THE EARLIEST RELIGIOUS DRAMA IN ENGLAND. the eleventh century, as they had been performed at Quedlinburg, and perhaps at Gandersheim. And as these performances would be in the first instance treated as part of the education of the children committed to the care of the religious foundations, the legends of the patron-saints of boys and girls, St. Nicholas and St. Catharine, would be expected to have been treated with especial predilection. The Ludus de S. Katharina, to be again mentioned below, which is the earliest religious play of which we have nominal mention, and which the Norman Geoffrey (afterwards Abbot of St. Albans) caused to be represented at Dunstaple about the year 1110, is indeed usually supposed to have been written in French. The supposition, however, is not proved; nor am I convinced by the arguments adduced in its favour'. In any case, we do not possess it, and cannot with confidence assert whether it is to be regarded as an essentially literary work, or as already belonging to the popularised form of the miracle-plays, of which there are several Latin specimens extant from the same century. Copes' were borrowed in which to act it; but this proves nothing. It is stated to have been the reverse of a novelty among the masters and scholars ;' and, while it is useless to dogmatise on the probable character of an extinct play, the fact of the cultivation of the religious drama, as a growth of literary origin, in the English monasteries from the latter part of the eleventh century can hardly be regarded as doubtful. And yet this fact is of very secondary importance; for the beginnings of the modern drama, which were to absorb into themselves whatever existed as a literary aftergrowth 1 See, however, Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry and Annals of the Stage, ii. 131, a work which I shall henceforth cite by the author's name only. It seems to be overlooked that the phrase 'quem miracula vulgariter appellamus' only shows that Matthew Paris, writing in 1240, classed the play of St. Catharine with the miracle-plays to which he was in his time accustomed. Geoffrey was not a religious when he wrote the play and had it acted; but he was 'expectans scholam S. Albani sibi repromissam.' As to the Latin plays (with an occasional French refrain) of the Englishman Hilarius, written in France not later than the reign of our Henry II, see Morley, English Writers, i. 542-552. For other Latin plays of the same century see Wright, Early Mysteries, &c. 5 No drama before the Norman without having themselves a literary origin, had long been in operation, and if they had in England not already asserted their claims to popular attention, were speedily to do so. It may, then, be assumed that the beginnings of a posin England sible dramatic literature, which are to be directly traced in their origin to the dramatic literature of the Romans and Greeks, existed in England as well as elsewhere in the period succeeding upon the Norman Conquest. Nor will the fact be forgotten hereafter, that it was precisely the class to whose fostering care the first efforts of the modern popular drama itself were due-viz. the ecclesiastics—which had not altogether lost sight of the dramatic form of literary composition. Before the Norman Conquest there are no signs in our own literature of any impulse towards the dramatic form; such literary tendencies, therefore, as might have survived in the English nation, were a priori unlikely to take such a direction. For the step is not only great, but vital, from the mere dialogue to the rudest form of drama. It is therefore needless to dwell on the popularity, in the so-called AngloSaxon times, of such a work as Boëthius On the Consolation of Philosophy, which King Alfred translated into his native tongue, and which is a philosophical colloquy, with quasi-lyrical passages, between the author and the abstractions of Wisdom, the Reason, and the Mind. The Debate of the Body and the Soul again, which in one or the other form makes its appearance in our literature from the tenth. to the fourteenth century, and which is a mixture of dialogue and narrative, has likewise no claim to be taken into account'. Nor have the earlier treatments of the subject of the Harrowing of Hell, which was to play so important a part in the mysteries, any dramatic element at all. Lastly, it would be an error to seck in the Anglo-Saxon In the French Débat du Corps et de l'Ame (Ancien Theatre François, vol. iii. pp. 325-336) an Acteur' narrates the action springing from the dialogue. 2 I speak of the two poems in the Exeter Book. Even a later poem on the subject, belonging to the reign of Edward II, is described (by Wright, Introduction to Chester Plays, Shaksp. Society's Publ. 1843, p. xiv.) as 'not a dramatic piece, but a mere poem in dialogue.' See also Reliquiae Antiquae, i. 253. DRAMATIC POSSIBILITIES NOT DRAMATIC BEGINNINGS. Passion of St. George', lively as is the mixture of narrative and speech which it presents, for any dramatic element leading in the direction of the miracle-play. These instances will suffice to guard against any mistaken attempt to search for dramatic beginnings where they are not to be found. And it may perhaps be here noted at once, that the looseness of terminology which confounds dramatic literature with other forms merely containing dramatic possibilities, is only characteristic of ages not vitally conscious of the essentials of the drama itself. Chaucer indeed made. a very innocent use of the words tragedy and comedy when he applied them simply to poems ending happily or unhappily; but the tendency to speak of works as dramatic when they are in no proper sense such is to be reprobated like all other looseness of expression. The very age which witnessed the flower of our drama drew a jealous distinction, which the dramatists themselves at times acknowledged, between the works of poets and the works of playwrights. This was indeed an utterly illegitimate distinction; but it marks by its very error the consciousness of the elementary principle, that no work abstaining from the employment of action has any concern with the drama. It may indeed frequently seem as if the genius of our literature had hovered on the verge of the discovery of the dramatic form; and it is in this sense that we are justified in speaking of Chaucer's gifts as dramatic, and of his masterpiece as containing in it the germ of a drama; but the indispensable step was not taken by him, (although he was certainly cognisant of the beginnings of the drama, as will be incidentally shown below,) and, had an opportunity offered itself, he would probably have disdained to take it. Lydgate, who was so ready to betake himself from his cloister and school to the streets of London, whose cries he knew by heart, might be willing to compose processions 1 Edited for the Percy Society (vol. xxviii.) by the late Archdeacon Hardwick. 2 Troilus and Cresseyde, bk. v. For similar examples see Warton, History of English Poetry, section v. This view has been admirably brought out by Professor Pauli, in his delightful essay on Chaucer and Gower in his Pictures of Old England. 7 The relics of the Roman stage. of pageants from the creation';' but Chaucer, however emptie' his purse, would doubtless have scorned to apply his fancy to such a purpose. But this is to anticipate, although the warning is possibly not premature even at this early point of the enquiry. To return to our starting-point, it may next be asked whether any other influences survived from the ancient world which, though not in themselves constituting the origin of the modern drama, were yet of a nature necessarily to affect its early growth. Now, it is well known that in the history of the Roman stage we have to distinguish two developements, the one native, the other foreign and artificial. The latter, which alone is represented in the Latin dramatic literature handed down to us, was, like the great body of that literature at large, borrowed from the Greeks. It is doubtful whether at any time the reproductions or imitations of Greek tragedy among the Romans secured the favour of more than a small cultivated minority; already in the latter days of the Republic the multitude (including even the knights, according to Horace) could only be reconciled to tragedy by the introduction of that species of accessories by which in our own day a play of Shakspere's is said to be 'revived". In the early days of the Empire tragedy was dissolved into choral music and pantomimic action; and the pantomime, a species of ballet of action, established itself as a favourite class of entertainment. Greek comedy, i. e. the new comedy of Menander, with which we are acquainted in the versions of Plautus and Terence, survived more honourably both in Rome and the provinces; it is praised by faint blame in a work of St. Augustine in the beginning of the fifth 1 Collier, ii. 141. The same author's Chichevache and Bycorne cannot be called dramatic in design or character. 2 The comparison is not impertinent. What could better correspond to Horace's description, 'Mox trahitur manibus regum fortuna retortis, Esseda festinant, pilenta, petorrita,' than e.g. the actual representation into a performance of Richard II. of Bolingbroke's entry into London? The imagination of our audiences is as systematically debilitated as that of the Roman mobs. THE ROMAN STAGE. 9 century; and it thus, as has been already seen, furnished strollers. In the days of the close of the Republic, and of the Mimes and early Empire, the size of the Roman theatres, as well as the diversity of nationality which was beginning to characterise the Roman population, made it necessary to devise entertainments suitable for large masses of spectators, and at the same time agreeable to the craving for mere enjoyments of the eye. The circus had at all times, and the amphitheatre since its establishment, outvied the theatre in popularity as they exhibited a constantly increasing variety of 1 The Italian farsa is the origin of the commedia dell' arte of the sixteenth century, as to the influence of which on our English comedy I shall have something to say below. At Naples, no form of dramatic entertainment seems to flourish during the heat of the summer except the oldest, unless it be the politico-religious sensation drama. I remember how, during a sojourn there in a summer-month of 1869, our nightly choice lay between Arlecchino and the Nun of Cracow. |