edward, was beginning to encourage the use of the vernacular idiom, and in 1338, Higden put forth mysteries in the native tongue, and thus accomplished what, in the great volume of the Polychronicon, he has so energetically exhorted should be done, for the maintenance of what he termed "the birth-tongue."

The day could not fail to arrive in the gradations of the public intellect, even such as it then was, that society would feel the want of something more directly operating on their sympathies, or their daily experience, than the unvaried scriptural tale. Mysteries however devout, by such familiar repet.i.tion, would lose something of their awfulness, as miracle-plays would satiate their tastes, as they became deficient in the freshness of invention. The first approaches of this change in their feelings are observable in the later miracle-plays, where, as a novel attraction to the old plays, abstract personations are partially introduced; but this novelty was to be carried much higher, and to include a whole set of new dramatic personages. A more intellectual faculty was now exercised in the plan of the MORALITY, or moral play.[16] This was no inconsiderable advancement in the progress of society; it was deepening the recesses of the human understanding, awakening and separating the pa.s.sions; it was one of those attempts which appear in the infancy of imagination, consisting not of human beings, but of their shadowy reflections, in the personification of their pa.s.sions,--in a word, it was allegory! To relieve the gravity of this ethical play, which was in some danger of calling on the audience for deeper attention than their amus.e.m.e.nt could afford, the morality not only retained their old favourite, the Devil, but introduced a more natural buffoon in the Vice, who performed the part of the domestic fool of our ancestors, or the clown of our pantomime.

These unsubstantial personages of allegory--these apparitions of human nature--were to a.s.sume a more bodily shape, when not only the pa.s.sions, but the individual characters whom they agitated, were exhibited in every-day life, not however yet venturing into a wide field of society, but peeping from a corner,--it was nothing more than a single act, satirical and comic, in a dialogue sustained by three or four professional characters of the times. It was called the INTERLUDE, or "_a play between_," to zest by its pleasantry the intervals of a luxurious, and sometimes a wearisome, banquet. The most dramatic interludes were the invention of JOHN HEYWOOD, the jester of Henry the Eighth. The Scottish Bard, Douglas, the Bishop of Dunkeld, alludes to these interludes, in his "Paleys of Honour."

Grete was the preis the feast royal to sene, At ease they eat, with INTERLUDES between.[17]

Such was the march of events, the steppings which were conducting the national genius to the verge of tragedy and comedy; a vast interval of time and labour separates the writers of these primitive plays from the fathers of dramatic art; yet however ludicrous to us the simplicity of the age, often these singular productions betray shrewd humour and natural emotions. To condemn them as barbarous and absurd would be forming a very inadequate notion of the influence of these earliest of our European dramas on their contemporaries. An enlightened lover of the arts has said, perhaps with great truth, that Raphael never received from his age such flattering applause, and excited such universal approbation, as did Cimabue, the rude father of his art. The first essays strike more deeply than even the masterpieces of a subsequent age after all its successful labour; for its more finished excellence depends partly on reflection, as well as on sensation.

The mystery and the morality lingered among us; but in the improved taste and literature of the court of Henry the Eighth, the facetious INTERLUDE, while it was facetious, won the royal smile. The successive agitations of the age, however, could not fail to reflect its tempers in these public exhibitions. In the reforming government of Edward the Sixth, the miracle-plays were looked on as Romish spectacles, and were fast sinking into neglect, when the clergy of the papistic queen retrograded into this whole fabulous mythology; adepts not only in the craft of miracles, but desirous, by these shows or "plays of miracles,"

to revive the taste in the imaginations of the people. The public authorities patronised what recently they had laughed at or had scorned.

On Corpus Christi day, the Lord Mayor and the Privy Council were spectators of _The Pa.s.sion of Christ_, always an affecting drama; and it was again represented before this select audience: and on St. Olave's day, the truly "miracle-play" of that legendary saint was enacted in the church dedicated to the saint.[18]

The history of the INTERLUDE more particularly marks an epoch, for it enters into our political history. Mysteries and moralities were purely religious or ethical themes, but the comic interludes took a more adventurous course; and their writers, accommodating themselves to the fas.h.i.+ons of the day, were the organs of the prevalent factions then dividing the unquiet realm.

From the earliest moment of the projected reformation or emanc.i.p.ation from the Papal dominion by Henry, we discover the players of interludes at their insidious work; but affairs were floating in that uncertain state when the new had by no means displaced the old. In 1527, Henry the Eighth was greatly diverted at an interlude where the heretic Luther and his wife were brought on the stage, and the Reformers were ridiculed.[19] The king in the Creed and the ceremonies remained a Romanist; and in 1533, a proclamation inhibits "the playing of enterludes concerning doctrines now in question and controversy."[20]

"The Defender of the Faith" was still irresolute to defend or to attack.

In 1543, an act of parliament was pa.s.sed for the control of dramatic representations; and at this later date, this reforming monarch decreed, that "no person should play in interludes any matter contrary to the doctrines of the Church of Rome!" Chronology in history is not only useful to date events, but to date the pa.s.sions of sovereigns. It was absolutely necessary for Edward the Sixth on his ascension immediately to repeal this express act of parliament of his father;[21] and then the emanc.i.p.ated interluders now, openly, with grave logic or laughing ridicule, struck at all "the Roman superst.i.tions." Hence we had Catholic and Protestant dramas. The Romanists had made very free strictures on Cromwell, Cranmer, and their followers; and on the side of the reformed we have no deficiency of oppugners of the Romish Church. Under Henry the Eighth, we have the sacred drama of _Every-man_, a single personage, by whom the writer not unaptly personifies human nature. This drama came from the Romanists to recall the auditors back to the forsaken ceremonies and shaken creed of their fathers. Under Edward the Sixth, we have _l.u.s.ty Juventus_, whom Satan and his old son Hypocrisy, with an extraordinary nomenclature of "holy things," would inveigle back to that seductive harlot, "Abominable Living," which the Reformer imagined was the favourite Dulcinea of "the false priests."[22] On the accession of Mary, this queen hastened a proclamation against the interludes of the Reformers. The term used in the proclamation looks like an ironical allusion to a word which now had long been bandied on the lips of the populace. It specifies to be for "the _reformation_ of busy meddlers in matters of religion." A strict watch was kept on the players, some of whom suffered for enacting a reformed interlude. Such plays seem to have been patronised in domestic secrecy. The interference of the Star Chamber was called forth in 1556 for the total suppression of dramatic entertainments. In many places some magistrates had slackened their pursuit after "players," and reluctantly obeyed the public authorities.

The first act of Elizabeth resembled in its character those of her brother Edward and her sister Mary, however opposite were the systems of their governments. The queen put a sudden stop to the enacting of all interludes which opposed the progress of the Reformation; there seemed to be no objection to any of a different cast; but Elizabeth lived to be an auditor of more pa.s.sionate dramas than these theological logomachies performed on the stage, where the dull poet had sometimes quoted chapter and verse in Genesis or St. Matthew.

It is not generally known that, while these Catholic and Protestant dramas were opposed to each other in England, at the same period the Huguenots in France had also entertained the derisory muse of the more comic interludes. There was, however, this difference in the fortunes of the writers; as in France the government had never reformed nor changed their position, there could have been no period which admitted of the public representation of these satirical dramas. In their dramatic history, it was long considered that the subjects of these Hugonistic dramas were too tender to bear the handling; and the brothers Parfait, in their copious "History of the French Theatre," only afford a slight indication of "the turbulent Calvinists," who had spread "pieces of dangerous heresy and fanaticism against the Pope, the cardinals, and the bishops; works which could not be noticed without profaning the page!"--and therefore they refrain from giving even their t.i.tles! It is in this spirit, and with such apologies, that historians have often castrated their own history. The existence of these dramas might have escaped our knowledge, had not the more enlightened judgment of the Duke de la Valliere supplied what the more stubborn Romanists had suppressed.