1It will be found in the additional manuscripts at the British Museum.2See an article on Psalms in vol. ii. of “Curiosities of Literature.”—Ed.
1It will be found in the additional manuscripts at the British Museum.
2See an article on Psalms in vol. ii. of “Curiosities of Literature.”—Ed.
PRIMITIVE DRAMAS.
Scripturaldramas, composed by the ecclesiastics, furnished the nations of Europe with the only drama they possessed during many centuries. Voltaire ingeniously suggested, thatGregoryof Nazianzen, to wean the Christians of Constantinople from the dramas of Greece and Rome, composed sacred dramas;The Passion of Christafforded one of the deepest interest. This remarkable transition might have occurred to this father of the Church, from the circumstance 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.1The 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 substitute 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 classes, they passed 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 virginsing;” but our learned Jesuit will not venture even to surmise that “the virgin and theangel”actedtheir parts, but merely chanted a poem.3The literary antiquary Signorelli inclines to fix the uncertain date of the first sacred drama so late as in 1445.4In 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.5So 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 Passion” was incorporated in 1402.
The earliest of these representations necessarily would be in Latin,6and 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 fashion, and to becomprehended 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 circumstances may account for the introduction of the mysteries in thevernacular 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 multitudinous 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 ofRomance, and were caught up by theTrouvères, we can easily imagine. These strollers excited the piety and contributed to the amusement 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,7and 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 assures us, that theseAutos Sacramentalesstill form a sourceof amusement 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 space, 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 nobility,9were 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 assistance 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.10Such was the concourse of spectators, and indeed the performers werethemselves 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”11was 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-glass, the buffoon of the times, among his neighbours in one of these mysteries;12a 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 whichthe 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.”13The devils were the buffoons, and compliment one another with the most atrocious titles. 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 theFrenchlanguage; but in this state they could not deeply delight the great body of the Saxon people.14The monk, Ralph Higden, under the influence of that national spirit whichhad 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 vernacularEnglishfor the people.15Three 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 repetition, 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 theMORALITY, or moral play.16This was no inconsiderable advancement in the progress of society; it was deepening the recesses of the human understanding, awakening and separating the passions; 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 passions,—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 amusement 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 assume a more bodily shape, when not only the passions, 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 theINTERLUDE, 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 ofJohn 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 royál to sene,At ease they eat, withInterludesbetween.17
Grete was the preis the feast royál to sene,
At ease they eat, withInterludesbetween.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 Cimabué, 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 facetiousINTERLUDE, 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 ofThe Passion of Christ, always an affecting drama; and it was again represented before this selectaudience: 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 theINTERLUDEmore 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 fashions of the day, were the organs of the prevalent factions then dividing the unquiet realm.
From the earliest moment of the projected reformation or emancipation 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.19The 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 passed 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 passions of sovereigns. It was absolutely necessary for Edward the Sixth on his ascension immediately to repeal this express act of parliament of his father;21and then the emancipated interluders now, openly, with grave logic or laughing ridicule, struck at all “the Roman superstitions.” 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 theEighth, we have the sacred drama ofEvery-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 haveLusty 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.”22On 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 “thereformationof 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 passionate 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 couldhave 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 titles! 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 Vallière supplied what the more stubborn Romanists had suppressed. This lover of literature has favoured the curious with the interesting analysis of two rare French Protestant plays,Le Marchand Converti, in 1558; andLe Pape Malade et tirant à sa Fin, in 1561. Allowing largely for the gross invectives of the Calvinist—“les impiétés”—they display an original comic invention, and sparkle with the most lively sallies.23It is remarkable thatLe Marchand Converti, at such an early period of modern literature, is a regular comedy of five acts, introduced by a prologue in verse; odes are interspersed, and each act concludes with a chorus, whom the author calls “the company.” The classical form of this unacted play, instinct with the spirit of the new reform, betrays the work of a learned hand.
1Warton’s “Hist. of Eng. Poetry,” iii. 195, 8vo edition; but it has been suggested that, as Saint Gregory composed more poetically, this earliest sacred drama was the production of a later writer, another Gregory, bishop of Antioch,A.D.572. The dramatist, however, was an ecclesiastic, and that point only is important on the present occasion.2Tertullian,Chrysostom,Lactantius,Cyprian, and others, have vehemently declaimed against theatres and actors. It is doubtless the invectives of the Fathers which have been the true origin of the puritanic denouncement against “stage-plays” and “play-goers.” The Fathers furnished ample quotations forPrynnein his “Histriomastix.” It is, however, curious to observe that at a later day, in the thirteenth century, the great schoolman, Thomas Aquinas, greatly relaxed the prohibitions; confessing that amusement is necessary to the happiness of man, he allows the decent exercise of the histrionic art. See a curious tract, “The Stage Condemned,” which contains a collection of the opinions of the Fathers, 1698. Riccoboni, “Sur les Théâtres,” does not fail to appeal to the great schoolman.3“Tiraboschi,” iv.4These dramas subsequently formed no uncommon spectacle in the streets of Italy, whence some Italian critics have fancied that the Gothic poem of Dante—his Hell, his Purgatory, and his Paradise—was an idea caught from the threefold stage of a mystery which often fixed his musings in the streets of his own Florence. As late as in the year 1739, a mystery ofThe Damned Soul, acted by living personages, was still exhibited by a company of strollers in Turin; we have the amusing particulars in a letter by Spence.—Spence’s “Anecdotes,” 397. They have sunk to the humble state of puppet-shows, and are still exhibited at Carnival time at Venice and elsewhere.5See the note and this extraordinary blunder inFabliaux, ii. 152.6Mr. Wright has published a curious collection of Latin mysteries of the twelfth century. [For a detailed notice of other printed collections see note to “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. i. p. 352.—Ed.]7Perhaps the very last remains of such rude dramatic exhibitions are yet to be traced in our counties—about Christmas-tide, or rather old Christmas, whose decrepit age is personified. In Lancashire and Yorkshire, and also in Dorsetshire, families are visited by “the great Emperor of the Turks” and St. George of England, or by the lion-hearted Richard. After a fierce onset, ringing their tin swords, the Saracens groan and drop. The Leech appears holding his phial; from some drops the dead survive their fate, and rise for the hospitable supper. The dialogue, however, has not been so traditional as the exhibition. The curious portion of these ancient exhibitions is, therefore, totally lost in the substitutions of the rude rustics. The Wassail Songs, or the Christmas Carols, have come down with fewer losses than these ancient “Tales of the Crusaders;” for the language of emotion, and the notice of old picturesque customs, cling to the memory, and endure with their localities. But for these we must travel far from the land of the Cockneys.8Bouterwek.9The clergy long continued to assist at these exhibitions, if they did not always act in them. In 1417, anEnglish Mysterywas exhibited before the Emperor Sigismund, at the Council of Constance, on the usual subject of the Nativity. TheEnglish Bishopshad it rehearsed several days, that the actors might be perfect before their imperial audience. We are not told in what language theirEnglish Mysterywas recited; but we are furnished with a curious fact, that “the Germans consider this play as the first introduction of that sort of dramatic performance in their country.”—“Henry of Monmouth,” by the Rev. J. E. Tyler, ii. 61.10The Spanish nation, unchangeable in their customs, have retained the last remains of the ancient Mysteries in the divisions of their dramas, called “Jornadas.”11“A sheep-skin for Jews, wigs for the Apostles, and vizards for Devils,” appear in the churchwardens’ accounts at Tewkesbury, 1578, “for the players’ geers.”—“Hist. of Dramatic Poetry,” ii. 140. The same diligent inquirer has also discovered the theatrical term “properties,” in allusion to the furniture of the stage, and which is so used by Shakspeare, employed in its present sense in an ancient morality.—Ib. ii. 129.12“Reliques of Ancient Poetry,” i. 129.13“Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française.”—The proverbial phrase is accompanied by a very superfluous remark—“Ce mot a passé d’usage avec les mœurs de ces temps anciens.” See also “Dict. de Trevoux,” art.Mystère.14That the translation of the “Chester Plays” was made from theFrench, and not from theLatin, as Warton supposed, is ingeniously elucidated by Mr. Collier. In the English translation, some of the original French passages have been preserved.—“Annals of the Stage,” ii. 129.When Warton found that these plays were translated into English, he concluded that they were from the Latin. He totally forgot that the French was long the prevalent language of England. And this important circumstance, too often overlooked by preceding inquirers, has thrown much confusion in our literary history.The best account we have of Ralph Higden may be found in thefirstvolume of Lardner’s Cyclopædia on “The Early History of the English Stage,” a work of some original research, at page 193.15The earliest and rudest known miracle-play in English has been published by Mr. Halliwell—The Harrowing of Hell. It was written in the reign of Edward the Second, and is a curious instance of the childhood of the drama.16The reign of Henry the Sixth may he fixed upon as the epoch of a new species of dramatic representation, known by the name of a moral.—Collier, i. 23.17The reader may gratify his curiosity, and derive considerable amusement, from the skilful analysis of primitive dramas, both manuscript and printed, which Mr.Collierhas drawn up with true dramatic taste. There are also copious specimens in a curious article on Heywood in the volume on “The English Drama” of Lardner’s Cyclopædia,—the labour of a learned antiquary. [One of Heywood’s Interludes was printed by the Percy Society from his MS. in the British Museum, under the editorial care of Mr. Fairholt; who prefixed an analysis with copious extracts from his other Interludes.] The progress of the drama was similar both in France and England, yet our vivacious neighbours seem to have invented a peculiar burlesque piece of their own, under the title ofSotties, and whose chief personage takes the quality ofPrince des Sots; andLa Mère Sotte, who is represented with her infantSots. These pieces still retained their devout character, with an intermixture of profane and burlesque scenes, highly relished by the populace. “Ils le nommèrent par un quolibet vulgaire,Jeux de Pois pilez, et ce fut selon toutes les apparences à cause de mélange du sacré et du profane qui régnait dans ces sortes de jeux.” The cant phrase which the people coined for this odd mixture of sacred and farcical subjects, ofMashed Peas, may lose its humour with us, but we find by Bayle, art. “D’Assoucy,” that they were collected and printed under this title, and fetched high prices among collectors. TheseSottieswere acted by a brotherhood calling themselvesEnfans sans Soucy.—Parfait, “Hist. du Théâtre Français,” i. 52. One of their chief composers wasPierre Gringoire, of whose rareSottiesI have several reprints by the learned Abbé Caron. Gringoire invented and performed hisSotties, in ridicule of the Pope, on a scaffold or stage, to charm his royal master, Louis the Twelfth, in 1511; for an ample list of his gay satires see “Biog. Universelle,” art. “Gringoire.”18Strype’s “Mem. of Eccles. Hist.,” iii. 379.19“Annals of the Stage,” i. 107.20Warton’s “Hist. of Eng. Poetry,” iii. 428, 8vo.21Rastell’s “Collection of Statutes,” fo. 32—d.22Both these ancient dramas are reprinted in Hawkins’ “Origin of the English Drama.” Many such dramas remain in manuscript.23“Bibliothèque du Théâtre Français,” iii. 263, ascribed to the Duke de la Vallière. He has preserved many passages exquisitely humorous. He felt awkwardly in performing his duty to his readers, after what his predecessors, Messieurs Parfait, had declared;—and, to calm the terrors ofles personnes scrupuleuses, it is amusing to observe his plea, or his apology, for noticing these admirable antipapistic satires:—“They are outrageous and abound with impieties; but they are extremely well written for their time, and truly comic. I considered that I could not avoid giving these extracts, were it only to show to what lengths the first pretended reformers carried their unreasonable violence against the holy Father, and the court of Rome.” The apology for their transcription, if not more ingenuous, is at least more ingenious than the apology for their suppression.
1Warton’s “Hist. of Eng. Poetry,” iii. 195, 8vo edition; but it has been suggested that, as Saint Gregory composed more poetically, this earliest sacred drama was the production of a later writer, another Gregory, bishop of Antioch,A.D.572. The dramatist, however, was an ecclesiastic, and that point only is important on the present occasion.
2Tertullian,Chrysostom,Lactantius,Cyprian, and others, have vehemently declaimed against theatres and actors. It is doubtless the invectives of the Fathers which have been the true origin of the puritanic denouncement against “stage-plays” and “play-goers.” The Fathers furnished ample quotations forPrynnein his “Histriomastix.” It is, however, curious to observe that at a later day, in the thirteenth century, the great schoolman, Thomas Aquinas, greatly relaxed the prohibitions; confessing that amusement is necessary to the happiness of man, he allows the decent exercise of the histrionic art. See a curious tract, “The Stage Condemned,” which contains a collection of the opinions of the Fathers, 1698. Riccoboni, “Sur les Théâtres,” does not fail to appeal to the great schoolman.
3“Tiraboschi,” iv.
4These dramas subsequently formed no uncommon spectacle in the streets of Italy, whence some Italian critics have fancied that the Gothic poem of Dante—his Hell, his Purgatory, and his Paradise—was an idea caught from the threefold stage of a mystery which often fixed his musings in the streets of his own Florence. As late as in the year 1739, a mystery ofThe Damned Soul, acted by living personages, was still exhibited by a company of strollers in Turin; we have the amusing particulars in a letter by Spence.—Spence’s “Anecdotes,” 397. They have sunk to the humble state of puppet-shows, and are still exhibited at Carnival time at Venice and elsewhere.
5See the note and this extraordinary blunder inFabliaux, ii. 152.
6Mr. Wright has published a curious collection of Latin mysteries of the twelfth century. [For a detailed notice of other printed collections see note to “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. i. p. 352.—Ed.]
7Perhaps the very last remains of such rude dramatic exhibitions are yet to be traced in our counties—about Christmas-tide, or rather old Christmas, whose decrepit age is personified. In Lancashire and Yorkshire, and also in Dorsetshire, families are visited by “the great Emperor of the Turks” and St. George of England, or by the lion-hearted Richard. After a fierce onset, ringing their tin swords, the Saracens groan and drop. The Leech appears holding his phial; from some drops the dead survive their fate, and rise for the hospitable supper. The dialogue, however, has not been so traditional as the exhibition. The curious portion of these ancient exhibitions is, therefore, totally lost in the substitutions of the rude rustics. The Wassail Songs, or the Christmas Carols, have come down with fewer losses than these ancient “Tales of the Crusaders;” for the language of emotion, and the notice of old picturesque customs, cling to the memory, and endure with their localities. But for these we must travel far from the land of the Cockneys.
8Bouterwek.
9The clergy long continued to assist at these exhibitions, if they did not always act in them. In 1417, anEnglish Mysterywas exhibited before the Emperor Sigismund, at the Council of Constance, on the usual subject of the Nativity. TheEnglish Bishopshad it rehearsed several days, that the actors might be perfect before their imperial audience. We are not told in what language theirEnglish Mysterywas recited; but we are furnished with a curious fact, that “the Germans consider this play as the first introduction of that sort of dramatic performance in their country.”—“Henry of Monmouth,” by the Rev. J. E. Tyler, ii. 61.
10The Spanish nation, unchangeable in their customs, have retained the last remains of the ancient Mysteries in the divisions of their dramas, called “Jornadas.”
11“A sheep-skin for Jews, wigs for the Apostles, and vizards for Devils,” appear in the churchwardens’ accounts at Tewkesbury, 1578, “for the players’ geers.”—“Hist. of Dramatic Poetry,” ii. 140. The same diligent inquirer has also discovered the theatrical term “properties,” in allusion to the furniture of the stage, and which is so used by Shakspeare, employed in its present sense in an ancient morality.—Ib. ii. 129.
12“Reliques of Ancient Poetry,” i. 129.
13“Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française.”—The proverbial phrase is accompanied by a very superfluous remark—“Ce mot a passé d’usage avec les mœurs de ces temps anciens.” See also “Dict. de Trevoux,” art.Mystère.
14That the translation of the “Chester Plays” was made from theFrench, and not from theLatin, as Warton supposed, is ingeniously elucidated by Mr. Collier. In the English translation, some of the original French passages have been preserved.—“Annals of the Stage,” ii. 129.
When Warton found that these plays were translated into English, he concluded that they were from the Latin. He totally forgot that the French was long the prevalent language of England. And this important circumstance, too often overlooked by preceding inquirers, has thrown much confusion in our literary history.
The best account we have of Ralph Higden may be found in thefirstvolume of Lardner’s Cyclopædia on “The Early History of the English Stage,” a work of some original research, at page 193.
15The earliest and rudest known miracle-play in English has been published by Mr. Halliwell—The Harrowing of Hell. It was written in the reign of Edward the Second, and is a curious instance of the childhood of the drama.
16The reign of Henry the Sixth may he fixed upon as the epoch of a new species of dramatic representation, known by the name of a moral.—Collier, i. 23.
17The reader may gratify his curiosity, and derive considerable amusement, from the skilful analysis of primitive dramas, both manuscript and printed, which Mr.Collierhas drawn up with true dramatic taste. There are also copious specimens in a curious article on Heywood in the volume on “The English Drama” of Lardner’s Cyclopædia,—the labour of a learned antiquary. [One of Heywood’s Interludes was printed by the Percy Society from his MS. in the British Museum, under the editorial care of Mr. Fairholt; who prefixed an analysis with copious extracts from his other Interludes.] The progress of the drama was similar both in France and England, yet our vivacious neighbours seem to have invented a peculiar burlesque piece of their own, under the title ofSotties, and whose chief personage takes the quality ofPrince des Sots; andLa Mère Sotte, who is represented with her infantSots. These pieces still retained their devout character, with an intermixture of profane and burlesque scenes, highly relished by the populace. “Ils le nommèrent par un quolibet vulgaire,Jeux de Pois pilez, et ce fut selon toutes les apparences à cause de mélange du sacré et du profane qui régnait dans ces sortes de jeux.” The cant phrase which the people coined for this odd mixture of sacred and farcical subjects, ofMashed Peas, may lose its humour with us, but we find by Bayle, art. “D’Assoucy,” that they were collected and printed under this title, and fetched high prices among collectors. TheseSottieswere acted by a brotherhood calling themselvesEnfans sans Soucy.—Parfait, “Hist. du Théâtre Français,” i. 52. One of their chief composers wasPierre Gringoire, of whose rareSottiesI have several reprints by the learned Abbé Caron. Gringoire invented and performed hisSotties, in ridicule of the Pope, on a scaffold or stage, to charm his royal master, Louis the Twelfth, in 1511; for an ample list of his gay satires see “Biog. Universelle,” art. “Gringoire.”
18Strype’s “Mem. of Eccles. Hist.,” iii. 379.
19“Annals of the Stage,” i. 107.
20Warton’s “Hist. of Eng. Poetry,” iii. 428, 8vo.
21Rastell’s “Collection of Statutes,” fo. 32—d.
22Both these ancient dramas are reprinted in Hawkins’ “Origin of the English Drama.” Many such dramas remain in manuscript.
23“Bibliothèque du Théâtre Français,” iii. 263, ascribed to the Duke de la Vallière. He has preserved many passages exquisitely humorous. He felt awkwardly in performing his duty to his readers, after what his predecessors, Messieurs Parfait, had declared;—and, to calm the terrors ofles personnes scrupuleuses, it is amusing to observe his plea, or his apology, for noticing these admirable antipapistic satires:—“They are outrageous and abound with impieties; but they are extremely well written for their time, and truly comic. I considered that I could not avoid giving these extracts, were it only to show to what lengths the first pretended reformers carried their unreasonable violence against the holy Father, and the court of Rome.” The apology for their transcription, if not more ingenuous, is at least more ingenious than the apology for their suppression.
THE REFORMER BISHOP BALE; AND THE ROMANIST JOHN HEYWOOD, THE COURT JESTER.
Bale,Bishop of Ossory, andJohn Heywood, the court jester, were contemporaries, and both equally shared in the mutable fortunes of the satiric dramas of their times; but they themselves were the antipodes of each other: the earnest ProtestantBale, the gravest reformer, and the inflexible CatholicHeywood, noted for “his mad merry wit,” form one of those remarkable disparities which the history of literature sometimes offers.
Balewas originally educated in a monastery; he found an early patron, and professed the principles of the Reformation; and, like Luther, sealed his emancipation from Catholic celibacy by a wife, whom he tenderly describes as “his faithful Dorothea.” It was a great thing for a monk to be mated with such constancy at a time when women were usually to be described as shrews, or worse. From the day of marriage the malice of persecution haunted the hapless heretic; such personal hatreds could not fail of being mutual. He seems to have too hastily anticipated the Reformation under Henry the Eighth, for though that monarch had freed himself from “the bishop of Rome,” he had by no means put aside the doctrines, and Bale, who had already begun a series of two-and-twenty reforming interludes in his “maternal idiom,” found it advisable to leave a kingdom but half reformed. He paused not, however, till he had written a whole library against “the Papelins,” the last production always seemed the most envenomed. On the death of Henry he unexpectedly appeared before Edward the Sixth, who imagined that he had died. Bale had the misfortune to be promoted to the Irish bishopric of Ossory—to plant Protestantism in a land of Papistry! Frustrated in his unceasing fervour, Bale escaped from martyrdom by hiding himself in Dublin. The death of Edward relieved our Protestant bishop from this sad dilemma;for on the accession of Mary he flew into Switzerland. There he indulged his anti-papistical vein; the press sent forth a brood, among which might have been some of better growth, for he laboured on our British biography and literature; but as there were yet but few Protestants to record, it flowed, and sometimes overflowed, against all the friends of the Papacy; Pits, who subsequently resumed the task, a sullen and fierce Papist, in revenge omitted in the line of our illustrious Britons, Wickliffe and every Wickliffite. Such were the beginnings of our literary history. On the accession of Elizabeth, his country received back its exile; but Bale refused to be reinstated in his Irish see, and sunk into a quiet prebendary of Canterbury. Fuller has called our good bishop “Bilious Bale.” Some conceive that this bishop has suffered ill-treatment merely for having thrown out some remarkable, or abominable, invectives. Proselytes, however sincere in their new convictions and their old hatreds, both operating at once, colour their style as some do their faces, till by long use the heightened tint seems faint, and they go on deepening it, and thus at last the natural countenance is lost in the artificial mass.
If Bale were no poet, in the singular dramas we have, he at least displays a fluent invention; he tells plainly what is meant, which we like to learn; and I do not know whether it be owing to his generally indifferent verse that we sometimes are struck by an idiomatic phrase, and a richness of rhymes peculiar to himself, which sustain our attention.1
OfJohn Heywood, the favourite jester of Henry the Eighth and his daughter Mary, and the intimate of Sir Thomas More, whose congenial humour may have mingled with his own, more table-talk and promptness at reply have been handed down to us than of any writer of the times. His quips, and quirks, and quibbles are of hisage, but his copious pleasantry still enlivens; these smoothed the brow of Henry, and relaxed the rigid muscles of the melancholy Mary. He had theentréeat all times to the privy-chamber, and often to administer a strong dose of himself, which her majesty’s physicians would prescribe. He is distinguished as Heywood the epigrammatist; a title fairly won by the man who has left six centuries of epigrams, collected and adjusted as many English proverbs in his verse, besides the quaint conceits of “crossing of proverbs.”2Of these six hundred epigrams it is possible not a single one is epigrammatic: we have never had a Martial. Even when it became a fashion, to write books of epigrams half a century subsequently, they usually closed in a miserable quibble, a dull apophthegm, or at the best, like those of Sir John Harrington, in a plain story rhymed. Wit, in our sense of the term, was long unpractised, and the modern epigram was not yet discovered.
Heywood, who had flourished under Henry, on the change in the reign of Edward, clung to the ancient customs. He was a Romanist, but had he not recovered in some degree from the cecity of superstition, he had not so keenly exposed, as he has done, some vulgar impostures. It happened, however, that some unlucky jest, trenching on treason, flew from the lips of the unguarded jester; it would have hanged some—but pleasant verses promptly addressed to the young sovereign saved him at the pinch,—however, he gathered from “the council” that this was no jesting-time, and he left the country in the day that Bale was returning from his emigration under King Henry. On Mary’s accession, Bale again retired, and Heywood suddenly appeared at court. Asked by the queen “What wind blew him there?” “Two specially; the one to see your majesty!” he replied. “We thank you for that,” said the queen, “but I pray you what is the other?” “That your grace might see me!” There was shrewdness in this pleasantry, to bespeak the favour of his royal patroness. Four short years did not elapse ere Elizabeth opened her long reign,and then the merry Romanist for ever bid farewell to his native land, while Bale finally sat beside his English hearth. These were very moveable and removeable times, and no one was certain how long he should remain in his now locality.
The genius ofHeywoodcreated “The Merrie Interlude;” unlikeBale, as in all things, he never opened the Bible for a stage-play, but approaching Comedy, he became the painter of manners, and the chronicler of domestic life. Warton certainly has hastily and contradictorily censured Heywood, without a right comprehension of his peculiar subjects; yet he admired at least one of Heywood’s writings, in which, being anonymous, he did not recognise the victim of his vague statements. Warton and his followers have obscured a true genius for exuberant humour, keen irony, and exquisite ridicule, such as Rabelais and Swift would not have disdained, and have not always surpassed. One of his interludes is accessible for those who can revel in a novel scene of comic invention. This interlude is “The Four P’s; the Palmer, the Pardoner, the Poticary, and the Pedler.” Each flouts the other, and thus display their professional knaveries.3
The ludicrous strokes of this piece could never have come from a bigot to the ancient superstition, however attached to the ancient creed. We cannot tell how far the jester may have been influenced by a proclamation of 28th of Henry the Eighth, to protect “the poor innocent people from those light persons called pardoners by colour of their indulgences,” &c. He has curiously exhibited to us all the trumpery regalia of papistry; as he also exposed “The Friery” in another interlude which has all the appearance of a merry tale from Boccaccio.
So plays the jocund spirit of Heywood the Jester, in his minstrel-verse and pristine idiom; but we have now to tell another tale. Heywood is the author of a ponderous volume, and an interminable “parable” of “The Spider and the Fly.” It is said to have occupied the thoughts of the writer during twenty years. This unlucky “heir of his invention” is dressed out with a profusionof a hundred woodcuts—then rare and precious things—among which starts up the full-length of the author more than once. Warton impatiently never reached the conclusion, where the author has confided to us the secret of his incomprehensible intention. There Warton would have found that “we must understand that the spiders represent the Protestants, and the flies the Catholics; that the maid with the broom sweeping away the cobwebs (to the annoyance of their weavers) is Mary armed with the civil power, executing the commands of her Master (Christ), and her mistress (Mother Church).” We see at once all the embarrassments and barrenness of this wearying and perplexed fancy. Warton contents himself with what he calls “a sensible criticism,” taken from Harrison, a Protestant minister, and one of the partners of Holinshed’s Chronicle; it is as mordacious as a periodical criticism. “Neither he who made this book, nor any who reads it, can reach unto the meaning.” Warton, to confirm “the sensible criticism,” alleges as a proof of its unpopularity, that it was never reprinted; but it was published in 1556, and Mary died in 1558. A vindication of “the maid with the broom” might be equally unwelcome to “spiders and flies.”
How it happened that the court jester who has sent forth such volumes of mirth could have kept for years hammering at a dull and dense poem, is a literary problem which perhaps admits of a solution. We may ascribe this aberration of genius to the author’s position in society. Heywood was a Romanist from principle; that he was no bigot, his free satires on vulgar superstitions attest. But the jester at times was a thoughtful philosopher. One of his interludes isThe Play of the Weather, where the ways of Providence are vindicated in the distribution of the seasons. But “mad, merry Heywood” was the companion of many friends—Papists and Protestants—at court and in all the world over. His creed was almost whole in broken times, perhaps agreeing a little with the Protestant, and then reverting to the Romanist. In this unbalanced condition, mingling the burlesque with the solemn, unwilling to excommunicate his friend the Protestant “spider,” and intent to vindicate the Romanist “fly;” often he laid aside, and often resumed, his confusedemotions. It might require dates to settle the precise allusions; what he wrote under Henry and Edward would be of another colour than under the Marian rule. His gaiety and his gravity offuscate one another; and the readers of his longsome fiction, or his dark parallel, were puzzled, even among his contemporaries, to know in what sense to receive them. Sympathising with “the fly,” and not uncourteous to “the spider,” our author has shown the danger of combining the burlesque with the serious; and thus it happened that the most facetious genius could occupy twenty years in compounding, by fits and starts, a dull poem which neither party pretended rightly to understand.