Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction | Page 6

are from the life, and
contrast well with the stilted and rather tiresome prophets. The scenes
at the babe's crib when the offerings are made of the shepherds' pipe,
old hat, and mittens, are both droll and tender.
The tragic counterparts of these scenes are those where the Three

Executioners work their pitiless task to an end at the Crucifixion, or
where the Three Maries go to the grave afterwards in the Cornish
mystery, or where Isaac bids his father bind his eyes that he shall not
see the sword. It was for long the fashion to say, as Sir Walter Scott did,
that these plays had little poetic life, or human interest in them. But
they are, at their best, truly touched with essential emotions, with
humour, terror, sorrow, pity, as the case may be. Dramatically they are
far more alive at this moment, than the English drama of the
mid-nineteenth century.
In the Cornish mysteries we lose much by having to use a translation.
But something of the spirit and life survive in spite of it, and one
detached passage from another of the plays, that of the Crucifixion, is
printed in the appendix, which loses nothing by being compared with
the treatment in other miracle-plays. Also in the Appendix will be
found an interesting note from Norris's Ancient Cornish Drama, on the
mode in which the Cornish mysteries were played; and a brief account
by Mr. Jenner of the trilogy contained in that work.
There remains John Bayle's play of God's Promises. Its author was
born at the sea-doomed city of Dunwich in Suffolk, in 1495. Destined
for the church, he showed his obstinacy early by marrying in defiance
of his cloth. He was lucky and unlucky in being a protégé of Thomas
Cromwell, and had to fly the country on that dangerous agent's death.
He returned when the new order was established, and became Bishop
of Ossory, had to suffer and turn exile for his tenets again in Mary's
reign; but found safe harbourage for his latter years at Canterbury,
where he died. He wrote, on his own evidence, more than twenty plays,
of which God's Promises, the Life of John the Baptist, and King John, a
history play of interest as a pioneer, are best known. He himself called
God's Promises a tragedy, but unless the sense of Sodom hanging in the
balance, while Abraham works down to its lowest point the
diminishing ratio of the just to be found there, or of David's appearing
before the Pater Coelestis as the great judge, of dramatic or tragic
emotion there is little indeed. But Bayle's rhetoric easily ran to the edge
of suspense, as in the opening of his seventh act, where he puts the
dramatic question in the last line:--

I have with fearcenesse mankynde oft tymes corrected, And agayne I
have allured hym by swete promes. I have sent sore plages, when he
hath me neglected, And then by and by, most confortable swetnes. To
wynne hym to grace, bothe mercye and ryghteousnes I have exercysed,
yet wyll he not amende. Shall I now lose hym, or shall I hym defende?
And what could be finer than the setting he gives to the antiphon, O
Oriens Splendor, at the end of the second act?
To turn from Bayle's play to the heart-breaking realities of Everyman is
like turning from a volume of all too edifying sermons to the last
chapters of one of the gospels. Into the full history of this play, opening
a difficult question about the early relations between Dutch and English
writers and printers, there is no room here to go. The Dutch
Everyman--Elckerlijk--was in all probability the original of the English,
and it was certainly printed a few years earlier. Richard Pynson, who
first imprinted the English play at the Sign of the George in Fleet Street,
was printing at his press there from the early years of the sixteenth
century. The play itself may have been written, and first performed, in
English, as in Dutch, a generation or more before.
It was written, no doubt, like most of the plays in this volume, by a
churchman; and he must have been a man of profound imagination, and
of the tenderest human soul conceivable. His ecclesiastical habit
becomes clear enough before the end of the play, where he bids
Everyman go and confess his sins. Like many of the more poignant
scenes and passages in the miracle-plays that follow it, this morality too
leaves one exclaiming on how good a thing was the plain English of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The relation of the several miracle-plays here printed to the
town-cycles from which they come will be seen at a glance on
reference to the tables of pageants that appear in