Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/73

Rh plays as obviously do not, being entirely secular in tone. As Professor Moltzer says, if the Dutch "abele spelen" are descended from the French, there must have existed in France before the fifteenth century a highly developed secular drama alongside the ecclesiastical, of which these plays give us our only conception. The pieces of Adam de la Halle—described by Mr Gregory Smith in an earlier volume—stand quite by themselves, and were probably composed for private performance.

Mysteries and Miracle-plays were produced in abundance in the fifteenth century; but in the sixteenth the favourite plays of the chambers of rhetoric were the Moralities or Zinnespelen, the seriousness of which they relieved with Esbattementen or farces. The chambers which issued the challenge for a Landjuweel propounded the subject of the plays to be performed—e.g., "What is the greatest mystery or grace provided by God for the salvation of man?" "What is Man's greatest consolation in death?" "What best prompts Man to the cultivation of art?" The Zinnespelen lent themselves readily to Catholic and anti-Catholic propagandism. At a great Landjuweel held at Ghent in 1539 the Protestant doctrines of Justification, and the superiority of the Bible and St Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and Scotus, were set forth in the boldest terms. The tone of the Ghent plays was serious, but in Den boom der schrifturen, performed at Middelburg in the same year, Romanism was bitterly satirised. Philip the Second naturally forbade this sort of thing, and the song became in