Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/379

364 entirely changed and a good deal Anglicised. There are 2548 lines, in metres similar to those of the Ordinalia, but less accurate. The play was printed in 1827 by Davies Gilbert, the Cornish historian, with a translation by John Keigwin, and in 1864, with a translation of his own, by Dr. Whitley Stokes.

These then are the remains of the Cornish drama. There is good reason to believe that there were once many more. It hardly seems possible, with the wealth of local hagiology that Cornwall possessed, and the great taste for religious drama known to have prevailed there, that St. Meriasek of Camborne should have been the only saint whose life was dramatised. Nicholas Roscarrock, himself a Cornish hagiologist, though he wrote in English, mentions in a letter to Camden, the Elizabethan antiquary, a life in Cornish of St. Columba, virgin and martyr, the patron saint of my native parish of St. Columb, Cornwall, which he says he had seen. This may well have been a miracle play, for a mere biography would have been more probably in Latin, and of these, of course, every parish had one for the Lessons of the Second Nocturn of its Feast Day, as Leland, in the Cornish part of his Itineranry, clearly indicates, though the stupid and illiterate blundering of the Edwardian Reformation made away with them. Unlike the English sets of mediæval miracle plays, the Cornish scriptural plays omit entirely the Nativity cycle, and go straight to the Passion. It may be that this is because the story of the Wood of the Cross is the connecting link of the trilogy, and as one can hardly suppose that so dramatic a story as the Annunciation and Nativity with its splendid stage possibilities should have been wholly neglected, one may conjecture that a play on that subject also may have perished. To this day the Christmas ‘Guees dancers’ and mummers go on in Cornwall, but the play is now only the English St. George story common to all south Britain.

It is not within the scope of this paper to trace the history of the religious drama in general, or to point out in detail the connection between the Cornish drama and that of other