The Birth of English Drama: Mystery and Morality

If, as it's often said, William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English -- perhaps, indeed, in any -- language, then where did his most famous genre come from?  Today, we look at the very earliest English plays, the birth of English theatre.  We will consider "The Second Shepherd's Play," "The York Crucifixion," and "Everyman."

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• 18:55 (Cont.) The Birth of English Drama: Mystery and Morality

Transcript

Now, Gracious God, grounded of all goodness,

As thy great glory never beginning had,

So thou succour and save all those that sit and see

And listeneth to our talking with silence still and sad.

For we purpose us pertly still in this press

The people to please with plays full glad!

Now listeneth us, lovely, both more and less,

Gentles and yeomanry of goodly life lead

This tide.

We shall you shew, as that we kan,

How that this world first began,

And how God made both mold and man,

If that ye will abide.

That’s the opening speech from the 15th century play “The Banns,” announcing that soon, very soon, the public will be treated to a glorious series of plays depicting God’s glorious creation of the world.  This is the birth of theatre. Today, we look at the beginnings of English drama.

But before we start looking, may I ask the audience to activate their cellular devices and like, follow, and subscribe to the podcast.  If you’ve a moment during intermission, I humbly beg that you post a positive review of the show so that others can find us.  Of course, should you be financially able to contribute to the passing hat, please click the “Support the Show” button.  Every little bit helps keep the lights on and the mike hot.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Yes, I think it’s fair to say that the English drama was born here in the 15th century, in the waning decades of what we now call the Middle Ages. It was, by our standards, rather primitive in its production, but these rough-and-tumble beginnings will produce, in the next century, what many consider the world’s most influential dramatic literature – yes, we’re talking primarily Shakespeare, but also Jonson, Marlowe, Fletcher and then the great Restoration playwrights, the inimitable Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, Harold Pinter, and on and on to today.  

Medieval drama had no theatre, of course.  The first purpose-built theatre would not open until 1576 in London, called (surprisingly enough) The Theatre.  No need to specify, I suppose.  No, drama in the late Middle Ages was very much a bourgeois affair, performed in towns during holy day festivals by local merchants and artisans.  Plays were staged in the marketplace and innyards, and so the rise of theatre is very much bound up in the rise of early capitalism – art and commerce thriving and competing side by side.  And the plays were, of course, religious in nature. 

Imagine yourself a yeoman, a free property owner.  You come to a market center, say York or Wakefield, during a festival to trade, to shop, to drink.  Maybe take in a show.  You jostle through the throng, the energetic swell of humanity, criers selling chickens, eggs, and wool. Someone tries to hoodwink you with a fixed game.  Savory roasted meats and potages fill the air, competing with the sweat and the dung of both animals and their owners.  Peasants wander slowly by, overwhelmed, unaccustomed to the bustling liberty.  A few aristocrats haggle with vendors for luxury items from the exotic lands beyond the sea. The heat, the smell, the dust.  The barking of dogs, the neighing of horses, the lowing of oxen.  All is tumble and noise.  You stop at the Red Lion Inn to wash the dust from your throat, and you see the wagons circling the yard.  The play is about to begin.

The play you are about to see may be one of two types.  Mystery plays dramatized episodes from the Bible and Christian lore.  These developed directly from Church liturgy and had almost no relation to the classical drama of Greece and Rome, which had long perished.  Mystery plays were usually performed in cycles, the most famous of which is the Corpus Christi Cycle.  We have four surviving versions of the Corpus Christi, which tells the sacred history from Creation (or sometimes the Fall of Lucifer) to the Last Judgment and was generally performed during midsummer festivals – particularly Corpus Christi, or the Feast of the Body of Christ.  How these plays came to be associated with this feast is a matter of some debate: as it commemorates Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist, a pivotal point in sacred history, it may have attracted a general desire to survey that history.  Or, since it usually occurs sometime in June when the days are longer, we have ample time for drama and pageantry as well as the commercial ability to flaunt wares.   Each play in the cycle was performed by one of the local craft guilds, working with ecclesiastical authorities, and the assignments were based on the guild’s craft.  For example, bakers would enact Jesus feeding the 5000 or water-carriers Noah’s Flood.  Incidentally, we call them mystery plays not because they are whodunnits, but because they were performed by these commercial trades or “mysteries” (think about the Latin word ministerium or the French mystere, meaning “one who has been initiated into some secret craft or learning).  They were never called mystery plays in medieval England – they were simply the Corpus Christi plays.

They were like a Bible for the illiterate and functioned typologically.  What I mean by this is that the plays offer a symbolic and teleological explanation of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.  That doesn’t seem any clearer.  OK, let’s take Jesus Christ as a type.  According to Christian theologians (and playwrights, I guess), figures from the Hebrew Scriptures such as Abel and Isaac, the one murdered by his brother and the other nearly sacrificed by his father, become what are called “antetypes” for Jesus, given that he, too, was betrayed and sacrificed.  “Ante-” here meaning preceding or earlier, not against.  Noah’s Flood is an antetype for Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, Moses leading the Israelites from Egypt is an antetype for Christ’s Harrowing of Hell.  And so on and so on.  Essentially, there is much allegorizing and parallelizing of the events of sacred history in order to present a holistic symmetry to the salvation narrative.

I mentioned earlier, in our little imaginary day at the market, that we saw the wagons circling.  What did I mean by that?  Well, the earliest church dramas, say from the 10th century or even earlier, were liturgical processions.  There would be, in essence, a parade through town by the clergy with whatever symbols and sounds were appropriate to the feast.  As these processions became pageants, one might see a tableau vivant on a wagon as part of the parade – a float to us – in which some folks would be posed in the representation of the Nativity or the Crucifixion.  In the fullness of time, perhaps little snatches of dialogue were added as an extra feature.  Eventually, these pageant wagons became quite elaborate moving stages, some multi-leveled (so you could have God speak from above in the heavens or Satan curse from below in Hell) with pretty nifty stage machinery for some special effects.  Whether the Corpus Christi cycle continued to process – that is, we stay at the Red Lion Inn, watch one play.  They push off to the next location while we wait for another wagon – throughout the centuries is difficult to say.  As the plays grew more elaborate, it would be difficult to stage a series of dozens of plays.  At some point, there must have been a central stationary location.

Among the most popular and famous mystery plays is the Christmassy Second Shepherd’s Play, part of a cycle of some 32 plays from Wakefield in Yorkshire.  Written by a cleric we have come to call the Wakefield Master, this is considered his outstanding artistic success.  The manuscript as we have it probably dates from about 1475, but we imagine some version of this play existed from perhaps 50 years earlier.  It’s not unfair to call the Second Shepherd’s play the first English comedy, but it is no mere farce meant to lighten the Nativity story.  Indeed, the Nativity itself has very little in the way of stage time.

Put on by the chandlers guild (that is, the candlemakers) the play ostensibly tells the backstory of the Visitation of the Shepherds to the Christ child in Bethlehem –  you know, the fellas who watched their flocks by night on the First Noel.  Here, though, the shepherds are real people, not mere representations of an outcast underclass as in the Gospel narrative.  Three shepherds – Coll, Gib, and Daw – enter, each offering a scathing monologue, condemning the brutally cold weather, the rapaciousness of landlords, and the nagging of wives (the plays are indeed stereotypically misogynistic).  Coll charges:

Bot we sely shepardes / that walks on the moore,     

In faith we are nere handys / out of the doore;

No wonder as it stands / if we be poore,     

ffor the tylthe of oure landys / lyys falow as the floore,     

As ye ken.     

we ar so hamyd,     

ffor-taxed and ramyd,     

We ar mayde hand tamed,     

with these gentlery men.     

Thus they refe us oure rest / our lady theym wary!     

These men that our lord fest / thay cause the plow tary.     

That men say is for the best / we fynde it contrary;     

Thus ar husbands opprest / in po[i]nte to myscary,     

On lyfe.     

Thus hold, thay us hunder,     

Thus they bring us in blonder;     

It were great wonder,     

And ever should we thrive.     

They are ill-clothed, ill-fed, and ill-tempered.  Daw, the youngest of the bunch, asks his elders for some relief, but despite their recent diatribes against the selfishness of gentry men, they abuse him for a lazy, crazy servant.

Then enters Mak, a well-known thief and scoundrel, feigning aristocratic manners. The shepherds suspect him of looking to steal their sheep, so they force him to lie down between them as they sleep, so they’ll know if he stirs toward their livestock.  But he casts a spell over them and as they drift to the land of Nod, he knicks one of their rams.

Mak hies home to his wife Gill, who says that he will be hanged for his theft.  Aha! She will put the sheep (all 140 lbs of it) in the empty cradle and she will give out loud howling labor pains – oh, its twins! – to put the shepherds off the scent.  Foolproof, I imagine you’re thinking.  She swears, “Ah, my meddill! I pray God so mild, if ever I you beguiled, that I eat this child that lies in the cradle!”

The shepherds at first desist, but then return to congratulate the couple on their new children when they notice the peculiar girth of the newborn in the cradle (again, 140 lbs) and the presence of a rather prominent pair of horns.  “Oh, no,” says Mak and Gill, “that’s our baby all right.  He’s uh, he’s been cursed by an elf.  Yeah, yeah.  That’s the ticket!”

Unbelievably, the shepherds penetrate this opaque ruse, but instead of handing Mak over to the law for execution, they decide to mercifully toss him in a blanket, a form of corporal punishment.

And now . . . now . . . we get to the Christmas story.  An angel appears, tells them the good news, they pop in to the stable for a visit, leave some cherries and a tennis ball, and return happy in their salvation.

Now, despite the rather ridiculous goings-on, there is quite a good deal of artistry evident by the Wakefield Master.  You might have noticed the poetry’s robust, vigorous rhythm.  The stock of the stanza includes internal rhyme before a caesura and alliteration, followed by a bob of two or three syllables, then a four-line wheel with three successive end rhymes concluding with a fourth line which rhymes with the bob.  All of this contributes to a rather muscular pounding quality – sounds like a protest chant, which I suppose it is, in a way.  These are hard men with hard lives who feel quite put upon.

The play moves deftly from winter’s discontents to the joyful incarnation.  The stolen sheep scenario indeed parodies the Nativity (getting quite close to blasphemy without quite tipping in) and the placing of the dead sheep in the cradle completes the archetypal circle of life: birth and death, spring and winter.  Sorrow feeds into the farce so that, at the glorious conclusion, that sorrow becomes affirmative.

Of course, we can notice other typological parallels.  The stolen sheep and Jesus, the lamb of God.  That sheep will suffer and die for Mak’s sin (Mak being a type of Adam, a figure in dire need of redemption).  Gill and Mak (and presumably the shepherds too) will eat the sheep, a type of Eucharist. Of course, Gill is an Eve type and a kind of profane Mary: her false pain in false childbirth inverts the events of the Fall in Eden as well as the Annunciation and Virgin Birth.  In the end, Mak does not get the death he deserves, but is saved by the mercy of the shepherds.  The Wakefield Master takes biblical stories of deep theological and soteriological significance and makes them relevant to and identifiable in everyday 15th century life.  Like a beast fable, the common events have a typological significance that permits the audience, or the reader, to perceive the miraculous in the mundane.

But the Wakefield Master does not imply that Christ's birth in any way nullifies the legitimate complaints of the world's oppressed.  No hint of patient waiting for a delayed justice in some nether world. Coll notes that the world’s great and celebrated were denied this privilege: “so poor as we are that he would appear / First find, and declare by his messenger.”  Mary agrees, saying, “He keep you from woe!”  while Gib notes that the baby “lies full cold.”  They understand that the miraculous birth is for them, the poor of the world, and is of them.  Their poverty is his, and how could the world call that justice?

Misapplied or maimed justice undergirds another famous Corpus Christi play, this time from the York cycle, the largest of the cycles at some 48 plays.  As a counterpoint to the shepherd’s play, which takes Christ’s birth as its focus, let’s look at the York Crucifixion play about the end of Christ’s life.

The play really has no plot, no story.  It’s really more like we are listening in to the everyday work of Roman soldiers as they carry out just another execution.  We overhear four soldiers glibly discussing the job at hand – they are more concerned with getting it done – “he must be dead needlings by noon” – and done with the careful craftsmanship of which they are evidently (despite their actual incompetence) quite proud: “Then to this work us must take heed, / So that our working be not wrong.”

The play then proceeds to juxtapose their horrifying cruelty with their oblivious attitude.  Jesus lays himself down upon the cross, in an act of sacrificial agency very like the heroic Christ of “The Dream of the Rood.”  He prays:

Almighty God, my Father free,

Let these matter be made in mind,

Thou bade that I should buxom be

For Adam’s plight to be pined.

That last line indicates for us that the guild performing the Crucifixion play were the pinners, those who make the pegs for joining wood (blackly comic or distastefully on the nose or both? Answers on the back of a $20 bill care of the Clubhouse). At first, the soldiers realize that whoever bored the holes in the crossbeam to receive the nails spaced them too far apart, so they stretch Jesus with cords, pulling like 4 bulls, tearing “asunder . . . both sinews and veins on ilka side.”  Throughout, they mock the pain they cause and heap abuse on the victim.  But strangely, at least to me, it seems, well . . . impersonal.  Have you ever had to fix something – around the house, in your garage – and the blasted thing will just not cooperate?  The bolts are rusted in or the board is warped or the battery is dead or the wrench gets stuck – whatever.  You fight and spit and curse and finally, when you’ve managed to cobble together some kind of jerry-rigged solution, you gloat about your victory over the inanimate object that you imagined had attempted to thwart you.  Maybe that’s just me, but that’s what it seems like these soldiers are doing: Jesus is not a man – they’re not insulting him personally because for them he’s just part of the job that’s frustrating them.  To really feel scorn or hatred for their victim, the soldiers would have first to perceive him as a man, as a person just like themselves.  But Jesus is just a short board, a stuck nut.

Then they can’t lift the cross up into its mortise.  They fumble and groan and complain about the weight and then finally drop the cross into the posthole with a bone-crunching jolt:  “This falling was more fell / Than all the harms he had.”  But the mortise is poorly sized and will not hold the cross straight, so they must hammer in wedges to rectify the angle.

It should be said that, until this point, the audience would not have been able to see Jesus; he would have been lying down on the stage.  We must focus on the action of the bumbling executioners and so, in some dramatic fashion, become complicit in their impersonal cruelty and ineptitude.  Indeed, we may even laugh at the darkly comic clumsiness.  

But now he is cruelly visible.  In his final speech, he charges:

Behold mine head, mine hands, and my feet,

And fully feel now, ere ye fine,

If any mourning may be meet 

Or mischief measured unto mine.  

My father, that all bales may beet

Forgive these men that do me pine

What they work, wot they not.

That last line I really love both for its balance and its sonic effect.  It means, of course, “they don’t know what they are doing,” and we can take that a couple of ways.  There is the straight way, the way consistent with Christ’s forgiveness, that these ignorant men are not aware of the great crime they commit, that humans are unaware of the great evil of which they are capable.  But we can also hear this as darkly ironic, that these men do not know how to carry out the work with which they are tasked.  They are foolish bumblers: they don’t know what they’re doing.  The play’s last line brutally complements Christ’s speech.  The second soldier says, “Go we then hence tite, / This travail here we tine.”  Let’s take off – this job was a waste of time.  We call this playwright the York Realist, usually for his careful rendering of local dialect, but also, I think, for his psychological frankness – our mechanical tasks make us machines, unfeeling in the pursuit of mere productivity.

Which leads me to the last play I would like to discuss with you.  About 20 minutes ago, I told you that, broadly, there were two kinds of play in the 15th century.  The ones we’ve discussed are mystery plays.  But I never told you the other and I am now prepared to relieve what must be agonizing suspense.  The second type we call a morality play (though, again, this is a term of art in our own age – the medievals would have simply called them moral plays).  The morality plays developed alongside the mysteries, though they did not share their roots in liturgy or ritual.  Whereas the mystery play took in sacred history in a gigantic scope, the morality plays focused on the individual person’s reckoning with God and were thus essentially a new genre in the late Middle Ages.  Professor David Bevington defines the play as “the dramatization of a spiritual crisis in the life of a representative mankind figure in which his spiritual struggle is portrayed as a conflict between personified abstractions representing good and evil.”  So we are once again in the realm of allegory which, as we’ve seen, fascinated the medieval mind (think Piers Plowman) because this type of extended metaphor narrative easily allows the everyday (probably illiterate) person access to complex philosophical and psychological questions like the nature of truth, will, appetite, and sin.

Oddly, the most famous morality play is also the least typical of the genre.  To be fair, we’ve only a bare handful of extant manuscripts, but the play Everyman differs from its peers in that the seriousness of its topic (the moment of the coming of death) is never leavened by the humor that characterizes both the mysteries and the other moralities.  Nor do we find the familiar character Vice (who would go on to many wonderful permutations in the hands of Elizabethan dramatists) and there is, in Everyman, a stark quality: no need for special effects, stage machines, or even costume changes.  We imagine the stage set to be quite spartan, even by the standards of the age.

The play begins with God’s lament that humanity has forsaken him in its pursuit of wealth and worldly pleasure.  He dispatches his messenger Death to call the character Everyman to his account.  We are to understand that Everyman is quite the lad about town: has amassed a good deal of property, likes a drink and a game of dice and a bit of the other when the lassies are willing.  He has no cares in his life beyond his own immediate pleasure.  Death contends: “His minde is on fleshly lusts and his treasure.” Ah, but then Death stops him announcing that “a reckoning [God] will needs have without any longer respite.”  Everyman balks, saying he isn’t ready to die: “give me another 12 years and I’ll have everything sorted!”  Bollocks, replies Death.

It should be noted that throughout Everyman, the language of trade and commerce dominates.  The words “reckoning,” “debt,” “account,” “book” (as in bookkeeping) often refer to God’s judgment of the sinner’s moral state.  I did say earlier that medieval drama depended largely for its popularity and strength on the emerging capitalism that occasioned feast days and market days.  Europe adopted double-entry accounting and the use of Arabic numerals only within the last century or so, allowing for bookkeeping that could record more complex business transactions.  Here, then, the language is ironically meta – perhaps the very reason you’re here watching this play is the reason the play applies to you!

Everyman is thus summoned on his final pilgrimage of reckoning.  He seeks companionship in his friends (personified as Fellowship) and his family (Kindred and Cousin) but both abandon him since his sex, drugs, and rocknroll lifestyle is over: “Fair promises men to me make, But whan I have most need they me forsake,” he laments.  He turns then to his wealth, his Goods, which too promises him succour: “For it is said ever among that money maketh all right that is wrong.”  But when Everyman informs Goods that his journey is to the grave, Goods remembers he has a thing back at the house and scarpers.

What about Good Deeds?  Yes, Everyman thinks, Good Deeds will come on my pilgrimage.  And indeed she would, but she says, “I cannot stande, verily.”  She is too weak, too frail, too burdened by Everyman’s sins to stand by him.  She refers him to her sister, Knowledge of Sin, who urges confession and penance, which strengthens Good Deeds to rise.  The pilgrims are soon joined by Strength, Discretion, Beauty, and Five Wits.  All pledge to accompany Everyman to the grave and they do, but once they arrive, Strength says that, in the grave, he will weaken and decay; Beauty says she will be hidden and rot; Discretion says he cannot go where the others cannot, and Five Wits confesses his uselessness from this point on.  Only Good Deeds and Knowledge remain: “Everyman, I will bide with thee!” promises the former.  Knowledge then says:  

Good Deeds shall make all sure.

Now that he hath made ending,

Methinketh that I hear angels sing

And make great joy and melody

Where Everyman’s soul received shall be.

I love a happy ending.  It may surprise that this play, of the three we studied today, is in some senses the most orthodox, the most directly didactic.  One can certainly see the necessity of the institutional Church to the playwright.  Five Wits gives a speech arguing that the priest is greater than any human office or occupation:

There is no emperor, king, duke, ne baron

That of God hath commission

As has the least priest in the world being

For of the blessed sacraments pure and benign

He has the keys. 

But Knowledge also recognizes that one must be wary of corrupt priests, those “which God their Saviour do buy and sell or they for any money do take or tell.”  

Those listeners less familiar with Catholic theology or the controversies surrounding its teaching on salvation in the middle ages and into the renaissance might not notice that the play depicts a pretty hardline case for what are called “works” in the debate.  That is, the play strongly implies that only through one’s good deeds and the proper functioning of the institutional Church does one attain everlasting life.  Everyman must have performed good deeds during his life; he must seek absolution from a priest for his sins; he must perform a mortification of the flesh to expunge them – all this prescribed and monitored by the corporate Church.  There is no real mention of faith or grace – this is a very behaviorally oriented point of view.  Mere years from now, a German monk named Martin Luther will take issue with this view of “earning salvation,” and this will spark the  Protestant Reformation, perhaps the most influential cultural schism in western history.

Talk about dramatic!