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REPRESENTATIVE ENGLISH PLAYS

REPRESENTATIVE ENGLISH PLAYS

I. THE MIDDLE AGES

MIRACLE PLAYS

Pope Urban IV, when he instituted in 1264 the church festival of Corpus Christi, became a real though unwitting patron of the drama. On the continent, Corpus Christi Day, the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, was soon established as an occasion for presenting religious plays. In England especially was the day notable, for the trade guilds, the associations of craftsmen roughly corresponding to the trade unions of our day, adopted it as their chief holiday, and assisted the church in its celebration with a procession through the town. In another way also they came to the aid of the church by taking over a form of activity which had for some time been growing in disfavor with the church authorities; namely, the performance of the liturgical plays. Originally introduced at Christmas and Easter for the edification of ignorant audiences, these became so popular that their primary didactic purpose was in danger of being forgotten. From motives in which religion and business for the church feast brought visitors and trade to town were oddly mixed, the guilds added pageantry to their procession, and were soon giving performances on a scale more sumptuous than the church had ever reached.

By the time that the miracle, or, as they are sometimes called, mystery, plays passed from the hands of Mother Church into the care of the guilds, they had already developed into a great drama of many acts, covering scriptural and apocryphal history from the Fall of the Angels to the Last Judgment. They were, therefore, well adapted for guild performance. Each guild took one section of the Bible story and tried to outdo its rivals in effectiveness of presentation. A quaint humor often marked the distribution of the separate plays among the various guilds. It is not difficult to see why, in the York plays, the Shipwrights undertook the Building of the Ark, and the Fishmongers the Flood; nor why in the same cycle the Goldsmiths selected the story of the Three Kings, with their offerings of gold and spices; the Vintners, the Miracle at Cana; the Bakers, the Last Supper. To the Tanners was signed the Fall of Lucifer and the torments of the fallen angels in hell, where the tan

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ning process was likely to be thorough; while the Cooks, well trained in taking things from the fire, could present, more fittingly than any other craft, the Harrying of Hell, with its delivery of well-roasted prophets and martyrs.

The performances took place upon pageant wagons, which could be drawn from place to place through the town. At street corners or open squares stations were assigned for the acting of the plays. When the play of the creation had been acted at the first station the pageant wagon moved on to the second station, while the story of the fall of Adam and Eve took its place at the first station, and so on. This method made possible the simultaneous production of many plays, each little audience, of course, seeing the entire sequence in the proper order. The wagons seem usually to have been built with two platforms, the lower curtained in and serving as a dressing room for the actors, the upper as the stage. Stage properties were of the simplest. Among the most prominent was Hell mouth, a great gaping pair of jaws at one side of the stage, painted flame color and belching forth the smoke of the torment, from which leaped forth the Devil with his boisterous "Ho! Ho!" and into which he pitched the lost souls with his wooden pitchfork and himself plunged at the end of the play. Some attempt was made at appropriateness of costume: God appeared in white leather, with gilded face and hair, the Devil in black leather, with full equipment of horns, hoofs, and a tail. But Herod boasted the full panoply of a knight of chivalry, and in general anachronism of attire as well as of speech was rampant.

We have records of such dramatic activity lasting from the thirteenth until far into the sixteenth century, all over England, as well as in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Not only the cathedral towns but market towns and even villages had their collective or individual miracle plays. The greatest activity, however, seems to have been localized in certain places. There are extant manuscripts, the earliest belonging to the fifteenth century, for four great cycles of miracle plays: the York, Chester, Towneley or Wakefield, and Coventry cycles. While each has its indi

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