Englands Antiphon | Page 7

in the choice of adjectives. But indeed
the combination of certain words had become conventional; as "The
hard tree," "The nails great and strong," and such like.
I know I have spoiled the poem in half-translating it thus; but I have
rendered it intelligible to all my readers, have not wandered from the
original, and have retained a degree of antiqueness both in the tone and
the expression.
CHAPTER II.
THE MIRACLE PLAYS AND OTHER POEMS OF THE

FOURTEENTH CENTURY.
The oldest form of regular dramatic representation in England was the
Miracle Plays, improperly called Mysteries, after the French. To these
plays the people of England, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
owed a very large portion of what religious knowledge they possessed,
for the prayers were in an unknown tongue, the sermons were very few,
and printing was uninvented. The plays themselves, introduced into the
country by the Normans, were, in the foolish endeavour to make
Normans of Anglo-Saxons, represented in Norman French[14] until the
year 1338, when permission was obtained from the Pope to represent
them in English.
The word Miracle, in their case, means anything recorded in Scripture.
The Miracle Plays had for their subjects the chief incidents of Old and
New Testament history; not merely, however, of this history as
accepted by the Reformed Church, but of that contained in the
Apocryphal Gospels as well. An entire series of these Miracles
consisted of short dramatic representations of many single passages of
the sacred story. The whole would occupy about three days. It began
with the Creation, and ended with the Judgment. That for which the
city of Coventry was famous consists of forty-two subjects, with a long
prologue. Composed by ecclesiastics, the plays would seem to have
been first represented by them only, although afterwards it was not
always considered right for the clergy to be concerned with them. The
hypocritical Franciscan friar, in "Piers Ploughman's Creed," a poem of
the close of the same century, claims as a virtue for his order--
At markets and miracles we meddleth us never.
They would seem likewise to have been first represented in churches
and chapels, sometimes in churchyards. Later, when the actors chiefly
belonged to city-guilds, they were generally represented in the streets
and squares.
It must be borne in mind by any who would understand the influence of
these plays upon the people, that much in them appearing to us
grotesque, childish, absurd, and even irreverent, had no such

appearance in the eyes of the spectators. A certain amount of the
impression of absurdity is simply the consequence of antiquity; and
even that which is rightly regarded as absurd in the present age, will not
at least have produced the discomposing effects of absurdity upon the
less developed beholders of that age; just as the quaint pictures with
which their churches were decorated may make us smile, but were by
them regarded with awe and reverence from their infancy.
It must be confessed that there is in them even occasional coarseness;
but that the devil for instance should always be represented as a baffled
fool, and made to play the buffoon sometimes after a disgusting fashion,
was to them only the treatment he deserved: it was their notion of
"poetic justice;" while most of them were too childish to be shocked at
the discord thus introduced, and many, we may well hope, too childlike
to lose their reverence for the holy because of the proximity of the
ridiculous.
There seems to me considerably more of poetic worth scattered through
these plays than is generally recognized; and I am glad to be able to do
a little to set forth the fact. I cannot doubt that my readers will be
interested in such fragments as the scope and design of my book will
allow me to offer. Had there been no such passages, I might have
regarded the plays as but remotely connected with my purpose, and
mentioned them merely as a dramatic form of religious versification. I
quote from the Coventry Miracles, better known than either of the other
two sets in existence, the Chester Plays and those of Widkirk Abbey.
The manuscript from which they have been edited by Mr. Halliwell,
one of those students of our early literature to whom we are endlessly
indebted for putting valuable things within our reach, is by no means so
old as the plays themselves; it bears date 1468, a hundred and thirty
years after they appeared in their English dress. Their language is
considerably modernized, a process constantly going on where
transcription is the means of transmission--not to mention that the
actors would of course make many changes to the speech of their own
time. I shall modernize it a little further, but only as far as change of