英国文学

返回首页

美国文学

课程概述

教师简介

课程学习

学习资源

复习题库

 

the beginning of English drama<-chapter 2<-contents<-position





VI. The Beginning of English Drama


1. Miracle Plays
   English drama had its beginnings with the church plays and pantomimes of the Middle Ages. Two types of plays, miracles and the moralities, became popular in the 14th century. These were evidently "miracle plays", though for England the distinction between miracles and mysteries is of no importance, all religious plays being called "miracles". Of miracle plays in the strict sense of the word nothing is preserved in English literature. The earliest religious plays were undoubtedly in Latin and French. The oldest extant miracle in English is the "Harrowing of Hell" (thirteenth century). Its subject is the apocryphal descent of Christ to the hell of the damned, and it belongs to the cycle of Easter-plays. From the fourteenth century dates the play of "Abraham and Isaac". A great impetus was again given to the religious drama in England as elsewhere by the institution of the festival of Corpus Christi (1264; generally observed since 1311) with its solemn processions. The Miracle plays were all written in verse, usually in rather complicated stanzas and often with both rhyme and alliteration.


2. Morality Plays
     Moralities are a development or an offshoot of the Miracle Plays and together with these form the greater part of Medieval drama. They were popular in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and existed side by side with the Miracle Plays of that date. In Morality plays, figures represent vices and virtues, qualities of the human mind, or abstract conceptions in general.
     The earliest English Morality of which we hear is a play of the "Lord's Prayer" of the latter half of the fourteenth century "in which all manner of vices and sins were held up to scorn and the virtues held up to praise". This play is lost. Dramatic power is shown in this Morality; the plot forms a unity, and is developed in logical sequence.
   About the end of the fifteenth century a new kind of Morality play appeared. In the earlier Moralities of which we have been speaking, time was not an object, nor was there need to limit the number of actors, but little by little, as performances began to take place indoors, in the hall of a king or a noble, and as they passed into the hands of professional actors, compression began to be necessary both in time and in the number of personages introduced. The aim of the play, also, became gradually more secular.


3. Interludes
    While the mystery plays and the morality plays were still performed, the interludes developed. They are significant in early English literature as a transition to Elizabethan drama. An interlude was generally short, often performed during the interval of a long play. The interludes were less concerned with religious themes and made more use of the realistic, comic and homely incidents in life. They presented heroes with more individual qualities. It is known that Sir Thomas More enjoyed them. One of the best is Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres (c.1497), which is regarded as the first secular play in English. The plot of the play is simple: the heroine, Lucres, hesitates over the choice between two suitors, and she finally decides to marry the one she loves though his family is poor. The interludes became popular owing to the efforts of John Heywood (c.1497-c. 1580) and John Rastell (c.1475-c.1536), the first English dramatists to recognize that the most important quality of a play was to entertain. Heywoods’s major interludes are The Four p’s and The Merry Play between John Jone the husband, Tyb His Wofe, and Sir John the Priest. Rastell’s interludes include The Nature of the Four Elements and The Field of the Cloth of God.

  previous page