Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/436

Rh 416 ENGLISH LITERATURE [RENAISSANCE. temporary fame as the author of coarse and ribald satires, directed against the abuses of his day, especially those which deformed the church. His latest work, a Dialog concerning the Afonarehe, appeared in 1553. Tn the article DRAMA it was described how the modern drama grew up under the shadow of the church, and an attempt was made to convey a clear notion of the - mode in which the ancient miracle plays were performed. As the people grew richer and more numerous, and the arts of life were improved, and experience suggested ways of correcting blemishes and adding fresh splendour to the spectacle, these plays were exhibited with ever increasing potnp. Yet, at the same time, the lay spirit getting hold of them more and more, and the religious laxity of the Renaissance attacking the clergy, we find those which date from the 15th century not only grotesque, but gross to the last degree. Their composition in many parts betrays a scandalous accommodation or condescension to the brutality or pruriency of the hearers. Take for instance, the scene called &quot; The Bridal of Mary and Joseph &quot; in the Coventry Mysteries. To interest masses of ignor ant people it may have been necessary to be simple, broad, and outspoken ; but it could not have been neces sary to introduce a heap of filthy jokes, not found in their original, gathering round the mystery of the Incar nation, for the sake of raising a horse-laugh, and cover ing the cheeks of the country girls with blushes. It must be remembered that the entire system of language and allusions in these plays is contemporary. Mary s kinsman, Abizachar, is a mediaeval bishop, with his court, his sumpnours, and his apparitors ; the whole thing is racy of the soil, and redolent of the national humour ; you are no more transported into Palestine than a travestie of &quot; Medea &quot; transports you into Greece. The moral effects upon juvenile spectators of so much loose talk, conveyed to them as it was with a sanction (for a religious aim was always professed, and indeed as a rule sincerely enter tained in these exhibitions), cannot have been of an improv ing nature. Miracle Besides the great serial plays, such as The Chester The plays. Coventry and the Tcnvnley Mysteries, in the successive scenes of which all the principal truths and doctrines of religion, beginning with the creation, and ending with &quot; Doomsday,&quot; were represented, a demand arose for special plays, treating of the life, or the miracles, or the martyrdom of some favourite saint. Such were The Conversion of St Paul, Si Mary Magdalen, and St Anne, which may be seen in a MS. in the Bodleian library. These were some times performed in the churches, on the festival of the saint celebrated in them, sometimes in the halls of royal palaces or colleges, sometimes again within the precincts of monasteries. Gradually something more refined, more in the fashion, than any -miracle play, was called for at Moral courts and colleges. Then arose the moral plays, in plays. which the allegorical treatment and metaphysical refine ments which were of the taste of the age were applied to dramatic entertainments. Saints and angels were dis carded ; and virtues, vices, and abstract notions of various kinds took their place as the dramatis persona?. The devil of the miracle plays, who had more and more become a grotesque and comic character, at least in many of them, appeared as the &quot;vice&quot; or &quot;iniquity&quot; of the moral plays, and introduced into them also a corresponding comic element ; this &quot; vice,&quot; as is well known, was gradually transformed into the clown of the modern stage. Skelton wrote two moral plays, one called The. Nigramansir, which was performed before Henry VII. and his court at Wood stock, the other Magnyfycence. A more ambitious effort was the Satyre of Thrie Estaits, by Lindsay; this enormous moral play was acted before the Scottish court in 1535, and occupied nine hours in the representation. The dulness and tediousness of plays of this kind, owing to the want of human interest, prevented them from holding their ground against the more natural form of the drama which the imitation of the ancients soon introduced; yet Mr Collier, in his History of Dramatic Poetry, has shown that moral plays continued to be written down to the very end of the reign of Elizabeth. Translations and imita tions of the plays of Plautus and Terence paved the way for the reign of a purer taste. Sixteen years after it had witnessed The Nigramansir, the English court was refreshed by &quot; a goodie comedie of Plautus,&quot; probably through the instrumentality of Sir Thomas More, who was then in high favour with Henry. The interludes of John Heywood, court-jester to the same king, wern another step in advance. The personified qualities are here dropped, and persons take their place ; these persons, however, are not yet individuals, but representatives of classes, &quot; a pedlar,&quot; &quot;a palmer,&quot; &o. The earliest proper comedy that has yet been discovered is the Ralph Roister Doister of Nicholas Udall, the head master of Eton College. In Ud this play, written to be performed by his scholars, Udall imitates so far as he can the style and manner of Terence. It is divided into acts and scenes, and is written in hob bling alexandrine rhyming lines, which, as containing twelve syllables, i.e., six feet, he obviously thought were the nearest English reproduction of the iambic trimeter. He did not see that the movement of our heroic blank verse, in spite of its being shorter by two syllables, represents more faithfully than any other English metre the movement of the iambic trimeter; while such rough alexandrines as his only recall the Saturnian verse of Nrevius. The recognition of the fact that for the English drama the proper metre is the blank verse of ten syllables was due to the finer perceptions of Sackville, who, with Sac Norton, produced the tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, or vill Gorbodue, in 1561; this, the earliest regular tragedy that has been discovered, was played before Queen Elizabeth in the hall of the Inner Temple. For some years the drama continued to be beholden to the hospitality of the court, or some legal society, or educational institution (Gray s Inn, Lincoln s Inn, St Paul s school, &c.), for the local habitation where it might display its illusions. But as the popular delight in such exhibitions increased at this time faster than the Puritanic aversion to them (although this also was gaining ground, as we shall see), it was in evitable that the stage should cease to be movable and migratory, and establish itself in a permanent home. The first public theatre was opened at Blackfriars in 1575 ; the histrionic art became a recognized profession ; many other theatres sprang up before the end of the century ; Italian plays were adapted, Latin plays translated, episodes of English history dramatized ; and, on the whole, a kind of dramatic atmosphere was generated in the English metro polis, highly favourable to the career of a great artist, should such a one appear. More s philosophical fiction of Utopia, imitated from Mo- Plato s Atlantis, appeared in Latin in 1516; it is the picture of an ideal commonwealth. The Governour, by Sir Thomas Elyot, was also intended to be a political treatise ; but under the despotism of Henry. the subject was too dangerous, and the author confines himself almost entirely to questions connected with education. The earliest good English prose, in Mr Hallam s opinion, is found in Sir Thomas More s History of Henry V., which appeared in 1513. But the curious treatise by Sir John Fortescue, written more than thirty years before, F O I the Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy, cue is really very good English, and contains few words that are not now in use ; if it were divested of its barbarous