Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction | Page 7

the Appendix. We
may take it that all these town and country plays represent continually
used and frequently tinkered texts, that must in some cases have passed
through many piecemeal changes. In making them easy to the average
reader of to-day, who takes the place of the mediæval playgoer at a
Corpus Christi festival, their latest copyists have but followed in the

wake of a series of Tudor scribes who renewed the prompt-books from
time to time. In this process, apart from the change of spelling, the
smallest possible alteration has been made consistent with the bringing
of the text to a fair modern level of intelligibility. Old words that have
been familiarised in Malory or Shakespeare, or the Bible, or in the
Border Ballads and north-country books, or in Walter Scott, or the
modern dialect of Yorkshire, are usually allowed to stand, and words
needed to keep the rhyme, are left intact. But really hard words, likely
to delay the reader, are glossed. One Towneley play, the Extractio
Animarum, another and a most spirited example of the "Harrowing of
Hell," mysteries that thrilled the people long ago, is given in the
original spelling, as some test of the change effected in the others.
Further, in the Appendix will be found a late example of a St. George
and the Dragon doggerel Christmas play, which comes from Cornwall,
and which in a slightly varying form has been played in many shires,
from Wessex to Tyneside, within living memory. This shows us the last
state of the traditional mystery, and the English folk-play as it became
when it was left to the village wits and playwrights to produce it,
without any co-operation from the trained eye and hand of a parson or a
learned clerk. Of some other forms of our earlier drama, not omitting
the Welsh interludes of Twm o'r Nant, it may be possible to give
illustrations in a later book, companion to this. Only so much is given
here as may interest the reader, who is a playgoer first of all, and asks
for entertainment and a light in these darker passages of the old British
drama.
* * * * *
Finally the amplest acknowledgments are due to those who have
worked upon these present plays, including Mrs. C. Richardson, M.A.,
Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Roberts, Miss Hawkins, G. R., and Mr. Ezra Pound;
and to the various editors of the "Early English Text Society," who
have made this book possible. Especially should tribute be paid to Dr.
Furnivall for his permission to make use of the Society's texts, and his
interest in this uncertain attempt to capture the outer public too, and
attract it to that ever-living literature to which he has devoted so many
days of his young old-age.

E. R.
* * * * *
Everyman: a moral play otherwise called: A Treatyse how the hye fader
of heven sendeth dethe to somon every creature to come and gyve a
counte of theyr lyves in this worlde], translated from the Dutch play,
Elckerlijk, 1520 (?); published in Dodsley's Select Collection of Old
English Plays, etc., vol. I., 1874; reprint of one of Skot's editions,
collated with his other edition and those of Pynson, Ed. H. Logeman,
1892; with an introduction by F. Sidgwick, 1902; reprinted by W. W.
Greg from the Edition by John Skot preserved at Britwell Court, 1904;
set to music by H. Walford Davies, etc. (with historical and analytical
notes), 1904; J. S. Farmer, Six Anonymous Plays (Early English
Dramatists), 1905; with designs by Ambrose Dudley, 1906; in
Broadway Booklets, 1906; with introduction, note-book, and word list,
J. S. Farmer (Museum Dramatists), 1906.
Miracle Plays: Towneley Mysteries, ed. by Surtees Society, 1836;
Pollard, Early English Text Society, 1897. York Mysteries, ed. Lucy
Toulmin Smith, 1885. Chester Mysteries, ed. Th. Wright, Shakespeare
Society, 1843-47; Deimling, Early English Text Society, 1893, etc.; T.
H. Markland (two plays), Roxburghe Club, 1818. Coventry Mysteries,
ed. Halliwell, Shakespeare Society, 1841. See also Sharp, Dissertation
on the Coventry Mysteries. For other Mysteries see Davidson, Modern
Language Notes, vii.; E. Norris, Ancient Cornish Drama, 1859.
Selections, or Separate Plays: Harrowing of Hell, ed. Halliwell, 1840;
Collier, Five Miracle Plays, 1867; Dr. E. Mall, 1871; A. W. Pollard,
English Miracle Plays, 1895; Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean
Drama, 1897, 2 vols. (a third vol. to come), Prof. Manly. See J. H.
Kirkham (Enquiry into Sources, etc.), 1885. Abraham and Isaac, ed. L.
Toulmin Smith (Brome Hall MS.), 1886; R. Brotanek (Dublin MS.),
Anglia, xxi.
General Literature: Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature,
1875-6; Payne Collier, The History of English Dramatic Poetry, 1879;
K. Hase, Miracle Plays, trans. A. W. Jackson, 1880; C. Davidson,

Studies in English Mystery Plays, 1892; A. W. Pollard, English Miracle
Plays, Moralities, and Interludes, Specimens of pre-Elizabethan Drama,
etc., 1895;