Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction
A >> Anonymous >> Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction[Illustration: POETS ARE THE TRUMPETS WHICH SING TO BATTLE
POETS ARE THE UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATORS OF THE WORLD
SHELLEY]
"EVERYMAN"
WITH OTHER INTERLUDES, including EIGHT MIRACLE PLAYS
[Illustration: EVERY MAN I WILL GO WITH THEE BE THY GVIDE
IN THY MOST NEED TO GO BY THY SIDE]
LONDON: PUBLISHED
by J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
AND IN NEW YORK
BY E. P. DUTTON & CO
First Issue of this Edition 1909
Reprinted 1910, 1912, 1914
INTRODUCTION
By craftsmen and mean men, these pageants are played,
And to commons and countrymen accustomably before:
If better men and finer heads now come, what can be said?
The pageants of the old English town-guilds, and the other mysteries and
interludes that follow, have still an uncommon reality about them if we
take them in the spirit in which they were originally acted. Their
office as the begetters of the greater literary drama to come, and their
value as early records, have, since Sharp wrote his _Dissertation on the
Coventry Mysteries_ in 1816, been fully illustrated. But they have
hardly yet reached the outside reader who looks for life and not for
literary origins and relations in what he reads. This is a pity, for
these old plays hide under their archaic dress the human interest that
all dramatic art, no matter how crude, can claim when it is touched with
our real emotions and sensations. They are not only a primitive
religious drama, born of the church and its feasts; they are the genuine
expression of the town life of the English people when it was still
lived with some exuberance of spirits and communal pleasure. As we read
them, indeed, though it be in cold blood, we are carried out of our
book, and set in the street or market-square by the side of the "commons
and countrymen," as in the day when Whitsuntide, or Corpus Christi,
brought round the annual pageantry to Chester, Coventry, York, and other
towns.
Of the plays that follow, six come from the old town pageants,
reflecting in their variety the range of subject and the contemporary
effect of the cycles from which they are taken. They are all typical,
and show us how the scenes and characters of the east were mingled with
the real life of the English craftsmen and townsfolk who acted them, and
for whose pleasure they were written. Yet they give us only a small
notion of the whole interest and extent of these plays. We gain an idea
of their popularity both from the number of them given in one town and
the number of places at which regular cycles, or single pageants, were
represented from year to year. The York plays alone that remain are
forty-eight in all; the Chester, twenty-four or five; the Wakefield,
thirty-two or three. Even these do not represent anything like the full
list. Mr. E. K. Chambers, in an appendix to his _Mediaeval Stage_, gives
a list of eighty-nine different episodes treated in one set or another
of the English and Cornish cycles. Then as to the gazette of the many
scattered places where they had a traditional hold: Beverley had a cycle
of thirty-six; Newcastle-on-Tyne and Norwich, each one of twelve; while
the village and parochial plays were almost numberless. In Essex alone
the list includes twenty-one towns and villages, though it is fair to
add that this was a specially enterprising shire. At Lydd and New
Romney, companies of players from fourteen neighbouring towns and
villages can be traced in the local records that stretch from a year or
so before, to eight years after, the fifteenth century.
Mrs. J. R. Green, in her history of _Town Life_ in that century, shows
us how the townspeople mixed their workday and holiday pursuits, their
serious duties with an apparent "incessant round of gaieties." Hardly a
town but had its own particular play, acted in the town hall or the
parish churchyard, "the mayor and his brethren sitting in state." In
1411 there was a great play, _From the Beginning of the World_, played
in London at the Skinner's Well. It lasted seven days continually, and
there were the most part of the lords and gentles of England. No copy of
this play exists, but of its character we have a pretty sensible idea
from various other plays of the Creation handed down from the
north-country cycles. In the best of them the predestined Adam is
created after a fashion both to suggest his treatment by Giotto in the
medallion at Florence, and his lineaments as an English mediaeval
prototype:--
"But now this man that I have made,
With the ghost of life, I make him glad,
Rise up, Adam, rise up rade,[1]
A man full of soul and life!"
But to surprise the English mediaeval smith or carpenter, cobbler or
bowyer, when he turns playgoer at Whitsuntide, assisting at a play
which expressed himself as well as its scriptural folk, we must go on to
later episodes. The Deluge in the Chester pageant, that opens the
present volume, has among its many Noah's Ark sensations, some of them
difficult enough to mimic on the pageant-wagon, a typical recall of the
shipwright and ark-builder. God says to Noah:--
A ship soon thou shalt make thee of trees, dry and light.
Little chambers therein thou make,
And binding pitch also thou take,
Within and out, thou ne slake
To anoint it thro' all thy might.
In the York Noah's Ark pageant, which seems to be the parent-play in
England of all its kind, we have this craftsman's episode much enlarged.
"Make it of boards," God says, "and wands between!"
Thus thriftily and not over thin,
Look that thy seams be subtly seen
And nailed well, that they not twin:
Thus I devised it should have been;
Therefore do forth, and leave thy din
Then, after further instructions, Noah begins to work before the
spectators, first rough-hewing a plank, then trying it with a line, and
joining it with a gynn or gin. He says:--
More subtilely can no man _sew_;[2]
It shall be clinched each ilk and deal,
With nails that are both noble and new,
Thus shall I fix it to the keel:
Take here a rivet, and there a screw,
With there bow,[3] there now, work I well,
This work, I warrant both good and true.
To complete the pedigree of this scene we must turn to the old poem, the
"Cursor Mundi," which, written in the fourteenth century, the time when
the northern miracle-plays were taking decisive shape, appears to have
served their writers as a stock-book. The following passage is own
brother to that in the York miracle-play:--
A ship must thou needs dight,
Myself shall be the master-wright.
I shall thee tell how broad and long,
Of what measure and how strong.
When the timber is fastened well,
Wind the sides ever each and deal.
Bind it first with balk and band,
And wind it then too with good wand.
With pitch, look, it be not thin!
Plaster it well without and in!
The likeness we see is startling: so near to the other indeed as to
suggest almost a common authorship.
As for the pastoral plays in the same towns, we find the shepherds and
countrymen were just as well furnished with rough cuts from the life.
The most real and frankly illustrative, and by no means the least
idyllic of them is perhaps the Chester play of the three shepherds. It
was not played by countrymen but by townsmen, like the other plays in
the town cycles, being in this case the "Paynters and Glasiors" play.
The first shepherd who opens it talks of the "bower" or cote he would
build, his "sheep to shield," his "seemly wethers to save:"--
From comely Conway unto Clyde
Under tyldes[4] them to hide
A better shepherd on no side
No earthly man may have
For with walking weary I have methought
Beside thee such my sheep I sought
My long-tail'd tups are in my thought
Them to save and heal
In the _Death of Abel_, another Chester play, Cain comes in with a
plough, and says:--
A tiller I am, and so will I be,
As my daddy hath taught it me
I will fulfil his lore
In the subsequent incident of the corn that Cain is to offer for his
sacrifice, we hear the plain echo of the English farmer's voice in the
corn-market mixing with the scriptural verse: "This standing corn that
was eaten by beasts," will do:
God, thou gettest no better of me,
Be thou never so grim
So throughout the plays the folk-life of their day, their customs and
customary speech, are for ever emerging from the biblical scene.
In trying to realise how the miracle-plays were mounted and acted, we
shall find the best witness at Chester. This was a rather late one.
Archdeacon Rogers, who saw them in 1594, when they had been going on for
something like three centuries in all. From his account (in the
_Harleian Miscellany_) it appears the Chester plays were given on
Whit-Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
"The manner of these plays were, every company had his pageant or part,
a high scaffold with two rooms, a higher and a lower, upon four wheels.
In the lower they apparelled themselves, and in the higher room they
played, being all open on the top, that all beholders might hear and see
them." They were played, he goes on to say, in every street:
"They began first at the abbey gates, and when the first pageant was
played, it was wheeled to the high cross before the mayor, and so to
every street. So every street had a pageant playing before it at one
time, till all the pageants for the day appointed were played. When one
pageant was near ended, word was brought from street to street, that so
they might come in place thereof, exceeding orderly, and all the streets
have their pageants before them, all at one time playing together, to
see which plays was great resort and also scaffolds and stages made in
the streets in those places where they determined to play their
pageants."
The same writer explains elsewhere that these plays were divided into
twenty-four pageants, according to the number of the city companies, and
that each company brought out its own pageant.
At York, whose plays Miss L. Toulmin Smith edited in 1887, we can turn
to Davies's two books[5] and the local records, to complete the Chester
description. Those who travel to York by rail to-day, and there
dismount, as most of us have often done, to walk through the city to the
cathedral, will be interested to find that the railway station now
stands where once was Pageant Green. Near it was formerly another kind
of station, where stood the houses hired to keep the pageants stored and
put away from one year's show to another. The word "pageant," (_pagina_,
or plank), we ought to recall, was used for the stage, or wheeled car of
two stories, before it was used for the show set forth upon it. Davies
helps us, as we perambulate York to-day, to mark where the old pageants
were performed in 1399, at twelve stations, which were fixed and stated
beforehand. The first station was at the gates of the Priory of the Holy
Trinity in Mickle Gate, and the pageants were moved on them in turn to
places at Skelder Gate end, North Street, Conyng Strete, Stane Gate and
the gates of the Minster, so to the end of Girdler Gate; while the last
of all was "upon the pavement." But the stations were subject to change,
and there was much competition among wealthy householders (one of whom
may have been the Robert Harpham mentioned in a 1417 list) to have the
pageant played before their windows. The highest bidder gained the
coveted right.
Before the actual day came, a town-crier was sent round the city to
proclaim the "banes" or banns.[6] Arms were forbidden: "We command that
no man go armed in this city with swords ne with carlill-axes, in
disturbance of the king's peace and the play, or hindering of the
procession of Corpus Christi, and that they leave their harness in their
inns, saving knights and squires of worship that ought to have swords
borne after them!" The plays began betimes. We read that at York the
players were to be ready "at the mid-hour betwixt the IVth and Vth of
the clock in the morning." Finally, for the players themselves, care was
taken to secure good ones for the several parts. Sometimes a player
doubled or trebled the characters in a particular play.
All through the XIVth and XVth centuries miracle-plays went on
being performed regularly, or irregularly, in most of the English
towns and larger villages. One of the smaller cycles was that of
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, played at Corpus Christi, from 1426 onwards. _The
Three Kings of Cologne_ is mentioned in 1536, which the goldsmiths,
plumbers, glaziers, and others were to play. Here the pageants were not
movable ones, but were given at fixed points. No doubt some of the spots
associated with the Whitsuntide "shuggy-shows" (as I remember them in my
time) were originally show-grounds of the town pageants too. Only one
play of the Newcastle series has survived, and that fitly enough, having
regard to the Tyneside shipbuilding, is a shipwrights' play. Unluckily
it has been so modernised that not a vestige of the local colour or
Tyneside dialect remains.
We come now to the date and origin of these town pageants. 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
mediaeval 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 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 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 _protege_ 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:--