Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction | Page 5

town play, till at length the elaborate cycle was
formed that began with sunrise on a June morning, and lasted until the
torch-bearers were called out at dusk to stand at the foot of the pageant.
The earliest miracle-plays that we can trace in the town cycles date
back to the early years of Edward III. The last to be performed in
London, according to Prynne, was Christ's Passion, which was given in
James I.'s reign. It was produced "at Ely House, Holborn, when
Gundomar lay there on Good Friday at night, at which there were
thousands present." This was a late survivor, however, called to life by
a last flicker of court sunshine on the occasion of the state visit of a
Spanish ambassador. Here is an extreme range of over three centuries;
and the old religious drama was still being performed in a more and
more uncertain and intermittent fashion all through the dramatic reign
of Shakspeare.
The ten plays that follow in this volume represent in brief the late
remnant of this early drama, rescued at the point where it was ending

its primitive growth, soon to give way to plays written with a
consciously artistic sense of the stage. They are headed by the great and
simple tragic masterpiece, in which they say their last word: the
morality of Everyman, the noblest interlude of death the religious
imagination of the middle ages has given to the stage. The two
following Old Testament plays, The Deluge and the Sacrifice of Isaac,
are the third and fourth pageants in the Chester series; played
respectively by the Water-Leaders and Drawers of the river Dee, and
by the Barbers and Wax-Chandlers. The next is from Coventry, a
Nativity play, played by the Shearmen and Tailors. From the Wakefield
series, preserved in the Towneley collection, we have three plays, the
famous second shepherds' play, with the Crucifixion and the Harrowing
of Hell, or extraction of souls from Hell (Extractio Animarum ab
Inferno). Two Cornish mysteries of the Resurrection are included: The
Three Maries at the Tomb, and Mary Magdalen bringing the News to
the Apostles. Then follows Bishop Bale's oracular play of God's
Promises, which is in effect a series of seven interludes strung on one
thread, united by one leading idea, and one protagonist, the Pater
Coelestis.
In these religious and moral interludes, the dramatic colouring,
however crude, is real and sincere. The humours of a broad
folk-comedy break through the scriptural web continually in the guild
plays like those in which Noah the shipbuilder, or the proverbial three
shepherds, appear in the pageant. Noah's unwilling wife in the Chester
Deluge, and Mak's canny wife in the Wakefield shepherd's play, where
the sheep-stealing scenes reveal a born Yorkshire humorist, offer a pair
of gossips not easy to match for rude comedy. Mak's wife, like the
shepherd's in the same pastoral, utters proverbs with every other breath:
"A woman's avyse helpys at the last!" "So long goys the pott to the
water, at last comys it home broken!"
Now in hot, now in cold, Full woeful is the household, That wants a
woman!
And her play upon the old north-country asseveration, "I'll eat my
bairn,"--

If ever I you beguiled, That I eat this child That lies in this cradle,
(the child being the stolen sheep), must have caused towns-folk and
country-folk outrageous laughter. Mak's wife is indeed memorable in
her way as the Wife of Bath, Dame Quickly, or Mrs. Gamp.
There is nothing so boldly drawn in the Coventry Nativity. But there
you have a startlingly realistic treatment joined to an emotional
lyricism of the simplest charm:
Neither in halls, nor yet in bowers, Born would he not be Neither in
castles, nor yet in towers That seemly were to see.
and--
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 merrily the shepherds their pipes can blow.
In this Coventry play we have nearly all the ingredients--foreign,
liturgical, or homely English--of the composite miracle play brought
together. It bears traces of many hands; and betrays in the dialogue of
the formal characters the rubricated lines of the church play on which it
was based. The chief characters live, move and act their recognised
parts with the certainty of the folk in a nursery tale. Herod out-Herods
himself with a Blunderbore extravagance:--
I am the cause of this great light and thunder; It is through my fury that
they such noise do make. My fearful countenance, the clouds so doth
incumber That oftentimes for dread thereof, the very earth doth quake.
"Fee, fi, fo, fum!" might be the refrain of this giant's litany. The other
types are as plainly stamped. The shepherd's