[Bibliographical Note.—The literary discussions and collections of texts named in the bibliographical note to chap. xxiii and the material on the annals of the stage in that to chap. xxiv remain available. W. Creizenach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas, vols. i-iii (1893-1903), is the best general guide on the classical drama and its imitations during the Middle Ages and the Renascence. W. Cloetta, Beiträge zur Litteraturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance: i. Komödie und Tragödie im Mittelalter (1890); ii. Die Anfänge der Renaissancetragödie (1892), deals very fully with certain points. C. H. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century (1886), has an admirable chapter on The Latin Drama. G. Saintsbury, The Earlier Renaissance (1901), chap. vi, may also be consulted. Useful books on the beginnings of the Elizabethan forms of drama are R. Fischer, Zur Kunstentwicklung der englischen Tragödie von ihren ersten Anfängen bis zu Shakespeare (1893); J. W. Cunliffe, The Influence of Seneca on Elizabethan Tragedy (1893); L. L. Schücking, Studien über die stofflichen Beziehungen der englischen Komödie zur italienischen bis Lilly (1901); F. E. Schelling, The English Chronicle Play (1902). The best bibliographies are, for the Latin plays, P. Bahlmann, Die Erneuerer des antiken Dramas und ihre ersten dramatischen Versuche, 1314-1478 (1896), and Die lateinischen Dramen von Wimpheling’s Stylpho bis zur Mitte des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1480-1550 (1893); and for English plays, W. W. Greg, A List of English Plays written before 1643 and printed before 1700 (1900). This may be supplemented from W. C. Hazlitt, A Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays (1892). A list of early Tudor interludes will be found in Appendix X.]

The dramatic material upon which the interlude was able to draw had naturally its points of relation to and of divergence from that of the popular stage, whose last days it overlapped. It continued to occupy itself largely with the morality. The ‘moral interludes’ of the early Tudor period are in fact distinguished with some difficulty from the popular moralities by their comparative brevity, and by indications of the mise en scène as a ‘room’ or ‘hall’ rather than an open ‘place⁠[591].’ The only clearly popular texts later than those of the fifteenth century, discussed in a previous chapter, are Sir David Lyndsay’s Scottish Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, and the Magnificence, which alone survives of several plays from the prolific pen of the ‘laureate’ poet, John Skelton. A somewhat intermediate type is presented by the Nature of Cardinal Morton’s chaplain, Henry Medwall. This was certainly intended for performance as an interlude, but it is on the scale of the popular moralities, needing division into two parts to bring it within the limits of courtly patience; and like them it is sufficiently wide in its scope to embrace the whole moral problem of humanity. The conditions of the interlude, however, enforced themselves, and the later morals have, as a rule, a more restricted theme. They make their selection from amongst the battalions of sins and virtues which were wont to invade the stage together, and set themselves the task of expounding the dangers of a particular temperament or the advantages of a particular form of moral discipline. Hickscorner shows man led into irreligion by imagination and freewill. Youth concerns itself with pride, lechery, and riot, the specific temptations of the young. The Nature of the Four Elements and John Redford’s somewhat later Wit and Science preach the importance of devotion to study. The distinction between the episodic and the more comprehensive moralities was in the consciousness of the writers themselves; and the older fashion did not wholly disappear. William Baldwin describes his play for the Inns of Court in 1556 as ‘comprehending a discourse of the worlde⁠[592]’; and mention is more than once made of an interesting piece called The Cradle of Security, which seems to have had a motive of death and the judgement akin to that found in The Pride of Life and in Everyman⁠[593].

The morality was not, perhaps, quite such an arid type of drama as might be supposed, especially after the dramatists learnt, instead of leaving humanity as a dry bone of contention between the good and evil powers, to adopt a biographic mode of treatment, and thus to introduce the interest of growth and development⁠[594]. But by the sixteenth century allegory had had its day, and the light-hearted court of Henry VIII and Katharine of Aragon might be excused some weariness at the constant presentation before it of argumentative abstractions which occasionally yielded nothing more entertaining than a personified débat⁠[595]. Certainly it is upon record that Medwall’s moral of ‘the fyndyng of Troth,’ played at the Christmas of 1513, appeared to Henry so long, that he got up and ‘departyd to hys chambre⁠[596].’ The offenders on this occasion were English and his company of household players. They seem to have been unwisely wedded to the old methods. They pursued the princess Margaret to Scotland with a ‘Moralite’ in 1503, and in the reign of Edward VI they were still playing the play of Self-Love⁠[597]. Perhaps this explains why they make distinctly less show in the accounts of Tudor revels than do their competitors of the Chapel. Unfortunately none of the pieces given by this latter body have been preserved. But, to judge by the descriptions of Hall, many of them could only be called interludes by a somewhat liberal extension of the sense of the term. There was perhaps some slight allegorical or mythological framework of spoken dialogue. But the real amusement lay in an abundance of singing, which of course the Chapel was well qualified to provide, and of dancing, in which the guests often joined, and in an elaborately designed pageant, which was wheeled into the hall and from which the performers descended. They were in fact masques rather than dramas in the strict sense, and in connexion with the origin of the masque they have already been considered⁠[598].

The popular stage, as has been said, had its farcical elements, but did not, in England, arrive at any notable development of the farce. Nor is any marked influence of the overseas habit even now to be traced. The name is not used in England, although it is in Scotland, where at the beginning of the sixteenth century the relations with France were much closer⁠[599]. Whether directly or indirectly through French channels, the farce is perhaps the contribution of minstrelsy to the nascent interlude. That some dramatic tradition was handed down from the mimi of the Empire to the mimi of the Middle Ages, although not susceptible of demonstration, is exceedingly likely⁠[600]. That solitary mediaeval survival, the Interludium de Clerico et Puella, hardly declares its origin. But the farce, in its free handling of contemporary life, in the outspokenness, which often becomes indecency, of its language, in its note of satire, especially towards the priest and other institutions deserving of reverence, is the exact counterpart of one of the most characteristic forms of minstrel literature, the fabliau. These qualities are reproduced in the interludes of John Heywood, who, though possibly an Oxford man, began life as a singer and player of the virginals at court, and belonged therefore to the minstrel class. He grew quite respectable, married into the family of Sir Thomas More and John Rastell the printer, and had for grandson John Donne. He was put in charge of the singing-school of St. Paul’s, the boys of which probably performed his plays. Of the six extant, Wit and Folly is a mere dialogue, and Love a more elaborate disputation, although both are presented ‘in maner of an enterlude.’ But the others, The Pardoner and the Friar, The Four P’s, The Weather, and John, Tib and Sir John are regular farces. And with them the farce makes good its footing in the English drama.

Those congeners of the French farce which took their origin from the Feast of Fools, the Sottie and the Sermon joyeux, are only represented in these islands by the Sermon of ‘Folie’ in Sir David Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis⁠[601]. But the ‘fool’ himself, as a dramatic character, is in Shakespeare’s and other Elizabethan plays, and it must now be pointed out that he is in some of the earliest Tudor interludes. Here he has the not altogether intelligible name of the ‘vice.’ A recent writer, Professor Cushman of the Nevada State University, has endeavoured to show that the vice came into the interludes through the avenue of the moralities. Originally ‘an allegorical representation of human weaknesses and vices, in short the summation of the Deadly Sins,’ he lost in course of time this serious quality, and ‘the term Vice came to be simply a synonym for buffoon⁠[602].’ This theory has no doubt the advantage of explaining the name. Unfortunately it proceeds by disregarding several plays in which the vice does occur, and reading him into many where there is none⁠[603]. ‘Vicious’ had his pageant in the Beverley Paternoster play, and vices in the ordinary sense of the word are of course familiar personages in the morals, which generally moreover have some one character who can be regarded as the representative or the chief representative of human frailty. But the vice is not found under that name in the text, list of dramatis personae, or stage directions of any popular morality or of any pre-Elizabethan moral interlude except the Marian Respublica. The majority of plays in which he does occur are not morals, even of the modified Elizabethan type; and although in those which are he generally plays a bad part, even this is not an invariable rule. In The Tide Tarrieth for No Man, as in the tragedy of Horestes, he is Courage. Moreover, as a matter of fact, he comes into the interludes through the avenue of the farce. The earliest vices, by some thirty years, are those of Heywood’s Love, in which he is ‘Neither Loving nor Loved,’ who mocks the other disputants, and plays a practical joke with fireworks upon them, and The Weather, in which he is ‘Merry Report,’ the jesting official of Jupiter. And in the later plays, even if he has some other dramatic function, he always adds to it that of a riotous buffoon. Frequently enough he has no other. It must be concluded then that, whatever the name may mean—and irresponsible philology has made some amazing attempts at explanation⁠[604]—the character of the vice is derived from that of the domestic fool or jester. Oddly enough he is rarely called a fool, although the description of Medwall’s Finding of Truth mentions ‘the foolys part⁠[605].’ But the Elizabethan writers speak of his long coat and lathen sword, common trappings of the domestic fool⁠[606]. Whether he ever had a cockscomb, a bauble, or an eared hood is not apparent. A vice seems to have been introduced into one or two of the later miracle-plays⁠[607]. At Bungay in 1566 he ‘made pastime’ before and after the play, as Tarleton or Kempe were in time to do with their ‘jigs’ upon the London boards. And probably this was his normal function on such occasions.

From the moral the interlude drew abstractions; from the farce social types. The possibility of vital drama lay in an advance to the portraiture of individualities. The natural way to attain to this was by the introduction of historical, mythical, or romantic personages. The miracle-play had, of course, afforded these; but there is little to show that the miracle-play, during the first half of the sixteenth century, had much influence on the interlude⁠[608]. The local players brought it to court, but, for the present, it was démodé. It was, however, to have its brief revival. The quarry of romantic narrative had hardly been opened by the Middle Ages. An old theme of Robert of Sicily, once used at Lincoln, was now remembered at Chester. Robin Hood had yielded dramatic May-games, and his revels were popular at Henry VIII’s court⁠[609]. New motives, however, now begin to assert themselves. Some at least of these were suggested by the study of Chaucer. Ralph Radclif’s school plays at Hitchin included one on Griselda and one on Meliboeus⁠[610]. Nicholas Grimald wrote one on Troilus, and another had been acted by the Chapel at court in 1516⁠[611]. Radclif was also responsible for a Titus and Gisippus, while the king’s players, shaking off their devotion to the moral, prepared in 1552 ‘a play of Aesop’s Crow, wherein the most part of the actors were birds⁠[612].’ An extant piece on ‘the beauty and good properties of women’ and ‘their vices and evil conditions’ is really a version through the Italian of the Spanish Celestina, one of the first of many English dramatic borrowings from South European sources.

So far I have written only of developments which were at least latent in mediaevalism. But the interlude had its rise in the very midst of the great intellectual and spiritual movement throughout Europe which is known as humanism; and hardly any branch of human activities was destined to be more completely transformed by the new forces than the drama. The history of this transformation is not, however, a simple one. Between humanism and mediaevalism there is no rigid barrier. As at all periods of transition, a constant action and reaction established themselves between the old and new order of ideas. Moreover, humanism itself held elements in solution that were not wholly reconcilable with each other. Many things, and perhaps particularly the drama, presented themselves in very different lights, according as they were viewed from the literary or the religious side of the great movement. Some brief indication of the in-and-out play of the forces of humanism as they affected the history of the interlude during the first half of the sixteenth century is, therefore, desirable.

The chief of these forces is, of course, the influence of classical comedy and tragedy. These, as vital forms of literature, did not long survive the fall of the theatres, with which, indeed, their connexion had long been of the slightest. In the East, a certain tradition of Christian book dramas begins with the anti-Gnostic dialogues of St. Methodius in the fourth century and ends with the much disputed Χριστὸς Πάσχων in the eleventh or twelfth⁠[613]. It is the merest conjecture that some of these may have been given some kind of representation in the churches⁠[614]. In the West the Aulularia of Plautus was rehandled under the title of Querolus at the end of the fourth century, and possibly also the Amphitruo under that of Geta⁠[615]. In the fifth, Magnus, the father of Consentius, is said by Sidonius, as Shakespeare is said by Ben Jonson, to have ‘outdone insolent Greece, or haughty Rome⁠[616].’ Further the production of plays cannot be traced. Soon afterwards most of the classical dramatists pass into oblivion. A knowledge of Seneca or of Plautus, not to speak of the Greeks, is the rarest of things from the tenth century to the fourteenth. The marked exception is Terence who, as Dr. Ward puts it, led ‘a charmed life in the darkest ages of learning.’ This he owed, doubtless, to his unrivalled gift of packing up the most impeccable sentiments in the neatest of phrases. His vogue as a school author was early and enduring, and the whole of mediaevalism, a few of the stricter moralists alone dissenting, hailed him as a master of the wisdom of life⁠[617]. At the beginning of the eleventh century, Notker Labeo, a monk of St. Gall, writes that he has been invited to turn the Andria into German⁠[618]. Not long before, Hrotsvitha, a Benedictine nun of Gandersheim in Saxony, had taken Terence as her model for half a dozen plays in Latin prose, designed to glorify chastity and to celebrate the constancy of the martyrs. The dramaturgy of Hrotsvitha appears to have been an isolated experiment and the merest literary exercise. Her plays abound in delicate situations, and are not likely to have been intended even for cloister representation⁠[619]. Nor is there much evidence for any representation of the Terentian comedies themselves. A curious fragment known as Terentius et Delusor contains a dialogue between the vetus poeta and a persona delusoris or mime. The nature of this is somewhat enigmatic, but it certainly reads as if it might be a prologue or parade written for a Terentian representation. In any case, it is wholly unparalleled⁠[620]. In fact, although the Middle Ages continued to read Terence, the most extraordinary ideas prevailed as to how his dramas were originally produced. Vague reminiscences of the pantomimic art of later Rome led to the mistaken supposition that the poet himself, or a recitator, declaimed the text from a pulpitum above the stage, while the actors gesticulated voicelessly below⁠[621]. By a further confusion the name of Calliopius, a third- or fourth-century grammarian through whose hands the text of Terence has passed, was taken for that of a recitator contemporary with the poet, and the Vita Oxoniensis goes so far as to describe him as a powerful and learned man, who read the comedies aloud in the senate⁠[622]. The same complete ignorance of things scenic declares itself in the notions attached to the terms tragoedia and comoedia, not only vulgarly, but in the formal definitions of lexicographers and encyclopaedists⁠[623].

The characteristics which really differentiate the drama from other forms of literature, dialogue and scenic representation, drop out of account, the latter entirely, the former very nearly so. Both tragedy and comedy are regarded as forms of narrative. Tragedy is narrative which concerns persons of high degree, is written in a lofty style, and beginning happily comes to a sad conclusion. Comedy, on the other hand, concerns itself with ordinary persons, uses humble and everyday language, and resolves its complications in a fortunate ending⁠[624]. Even these distinctions are not all consistently maintained, and the sad or happy event becomes the only fixed and invariable criterion⁠[625]. The origin of such conceptions is to be found partly in the common derived classical use of tragoedia and comoedia to describe tragic and comic events as well as the species of drama in which these are respectively represented; partly in a misunderstanding of grammarians who, assuming the dialogue and the representation, gave definitions of tragedy and comedy in relation to each other⁠[626]; and partly in the solecism of the fifth-century epic writer Dracontius, who seems to have called his Orestes a tragedy, merely because it was from tragedies that the material he used was drawn⁠[627]. The comoedia and tragoedia of the Latin writers, thus defined, was extended to all the varieties of narrative, in the widest sense of the word. The epics of Lucan and Statius, the elegies of Ovid, are tragoediae; the epistles of Ovid, the pastoral dialogues of Virgil, are comoediae; the satires of Horace, Persius, Juvenal, are one or the other, according to the point of view⁠[628]. It is curious that, with all this wide extension of the terms, they were not applied to the one form of mediaeval Latin composition which really had some analogy to the ancient drama; namely to the liturgical plays out of which the vernacular mysteries grew. These must have been written by learned writers: some of them were probably acted by schoolboys trained in Terence; and yet, if Hrosvitha, as she should be, is put out of the reckoning, no inward or outward trace of the influence of classical tragedy or comedy can be found in any one of them. In the manuscripts, they are called officium, ordo, ludus, miraculum, repraesentatio and the like, but very rarely comoedia or tragoedia, and never before 1204⁠[629]. From the Latin the mediaeval notions of tragedy and comedy were transferred to similar compositions in the vernaculars. Dante’s Divina Commedia is just a story which begins in Hell and ends in Paradise⁠[630]. Boccaccio⁠[631], Chaucer⁠[632], and Lydgate⁠[633] use precisely similar language. And, right up to the end of the sixteenth century, ‘tragedy’ continues to stand for ‘tragical legend’ with the authors of the Mirror for Magistrates and their numerous successors⁠[634]. Long before this, of course, humanistic research, without destroying their mediaeval sense, had restored to the wronged terms their proper connotation. There is a period during which it is a little difficult to say what, in certain instances, they do mean. When Robert Bower, in 1447, speaks of comoediae and tragoediae on the theme of Robin Hood and Little John, it is a matter for conjecture whether he is referring to dramatized May-games or merely to ballads⁠[635]. Bale, in writing of his contemporaries, certainly applies the words to plays; but when he ascribes tragoedias vulgares to Robert Baston, a Carmelite friar of the time of Edward II, it is probable that he is using, or quoting a record which used, an obsolescent terminology⁠[636]. What the comoediae of John Scogan, under Edward IV, may have been, must remain quite doubtful⁠[637].

It is in the early fourteenth century and in Italy that a renewed interest in the Latin dramatists, other than Terence, can first be traced. Seneca became the subject of a commentary by the English Dominican Nicholas Treveth, and also attracted the attention of Lovato de’ Lovati and the scholarly circle which gathered round him at Padua. The chief of these was Albertino Mussato, who about 1314 was moved by indignation at the intrigues of Can Grande of Verona to write his Ecerinis on the fate of that Ezzelino who, some eighty years before, had tyrannized over Padua. This first of the Senecan tragedies of the Renascence stirred enthusiasm amongst the growing number of the literati. It was read aloud and Mussato was laureated before the assembled university. Two learned professors paid it the tribute of a commentary. The example of Mussato was followed in the Achilleis (1390) of Antonio de’ Loschi of Vicenza and the Progne (†1428) of Gregorio Corraro of Mantua. Petrarch was familiar not only with Terence, but also with Seneca and Plautus, and his Philologia, written before 1331 and then suppressed, may claim to take rank with the Ecerinis as the first Renascence comedy. It was modelled, says Boccaccio, upon Terence. A fresh impulse was given to the study and imitation of Latin comedy in 1427 by the discovery of twelve hitherto unknown Plautine plays, including the Menaechmi and the Miles Gloriosus, and various attempts were made to complete the imperfect plays. In 1441 Leonardo Dati of Florence introduced a motive from the Trinummus into his, not comedy, but tragedy of Hiempsal⁠[638].

It must be borne in mind that during these early stages of humanism classical models and neo-Latin imitations alike were merely read and not acted. There is no sign whatever that as yet the mediaeval misconception as to the nature of Roman scenic representation had come to an end. It was certainly shared by Nicolas Treveth and probably by both Petrarch and Boccaccio⁠[639]. It was not indeed in these regular dramas that the habit of acting Latin first re-established itself, but in a mixed and far less classical type of play. It is probable that in schools the exercise of reciting verse, and amongst other verse dialogue, had never died out since the time of the Empire. In the fourth century the Ludus Septem Sapientum of the Bordeaux schoolmaster Ausonius, which consists of no more than a set of verses and a ‘Plaudite!’ for each sage, was doubtless written for some such purpose⁠[640]. Such also may have been the destiny of the ‘elegiac’ and ‘epic’ comedies and tragedies of which a fair number were produced, from the eleventh century to the thirteenth. These are comedies and tragedies, primarily, in the mediaeval sense. They are narrative poems in form. But in all of them a good deal of dialogue is introduced, and in some there is hardly anything else. Their subject-matter is derived partly from Terence and partly from the stock of motives common to all forms of mediaeval light literature. Their most careful student, Dr. Cloetta, suggests that they were intended for a half-dramatic declamation by minstrels. This may sometimes have been the case, but the capacity and the audience of the minstrels for Latin were alike limited, and I do not see why at any rate the more edifying of them may not have been school pieces⁠[641]. By the fifteenth century it will be remembered, students, who had long been in the habit of performing miracle-plays, had also taken to producing farces, morals, and those miscellaneous comic and satiric pieces which had their origin in the folk-festivals. Many of these were in the vernaculars; but it is difficult to avoid classing with them a group of Latin dialogues and loosely constructed comedies, written in Terentian metres and presenting a curious amalgam of classical and mediaeval themes. Of hardly any of these can it be said positively that they were intended to be acted. This is, however, not unlikely in the case of the anonymous Columpnarium, which goes back to the fourteenth century. Pavia probably saw a performance of Ugolini Pisani’s Confabulatio coquinaria (1435), which has all the characteristics of a carnival drollery, and certainly of Ranzio Mercurino’s De Falso Hypocrita, which is stated in the manuscript to have been ‘acta’ there on April 15, 1437. The Admiranda of Alberto Carrara was similarly ‘acta’ at Padua about 1456. The exact way in which these pieces and others like them were performed must remain doubtful. Acting in the strict sense can only be distinctly asserted of Francesco Ariosto’s dialogue of Isis which was given ‘per personatos’ at the Ferrara carnival of 1444⁠[642].

All this pseudo-classic comedy was looked upon with scorn by the purists of humanism. But it made its way over the Alps and had a considerable vogue in Germany. In France it found an exponent in Jean Tissier de Ravisy (Ravisius Textor), professor of rhetoric in the College of Navarre at Paris, and afterwards rector of the Paris University, who wrote, in good enough Latin, but wholly in the mediaeval manner, a large number of morals, farces, and dialogues for representation by his pupils⁠[643]. Two at least of these were turned into English interludes. The classical element predominates in the pseudo-Homeric Thersites, the production of which can be fixed to between October 12 and 24, 1537; the mediaeval in Thomas Ingelend’s The Disobedient Child, which belongs to the very beginning of the reign of Elizabeth.

It was doubtless the study of Vitruvius which awakened the humanists to the fact that their beloved comedies had after all been acted after very much the fashion so long familiar in farces and miracle-plays. Exactly when the knowledge came is not clear. Polydore Vergil is still ignorant, and even Erasmus, at the date of the Adagia, uncertain. Alberti put a theatrum in the palace built on the Vatican for Nicholas V about 1452, but there is no record of its use for dramatic performances at that time, and the immediate successors of Nicholas did not love humanism. Such performances seem to have been first undertaken by the pupils of a Roman professor, Pomponius Laetus. Amongst these was Inghirami, who was protagonist in revivals of the Asinaria of Plautus and the Phaedra of Seneca. These took place about 1485. Several other representations both of classical plays and of neo-Latin imitations occurred in Italy before the end of the century; and the practice spread to other countries affected by the humanist wave, soon establishing itself as part of the regular sixteenth-century scheme of education. By this time, of course, Greek as well as Latin dramatic models were available. The Latin translation of the Plutus of Aristophanes by Leonardo Bruni (†1427) found several successors, and the play was acted at Zwickau in 1521. The study of Sophocles and Euripides began with Francesco Filelfo (†1481), but no representations of these authors are mentioned⁠[644].

The outburst of dramatic activity in English schools and universities during the first half of the sixteenth century has already been noted. Wolsey may claim credit for an early encouragement of classical comedy in virtue of the performances of the Menaechmi and the Phormio given in his house by the boys of St. Paul’s in 1527 and 1528⁠[645]. The master of St. Paul’s from 1522 to 1531 was John Ritwise, who himself wrote a Latin play of Dido, which also appears to have been acted before Wolsey⁠[646]. The Plutus was given at St. John’s College, Cambridge, in 1536; the Pax at Trinity about a decade later⁠[647]. A long series of English translations of classical plays begins with one of the Andria printed, possibly by John Rastell, under the title of Terens in Englysh⁠[648].

A more important matter is the influence exercised by classical models upon the vernacular interludes. This naturally showed itself in school dramas, and only gradually filtered down to the professional players. Two plays compete for the honour of ranking as ‘the first regular English comedy,’ a term which is misleading, as it implies a far more complete break with the past than is to be discerned in either of them. One is Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, the performance of which can be dated with some confidence in 1553, by which time its author may already have been head master of Westminster; the other is Gammer Gurton’s Needle, which was put on the stage at Christ’s College, Cambridge, has been ascribed to John Still, afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells, and to John Bridges, afterwards bishop of Oxford, but is more probably the work of one William Stevenson, who was certainly superintending plays at Christ’s College in 1550-3. Both plays adopt the classical arrangement by acts and scenes. But of the two Gammer Gurton’s Needle is far closer to the mediaeval farce in its choice and treatment of subject. Ralph Roister Doister, although by no means devoid of mediaeval elements, is in the main an adaptation of the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus. A slighter and rather later piece of work, Jack Juggler, was also intended for performance by schoolboys, and is based upon the Amphitruo. The earliest ‘regular English tragedy’ on Senecan lines, or at least the earliest which oblivion has spared, is the Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex of 1561. This falls outside the strict scope of this chapter. But a fragment of a play from the press of John Rastell (1516-33) which introduces ‘Lucres’ and Publius Cornelius, suggests that, here as elsewhere, the Elizabethan writers were merely resuming the history of the earlier English Renascence, which religious and political disturbances had so wofully interrupted.

Towards the end of Henry VIII’s reign, the course of the developing interlude was further diverted by a fresh wave of humanist influence. This came from the wing of the movement which had occupied itself, not only with erudition, but also with the spiritual stirrings that issued in the Reformation. It must be borne in mind that the attitude of mere negation which the English Puritans, no doubt with their justification in ‘antiquity,’ came to adopt towards the stage, was by no means characteristic of the earlier Protestantism. The Lutheran reformers were humanists as well as theologians, and it was natural to them to shape a literary weapon to their own purposes, rather than to cast it aside as unfit for furbishing. About 1530 a new school of neo-Latin drama arose in Holland, which stood in much closer relations to mediaevalism than that which had had its origin in Italy. It aimed at applying the structure and the style of Terence to an edifying subject-matter drawn from the tradition of the religious drama. The English Everyman belongs to a group of related plays, both in Latin and in the vernaculars, on its moral theme. The Acolastus (1530, acted 1529) of William Gnaphaeus and the Asotus (1537, written †1507) of George Macropedius began a cycle of ‘Prodigal Son’ plays which had many branches. The movement began uncontroversially, but developed Protestant tendencies. It spread to Basle, where Sixt Birck, who called himself Xystus Betuleius, wrote a Susanna (1537), an Eva (1539), a Judith (1540), and to France, where the Scotchman George Buchanan added to the ‘Christian Terence’ a ‘Christian Seneca’ in the Jephthes (1554) and Baptistes (1564) performed, between 1540 and 1543, by his students at Bordeaux. In these, which are but a few out of many similar plays produced at this period, the humanists drew in the main upon such scriptural subjects, many of them apocryphal or parabolic, as were calculated, while no doubt making for edification, at the same time to afford scope for a free portrayal of human life. This on the whole, in spite of the treatment of such episodes as the Magdalen in gaudio, was a departure from the normal mediaeval usage⁠[649].

A new note, of acute and even violent controversy, was introduced into the Protestant drama by the fiery heretic, Thomas Kirchmayer, or Naogeorgos. Kirchmayer wrote several plays, but the most important from the present point of view is that of Pammachius (1538), written during his pastorate of Sulza in Thuringia before his extreme views had led, not merely to exile from the Empire, but also to a quarrel with Luther. The Pammachius goes back to one of the most interesting, although of course not one of the most usual, themes of mediaeval drama, that of Antichrist; and it will readily be conceived that, for Kirchmayer, the Antichrist is none other than the Pope. It is interesting to observe that the play was dedicated to Archbishop Cranmer, whose reforming Articles of 1536 had roused the expectations of Protestant Germany. It was translated into English by John Bale, and was certainly not without influence in this country⁠[650].

Both the merely edifying and the controversial type of Lutheran drama, indeed, found its English representatives. To the former belong the Christus Redivivus (1543) and the Archipropheta (1548) of the Oxford lecturer, Nicholas Grimald, one of which deals, somewhat exceptionally at this period, with the Resurrection, the other with John the Baptist. The Absalon of Thomas Watson, the Jephthes of John Christopherson (1546)⁠[651], and the Sodom, Jonah, Judith, Job, Susanna, and Lazarus and Dives of Ralph Radclif (1546-56)⁠[652], can only conjecturally be put in this class; and Nicholas Udall, who wrote an Ezechias in English, certainly did not commit himself irrecoverably in the eyes of good Catholics. John Palsgrave’s Ecphrasis or paraphrase of Acolastus (1540) is supplied with grammatical notes, and is conceived wholly in the academic interest. On the other hand controversy is suggested in the titles of Radclif’s De Iohannis Hussi Damnatione, and of the De Meretrice Babylonica ascribed by Bale to Edward VI⁠[653], and is undeniably present in the Christus Triumphans (1551) of John Foxe, the martyrologist. This, like Pammachius, to which it owes much, belongs to the Antichrist cycle.

Nor was controversy confined to the learned language. As Protestantism, coquetted with by Henry VIII, and encouraged by Cromwell, became gradually vocal in England and awakened an equally resonant reply, the vernacular drama, like every other form of literary expression, was swept into the war of creeds. This phase, dominating even the professional players, endured through the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, and still colours the early Elizabethan interludes. Its beginnings were independent of the Lutheran influences that so profoundly affected its progress. The morality already contained within itself that tendency to criticism which was perhaps the easiest way to correct its insipidity. Historically it was politics rather than religion with which the interlude first claimed to interfere. The story begins, harmlessly enough, at court, with an allegorical ‘disguising’ during the visit of the Emperor Charles V to London in 1523, in which the French king, typified by an unruly horse, was tamed by Amitie, who stood for the alliance between Charles and Henry⁠[654]. In 1526 John Roo’s morality, played at Gray’s Inn, of ‘Lord Governaunce’ and ‘Lady Publike-Wele’ wrung Wolsey’s withers, although as a matter of fact it was twenty years old⁠[655]. Religion was first touched in 1527 in a piece of which one would gladly know more. It was played, as it seems, in Latin and French by the St. Paul’s boys under John Ritwise, before ambassadors from France. The subject was the captivity of the Pope, and amongst the singular medley of characters named are found ‘the herretyke, Lewtar’ and ‘Lewtar’s wyfe, like a frowe of Spyers in Almayn⁠[656].’ This was, no doubt, all in the interests of orthodoxy; and a similar tone may be assumed in the comedies acted before Wolsey in the following year on the release of the Pope⁠[657]. But much water passed under the mill in the next few years, and in 1533 there was a comedy at court ‘to the no little defamation of certain cardinals⁠[658].’ In the same year, however, a proclamation forbade ‘playing of enterludes’ ‘concerning doctrines in matters now in question and controversie⁠[659].’ This is a kind of regulation which it is easier to make than to enforce. Its effect, if it had any, was not of long duration. In 1537 much offence was given to Bishop Gardiner, the Chancellor of Cambridge University, by the performance amongst the youth of Christ’s College of a ‘tragedie,’ part at least of which was ‘soo pestiferous as were intolerable.’ This ‘tragedie’ was none other than the redoubtable Pammachius itself⁠[660]. In the same year, strict orders were issued to stay games and unlawful assemblies in Suffolk, on account of a ‘seditious May-game’ which was ‘of a king, how he should rule his realm,’ and in which ‘one played Husbandry, and said many things against gentlemen more than was in the book of the play⁠[661].’ These were exceptional cases. Both the students of Christ’s and the Suffolk rustics had in their various ways overstepped the permitted mark. Certainly Henry was not going to have kingship called in question on a village green. But it is notorious that, in matters of religion, he secretly encouraged many obstinate questionings which he openly condemned. And there is evidence that Cromwell at least found the interlude a very convenient instrument for the encouragement of Protestantism. Bale tells us that he himself won the minister’s favour ob editas comedias⁠[662]; and there is extant amongst his papers a singular letter of this same year 1537, from Thomas Wylley, the vicar of Yoxford in Suffolk, in which he calls attention to three plays he has written, and asks that he may have ‘fre lyberty to preche the trewthe⁠[663].’ Cranmer, too, seems to have been in sympathy with Cromwell’s policy, for in 1539 there was an enterlude at his house which a Protestant described as ‘one of the best matiers that ever he sawe towching King John,’ and which may quite possibly have been John Bale’s famous play⁠[664].

The position was altered after 1540, when Cromwell had fallen and the pendulum of Henry’s conscience had swung back to orthodoxy. Foxe records how under the Act Abolishing Diversity in Opinions (1539), known as the Act of the Six Articles, one Spencer, an ex-priest who had become an interlude-player, was burned at Salisbury for ‘matter concerning the sacrament of the altar’; and how, in London, one Shermons, keeper of the Carpenters’ Hall in Shoreditch, ‘was presented for procuring an interlude to be openly played, wherein priests were railed on and called knaves⁠[665].’ But the stage was by now growing difficult to silence. In 1542 the bishops petitioned the king to correct the acting of plays ‘to the contempt of God’s Word⁠[666]’; and in 1543 their desire was met by the Act for the Advauncement of true Religion and for the Abolishment of the Contrary, which permitted of ‘plays and enterludes for the rebukyng and reproching of vices and the setting forth of vertue’; but forbade such as meddled with ‘interpretacions of scripture, contrary to the doctryne set forth or to be set forth by the kynges maiestie⁠[667].’ This led to a vigorous protest from John Bale, writing under the pseudonym of Henry Stalbridge, in his Epistel Exhortatorye of an Inglyshe Christian. Its repeal was one of the first measures passed under Edward VI⁠[668].

Lord Oxford’s men were playing in Southwark at the very hour of the dirge for Henry in the church of St. Saviour’s⁠[669]. Almost immediately ‘the Poope in play’ and ‘prests in play’ make their appearance once more⁠[670]. Edward himself wrote his comedy De Meretrice Babylonica. In 1551 the English comedies ‘in demonstration of contempt for the Pope’ were reported by the Venetian ambassador to his government⁠[671]. But the players were not to have quite a free hand. It was now the Catholic interludes that needed suppression. A proclamation of August 6, 1549, inhibited performances until the following November in view of some ‘tendyng to sedicion⁠[672].’ The Act of Uniformity of the same year forbade interludes ‘depraving and despising’ the Book of Common Prayer⁠[673]. A more effective measure came later in a proclamation of 1551, requiring either for the printing or the acting of plays a licence by the king or the privy council⁠[674]. Mary, at whose own marriage with Philip in 1554 there were Catholic interludes and pageants⁠[675], issued a similar regulation in 1553, though naturally with a different intention⁠[676]. But this was not wholly effectual, and further orders and much vigilance by the Privy Council in the oversight of players were required in the course of the reign⁠[677].

Only a few texts from this long period of controversial drama have come down to us. On the Catholic side there is but one, the play of Respublica (1553). In this, and in the Protestant fragment of Somebody, Avarice and Minister, the ruling literary influence is that of Lyndsay’s Satyre of the Thre Estaitis. Of the remaining Protestant plays, Nice Wanton (1560) and Thomas Ingelend’s The Disobedient Child (n.d.) derive from the Dutch school of Latin drama and its offshoots. Nice Wanton is an adaptation of the Rebelles (1535) of Macropedius. The Disobedient Child has its relations, not only to the play of Ravisius Textor already mentioned, but also to the Studentes (1549) of Christopher Stymmelius. More distinctly combative in tendency is the Lusty Juventus (n.d.) of R. Wever, who may be reckoned as a disciple of John Bale. The activity of Bale himself can be somewhat obscurely discerned as the strongest impelling force on the Protestant side. He had his debts both to Lyndsay and to Kirchmayer, whose Pammachius, if not his other plays, he translated. But he is very largely original, and he is set apart from the other great figures of the Lutheran drama by the fact that all his plays were written in idiomate materno. Moreover, though not without classical elements, they were probably intended for popular performance, and approach more closely to the mediaeval structure than to that of the contemporary interlude. In his Scriptores he enumerates, under twenty-two titles, some forty-six of them. The five extant ones were probably all ‘compiled’ about 1538 while he was vicar of Thorndon in Suffolk. But some of them were acted at the market-cross of Kilkenny in 1553, and the others show signs of revision under Edward VI or even Elizabeth. In God’s Promises, John Baptist, and The Temptation, Bale was simply adapting and Protestantizing the miracle-play. The first is practically a Prophetae, and they are all ‘actes,’ or as the Middle Ages would have said ‘processes’ or ‘pageants,’ from a scriptural cycle. Of similar character were probably a series of eleven plays extending from Christ in the Temple to the Resurrection. A Vita D. Joannis Baptistae in fourteen libri perhaps treated this favourite sixteenth-century theme in freer style. The polemics are more marked in Three Laws, which is a morality; and in King John, which is a morality varied by the introduction of the king himself as a champion against the Pope and of certain other historical figures. It thus marks an important step in the advance of the drama towards the treatment of individualities. With the Three Laws and King John may be grouped another set of lost plays whose Latinized titles point unmistakably to controversy. An Amoris Imago might be merely edifying; but it would be difficult to avoid meddling in matters of doctrine with such themes to handle as De Sectis Papisticis, Erga Momos et Zoilos, Perditiones Papistarum, Contra Adulterantes Dei Verbum, De Imposturis Thomae Becketi. A pair of plays Super utroque Regis Coniugio, must have been, if they were ever acted, a climax of audacity even for John Bale.

What then, in sum, was the heritage which the early Elizabethan writers and players of interludes received from their immediate predecessors? For the writers there were the stimulus of classical method and a widened range both of intention and of material. Their claim was established to dispute, to edify, or merely to amuse. They stood on the verge of more than one field of enterprise which had been barely entered upon and justly appeared inexhaustible. ‘Tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’; they possessed at least the keys to them all. Their own work is a heterogeneous welter of all the dramatic elements of the past and the future. Belated morals and miracle-plays jostle with adaptations of Seneca and Plautus. The dramatis personae of a single play will afford the abstractions of the allegory and the types of the farce side by side with real living individualities; and the latter are drawn indifferently from contemporary society, from romance, from classical and from national history. These are precisely the dry bones which one day, beneath the breath of genius, should spring up into the wanton life of the Shakespearean drama. The players had made good their footing both in courts and amongst the folk. But their meddlings with controversy had brought upon them the hand of authority, which was not to be lightly shaken off. Elizabeth, like her brother, signalized the opening of her reign by a temporary inhibition of plays⁠[678]; and her privy council assumed a jurisdiction, by no means nominal, over things theatrical. In their censorship they had the assistance of the bishop of London, as ‘ordinary.’ The lesser companies may have suffered from the statute of 1572 which confined the privilege of maintaining either minstrels or players of interludes to barons and personages of higher degree⁠[679]. But the greater ones which had succeeded in establishing themselves in London, grew and flourished. They lived down the competition of the amateurs which during the greater part of the century threatened to become dangerous, by their profitable system of double performances, at court and in the inn yards. Thus they secured the future of the drama by making it economically independent; and the copestone of their edifice was the building of the permanent theatres. But for courtesy and a legal fiction, they were vagabonds and liable to whipping: yet the time was at hand when one player was to claim coat armour and entertain preachers to sack and supper at New Place, while another was to marry the daughter of a dean and to endow an irony for all time in the splendid College of God’s Gift at Dulwich.