In one shape or another, the drama, acting with or without written words, is always in existence, at least in the form of pantomime, even among the rudest peoples. The Church permitted a kind of half-ritual, half-dramatic representation of sacred scenes at a very early period: but we have no earlier relic of English written plays than the very brief "Harrowing of Hell" of the first half of the fourteenth century. There are a few speeches between our Lord and Satan, and our Lord and the released Hebrew patriarchs. A good idea of the plays of the fifteenth century may be obtained from the set called the "Townley Plays" because the manuscript belonged at one time to the old Jacobite family of Townley. It is thought to have been originally the property of the Abbey of Woodkirk or Widkirk near Wakefield, and one play, the second play representing the Shepherds at the birth of Christ, contains allusions to the country scenes near Woodkirk. The plays were acted on movable wooden stages, by the members of the various trade guilds, such as the Glovers, the Barkers (Tanners, "There is brass on the target of barkened bull\'s hide," says Scott in "Bonnie Dundee"), the Grocers, and so forth.

The plays of one town are sometimes the basis of the plays of another town, some of those of York follow those of Wakefield, and in places Wakefield borrows from York. The authors are unknown; if they were priests, these clerics had much more of broad humour than of reverence as we understand it. No doubt the plays informed the spectators on points of the scriptural story, but the religion was highly recreative. Nothing can have been more amusing to the crowd than the spectacle of their neighbours[Pg 154] playing all manner of highly laughable pranks by way of illustrating the gross, grumbling, reckless, impudent Cain; or the rustic waggeries of the local shepherds of Bethlehem. Even now the words of the plays make a man laugh aloud, in the comic parts, as he reads them. They are of the broadest farce, yet our mirth rises more from the character displayed than from mere practical buffoonery and clowning. The Tanners enacted the "Creation"; the Glovers, the "Death of Abel". Many Old Testament stories were played, the unaccomplished Sacrifice of Isaac, the story of Abraham, and so on, with the Birth, Crucifixion, and Ascension of our Lord, and the soliloquy and suicide of Judas, a fragment.

Whoever the authors may have been, they took pains to represent the most unearthly characters as very human, though the opening soliloquy of the Deity at the Creation is orthodox and majestic. The Cherubim then take up the tale, praising the Works, especially praising Lucifer, "He is so lovely and so bright!" Lucifer enters and, accepting the praise, proposes to be Lord of all and says that the Throne becomes him rarely, taking his seat on it! The bad Angels approve in the most colloquial style; the good dissent, and the bad, sent down below, express their lively regrets.

The slaying of Abel is introduced by Garcio, not a scriptural character, in an impudent speech; and then Cain enters, ploughing, cursing his horses, and wrangling with his boy, who offers to fight him. Abel enters, full of human kindness, but Cain insults him in the coarsest rustic manner, "Go to the Devil and say I bade". Abel insists that Cain should offer a burnt-sacrifice of a tenth of his corn, but Cain loves paying tithes no more than any other farmer. He grumbles in the true natural tone of the depressed agriculturist,

When all men\'s com was fair in field,
There was mine not worth a held.

The weather is such, says Cain, that the farmer owes no gratitude to providence, no tithes. He selects his worst sheaves, as pay tithe he must. The Deity intervenes, but Cain treats him with the most serene insolence, kills the remonstrating Abel with the jaw-bone of some animal, and, in short, is no more edifying than[Pg 155] Mr. Punch, whose lawless and irreverent behaviour in the popular street drama is a survival of the humour of Cain.

The "Rejoicing of the Shepherds," the second play, is much more human and various: the shepherds are full of the complaints of their condition with which Piers Plowman has made us familiar, but the provisions at their picnic are rich and various, and the adventure of Mak, the sheep stealer, is of the best comedy. Hospitably entertained by the shepherds, Mak steals a sheep, flays it, and takes it home to his wife. They put it in a cradle, and cover it with blankets, next Mak hies to the shepherds again, grumbling that his wife has a new baby. They suspect and follow him; he denies his theft, and will eat the child in the cradle, if the sheep can be found on his premises. It is found. This child, says a shepherd, has too long a snout. Mrs. Mak, with much presence of mind, admits the fact, but declares that her child is a fairy changeling: fairies stole the baby at midnight, and left this ugly substitute. The shepherds forgive Mak, for the joke\'s sake, after tossing him in a sheet.

The same story is told of Archy Armstrong, the border reiver and jester. When the shepherds go back to their flocks, the Angel sings Gloria in excelsis; and the shepherds criticize the music learnedly, "there was no crochet wrong," and imitate the air. The sacred part of the play, the Adoration, and offering of balls and toys to the new-born babe, is very brief. The play is a most humorous and lively representation of "our liberal shepherds," the sacred narrative merely affords a pretext for the gambol. England was merry England in the fifteenth century, in spite of defeats in France, murder and civil war at home, preachings and burnings of Lollards, and all the grievances of Piers Plowman, the cruelty of the great, and the greed and cunning of the Friars.

The play of "Lazarus," on the other hand, is not only solemn, closely following the words of the Gospel, but is as full as the Anglo-Saxon poem, "The Grave," of sepulchral horrors.

Of the costumes we may judge by that of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, in "The Digby Plays"—the Apostle is "dressed like an adventurous knight," and is mounted. In place of scene-shifting[Pg 156] the audience shifted from one open-air stage in the street to another. There were dances between the scenes. Paul\'s servant has a scene of banter with an ostler. He maintains that he is a gentleman\'s servant, a superior person. Says the ostler: "I saw such another gentleman with you, a barrowful he bare of horse dung... and such other gear".

There are forty characters and a crowd in the play of "Mary Magdalene," and much skill in stage management must have been needed. In this play of more than two thousand lines allegorical characters abound, including the Seven Deadly Sins; much of the Gospel story of the Magdalene is introduced, with lively scenes from the unconverted career of the Lady of the Castle of Magdala, and there is a long passage of sheer romance; we have a storm at sea; the abandonment of the King\'s wife and child on a rock; their discovery later, alive and well—in fact the story is akin to that in Shakespeare\'s "Pericles".

We see that the secular entertainment, the drama of romance, is ousting its religious occasion and pretext. In "Mary Magdalene," too, we observe that the "Miracle Play" on sacred subjects, is combined with the "Morality," the drama with allegorical characters (as in the "Romance of the Rose"), presented in flesh and blood, and therefore more entertaining than they are in the endless allegorical poems. The Morality of "Everyman" has been revived with much success in our own time. In all these plays the verse takes many rhyming forms, mainly lyric. The chief collections are the Townley, York, Chester, Digby, Coventry, and a Macro (named from an owner of the manuscript). In the Macro play, "Mankind," the actors make collections of money from the audience: they must have belonged to a professional strolling company, not to an honourable and disinterested trading guild. The piece is a gross burlesque of morality, full of blatant jests and dog-Latin rhymes.

There is a scientific Morality, an "Interlude," "The Four Elements," in which Nature, Humanity, Studious Desire, Sensual Appetite, Experience, and Ignorance play their parts. Much novel information about the dimensions of the earth and meteorology is given; Studious Desire is an apt pupil, but Sensual[Pg 157] Appetite and the Taverner offer instruction more palatable to "the Man in the Street". They introduce

little Nell
A proper wench, she danceth well,
And Jane with the black lace,
We will have bouncing Bess also.

and Humanity slinks out of the lecture room, being more concerned

to see a pretty girl,
It is a world to see her whirl
Dancing in a round,

than to observe the gyrations of the terrestrial globe.

In "Hickscorner," an interlude of the same kind, the hero has been in as many places as Widsith himself, including

the land of Rumbelow
Three mile out of hell.

Hickscorner and Free Will are worse roisterers than Humanity, and their rude waggeries make the mirth, though Free Will speaks of forswearing sack and living cleanly.

Heywood.

John Heywood is one of the few known authors of these things; he was of what is now Pembroke College, Dr. Johnson\'s College, in Oxford, and was an acquaintance of Sir Thomas More, who frankly admits that by nature he was "a giglot," a gay fellow, though, by grace, devout. Heywood was merry in mournful times, when Henry VIII began to make martyrs of Protestants, and of Catholics who were not, at any moment, of the same shade of belief as himself. The anecdotes say that Heywood saved his skin by his jests, that after Henry\'s death he amused Mary Tudor, who was not easily amused, and that he fled from persecution under Edward VI, and died abroad in the reign of Elizabeth.

His best-known piece is "The Four P\'s," a Pothecary, Pardoner, Palmer, and Pedlar. Why, asks the Pardoner, should the Palmer visit hundreds of remote shrines, while the Pardoner, at his very door, can sell him forgiveness of sins at the lowest[Pg 158] figure? He can cleanse a thousand souls for as sma............