Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/378

322 classical themes; that a similar combination occurred in the Elizabethan drama, notably in Shakespeare, where the fairy mythology of the folk is interweaved with the plots and stories of the plays. And thus, by repeated efforts, the development was brought back as far as possible to the line, and the racial character of our drama was redeemed.

It seems to me that this is to give our drama a more illustrious lineage, and a more natural origin, than by ascribing it to the miracle-plays of the Middle Ages. What may have been contributed by the miracle-play—but we cannot be sure—is the form of dialogue, the conduct of a story by speaking characters. But this the ecclesiastics borrowed from Greece and Rome. Our Saxon forefathers may even have had a rude form of it themselves. It is possible that traditions of the dramatic action used by the scalds in their recitals of the Eddas—parts of which are in dialogue form—may have lingered among them; nor should it be forgotten that the folk-tales of a race with such remarkable dramatic propensities would receive a dramatic rendering in recitation. In the Elizabethan drama I find not a trace of the miracle-play. On the other hand, I do find it in some of the elements which were thrust into the miracle-plays, when the dramatic genius of the people, rude as it may have been, could no longer be restrained, and unconsciously strove to make the religious plays hold the mirror up to nature. And when I come to Shakespeare I feel that the clash of arms, the battles, the warlike processions, belong by right of blood and ancestry to the sword-dance of Odin.

The facility with which folk-drama became combined with the literary drama is explainable by the fact of their common origin. The combination was of crude and undeveloped dramatic elements, existing in the body of the national tradition, with the reflected drama of classical Greece and Rome, both having a common origin, the Northern undeveloped, the Southern developed. In this sense English drama has carried on the spirit of the ancient classical