Chapter XXV: Humanism and Mediaevalism (1)

[_Bibliographical Note._—The literary discussions and
collections of texts named in the bibliographical note to chap.
xxiii and the material on the annals of the stage in that to
chap. xxiv remain available. W. Creizenach, _Geschichte des
neueren Dramas_, vols. i-iii (1893-1903), is the best general
guide on the classical drama and its imitations during the
Middle Ages and the Renascence. W. Cloetta, _Beiträge zur
Litteraturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance_: i.
_Komödie und Tragödie im Mittelalter_ (1890); ii. _Die Anfänge
der Renaissancetragödie_ (1892), deals very fully with certain
points. C. H. Herford, _Studies in the Literary Relations of
England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century_ (1886), has an
admirable chapter on _The Latin Drama_. G. Saintsbury, _The
Earlier Renaissance_ (1901), chap. vi, may also be consulted.
Useful books on the beginnings of the Elizabethan forms of
drama are R. Fischer, _Zur Kunstentwicklung der englischen
Tragödie von ihren ersten Anfängen bis zu Shakespeare_ (1893);
J. W. Cunliffe, _The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan
Tragedy_ (1893); L. L. Schücking, _Studien über die stofflichen
Beziehungen der englischen Komödie zur italienischen bis
Lilly_ (1901); F. E. Schelling, _The English Chronicle Play_
(1902). The best bibliographies are, for the Latin plays, P.
Bahlmann, _Die Erneuerer des antiken Dramas und ihre ersten
dramatischen Versuche, 1314-1478_ (1896), and _Die lateinischen
Dramen von Wimpheling’s Stylpho bis zur Mitte des sechzehnten
Jahrhunderts, 1480-1550_ (1893); and for English plays, W. W.
Greg, _A List of English Plays written before 1643 and printed
before 1700_ (1900). This may be supplemented from W. C.
Hazlitt, _A Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English
Plays_ (1892). A list of early Tudor interludes will be found
in Appendix X.]

The dramatic material upon which the interlude was able to draw had naturally its points of relation to and of divergence from that of the popular stage, whose last days it overlapped. It continued to occupy itself largely with the morality. The ‘moral interludes’ of the early Tudor period are in fact distinguished with some difficulty from the popular moralities by their comparative brevity, and by indications of the _mise en scène_ as a ‘room’ or ‘hall’ rather than an open ‘place[591].’ The only clearly popular texts later than those of the fifteenth century, discussed in a previous chapter, are Sir David Lyndsay’s Scottish _Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis_, and the _Magnificence_, which alone survives of several plays from the prolific pen of the ‘laureate’ poet, John Skelton. A somewhat intermediate type is presented by the _Nature_ of Cardinal Morton’s chaplain, Henry Medwall. This was certainly intended for performance as an interlude, but it is on the scale of the popular moralities, needing division into two parts to bring it within the limits of courtly patience; and like them it is sufficiently wide in its scope to embrace the whole moral problem of humanity. The conditions of the interlude, however, enforced themselves, and the later morals have, as a rule, a more restricted theme. They make their selection from amongst the battalions of sins and virtues which were wont to invade the stage together, and set themselves the task of expounding the dangers of a particular temperament or the advantages of a particular form of moral discipline. _Hickscorner_ shows man led into irreligion by imagination and freewill. _Youth_ concerns itself with pride, lechery, and riot, the specific temptations of the young. _The Nature of the Four Elements_ and John Redford’s somewhat later _Wit and Science_ preach the importance of devotion to study. The distinction between the episodic and the more comprehensive moralities was in the consciousness of the writers themselves; and the older fashion did not wholly disappear. William Baldwin describes his play for the Inns of Court in 1556 as ‘comprehending a discourse of the worlde[592]’; and mention is more than once made of an interesting piece called _The Cradle of Security_, which seems to have had a motive of death and the judgement akin to that found in _The Pride of Life_ and in _Everyman_[593].

The morality was not, perhaps, quite such an arid type of drama as might be supposed, especially after the dramatists learnt, instead of leaving humanity as a dry bone of contention between the good and evil powers, to adopt a biographic mode of treatment, and thus to introduce the interest of growth and development[594]. But by the sixteenth century allegory had had its day, and the light-hearted court of Henry VIII and Katharine of Aragon might be excused some weariness at the constant presentation before it of argumentative abstractions which occasionally yielded nothing more entertaining than a personified _débat_[595]. Certainly it is upon record that Medwall’s moral of ‘the fyndyng of Troth,’ played at the Christmas of 1513, appeared to Henry so long, that he got up and ‘departyd to hys chambre[596].’ The offenders on this occasion were English and his company of household players. They seem to have been unwisely wedded to the old methods. They pursued the princess Margaret to Scotland with a ‘Moralite’ in 1503, and in the reign of Edward VI they were still playing the play of _Self-Love_[597]. Perhaps this explains why they make distinctly less show in the accounts of Tudor revels than do their competitors of the Chapel. Unfortunately none of the pieces given by this latter body have been preserved. But, to judge by the descriptions of Hall, many of them could only be called interludes by a somewhat liberal extension of the sense of the term. There was perhaps some slight allegorical or mythological framework of spoken dialogue. But the real amusement lay in an abundance of singing, which of course the Chapel was well qualified to provide, and of dancing, in which the guests often joined, and in an elaborately designed pageant, which was wheeled into the hall and from which the performers descended. They were in fact masques rather than dramas in the strict sense, and in connexion with the origin of the masque they have already been considered[598].

The popular stage, as has been said, had its farcical elements, but did not, in England, arrive at any notable development of the farce. Nor is any marked influence of the overseas habit even now to be traced. The name is not used in England, although it is in Scotland, where at the beginning of the sixteenth century the relations with France were much closer[599]. Whether directly or indirectly through French channels, the farce is perhaps the contribution of minstrelsy to the nascent interlude. That some dramatic tradition was handed down from the _mimi_ of the Empire to the _mimi_ of the Middle Ages, although not susceptible of demonstration, is exceedingly likely[600]. That solitary mediaeval survival, the _Interludium de Clerico et Puella_, hardly declares its origin. But the farce, in its free handling of contemporary life, in the outspokenness, which often becomes indecency, of its language, in its note of satire, especially towards the priest and other institutions deserving of reverence, is the exact counterpart of one of the most characteristic forms of minstrel literature, the _fabliau_. These qualities are reproduced in the interludes of John Heywood, who, though possibly an Oxford man, began life as a singer and player of the virginals at court, and belonged therefore to the minstrel class. He grew quite respectable, married into the family of Sir Thomas More and John Rastell the printer, and had for grandson John Donne. He was put in charge of the singing-school of St. Paul’s, the boys of which probably performed his plays. Of the six extant, _Wit and Folly_ is a mere dialogue, and _Love_ a more elaborate disputation, although both are presented ‘in maner of an enterlude.’ But the others, _The Pardoner and the Friar_, _The Four P’s_, _The Weather_, and _John, Tib and Sir John_ are regular farces. And with them the farce makes good its footing in the English drama.

Those congeners of the French farce which took their origin from the Feast of Fools, the _Sottie_ and the _Sermon joyeux_, are only represented in these islands by the Sermon of ‘Folie’ in Sir David Lyndsay’s _Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis_[601]. But the ‘fool’ himself, as a dramatic character, is in Shakespeare’s and other Elizabethan plays, and it must now be pointed out that he is in some of the earliest Tudor interludes. Here he has the not altogether intelligible name of the ‘vice.’ A recent writer, Professor Cushman of the Nevada State University, has endeavoured to show that the vice came into the interludes through the avenue of the moralities. Originally ‘an allegorical representation of human weaknesses and vices, in short the summation of the Deadly Sins,’ he lost in course of time this serious quality, and ‘the term Vice came to be simply a synonym for buffoon[602].’ This theory has no doubt the advantage of explaining the name. Unfortunately it proceeds by disregarding several plays in which the vice does occur, and reading him into many where there is none[603]. ‘Vicious’ had his pageant in the Beverley _Paternoster_ play, and vices in the ordinary sense of the word are of course familiar personages in the morals, which generally moreover have some one character who can be regarded as the representative or the chief representative of human frailty. But the vice is not found under that name in the text, list of _dramatis personae_, or stage directions of any popular morality or of any pre-Elizabethan moral interlude except the Marian _Respublica_. The majority of plays in which he does occur are not morals, even of the modified Elizabethan type; and although in those which are he generally plays a bad part, even this is not an invariable rule. In _The Tide Tarrieth for No Man_, as in the tragedy of _Horestes_, he is Courage. Moreover, as a matter of fact, he comes into the interludes through the avenue of the farce. The earliest vices, by some thirty years, are those of Heywood’s _Love_, in which he is ‘Neither Loving nor Loved,’ who mocks the other disputants, and plays a practical joke with fireworks upon them, and _The Weather_, in which he is ‘Merry Report,’ the jesting official of Jupiter. And in the later plays, even if he has some other dramatic function, he always adds to it that of a riotous buffoon. Frequently enough he has no other. It must be concluded then that, whatever the name may mean—and irresponsible philology has made some amazing attempts at explanation[604]—the character of the vice is derived from that of the domestic fool or jester. Oddly enough he is rarely called a fool, although the description of Medwall’s _Finding of Truth_ mentions ‘the foolys part[605].’ But the Elizabethan writers speak of his long coat and lathen sword, common trappings of the domestic fool[606]. Whether he ever had a cockscomb, a bauble, or an eared hood is not apparent. A vice seems to have been introduced into one or two of the later miracle-plays[607]. At Bungay in 1566 he ‘made pastime’ before and after the play, as Tarleton or Kempe were in time to do with their ‘jigs’ upon the London boards. And probably this was his normal function on such occasions.

From the moral the interlude drew abstractions; from the farce social types. The possibility of vital drama lay in an advance to the portraiture of individualities. The natural way to attain to this was by the introduction of historical, mythical, or romantic personages. The miracle-play had, of course, afforded these; but there is little to show that the miracle-play, during the first half of the sixteenth century, had much influence on the interlude[608]. The local players brought it to court, but, for the present, it was _démodé_. It was, however, to have its brief revival. The quarry of romantic narrative had hardly been opened by the Middle Ages. An old theme of Robert of Sicily, once used at Lincoln, was now remembered at Chester. Robin Hood had yielded dramatic May-games, and his revels were popular at Henry VIII’s court[609]. New motives, however, now begin to assert themselves. Some at least of these were suggested by the study of Chaucer. Ralph Radclif’s school plays at Hitchin included one on _Griselda_ and one on _Meliboeus_[610]. Nicholas Grimald wrote one on _Troilus_, and another had been acted by the Chapel at court in 1516[611]. Radclif was also responsible for a _Titus and Gisippus_, while the king’s players, shaking off their devotion to the moral, prepared in 1552 ‘a play of _Aesop’s Crow_, wherein the most part of the actors were birds[612].’ An extant piece on ‘the beauty and good properties of women’ and ‘their vices and evil conditions’ is really a version through the Italian of the Spanish _Celestina_, one of the first of many English dramatic borrowings from South European sources.

So far I have written only of developments which were at least latent in mediaevalism. But the interlude had its rise in the very midst of the great intellectual and spiritual movement throughout Europe which is known as humanism; and hardly any branch of human activities was destined to be more completely transformed by the new forces than the drama. The history of this transformation is not, however, a simple one. Between humanism and mediaevalism there is no rigid barrier. As at all periods of transition, a constant action and reaction established themselves between the old and new order of ideas. Moreover, humanism itself held elements in solution that were not wholly reconcilable with each other. Many things, and perhaps particularly the drama, presented themselves in very different lights, according as they were viewed from the literary or the religious side of the great movement. Some brief indication of the in-and-out play of the forces of humanism as they affected the history of the interlude during the first half of the sixteenth century is, therefore, desirable.

The chief of these forces is, of course, the influence of classical comedy and tragedy. These, as vital forms of literature, did not long survive the fall of the theatres, with which, indeed, their connexion had long been of the slightest. In the East, a certain tradition of Christian book dramas begins with the anti-Gnostic dialogues of St. Methodius in the fourth century and ends with the much disputed Χριστὸς Πάσχων in the eleventh or twelfth[613]. It is the merest conjecture that some of these may have been given some kind of representation in the churches[614]. In the West the _Aulularia_ of Plautus was rehandled under the title of _Querolus_ at the end of the fourth century, and possibly also the _Amphitruo_ under that of _Geta_[615]. In the fifth, Magnus, the father of Consentius, is said by Sidonius, as Shakespeare is said by Ben Jonson, to have ‘outdone insolent Greece, or haughty Rome[616].’ Further the production of plays cannot be traced. Soon afterwards most of the classical dramatists pass into oblivion. A knowledge of Seneca or of Plautus, not to speak of the Greeks, is the rarest of things from the tenth century to the fourteenth. The marked exception is Terence who, as Dr. Ward puts it, led ‘a charmed life in the darkest ages of learning.’ This he owed, doubtless, to his unrivalled gift of packing up the most impeccable sentiments in the neatest of phrases. His vogue as a school author was early and enduring, and the whole of mediaevalism, a few of the stricter moralists alone dissenting, hailed him as a master of the wisdom of life[617]. At the beginning of the eleventh century, Notker Labeo, a monk of St. Gall, writes that he has been invited to turn the _Andria_ into German[618]. Not long before, Hrotsvitha, a Benedictine nun of Gandersheim in Saxony, had taken Terence as her model for half a dozen plays in Latin prose, designed to glorify chastity and to celebrate the constancy of the martyrs. The dramaturgy of Hrotsvitha appears to have been an isolated experiment and the merest literary exercise. Her plays abound in delicate situations, and are not likely to have been intended even for cloister representation[619]. Nor is there much evidence for any representation of the Terentian comedies themselves. A curious fragment known as _Terentius et Delusor_ contains a dialogue between the _vetus poeta_ and a _persona delusoris_ or mime. The nature of this is somewhat enigmatic, but it certainly reads as if it might be a prologue or _parade_ written for a Terentian representation. In any case, it is wholly unparalleled[620]. In fact, although the Middle Ages continued to read Terence, the most extraordinary ideas prevailed as to how his dramas were originally produced. Vague reminiscences of the pantomimic art of later Rome led to the mistaken supposition that the poet himself, or a _recitator_, declaimed the text from a _pulpitum_ above the stage, while the actors gesticulated voicelessly below[621]. By a further confusion the name of Calliopius, a third- or fourth-century grammarian through whose hands the text of Terence has passed, was taken for that of a _recitator_ contemporary with the poet, and the _Vita Oxoniensis_ goes so far as to describe him as a powerful and learned man, who read the comedies aloud in the senate[622]. The same complete ignorance of things scenic declares itself in the notions attached to the terms _tragoedia_ and _comoedia_, not only vulgarly, but in the formal definitions of lexicographers and encyclopaedists[623].

The characteristics which really differentiate the drama from other forms of literature, dialogue and scenic representation, drop out of account, the latter entirely, the former very nearly so. Both tragedy and comedy are regarded as forms of narrative. Tragedy is narrative which concerns persons of high degree, is written in a lofty style, and beginning happily comes to a sad conclusion. Comedy, on the other hand, concerns itself with ordinary persons, uses humble and everyday language, and resolves its complications in a fortunate ending[624]. Even these distinctions are not all consistently maintained, and the sad or happy event becomes the only fixed and invariable criterion[625]. The origin of such conceptions is to be found partly in the common derived classical use of _tragoedia_ and _comoedia_ to describe tragic and comic events as well as the species of drama in which these are respectively represented; partly in a misunderstanding of grammarians who, assuming the dialogue and the representation, gave definitions of tragedy and comedy in relation to each other[626]; and partly in the solecism of the fifth-century epic writer Dracontius, who seems to have called his _Orestes_ a tragedy, merely because it was from tragedies that the material he used was drawn[627]. The _comoedia_ and _tragoedia_ of the Latin writers, thus defined, was extended to all the varieties of narrative, in the widest sense of the word. The epics of Lucan and Statius, the elegies of Ovid, are _tragoediae_; the epistles of Ovid, the pastoral dialogues of Virgil, are _comoediae_; the satires of Horace, Persius, Juvenal, are one or the other, according to the point of view[628]. It is curious that, with all this wide extension of the terms, they were not applied to the one form of mediaeval Latin composition which really had some analogy to the ancient drama; namely to the liturgical plays out of which the vernacular mysteries grew. These must have been written by learned writers: some of them were probably acted by schoolboys trained in Terence; and yet, if Hrosvitha, as she should be, is put out of the reckoning, no inward or outward trace of the influence of classical tragedy or comedy can be found in any one of them. In the manuscripts, they are called _officium_, _ordo_, _ludus_, _miraculum_, _repraesentatio_ and the like, but very rarely _comoedia_ or _tragoedia_, and never before 1204[629]. From the Latin the mediaeval notions of tragedy and comedy were transferred to similar compositions in the vernaculars. Dante’s _Divina Commedia_ is just a story which begins in Hell and ends in Paradise[630]. Boccaccio[631], Chaucer[632], and Lydgate[633] use precisely similar language. And, right up to the end of the sixteenth century, ‘tragedy’ continues to stand for ‘tragical legend’ with the authors of the _Mirror for Magistrates_ and their numerous successors[634]. Long before this, of course, humanistic research, without destroying their mediaeval sense, had restored to the wronged terms their proper connotation. There is a period during which it is a little difficult to say what, in certain instances, they do mean. When Robert Bower, in 1447, speaks of _comoediae_ and _tragoediae_ on the theme of Robin Hood and Little John, it is a matter for conjecture whether he is referring to dramatized May-games or merely to ballads[635]. Bale, in writing of his contemporaries, certainly applies the words to plays; but when he ascribes _tragoedias vulgares_ to Robert Baston, a Carmelite friar of the time of Edward II, it is probable that he is using, or quoting a record which used, an obsolescent terminology[636]. What the _comoediae_ of John Scogan, under Edward IV, may have been, must remain quite doubtful[637].

It is in the early fourteenth century and in Italy that a renewed interest in the Latin dramatists, other than Terence, can first be traced. Seneca became the subject of a commentary by the English Dominican Nicholas Treveth, and also attracted the attention of Lovato de’ Lovati and the scholarly circle which gathered round him at Padua. The chief of these was Albertino Mussato, who about 1314 was moved by indignation at the intrigues of Can Grande of Verona to write his _Ecerinis_ on the fate of that Ezzelino who, some eighty years before, had tyrannized over Padua. This first of the Senecan tragedies of the Renascence stirred enthusiasm amongst the growing number of the _literati_. It was read aloud and Mussato was laureated before the assembled university. Two learned professors paid it the tribute of a commentary. The example of Mussato was followed in the _Achilleis_ (1390) of Antonio de’ Loschi of Vicenza and the _Progne_ (†1428) of Gregorio Corraro of Mantua. Petrarch was familiar not only with Terence, but also with Seneca and Plautus, and his _Philologia_, written before 1331 and then suppressed, may claim to take rank with the _Ecerinis_ as the first Renascence comedy. It was modelled, says Boccaccio, upon Terence. A fresh impulse was given to the study and imitation of Latin comedy in 1427 by the discovery of twelve hitherto unknown Plautine plays, including the _Menaechmi_ and the _Miles Gloriosus_, and various attempts were made to complete the imperfect plays. In 1441 Leonardo Dati of Florence introduced a motive from the _Trinummus_ into his, not comedy, but tragedy of _Hiempsal_[638].

It must be borne in mind that during these early stages of humanism classical models and neo-Latin imitations alike were merely read and not acted. There is no sign whatever that as yet the mediaeval misconception as to the nature of Roman scenic representation had come to an end. It was certainly shared by Nicolas Treveth and probably by both Petrarch and Boccaccio[639]. It was not indeed in these regular dramas that the habit of acting Latin first re-established itself, but in a mixed and far less classical type of play. It is probable that in schools the exercise of reciting verse, and amongst other verse dialogue, had never died out since the time of the Empire. In the fourth century the _Ludus Septem Sapientum_ of the Bordeaux schoolmaster Ausonius, which consists of no more than a set of verses and a ‘_Plaudite!_’ for each sage, was doubtless written for some such purpose[640]. Such also may have been the destiny of the ‘elegiac’ and ‘epic’ comedies and tragedies of which a fair number were produced, from the eleventh century to the thirteenth. These are comedies and tragedies, primarily, in the mediaeval sense. They are narrative poems in form. But in all of them a good deal of dialogue is introduced, and in some there is hardly anything else. Their subject-matter is derived partly from Terence and partly from the stock of motives common to all forms of mediaeval light literature. Their most careful student, Dr. Cloetta, suggests that they were intended for a half-dramatic declamation by minstrels. This may sometimes have been the case, but the capacity and the audience of the minstrels for Latin were alike limited, and I do not see why at any rate the more edifying of them may not have been school pieces[641]. By the fifteenth century it will be remembered, students, who had long been in the habit of performing miracle-plays, had also taken to producing farces, morals, and those miscellaneous comic and satiric pieces which had their origin in the folk-festivals. Many of these were in the vernaculars; but it is difficult to avoid classing with them a group of Latin dialogues and loosely constructed comedies, written in Terentian metres and presenting a curious amalgam of classical and mediaeval themes. Of hardly any of these can it be said positively that they were intended to be acted. This is, however, not unlikely in the case of the anonymous _Columpnarium_, which goes back to the fourteenth century. Pavia probably saw a performance of Ugolini Pisani’s _Confabulatio coquinaria_ (1435), which has all the characteristics of a carnival drollery, and certainly of Ranzio Mercurino’s _De Falso Hypocrita_, which is stated in the manuscript to have been ‘_acta_’ there on April 15, 1437. The _Admiranda_ of Alberto Carrara was similarly ‘_acta_’ at Padua about 1456. The exact way in which these pieces and others like them were performed must remain doubtful. Acting in the strict sense can only be distinctly asserted of Francesco Ariosto’s dialogue of _Isis_ which was given ‘_per personatos_’ at the Ferrara carnival of 1444[642].

All this pseudo-classic comedy was looked upon with scorn by the purists of humanism. But it made its way over the Alps and had a considerable vogue in Germany. In France it found an exponent in Jean Tissier de Ravisy (Ravisius Textor), professor of rhetoric in the College of Navarre at Paris, and afterwards rector of the Paris University, who wrote, in good enough Latin, but wholly in the mediaeval manner, a large number of morals, farces, and dialogues for representation by his pupils[643]. Two at least of these were turned into English interludes. The classical element predominates in the pseudo-Homeric _Thersites_, the production of which can be fixed to between October 12 and 24, 1537; the mediaeval in Thomas Ingelend’s _The Disobedient Child_, which belongs to the very beginning of the reign of Elizabeth.

It was doubtless the study of Vitruvius which awakened the humanists to the fact that their beloved comedies had after all been acted after very much the fashion so long familiar in farces and miracle-plays. Exactly when the knowledge came is not clear. Polydore Vergil is still ignorant, and even Erasmus, at the date of the _Adagia_, uncertain. Alberti put a _theatrum_ in the palace built on the Vatican for Nicholas V about 1452, but there is no record of its use for dramatic performances at that time, and the immediate successors of Nicholas did not love humanism. Such performances seem to have been first undertaken by the pupils of a Roman professor, Pomponius Laetus. Amongst these was Inghirami, who was protagonist in revivals of the _Asinaria_ of Plautus and the _Phaedra_ of Seneca. These took place about 1485. Several other representations both of classical plays and of neo-Latin imitations occurred in Italy before the end of the century; and the practice spread to other countries affected by the humanist wave, soon establishing itself as part of the regular sixteenth-century scheme of education. By this time, of course, Greek as well as Latin dramatic models were available. The Latin translation of the _Plutus_ of Aristophanes by Leonardo Bruni (†1427) found several successors, and the play was acted at Zwickau in 1521. The study of Sophocles and Euripides began with Francesco Filelfo (†1481), but no representations of these authors are mentioned[644].

The outburst of dramatic activity in English schools and universities during the first half of the sixteenth century has already been noted. Wolsey may claim credit for an early encouragement of classical comedy in virtue of the performances of the _Menaechmi_ and the _Phormio_ given in his house by the boys of St. Paul’s in 1527 and 1528[645]. The master of St. Paul’s from 1522 to 1531 was John Ritwise, who himself wrote a Latin play of _Dido_, which also appears to have been acted before Wolsey[646]. The _Plutus_ was given at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1536; the _Pax_ at Trinity about a decade later[647]. A long series of English translations of classical plays begins with one of the _Andria_ printed, possibly by John Rastell, under the title of _Terens in Englysh_[648].

A more important matter is the influence exercised by classical models upon the vernacular interludes. This naturally showed itself in school dramas, and only gradually filtered down to the professional players. Two plays compete for the honour of ranking as ‘the first regular English comedy,’ a term which is misleading, as it implies a far more complete break with the past than is to be discerned in either of them. One is Nicholas Udall’s _Ralph Roister Doister_, the performance of which can be dated with some confidence in 1553, by which time its author may already have been head master of Westminster; the other is _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_, which was put on the stage at Christ’s College, Cambridge, has been ascribed to John Still, afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells, and to John Bridges, afterwards bishop of Oxford, but is more probably the work of one William Stevenson, who was certainly superintending plays at Christ’s College in 1550-3. Both plays adopt the classical arrangement by acts and scenes. But of the two _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ is far closer to the mediaeval farce in its choice and treatment of subject. _Ralph Roister Doister_, although by no means devoid of mediaeval elements, is in the main an adaptation of the _Miles Gloriosus_ of Plautus. A slighter and rather later piece of work, _Jack Juggler_, was also intended for performance by schoolboys, and is based upon the _Amphitruo_. The earliest ‘regular English tragedy’ on Senecan lines, or at least the earliest which oblivion has spared, is the _Gorboduc_ or _Ferrex and Porrex_ of 1561. This falls outside the strict scope of this chapter. But a fragment of a play from the press of John Rastell (1516-33) which introduces ‘Lucres’ and Publius Cornelius, suggests that, here as elsewhere, the Elizabethan writers were merely resuming the history of the earlier English Renascence, which religious and political disturbances had so wofully interrupted.

Towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign, the course of the developing interlude was further diverted by a fresh wave of humanist influence. This came from the wing of the movement which had occupied itself, not only with erudition, but also with the spiritual stirrings that issued in the Reformation. It must be borne in mind that the attitude of mere negation which the English Puritans, no doubt with their justification in ‘antiquity,’ came to adopt towards the stage, was by no means characteristic of the earlier Protestantism. The Lutheran reformers were humanists as well as theologians, and it was natural to them to shape a literary weapon to their own purposes, rather than to cast it aside as unfit for furbishing. About 1530 a new school of neo-Latin drama arose in Holland, which stood in much closer relations to mediaevalism than that which had had its origin in Italy. It aimed at applying the structure and the style of Terence to an edifying subject-matter drawn from the tradition of the religious drama. The English _Everyman_ belongs to a group of related plays, both in Latin and in the vernaculars, on its moral theme. The _Acolastus_ (1530, acted 1529) of William Gnaphaeus and the _Asotus_ (1537, written †1507) of George Macropedius began a cycle of ‘Prodigal Son’ plays which had many branches. The movement began uncontroversially, but developed Protestant tendencies. It spread to Basle, where Sixt Birck, who called himself Xystus Betuleius, wrote a _Susanna_ (1537), an _Eva_ (1539), a _Judith_ (1540), and to France, where the Scotchman George Buchanan added to the ‘Christian Terence’ a ‘Christian Seneca’ in the _Jephthes_ (1554) and _Baptistes_ (1564) performed, between 1540 and 1543, by his students at Bordeaux. In these, which are but a few out of many similar plays produced at this period, the humanists drew in the main upon such scriptural subjects, many of them apocryphal or parabolic, as were calculated, while no doubt making for edification, at the same time to afford scope for a free portrayal of human life. This on the whole, in spite of the treatment of such episodes as the Magdalen _in gaudio_, was a departure from the normal mediaeval usage[649].

A new note, of acute and even violent controversy, was introduced into the Protestant drama by the fiery heretic, Thomas Kirchmayer, or Naogeorgos. Kirchmayer wrote several plays, but the most important from the present point of view is that of _Pammachius_ (1538), written during his pastorate of Sulza in Thuringia before his extreme views had led, not merely to exile from the Empire, but also to a quarrel with Luther. The _Pammachius_ goes back to one of the most interesting, although of course not one of the most usual, themes of mediaeval drama, that of Antichrist; and it will readily be conceived that, for Kirchmayer, the Antichrist is none other than the Pope. It is interesting to observe that the play was dedicated to Archbishop Cranmer, whose reforming _Articles_ of 1536 had roused the expectations of Protestant Germany. It was translated into English by John Bale, and was certainly not without influence in this country[650].

Both the merely edifying and the controversial type of Lutheran drama, indeed, found its English representatives. To the former belong the _Christus Redivivus_ (1543) and the _Archipropheta_ (1548) of the Oxford lecturer, Nicholas Grimald, one of which deals, somewhat exceptionally at this period, with the Resurrection, the other with John the Baptist. The _Absalon_ of Thomas Watson, the _Jephthes_ of John Christopherson (1546)[651], and the _Sodom_, _Jonah_, _Judith_, _Job_, _Susanna_, and _Lazarus and Dives_ of Ralph Radclif (1546-56)[652], can only conjecturally be put in this class; and Nicholas Udall, who wrote an _Ezechias_ in English, certainly did not commit himself irrecoverably in the eyes of good Catholics. John Palsgrave’s _Ecphrasis_ or paraphrase of _Acolastus_ (1540) is supplied with grammatical notes, and is conceived wholly in the academic interest. On the other hand controversy is suggested in the titles of Radclif’s _De Iohannis Hussi Damnatione_, and of the _De Meretrice Babylonica_ ascribed by Bale to Edward VI[653], and is undeniably present in the _Christus Triumphans_ (1551) of John Foxe, the martyrologist. This, like _Pammachius_, to which it owes much, belongs to the Antichrist cycle.

Nor was controversy confined to the learned language. As Protestantism, coquetted with by Henry VIII, and encouraged by Cromwell, became gradually vocal in England and awakened an equally resonant reply, the vernacular drama, like every other form of literary expression, was swept into the war of creeds. This phase, dominating even the professional players, endured through the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, and still colours the early Elizabethan interludes. Its beginnings were independent of the Lutheran influences that so profoundly affected its progress. The morality already contained within itself that tendency to criticism which was perhaps the easiest way to correct its insipidity. Historically it was politics rather than religion with which the interlude first claimed to interfere. The story begins, harmlessly enough, at court, with an allegorical ‘disguising’ during the visit of the Emperor Charles V to London in 1523, in which the French king, typified by an unruly horse, was tamed by Amitie, who stood for the alliance between Charles and Henry[654]. In 1526 John Roo’s morality, played at Gray’s Inn, of ‘Lord Governaunce’ and ‘Lady Publike-Wele’ wrung Wolsey’s withers, although as a matter of fact it was twenty years old[655]. Religion was first touched in 1527 in a piece of which one would gladly know more. It was played, as it seems, in Latin and French by the St. Paul’s boys under John Ritwise, before ambassadors from France. The subject was the captivity of the Pope, and amongst the singular medley of characters named are found ‘the herretyke, Lewtar’ and ‘Lewtar’s wyfe, like a frowe of Spyers in Almayn[656].’ This was, no doubt, all in the interests of orthodoxy; and a similar tone may be assumed in the comedies acted before Wolsey in the following year on the release of the Pope[657]. But much water passed under the mill in the next few years, and in 1533 there was a comedy at court ‘to the no little defamation of certain cardinals[658].’ In the same year, however, a proclamation forbade ‘playing of enterludes’ ‘concerning doctrines in matters now in question and controversie[659].’ This is a kind of regulation which it is easier to make than to enforce. Its effect, if it had any, was not of long duration. In 1537 much offence was given to Bishop Gardiner, the Chancellor of Cambridge University, by the performance amongst the youth of Christ’s College of a ‘tragedie,’ part at least of which was ‘soo pestiferous as were intolerable.’ This ‘tragedie’ was none other than the redoubtable _Pammachius_ itself[660]. In the same year, strict orders were issued to stay games and unlawful assemblies in Suffolk, on account of a ‘seditious May-game’ which was ‘of a king, how he should rule his realm,’ and in which ‘one played Husbandry, and said many things against gentlemen more than was in the book of the play[661].’ These were exceptional cases. Both the students of Christ’s and the Suffolk rustics had in their various ways overstepped the permitted mark. Certainly Henry was not going to have kingship called in question on a village green. But it is notorious that, in matters of religion, he secretly encouraged many obstinate questionings which he openly condemned. And there is evidence that Cromwell at least found the interlude a very convenient instrument for the encouragement of Protestantism. Bale tells us that he himself won the minister’s favour _ob editas comedias_[662]; and there is extant amongst his papers a singular letter of this same year 1537, from Thomas Wylley, the vicar of Yoxford in Suffolk, in which he calls attention to three plays he has written, and asks that he may have ‘fre lyberty to preche the trewthe[663].’ Cranmer, too, seems to have been in sympathy with Cromwell’s policy, for in 1539 there was an enterlude at his house which a Protestant described as ‘one of the best matiers that ever he sawe towching King John,’ and which may quite possibly have been John Bale’s famous play[664].

The position was altered after 1540, when Cromwell had fallen and the pendulum of Henry’s conscience had swung back to orthodoxy. Foxe records how under the _Act Abolishing Diversity in Opinions_ (1539), known as the _Act of the Six Articles_, one Spencer, an ex-priest who had become an interlude-player, was burned at Salisbury for ‘matter concerning the sacrament of the altar’; and how, in London, one Shermons, keeper of the Carpenters’ Hall in Shoreditch, ‘was presented for procuring an interlude to be openly played, wherein priests were railed on and called knaves[665].’ But the stage was by now growing difficult to silence. In 1542 the bishops petitioned the king to correct the acting of plays ‘to the contempt of God’s Word[666]’; and in 1543 their desire was met by the _Act for the Advauncement of true Religion and for the Abolishment of the Contrary_, which permitted of ‘plays and enterludes for the rebukyng and reproching of vices and the setting forth of vertue’; but forbade such as meddled with ‘interpretacions of scripture, contrary to the doctryne set forth or to be set forth by the kynges maiestie[667].’ This led to a vigorous protest from John Bale, writing under the pseudonym of Henry Stalbridge, in his _Epistel Exhortatorye of an Inglyshe Christian_. Its repeal was one of the first measures passed under Edward VI[668].

Lord Oxford’s men were playing in Southwark at the very hour of the dirge for Henry in the church of St. Saviour’s[669]. Almost immediately ‘the Poope in play’ and ‘prests in play’ make their appearance once more[670]. Edward himself wrote his comedy _De Meretrice Babylonica_. In 1551 the English comedies ‘in demonstration of contempt for the Pope’ were reported by the Venetian ambassador to his government[671]. But the players were not to have quite a free hand. It was now the Catholic interludes that needed suppression. A proclamation of August 6, 1549, inhibited performances until the following November in view of some ‘tendyng to sedicion[672].’ The _Act of Uniformity_ of the same year forbade interludes ‘depraving and despising’ the _Book of Common Prayer_[673]. A more effective measure came later in a proclamation of 1551, requiring either for the printing or the acting of plays a licence by the king or the privy council[674]. Mary, at whose own marriage with Philip in 1554 there were Catholic interludes and pageants[675], issued a similar regulation in 1553, though naturally with a different intention[676]. But this was not wholly effectual, and further orders and much vigilance by the Privy Council in the oversight of players were required in the course of the reign[677].

Only a few texts from this long period of controversial drama have come down to us. On the Catholic side there is but one, the play of _Respublica_ (1553). In this, and in the Protestant fragment of _Somebody, Avarice and Minister_, the ruling literary influence is that of Lyndsay’s _Satyre of the Thre Estaitis_. Of the remaining Protestant plays, _Nice Wanton_ (1560) and Thomas Ingelend’s _The Disobedient Child_ (n.d.) derive from the Dutch school of Latin drama and its offshoots. _Nice Wanton_ is an adaptation of the _Rebelles_ (1535) of Macropedius. _The Disobedient Child_ has its relations, not only to the play of Ravisius Textor already mentioned, but also to the _Studentes_ (1549) of Christopher Stymmelius. More distinctly combative in tendency is the _Lusty Juventus_ (n.d.) of R. Wever, who may be reckoned as a disciple of John Bale. The activity of Bale himself can be somewhat obscurely discerned as the strongest impelling force on the Protestant side. He had his debts both to Lyndsay and to Kirchmayer, whose _Pammachius_, if not his other plays, he translated. But he is very largely original, and he is set apart from the other great figures of the Lutheran drama by the fact that all his plays were written _in idiomate materno_. Moreover, though not without classical elements, they were probably intended for popular performance, and approach more closely to the mediaeval structure than to that of the contemporary interlude. In his _Scriptores_ he enumerates, under twenty-two titles, some forty-six of them. The five extant ones were probably all ‘compiled’ about 1538 while he was vicar of Thorndon in Suffolk. But some of them were acted at the market-cross of Kilkenny in 1553, and the others show signs of revision under Edward VI or even Elizabeth. In _God’s Promises_, _John Baptist_, and _The Temptation_, Bale was simply adapting and Protestantizing the miracle-play. The first is practically a _Prophetae_, and they are all ‘actes,’ or as the Middle Ages would have said ‘processes’ or ‘pageants,’ from a scriptural cycle. Of similar character were probably a series of eleven plays extending from Christ in the Temple to the Resurrection. A _Vita D. Joannis Baptistae_ in fourteen _libri_ perhaps treated this favourite sixteenth-century theme in freer style. The polemics are more marked in _Three Laws_, which is a morality; and in _King John_, which is a morality varied by the introduction of the king himself as a champion against the Pope and of certain other historical figures. It thus marks an important step in the advance of the drama towards the treatment of individualities. With the _Three Laws_ and _King John_ may be grouped another set of lost plays whose Latinized titles point unmistakably to controversy. An _Amoris Imago_ might be merely edifying; but it would be difficult to avoid meddling in matters of doctrine with such themes to handle as _De Sectis Papisticis_, _Erga Momos et Zoilos_, _Perditiones Papistarum_, _Contra Adulterantes Dei Verbum_, _De Imposturis Thomae Becketi_. A pair of plays _Super utroque Regis Coniugio_, must have been, if they were ever acted, a climax of audacity even for John Bale.

What then, in sum, was the heritage which the early Elizabethan writers and players of interludes received from their immediate predecessors? For the writers there were the stimulus of classical method and a widened range both of intention and of material. Their claim was established to dispute, to edify, or merely to amuse. They stood on the verge of more than one field of enterprise which had been barely entered upon and justly appeared inexhaustible. ‘Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’; they possessed at least the keys to them all. Their own work is a heterogeneous welter of all the dramatic elements of the past and the future. Belated morals and miracle-plays jostle with adaptations of Seneca and Plautus. The _dramatis personae_ of a single play will afford the abstractions of the allegory and the types of the farce side by side with real living individualities; and the latter are drawn indifferently from contemporary society, from romance, from classical and from national history. These are precisely the dry bones which one day, beneath the breath of genius, should spring up into the wanton life of the Shakespearean drama. The players had made good their footing both in courts and amongst the folk. But their meddlings with controversy had brought upon them the hand of authority, which was not to be lightly shaken off. Elizabeth, like her brother, signalized the opening of her reign by a temporary inhibition of plays[678]; and her privy council assumed a jurisdiction, by no means nominal, over things theatrical. In their censorship they had the assistance of the bishop of London, as ‘ordinary.’ The lesser companies may have suffered from the statute of 1572 which confined the privilege of maintaining either minstrels or players of interludes to barons and personages of higher degree[679]. But the greater ones which had succeeded in establishing themselves in London, grew and flourished. They lived down the competition of the amateurs which during the greater part of the century threatened to become dangerous, by their profitable system of double performances, at court and in the inn yards. Thus they secured the future of the drama by making it economically independent; and the copestone of their edifice was the building of the permanent theatres. But for courtesy and a legal fiction, they were vagabonds and liable to whipping: yet the time was at hand when one player was to claim coat armour and entertain preachers to sack and supper at New Place, while another was to marry the daughter of a dean and to endow an irony for all time in the splendid College of God’s Gift at Dulwich.

APPENDICES

A

THE TRIBUNUS VOLUPTATUM

[The _tribunus voluptatum_ was a municipal officer of the later
Empire charged with the superintendence of the _spectacula_. He
seems to have been appointed for life by the Emperor, and to
have taken over functions formerly discharged by the praetors
and quaestors. Mommsen, _Ostgothische Studien_ (_Neues Archiv_,
xiv. 495), says that he first appears in the fifth century.
Possibly, therefore, Suetonius, _Tiberius_, 42, ‘novum denique
officium instituit a voluptatibus, praeposito equite R. T.
Caesonio Prisco’ refers to some other post. A _titulus_, ‘de
officio tribuni voluptatū qd a temelicis et scenariis,’ which
should be _C. Th._ i. 19, is missing from the text. _C. Th._
xv. 7, 13 (413), is addressed to the _tribunus voluptatum_ of
Carthage. The office was maintained in Italy under Theodoric
(493-526). The _formula_ of appointment here given is preserved
by Cassiodorus, _Variae_, vii. 10; cf. _Var._ vi. 19 ‘cum
lascivae voluptates recipiant tribunum.’ The Senate is informed
by _Var._ i. 43 (†509) of the promotion of Artemidorus, who
had held the office, to be _praefectus urbanus_. The _tribunus
voluptatum_ of Rome is referred to in two inscriptions of
522 and 526 (Rossi, _Inscr. Christ._ i. Nos. 989, 1005). One
Bacauda is appointed _tribunus voluptatum_ in Milan by _Var._
v. 25 (523-6). Constantine Porphyrogenitus _de Caer._ i. 83
mentions an ἄρχων τῆς θυμέλης in the tenth-century court of
Byzantium, who may be the same officer.]

_Formula Tribuni Voluptatum._

Quamvis artes lubricae honestis moribus sint remotae et histrionum vita vaga videatur efferri posse licentia, tamen moderatrix providit antiquitas, ut in totum non effluerent, cum et ipsae iudicem sustinerent. amministranda est enim sub quadam disciplina exhibitio voluptatum. teneat scaenicos si non verus, vel umbratilis ordo iudicii. temperentur et haec legum qualitate negotia, quasi honestas imperet inhonestis, et quibusdam regulis vivant, qui viam rectae conversationis ignorant. student enim illi non tantum iucunditati suae, quantum alienae laetitiae et condicione perversa cum dominatum suis corporibus tradunt, servire potius animos compulerunt. Dignum fuit ergo moderatorem suscipere, qui se nesciunt iuridica conversatione tractare. locus quippe tuus his gregibus hominum veluti quidam tutor est positus. nam sicut illi aetates teneras adhibita cautela custodiunt, sic a te voluptates fervidae impensa maturitate frenandae sunt. age bonis institutis quod nimia prudentia constat invenisse maiores. leve desiderium etsi verecundia non cohibet, districtio praenuntiata modificat. agantur spectacula suis consuetudinibus ordinata, quia nec illi possunt invenire gratiam, nisi imitati fuerint aliquam disciplinam. Quapropter tribunum te voluptatum per illam indictionem nostra fecit electio, ut omnia sic agas, quemadmodum tibi vota civitatis adiungas, ne quod ad laetitiam constat inventum, tuis temporibus ad culpas videatur fuisse transmissum. cum fama diminutis salva tua opinione versare. castitatem dilige, cui subiacent prostitutae: ut magna laude dicatur: ‘virtutibus studuit, qui voluptatibus miscebatur.’ optamus enim ut per ludicram amministrationem ad seriam pervenias dignitatem.

B

TOTA IOCULATORUM SCENA

John of Salisbury, _Polycraticus_ i. 8 (†1159, _P. L._ cxcix, 406), says, Satius enim fuerat otiari quam turpiter occupari. Hinc mimi, salii vel saliares, balatrones, aemiliani, gladiatores, palaestritae, gignadii, praestigiatores, malefici quoque multi, et tota ioculatorum scena procedit.’ The specific terms belong to John of Salisbury’s classical learning rather than to contemporary use; but his generic _ioculator_ is the normal mediaeval Latin term for the minstrel in the widest sense. Classically the word, like its synonym _iocularis_, is an adjective, ‘given to ioca,’ ‘merry.’ Thus Cicero, _ad Att_. iv. 16. 3 ‘huic ioculatorem senem illum interesse sane nolui.’ Similarly Firmicus Maternus (fourth century), _Mathesis_, viii. 22 ‘histriones faciat, pantomimos, ac scaenicos ioculatores,’ and 4 _Conc. Carthag._ (398), c. 60 (_C. I. C. Decr. Gratiani_, i. 46. 6) ‘clericum scurrilem et verbis turpibus ioculatorem ab officio retrahendum censemus.’ Here the technical meaning is approached, which Gautier, ii. 12, declares to be complete in Salvian (fifth century), _de gubernatione Dei_. I cannot, however, find the word in Salvian, though I do find _iugulator_, ‘cut-throat.’ I have not come across _ioculator_ as a noun before the eighth century (vol. i. p. 37), but thenceforward it is widely used for minstrels of both the _scôp_ and the _mimus_ type. A rarer form is _iocista_. _Ioculator_ gives rise to the equally wide French term _jouglere_, _jougleur_, which seems to merge with the doublet _jogeler_, _jougler_, from _iocularis_. Similarly _ioca_ becomes _jeu_, the equivalent of the classical and mediaeval Latin _ludus_, also in the widest sense. In Provençal _ioculator_ becomes _joglar_, in English _jugelour_, _jugelere_, _jogeler_, &c. Thus _S. Eng. Leg._ i. 271 (†1290) ‘Is iugelour a day bifore him pleide faste And nemde in his ryme and in is song þene deuel atþe laste’; King Horn (ed. Ritson), 1494 (†1300) ‘Men seide hit were harperis, Jogelers, ant fythelers.’ The incorrect modern French form _jongleur_ seems due to a confusion between _jougleur_ and _jangleur_, ‘babbler,’ and the English _jangler_ has a similar use; cf. _Piers the Plowman_, B. Text, _passus_ x. 31 (ed. Skeat, i. 286) ‘Iaperes and Iogeloures, and Iangelers of gestes.’ Here both words appear side by side. The English _jogelour_ sometimes has the full sense of the French _jougleur_, as in the instances just given, but as a term for minstrels of the higher or _scôp_ type it has to compete, firstly, with the native _gleeman_, from O. E. _gleoman_, _gligman_, and secondly, with _minstrel_; and as a matter of fact its commoner use is for the lower type of minstrel or buffoon, and in particular, in the exact sense of the modern _juggler_, for a conjuror, _tregetour_ or _prestigiator_. The latter is the usual meaning of _jogelour_, with the cognate _jogelrye_, in Chaucer; for the former, cf. Adam Davie (†1312) ‘the minstrels sing, the jogelours carpe.’ In English documents the Latin _ioculator_ itself to some extent follows suit; the _ioculator regis_ of late fifteenth or early sixteenth-century accounts is not a minstrel or musician, but the royal _juggler_ (cf. vol. i. p. 68). On the other hand the Provençal _joglar_ is differentiated in the opposite sense, to denote a grade of minstrelsy raised above the mere _bufos_ (vol. i. p. 63).