Characters Lifeless and Wooden Introduction of Personal Types greatly restricted. The religious element was still its basis, and its characters were of necessity wooden and lifeless. They lacked flesh and blood; an abstract quality personified can never be galvanized into life. The abundance of action in the Moralities, the buffoonery and horse-play, had kept them alive; they had pleased the people precisely as the Punch-and-Judy shows please children to-day; but without an added element they never could have made an advance. The drama, says Miss Bates, had " dribbled into miserable hybrids neither secular nor sacred." But at length a saving element began to appear; actual men and women, familiar village types, began to take places among the puppets. Hyke Scorner, the last of the Moralities, brings before us a delightful study from real life. He is a creature of the borderland bearing the name of an abstract human attribute and yet characterized until we recognize the type. Suddenly at this point there appeared a writer “ bold enough," in the words of Ward, " to throw overboard altogether the traditionary machinery and the personified abstractions of allegory and elevate to the first place the personal types which had been gradually introduced." With Heywood the English drama lost the last traces of its religious origin: it was no longer to be a medium of instruction; its sole function was to amuse. In creating the Interlude Heywood was only obeying the voice of the times. The reign of Henry VIII. was an era of untold love of ostentation and amusement. A gay whirl of pleasure was in constant demand. Every court occasion, every move of the sovereign or his circle, must be accompanied with appropriate pageants and plays, the more gay and boisterous the better. To meet Heywood's Interludes The Four P's the extravagant demands of the times a class of professional actors had sprung up. Not only the King but also many of the nobles kept bands of players continually in their employ. There was an unusual demand for plays, and vast numbers were created, many of them extemporaneous productions which perished with the occasion. All through the Tudor century, that most intense and active era in English history, plays and pageants were made and acted in unheard-of profusion. It was John Heywood, a musician and actor in the court of Henry VIII. who, more than any one else, directed the current into its new channel. He realized that the demand was for short secular pieces,-little farces that went with vigor and snap and were soon over; and his The Pardoner and the Friar, The Four P's, and other pieces mark another era in English dramatic history. The Four P's may be taken as a type of the Interlude. The plot is simple indeed. Four familiar characters, a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Potycary, and a Pedler, engage in a lying contest, and the prize is won by the Palmer, who declares that In all places where I haue ben Of all the women that I haue sene, I neuer sawe or knewe, in my consyens, The humor of the piece consists almost wholly in the droll raillery of the actors at each other's professions, in coarse jokes and allusions, in puns, and animated disputes. There is such a redundancy of wit that it becomes wearisome and even nauseating. In Heywood's Play between John the Husband and Tyb the Wife we are shown the Influence of the New Learning The Rise of Comedy woes of a henpecked husband, which culminate in a hard beating for the poor victim. REQUIRED READING. Heywood, The Pardoner and the Friar in Pollard, English Miracle Plays. 3. The Classic Comedy. It is at this point that the line of the new learning crosses the path of the drama. The Interludes had been without a trace of foreign influence; they had grown spontaneously and naturally from the native religious drama; but in 1536, or later, while Heywood was still writing, Nicholas Udall, a scholar of note, head master of Eton, and afterwards head master of Westminster School, turned his attention to dramatic work, and, like a true son of the Renaissance, modeled his play after classic patterns. The writers most prized by the new learning seem to have been Plautus, Terence, and Seneca. Erasmus and others of his school knew their Terence by heart. It is not strange that Udall, attempting an English drama, should turn to these Latin masters, that he should declare in his prologue that Plautus and Terence" among the learned at this day bear the bell." His Ralph Roister Doister is but a careful imitation of the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus. Heywood had depended on dialogue, on incessant rapier flashes of wit; he had drawn his characters from actual life, but he had not attempted the development of character by dialogue and action. The plays of Plautus had aimed to reproduce their age by means of comic characterization; they had made studies from real life, and they had depended not alone upon dialogue and brilliancy of wit but upon action and contrasts of character. Udall held to the best points of both the Latin and the English drama, and the result was an epoch-making work,-Ralph Roister Doister, Ralph Roister Doister Gammer Gurtons Nedle the first English comedy. It is not in itself a great play; it is full of Latin echoes; its principal characters are copied faithfully from Plautus; its methods are borrowed either from the Latin master or from Heywood, but nevertheless it marks a new tendency. In it we find blended for the first time naturalness, individuality of characterization, sprightliness of dialogue, brilliancy of wit, and freedom of action. It is also significant that it is divided into five acts, each subdivided into scenes. Udall's work was followed before 1562 by another notable comedy, Gammer Gurtons Nedle, by an anonymous writer, perhaps John Still, Bishop of Bath and Wells. At first sight it seems like a step backward, for, compared with Ralph Roister Doister, the play is rude and unclassic, the plot is exceedingly slender, and the humor and the language are coarse and popular. A careful reading of the comedy, however, quickly corrects such an estimate. The play is unquestionably the most promising dramatic work that had been produced in England up to that time. It was but a step from Gammer Gurton to the Comedy of Errors and the Merry Wives of Windsor, for its characters are living people, and they act and speak and think just as might be expected of characters in their walk of life and under the same conditions. The play manifestly tried to follow classic rules, but notwithstanding this its spirit is almost wholly English. It takes us into the coarse, brutal world of the English peasantry. We can imagine as we read it where the early audiences would burst into boisterous merriment. Such people are insensible to the more delicate forms of wit and humor: nothing will make them laugh but coarse horse-play, vulgar jokes, and hard blows. When Dr. Rat appears with Its Characterizations Its Truth to Nature his broken head, all burst into a roar which increases the more he complains, and the climax of mirth comes when the two good wives of the play, after exhausting their copious vocabularies, fall upon each other, tooth and nail. It is no imaginary picture; it is the real England that we are looking at, and these are types of the great majority of its people. These rude creatures in scanty leather clothing, with their narrow little world, with their ignorance, their nearness to the soil, are as truly Englishmen as the perfumed gallants of the great Henry's court. How full of coarse life they are! With what broad strokes are Hodge, and Tyb, and Dame Chat, and Dr. Rat made real to us! It is as if we were actually visiting a rural hamlet. We feel acquainted even with Gyb, the cat, jumping into "the milk-pan over head and ears"; crouching in the fireplace until Hodge blows upon her eyes, thinking them coals; and gasping with a bone in her throat until all believe that she has swallowed the needle. There is a touch of nature in the work, an unconscious portrayal of character, a study of life at first hand, that promised glorious things. It is a document in the nation's history; it gives us more of the actual Tudor England than the whole school of the Courtly Makers with their elaborate library of miscellanies. England was moving with huge strides toward its greatest creative epoch. REQUIRED READING. Drinking song in Act. II. of Gammer Gurton," Back and syde go bare," and Act III., iv.; Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearian Drama, Vol. ii. 4. The Classic Tragedy. (See Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy.) Only one more step |