"Everyman," With Other Interludes, Including Eight Miracle Plays Part 1

Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays.

by Anonymous.

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 ill.u.s.trated. 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 Ess.e.x alone the list includes twenty-one towns and villages, though it is fair to add that this was a specially enterprising s.h.i.+re. 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 fas.h.i.+on 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, a.s.sisting 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 s.h.i.+pwright and ark-builder. G.o.d says to Noah:--

A s.h.i.+p 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," G.o.d 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sage is own brother to that in the York miracle-play:--

A s.h.i.+p 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 authors.h.i.+p.

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 ill.u.s.trative, 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 s.h.i.+eld," 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:

G.o.d, 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 compet.i.tion 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sociated 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 s.h.i.+pbuilding, is a s.h.i.+pwrights' 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, ill.u.s.trating in chief the birth, life, death and pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sumed 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 G.o.des love, be-ware by me!

These breathe, not a Norman, but an Anglo-Saxon fantasy, and they speak for themselves. But many tell-tale doc.u.ments 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 pa.s.sage 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.