A Literary History of the English People Part 53

_Mak._ I have skapyd, Gelott, oft as hard as glase.

_Wife._ Bot so long goys the pott to the water, men says, At last Comys it home broken.

I remember it well, says Mak, but it is not a time for proverbs and talk; let us do for the best. The shepherds know Mak too well not to come straight to his house; and so they do. Moans are heard; the cause being, they learn, that Mak's wife has just given birth to a child. As the shepherds walk in, Mak meets them with a cheerful countenance, and welcomes them heartily:

Bot ar ye in this towne to-day?

Now how fare ye?

Ye have ryn in the myre, and ar weytt yit; I shalle make you a fyre, if ye wille syt.

His offers are coldly received, and the visitors explain what has happened.

Nowe if you have suspowse, to Gille or to me, Com and rype oure howse!

The woman moans more pitifully than ever:

_Wife._ Outt, thefys, fro my barne! negh hym not th.o.r.e.

_Mak._ Wyst ye how she had farne, youre hartys wold be sore.

Ye do wrang, I you warne, that thus commys before To a woman that has farne, bot I say no more.

_Wife._ A my medylle!

I pray G.o.d so mylde, If ever I you begyld, That I ete this chylde That lyges in this credylle.

The shepherds, deafened by the noise, look none the less about the house, but find nothing. Their host is not yet, however, at the end of his trouble.

_Tertius Pastor._ Mak, with youre lefe, let me gyf youre barne Bot six pence.

_Mak._ Nay, do way, he slepys.

_Pastor._ Me thynk he pepys.

_Mak._ When he wakyns he wepys; I pray you go hence.

_Pastor._ Gyf me lefe hym to kys, and lyft up the clowth.

What the deville is this? he has a long snowte!

And the fraud is discovered; it was the sheep. From oaths they were coming to blows, when on a sudden, amid the stars, angels are seen, and their song is heard in the night: Glory to G.o.d, peace to earth! the world is rejuvenated.... Anger disappears, hatreds are effaced, and the rough shepherds of England take, with penitent heart, the road to Bethlehem.

IV.

The fourteenth century saw the religious drama at its height in England; the fifteenth saw its decay; the sixteenth its death. The form under which it was best liked was the form of Mysteries, based upon the Bible.

The dramatising of the lives of saints and miracles of the Virgin was much less popular in England than in France. In the latter country enormous collections of such plays have been preserved[814]; in the other the examples of this kind are very few; the Bible was the main source from which the English dramatists drew their inspiration. As we have seen, however, they did not forbear from adding scenes and characters with nothing evangelical in them; these scenes contributed, with the interludes and the facetious dialogues of the jongleurs, to the formation of comedy. Little by little, comedy took shape, and it will be found existing as a separate branch of dramatic art at the time of the Renaissance.

In the same period another sort of drama was to flourish, the origin of which was as old as the fourteenth century, namely, _Moralities_. These plays consisted in pious treatises and ethical books turned into dramas, as Mysteries offered a dramatisation of Scriptures. Psychology was there carried to the extreme, a peculiar sort of psychology, elementary and excessive at the same time, and very different from the delicate art in favour to-day. Individuals disappeared; they were replaced by abstractions, and these abstractions represented only a single quality or defect. Sins and virtues fought together and tried to draw mankind to them, which stood doubtful, as Hercules "at the starting point of a double road;" in this way, again, was manifested the fondness felt in the Middle Ages for allegories and symbols. The "Roman de la Rose" in France, "Piers Plowman" in England, the immense popularity in all Europe of the Consolation of Boethius, had already been manifestations of those same tendencies. In these works, already, dialogue was abundant, in the "Roman de la Rose" especially, where an immense s.p.a.ce is occupied by conversations between the Lover and Fals-Semblant.[815] The names of the speakers are inscribed in the margin, as if it were a real play. When he admitted into his collection of tales the dialogued story of Melibeus and Prudence, Chaucer came very near to Moralities, for the work he produced was neither a treatise nor a tale, nor a drama, but had something of the three; a few changes would have been enough to make of it a Morality, which might have been called the Debate of Wisdom and Mankind.

Abstractions had been allowed a place in the Mysteries so far back as the fourteenth century; death figures in the Woodkirk collection; in "Mary Magdalene" (fifteenth century) many abstract personages are mixed with the others: the Seven Deadly Sins, Mundus, the King of the Flesh, Sensuality, &c.; the same thing happens in the so-called Coventry collection.

This sort of drama, for us unendurable, gradually separated from Mysteries; it reached its greatest development under the early Tudors.

The authors of Moralities strove to write plays not merely amusing, as farces, then also in great favour, but plays with a useful and practical aim. By means of now unreadable dramas, virtues, religion, morals, sciences were taught: the Catholic faith was derided by Protestants, and the Reformation by Catholics.[816] The discovery, then quite new, of America was discoursed about, and great regret was expressed at its being not due to an Englishman:

O what a thynge had be than, If they that be Englyshemen Myght have ben furst of all That there shuld have take possessyon![817]

Death, as might be expected, is placed upon the stage with a particular zeal and care, and meditations are dedicated to the dark future of man, and to the gnawing worm of the charnel house.[818]

Fearing the audience might go to sleep, or perhaps go away, the science and the austere philosophy taught in these plays were enlivened by tavern scenes, and by the gambols of a clown, fool, or buffoon, called Vice, armed, as Harlequin, with a wooden dagger. And often, such is human frailty, the beholders went, remembering nothing but the mad pranks of Vice. It was in their eyes the most important character in the play, and the part was accordingly entrusted to the best actor.

Shakespeare had seen Vice still alive, and he commemorated his deeds in a song:

I am gone, sir, And anon, sir, I'll be with you again, In a trice, Like to the old Vice, Your need to sustain, Who, with dagger of lath, In his rage and his wrath, Cries, ah ha! to the devil.[819]

This character also found place on the French stage, where it was called the "Badin." Rabelais had the "Badin" in great esteem: "In this manner we see, among the jongleurs, when they arrange between them the cast of a play, the part of the Sot, or Badin, to be attributed to the cleverest and most experienced in their company."[820]

In the meanwhile, common ancestors of the various dramatic tribes, source and origin of many sorts of plays, the Mysteries, which had contributed to the formation of the tragical, romantic, allegorical, pastoral, and comic drama, were still in existence. Reformation had come, the people had adopted the new belief, but they could not give up the Mysteries. They continued to like Herod, Noah and his wife, and the tumultuous troup of devils, great and small, inhabiting h.e.l.l-mouth.

Prologues had been written in which excuses were offered on account of the traces of superst.i.tion to be detected in the plays, but conscience being thus set at rest, the plays were performed as before. The Protestant bishop of Chester prohibited the representation in 1572, but it took place all the same. The archbishop of York renewed the prohibition in 1575, but the Mysteries were performed again for four days; and some representations of them took place even later.[821] At York the inhabitants had no less reluctance about giving up their old drama; they were sorry to think that religious differences now existed between the town and its beloved tragedies. Converted to the new faith, the citizens would have liked to convert the plays too, and the margins of the ma.n.u.script bear witness to their efforts. But the task was a difficult one; they were at their wits' end, and appealed to men more learned than they. They decided that "the booke shalbe carried to my Lord Archebisshop and Mr. Deane to correcte, if that my Lord Archebisshop do well like theron," 1579.[822] My Lord Archbishop, wise and prudent, settled the question according to administrative precedent; he stored the book away somewhere, and the inhabitants were simply informed that the prohibition was maintained. The York plays thus died.

In France the Mysteries survived quite as late; but, on account of the radical effects of the Renaissance there, they had not the same influence on the future development of the drama. They continued to be represented in the sixteenth century, and the Parliament of Paris complained in 1542 of their too great popularity: parish priests, and even the chanters of the Holy Chapel, sang vespers at noon, a most unbecoming hour, and sang them "post haste," to see the sight. Six years later the performance of Mysteries was forbidden at Paris; but the cross and ladder, emblems of the "Confreres de la Pa.s.sion," continued to be seen above the gates of the "Hotel de Bourgogne," and the privilege of the Confreres, which dated three centuries back, was definitely abolished in the reign of Louis XIV., in December, 1676.[823] Moliere had then been dead for three years.

In England, at the date when my Lord Archbishop stopped the representation at York,[824] the old religious dramas had produced all their fruit: they had kept alive the taste for stage plays, they left behind them authors, a public, and companies of players. Then was growing in years, in a little town by the side of the river Avon, the child who was to reach the highest summits of art. He followed on week-days the teaching of the grammar school; he saw on Sundays, painted on the wall of the Holy Cross Chapel, a paradise and h.e.l.l similar to those in the Mysteries, angels of gold and black devils, and that immense mouth where the d.a.m.ned are parboiled, "ou d.a.m.nes sont boulus,"

as the poor old mother of Villon says in a ballad of her son's.[825]

At the date of the York prohibition, William Shakespeare was fifteen.

FOOTNOTES:

[742] "Nostra aetas prolapsa ad fabulas et quaevis inania, non modo sures et cor prost.i.tuit vanitati, sed oculorum et aurium voluptate suam mulcet desidiam.... Nonne piger desidiam instruit et somnos provocat instrumentorum suavitate, aut voc.u.m modulis, hilaritate canentium aut fabulantium gratia, sive quod turpius est ebrietate vel c.r.a.pula?...

Admissa sunt ergo spectacula et infinita tyrocinia vanitatis, quibus qui omnino otiari non possunt perniciosius occupentur. Satius enim fuerat otiari quam turpiter occupari. Hinc mimi, salii vel saliares, balatrones aemiliani, gladiatores, palaestritae, gignadii, praestigiatores, malefici quoque multi et tota joculatorum scena procedit. Quorum adeo error invaluit, ut a praeclaris domibus non arceantur, etiam illi qui obscenis partibus corporis oculis omnium eam ingerunt turpitudinem, quam erubescat videre vel cynicus. Quodque magis mirere, nec tunc ejiciuntur, quando tumultuantes inferius crebro sonitu aerem foedant, et turpiter inclusum turpius produnt.... Jucundum quidem est et ab honeste non recedit virum prob.u.m quandoque modesta hilaritate mulcere."

"Policraticus," Book i. chap. viii., in "Opera Omnia," ed. Giles, Oxford, 1848, vol. iii. p. 42.

[743] C., xvi. 205.

[744] "De Mimo et Rege Francorum," in Wright, "Latin Stories," 1842, No.

cx.x.xvii.

[745]

Le roi demaund par amour: Ou qy estes vus, sire Joglour?

E il respount sauntz pour: Sire, je su ou mon seignour.

Quy est toun seignour? fet le Roy.

Le baroun ma dame, par ma foy....

Quei est le eve apele, par amours?

L'em ne l'apele pas, eynz vint tous jours.

Concerning the horse:

Mange il bien, ce savez dire.

Ol certes, bel douz sire; Yl mangereit plus un jour d'aveyne Que vus ne frez pas tote la semeyne.

Montaiglon and Raynaud, "Recueil general des Fabliaux," vol. ii. p. 243.