Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction | Page 4

Of the
three chief cycles earliest mention is to be found at Chester, and it
carries us doubtfully back to 1268. Sir John Arnway was mayor in that
year, according to one account: but the name recurs pretty positively in
1327-8, and about that time Randall Higgenet, a monk of Chester
Abbey, wrote the plays. But in the text handed down they are of a much
later style of diction, and no doubt later in date than the Towneley or
York series.
About the real origin of these plays there can be no question. They
began in the churches as liturgy plays, which were given at the
Christmas, Easter, and other festivals, illustrating in chief the birth, life,
death and passion of Christ. We owe to Professor Skeat the recovery of
some fragments of liturgical plays in Latin, which have been reprinted
by Professor Manly, in his Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama.
The earliest example there is may be dated as early as 967, an
important landmark for us, as it is often assumed that we have no
dramatic record of any kind in these islands earlier than the Norman
Conquest. Another generation or two of research, such as the pioneer
work of Dr. Furnivall and the Early English Text Society has made
possible, and we shall distinguish clearly the two lines of growth,
French and Norman, English and Saxon, by which the town-pageants

and folk-plays of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries came to a head.
Then the grafting of the English pastoral on the church-play, after it had
been carried out into the open town or market-place, may become clear.
Then, too, one will know how charged with potential dramatic life was
the mind of him who wrote that interlude in four lines of the "Three
Queens and the Three Dead Men," which contains in it the essence of a
thousand moralities.
1st Queen. I am afeard.
2nd Queen. Lo, what I see?
3rd Queen. Me thinketh it be devils three!
1st Dead Body. I was well fair
2nd Dead Body. Such shall thou be.
3rd Dead Body. For Godes love, be-ware by me!
These breathe, not a Norman, but an Anglo-Saxon fantasy, and they
speak for themselves. But many tell-tale documents exist to mark the
concurrent Norman and English development that went on in the
English mediæval literature, and was seen and felt in the church and
guild plays, just as it went on in the towns themselves. It finds at last its
typical expression in an interlude like the Coventry Nativity-play,
reprinted in this volume. Long before the miracle-play was written in
the form it finally took, and about the time when William of Rouen,
after much trouble with his son Robert culminating at the battle of
Gerberoi, was about to return to England, the new opening in the
church in this country became one to tempt poor foreign students of
some parts and some ambition. Among these was a graduate of the
University of Paris, one Geoffrey, known to us now as Geoffrey of St.
Albans. He had been offered the post of master of the abbey school at
that place, but when he arrived after some delay--due perhaps to his
going to see a mystery play at Paris--he found the post filled up. He
then made his way to Dunstable, and while there proved his spirit by
getting up a miracle-play of "Sancta Katarina." He borrowed copes

from St. Albans in which to dress the actors; unluckily a fire took place,
and the costumes were burnt. Thereupon he seems to have rendered
himself up as it were in pious pledge for their loss, for he became a
monk. In 1119 he was elected abbot, and if we give him about
twenty-one years in which to rise to that dignity, we can date the St.
Katharine play at 1098 or 9. This passage in a life of that time is a clue
to the further history of the religious play in England. Geoffrey's
attempt to present one at Dunstable, no doubt a reproduction of one he
had seen in France, is an instance of the naturalisation process that
slowly went on.
The distinct break in the history of the miracle-play that made it from a
church into a town pageant occurred about the close of the thirteenth
century. From a performance within the church building it went on then
into the church-yard, or the adjoining close or street, and so into the
town at large. The clerics still kept a hand in its purveyance; but the
rise of the town guilds gave it a new character, a new relation to the
current life, and a larger equipment. The friendly rivalry between the
guilds, and the craftsmen's pride in not being outdone by other crafts,
helped to stimulate the