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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.
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