System of dramatic exhibition

one great piece composed of a number of consecutive plays, so arranged as to
embrace the entire course of sacred history, each company taking one. The
machinery employed carried us back to the days when Thespis and his fellow-
performers-if Horace may be believed-perambulated Attica in a cart.
consisted of two movable stages, one the pageant (Greek pegma or Latin

It

pagina-plank) or platform upon which the representation was given, a term
now transferred to the show itself; and a scaffold for the spectators. The
stage for the performers was in two storeys, in the lower of which they dressed
and undressed, while the piece was acted in the upper. The scaffolds, with a
slow solemnity worthy of the Trojan Horse or the Car of Juggernaut, passed
through the town and paused at places convenient for a concourse of specta-
tors. When the representation was finished, platform and scaffold moved on, and

1

THE SACRED DRAMA ON THE STAGE

225

a new company and a new piece came forward in their place. A stage direction seems to imply that the performance was not strictly confined to the "pageant"; but that King Herod, at least when extra furious, “raged in the street." There could be little attempt at scenery, but details of costume and stage fittings are abundantly supplied by the account books of the municipalities, when these have been preserved, and are full of curiosity and interest. The representation of Paradise naturally surpassed the powers of the scenic artists of that period, but they were perfectly at home in Hell, and especial pains were taken with Hell mouth, delineated as the literal mouth of an enormous monster, and with the pitchforks and clubs of the demons. The latter implements were considerately made of wadding: but the gunpowder which the fiends are enjoined to carry about various parts of their persons, if not mere brutum fulmen, in which case it might as well have been omitted, must have been productive of considerable inconvenience to the performer. The whole of this department of the representation is a strange mixture of the terrible and the ludicrous, entirely in the spirit of the grotesque carvings of cathedral corbels; and the semblances of the fiends preserved in some contemporary delineations offer strong affinity to the figures in ancient editions of the Ars Moriendi. Elsewhere there is abundant simplicity, but no intentional irreverence; the comic scenes, coarse as they sometimes are, being confined to inferior characters, and kept apart from the main action. Music was not wanting, and some of the few songs which have been preserved possess real grace and lyrical spirit. The following are examples of the songs of shepherds at the Nativity :

As I outrode this enderes' night,

Of three jolly shepherds I saw a sight,

And all about their fold a star shone bright.

They sang terli terlow,

So meryly the shepherds their pipes can blow.

Down from heaven from heaven so high,

Of angels ther came a great company,
With mirth and joy and great solemnity,
They sang terli terlow,

So meryly the shepherds their pipes can blow.

One shepherd offers the infant Saviour his flute, another his hat, another his mittens, in language simple and quaint, but embodying the sentiment, "Take this, O Lord, 'tis all I have to give." In another version a shepherd offers his wife's old stockings, and a lad, foreseeing that the infant Christ will one day have occasion for a nuthook, presents his own :

To pull down apples, pears and plums.

Old Joseph shall not need to hurt his thumbs.

It is easy to realise how much life and colour the miracle play must have brought into the existence of medieval society, and to what extent the happy idea of making its representation the business of a particular order of the

VOL. I

1 Last.

P

NAÏVETÉ OF THE MIRACLE PLAY

227 community must have rendered it a matter of general public interest: with what anxiety Corpus Christi day must have been looked forward to; how bright and brilliant the show must have been under favourable auspices; how grievous the disappointment of bad weather; how free the criticisms of the respective guilds on the doings of their colleagues and rivals; and, in spite of ludicrous blunders and deliberate travesties, how important an educational influence the performances must have been for the unlettered man. How far misrepresentation, innocent or otherwise, could be carried, especially when a farcical element entered into the performance, may be illustrated by a scene in the mystery of Mary Magdalen (a play with much affinity to the morality, and where, though in rhyme, alliteration is systematically employed), where the Emperor Tiberius is exhibited in the act of holding a solemn service for the worship of Mahomet. The heathen priest of "Mahound" (by a singular irony of fortune the inveterate enemy of idolatry was all over Europe taken for an idol himself) is attended by a clerk, and is as particular as any clergyman of the Greek or Latin rite about the correctness of his vestments and the due decoration of his altar :

Now, my clerke Hawkyn, for love of me,

Loke fast myne awter were arayed.

Goo, ring a bellé two or three;

Lythly, childe, it be not delayd;

For here xall be a grete solemnyté ;

Loke, boy, thou do it with a brayd.'

The boy misbehaves himself, and is beaten, but upon being taken into favour again, is thus addressed by his master:

Now, boy, to my awter I wyll me dresse,
On xall my westment and myn aray.
Boy. Nor than the lesse wyll I expresse
Lyke as lengyth for the service of this day.

Leccio mahoundys, viri fortissimi saracenorum
Glabriosum ad glumendum glumandinorum:

with three more lines of gibberish followed by a free translation, ending:

Grant you grace to dye on the galowes.

This recalls. Bruce's benediction (in English) to the Abyssinian monks, “Lord send you all a halter, as he did to the Acab Saat," a turbulent ecclesiastic who had been hanged some time previously. "To which they, thinking that I was recommending them to the prayers of the departed patriarch, devoutly responded, Amen! so be it!"

Another source of misrepresentation in the religious drama was the necessity for adapting it in some respects to the comprehension of the ignorant. "As," remarks Mr. Courthope," many of the spectators would not have understood the term 'high priest,' Annas and Caiaphas are called 'bishops.' When Pilate is first approached by the leaders of the Jews he tells

1 Loud noise.

Author

ship of the religious dramas

Early
Mysteries

them they must bring their cause before him in parliament.' In order to obtain a place for setting up the cross, negotiations have to be entered into with a 'squire,' who gives a lease of Calvary, but is cheated in the transaction." Of the authors of these plays little is known.

The difficulty which they evidently experience in accommodating their matter to the restraints

of metre and rhyme, which occasionally renders them very obscure, seems to show that they were not practised writers, and the dogmatic purpose and unity of plan apparent in the York mysteries in particular would almost justify the attribution of most of them to a single author, who may have been either a layman or a cleric. The freedom of some might seem to exclude clerical authorship, but the manners of the age and the intimate association of clergy and laity must be taken into account. Many of the pieces which have come down to us as performed at different places may have been derived from some common source, now lost. At a very late period we encounter a hired professional poet, John Green, who is paid by the men of Coventry

five shillings for his play, exactly the amount awarded to the trumpeter. Perhaps the oldest example of an English mystery that has come down to us is The Harrying of Hell, founded on perhaps the only Christian legend which it is safe to ascribe to a Buddhist origin. Though a rhymed dialogue this is scarcely a dramatic piece, and would hardly have borne acting. It is simply a dispute between Christ and Satan, in the course of which Satan is