Drama

"A play in which the element of conflict is slight will always be found defective as a play, however great its other merits may be".

The Beginnings of the English Drama-Miracle Plays

The history of the English drama takes us back to the century succeeding the coming of the Normans, the earliest mention of any dramatic representation in this country referring to a performance of a Latin play in honour of St.Katherine, at Dunstable. By the time of the Norman Conquest a form of religious drama, which in the first instance had evolved out of the rich symbolic liturgy of the church, had already established itself in France, and as a matter of course it soon found its way into England. Its purpose was directly didactic; that is, it was the work of ecclesiastical authors, who used it as a means for instructing the unlettered masses in the truths of their religion.

The Church had this drama under complete control; performances were given in the sacred buildings themselves; the priests were the actors; and the language employed was the Latin of the service. But as the mystery or miracle play, as it was called, increased in popularity, and on great occasions larger and larger crowds thronged about the church, it became necessary to remove the stage from the interior of the building to the porch. Later, it was taken from the porch into the churchyard, and finally from the precincts of the church altogether to the village green or the city street. Laymen at the same time began to take part in the performance, and presently they superseded the clerical actors entirely, while the vernacular tongue--first French, then English--was substituted for the original Latin. But the religious drama in England did not reach its height till the fourteenth century, from which time onward at the festival of Corpus Christi, in early summer, miracle plays were represented in nearly all our large towns in great connected sequences or cycles.

Arranged to exhibit the whole history of the fall of man and his redemption, these Corpus Christi plays, or 'collective mysteries', as they are sometimes called, were apportioned among the Trading Guilds of the different towns, each one of which took charge of its own particular play, and their performance occupied several days. Four of these cycles have come down to us complete: the Chester cycle of 25 plays; the Coventry, of 42; the Wakefield, of 31; and the York, of 48. Each of these begins with the creation of the world and the world and the fall of man, and, after dealing with such prophetic themes as the Flood, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and the Exodus from Egypt, goes on to elaborate the last scenes in the life if Christ, the Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension, and closes with the Last Judgement. In literary quality they are of course crude, but here and there they touch the note of pathos, as in the story of Abraham and Issac, and the note of tragedy, as in the scene of the Crucifixion; while the occasional introduction of a comic element, as notably in the Shepherd plays of the Wakefield series, which are, in fact, rough country farces, only slightly connected with their context, shows even more clearly the growth of the dramatic sense. These religious performances lasted well on into the sixteenth century, and there is good reason to think that Shakespeare must have witnessed once at least those which, during his boyhood, were still being given annually at Coventry. Hamlet's advice to the players not to 'out-herod Herod' recalls the ranting braggart Herod of the old miracle plays.

Morality Plays and Interludes

The Morality play has a vital role in the evolution of the drama. This, like the miracle play, was didactic; but its characters, instead of being taken from sacred narrative, or the legends of the saints, were personified abstractions. The rise of this form of drama was very natural at a time when allegorical poetry was immensely popular. All sorts of mental and moral qualities thus appeared embodied in types--Science, Perseverance, Mundus, Free Will, the Five Senses, the Seven Deadly Sins(separately or together), Good and Bad Angles, Now-a-Days, Young England, Lusty Juventus, Humanum Genus, Every-man. Among such personifications (of which the foregoing are, of course, only examples), there was generally a place for the Devil, who had held a prominent position in the miracle plays. A later introduction of much importance was the so-called Vice, who was some humorous incarnation of evil taken on the comic side, and as such was the recognised fun-maker of the piece. He sometimes scored a tremendous popular success by jumping on the Devil's back, sticking thorns into him, belabouring him with a dagger of lath, and making him roar with follow the perscribed lines of any given story, it had greater freedom in the handing both of plot and of characters. During the excitement of the Reformation period it was much used for purposes of exposition, and even of controversy by both religious parties; one of the finest extant examples, the play of Everyman, for instance, being written expressly to inculcate the sacramental doctrines of the Catholic Church. Little by little, as the personified abstractions came more and more to resemble individual persons, the morality passed insensibly is not comedy.

The interlude was also a late product of the dramatic development of the morality play. There is indeed some confusion regarding the exact scope and proper use of this word, for many so-called interludes are only modified forms of the morality; but in its more specific sense it seems to mean any short dramatic piece of a satiric rather than of a directly religious or ethical character, and in tone and purpose far less serious than the morality proper. This form grew up early in the sixteenth centuary, and is rather closely associated with the name of JOHN HEYWOOD (1497-1580), who for a time was court musician and general provider of entertainments to Henry VIII. His Four P's dialogue in which a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Pothecary, and a Pedlar exchange racy stories,and finally enter into competition as to which of them can tell the biggest lie, is the most amusing specimen of its class. Interludes were also used for scholastic purposes, as in the Interlude of the Four Elements; while in such a production as Thersytes, the addition of action turns the form into a sort of elementary comedy.

The Beginnings of Regular Comedy and Tragedy

The early experiments in play-writing are of great importance historically, because they provided a kind of 'Dame School for English dramatic genius, and did much to prepare the way for the regular drama. It was however, under the direct influence of the revival of learning that English comedy and tragedy alike passed out of these preliminary phases of their development into the forms of art. Filled with enthusiasm for everything belonging to pagan antiquity, men now went back to the classics for inspiration and example in the drama as in all other fields of literary enterprise, though it was the works of the Latin, not of the Greek playwrights, that they took as their models.

At earlier times, the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and the tragedies of Seneca were themselves acted at the universities, and on special occasions elsewhere, before audiences of scholars. Then came Latin imitations, and in due course these were followed by attempts to fashion English plays more or less precisely upon the patterns of the originals. In such attempts English writers learned many valuable lessons in the principles of dramatic construction and technique. Our first real comedy, Roister Doister, was written about 1550 by NICHOLAS UDALL, head master of Eton, for performance by his schoolboys in place of the regular Latin play. It is composed in riming couplets, divided into acts and scenes in the Latin style, and deals in an entertaining way with the wooing of Dame Custance by the vainglories hero, his various misadventures, and the pranks of Matthew Merrygreek the jester. Though greatly indebted to Plautus and Terence, it is everywhere reminiscent of the older humours ofr the miracle plays and the moralities. Our first real tragedy, on the other hand, is an almost pedantic effort to reproduce the forms and spirit of Senecan tragedy. It is entitled Gorboduc (or later, Ferrex and Porrex); is based upon an episode in Geoffrey of Monmouth's history and was written by THOMAS SACKVILLE, LORD BUCKHURST (1536-1608) and THOMAS NORTON (1532-84) for representation before the members of the Inner Temple at their Christmas festivities of 1561.

It is an interesting point that this first English tragedy was also the first of our plays to use blank verse, which, it will be remembered, had been introduced into English poetry only a few years before.