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

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 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