THE DRAMATIC DEVELOPMENT
OF THE ENGLISH CYCLES |
WHEN,
after the reinstitution of the festival of Corpus Christi
in 1311, the miracle plays began in England to be a function
of the guilds, their secularisation, even though the clerks still
participated in the acting, was but a question of time; and the
injection of crude comedy was a natural response to the civic
demand. Indeed, if we consider comedy in its higher meaning as
the play of the individual achieving his ends, not by revolt,
but by adjustment to circumstance and convention, the miracle
play was in its essence a preparation for comedy rather than
tragedy. For the theme of these dramas is, in a word, Christian:
the career of the individual as an integral part of the social
organism, of the religious whole. So, also, their aim: the welfare
of the social individual. They do not exist for the purpose of
portraying immoderate self-assertion and the vengeance that rides
after, but the beauty of holiness or the comfort of contrition.
Herod, Judas, and Antichrist are foils, not heroes. The hero
of the miracle seals his salvation by accepting the spiritual
ideal of the community. These plays, accordingly, contribute
in a positive manner to the maintenance of the social organism.
The tragedies of life and literature, on the other hand, proceed
from secular histories, histories of personages liable to disaster
because of excessive peculiarity,--of person or position. Tragedy
is the drama of Cain, of the individual in opposition to the
social, political, divine; its occasion is an upheaval of the
social organism. The dramatic tone of the miracle cycle is, therefore,
determined by the conservative character of Christianity in general;
the nature of the several plays is, however, modified by the
relation of each to one or other of the supreme crises in the
biblical history of God's ways toward man. The Massacre of the
Innocents emphasises not the weeping of Rachel, but the joyous
escape of the Virgin and the Child. In all such stories the horrible
is kept in the background or used by way of suspense before the
happy outcome, or frequently as material for mirth. The murder
of Abel gradually passes into a comedy of the grotesque. Upon
the sweet and joyous character of the pageants of Joseph and
Mary and the Child we shall in due course dwell. They are of
the very essence of comedy. Indeed, it must be said that in the
old cycles the plays surrounding even the Crucifixion are not
tragedy; they are specimens of the serious drama, of tragedy
averted. The drama of the cross is a triumph. In no cycle does
the consummation est close the pageant of the Crucifixion;
the actors announce, and the spectators believe, that this is
"Goddis Sone," whom within three days they shall again
behold, though he has been "nayled on a tree unworthilye
to die."
But though the dramatic edifice constructed
by our medieval forbears is generally comedy, it is also divine.
And not for a moment did these builders lose their reverence
for the House Spiritual that was sacred, nor once forget that
the stones which they ignorantly and often mirthfully swung into
strange juxtaposition were themselves hewn by Other Hands. The
comic scenes of the English Miracle should, therefore, be regarded
not as interruptions to the sacred drama, nor as independent
episodes, but as counterpoint or dramatic relief. Regarding the
plays as units, we may discover in one, like the beautiful Brome
play of Abraham and Isaac, or its allied pageants of Chester,
York, and Wakefield, a preponderance of the pathetic; in another,
like the York of the Wakefield Scourging of Christ, a
preponderance of the horrible; in the Joseph and Mary plays of
the Ludus Coventriæ a preponderance of the romantic,
and so on. But when we regard them as interdependent scenes of
the cycles to which they might, or do, belong, the varied emotional
colours blend: indigo, gamboge, vermilion producing an effect,
gorgeous--sometimes disquieting, but always definite. Not only
definite, but homogeneous and reposeful, when, in moments of
historic vision, the tints grow misty, subliminal, and all is
moss-green, lavender, or grey,--as when with self-obliteration
one contemplates the stained glass window of a medieval church,
King's College Chapel, St. Mark's of Venice, or Nôtre Dame.
The best comedies of the cycles--the York
and Wakefield pageants of the Flood, the N-Town Trial
of Joseph and Mary--pass from jest to earnest as imperceptibly
as autumn through an Indian summer. In the Second Shepherds'
Play, one cannot but remark the propriety of the charm, as well
as the dramatic effect, with which the foreground of the sheep-stealing
fades into the radiant picture of the Nativity. The pastoral
atmosphere is already shot with a prophetic gleam; the fulfilment
is, therefore, no shock or contrast, but a transfiguration--an
epiphany. It is, moreover, to be remembered that such characters
and episodes as are comically treated are of secular derivation,
or, if scriptural, of no sacred significance. Thus the comic
and the realistic in the poet were set free; and it is just when
he is embroidering the material of mystery with the stammel-red
or russet of his homespun that he is of most interest to us.
When the plays have passed into the hands of the guilds, the
playwright puts himself most readily into sympathy with the literary
consciousness as well as the untutored aesthetic taste of the
public if he colours the spectacle, old or new, with what is
pre-eminently popular and distinctively national. In the minster
and out of it, all through the Christian year, the townsfolk
of York or Chester had as much of ritual, scriptural narrative,
and tragic mystery as they desired, and probably more. When the
pageants were acted, they listened with simple credulity, no
doubt, to the sacred history, and with a reverence that our age
of illumination can neither emulate nor understand; but we may
be sure that they awaited with keenest expectation those invented
episodes where tradition conformed itself to familiar life--the
impromptu sallies, the cloth-yard shafts of civic and domestic
satire sped by well-known wags of town or guild. Of the appropriateness
of these insertions the spectators made no question, and the
dramatists themselves do not seem to have thought it necessary
to apologise for their aesthetic creed or practice.
It is propædeutic to comedy, then,
rather than tragedy that I prefer to treat the miracle plays.
And I find it easier to trace some order of dramatic development
by approaching them from this point of view.
Continue...
This article was originally
published in Plays of Our Forefathers. Charles Mills Gayley.
New York: Duffield & Co., 1907. pp. 144-52.
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