Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction

Everyman and Other Old
Religious Plays,
by Anonymous

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Everyman and Other Old Religious
Plays,
with an Introduction, by Anonymous This eBook is for the use of
anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever.
You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project
Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
www.gutenberg.org
Title: Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction
Author: Anonymous
Editor: Ernest Rhys
Release Date: October 6, 2006 [EBook #19481]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
EVERYMAN AND OTHERS ***

Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Melanie Lybarger, Curtis Weyant and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

[Illustration: POETS ARE THE TRUMPETS WHICH SING TO
BATTLE POETS ARE THE UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATORS
OF THE WORLD
SHELLEY]

"EVERYMAN"
WITH OTHER INTERLUDES, including EIGHT MIRACLE PLAYS
[Illustration: EVERY MAN I WILL GO WITH THEE BE THY
GVIDE IN THY MOST NEED TO GO BY THY SIDE]
LONDON: PUBLISHED by J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. AND IN
NEW YORK BY E. P. DUTTON & CO

First Issue of this Edition 1909 Reprinted 1910, 1912, 1914

INTRODUCTION
By craftsmen and mean men, these pageants are played, And to
commons and countrymen accustomably before: If better men and finer
heads now come, what can be said?

The pageants of the old English town-guilds, and the other mysteries
and interludes that follow, have still an uncommon reality about them if
we take them in the spirit in which they were originally acted. Their
office as the begetters of the greater literary drama to come, and their
value as early records, have, since Sharp wrote his Dissertation on the
Coventry Mysteries in 1816, been fully illustrated. But they have hardly
yet reached the outside reader who looks for life and not for literary

origins and relations in what he reads. This is a pity, for these old plays
hide under their archaic dress the human interest that all dramatic art,
no matter how crude, can claim when it is touched with our real
emotions and sensations. They are not only a primitive religious drama,
born of the church and its feasts; they are the genuine expression of the
town life of the English people when it was still lived with some
exuberance of spirits and communal pleasure. As we read them, indeed,
though it be in cold blood, we are carried out of our book, and set in the
street or market-square by the side of the "commons and countrymen,"
as in the day when Whitsuntide, or Corpus Christi, brought round the
annual pageantry to Chester, Coventry, York, and other towns.
Of the plays that follow, six come from the old town pageants,
reflecting in their variety the range of subject and the contemporary
effect of the cycles from which they are taken. They are all typical, and
show us how the scenes and characters of the east were mingled with
the real life of the English craftsmen and townsfolk who acted them,
and for whose pleasure they were written. Yet they give us only a small
notion of the whole interest and extent of these plays. We gain an idea
of their popularity both from the number of them given in one town and
the number of places at which regular cycles, or single pageants, were
represented from year to year. The York plays alone that remain are
forty-eight in all; the Chester, twenty-four or five; the Wakefield,
thirty-two or three. Even these do not represent anything like the full
list. Mr. E. K. Chambers, in an appendix to his Mediæval Stage, gives a
list of eighty-nine different episodes treated in one set or another of the
English and Cornish cycles. Then as to the gazette of the many
scattered places where they had a traditional hold: Beverley had a cycle
of thirty-six; Newcastle-on-Tyne and Norwich, each one of twelve;
while the village and parochial plays were almost numberless. In Essex
alone the list includes twenty-one towns and villages, though it is fair
to add that this was a specially enterprising shire. At Lydd and New
Romney, companies of players from fourteen neighbouring towns and
villages can be traced in the local records that stretch from a year or so
before, to eight years after, the fifteenth century.
Mrs. J. R. Green, in her history of Town Life in that century, shows us

how the townspeople mixed their workday and holiday pursuits, their
serious duties with an apparent "incessant round of gaieties." Hardly a
town but had its own particular play, acted in the town hall or the
parish churchyard, "the mayor and his brethren sitting in state." In 1411
there was a great play, From the Beginning