A History of English Literature

the angel of the Annunciation, his wooing of Alysoun echoes The Song of Songs, and
the gullible wife-worshipping carpenter recalls the foolish Joseph of the Nativity
plays. The familiarity of religion encouraged comedy, even what now seems blas-
phemy. Every summer the citizens acted out the drama of human history; the
Mystery plays were communal (see the illustration on p. 66).

Morality plays

The Morality plays of the 15th and 16th centuries, which showed the fate of the
single human person, were played by travelling companies. The Castle of
Perseveraunce (c.1405) is a spectacle with a cast of thirty-six, to be played in a large
open-air arena, dramatizing the life of Human Kind from birth to death, with a
tournament of virtue and vice, as at the end ofKing Lear.Mankind (1465) and
Everyman (c.1510) show the lives of representative humans in dialogue with persons
such as Fellowship and Good Deeds. Knowledge says, ‘Everyman, I will go with thee
and be thy guide,/ In thy most need to go by thy side.’ (This was adopted as the
motto of Everyman’s Library in 1905.)
The Moralities survive in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, with its soliloquizing protago-
nist,its Good and Bad Angels, and its final moral. But it is to the Mysteries that
Elizabethan drama owes a long-established communal participation in religious
drama, civic comedy and secular drama, recorded but not extant. The Mysteries did
not (as was long taught) ‘wane’ at the Reformation; along with other popular forms
of piety, they were suppressed by Tudor central government. The Coventry plays
were last per formed in 1580. Scriptural drama was banned from the stage, returning
in Milton’s Paradise Lostand in Handel’s Messiah.

Religious lyric

Religious lyric derived from Latin songs and hymns. Hymns came into the Latin
church in the 4th century, bringing in accentual rhythm and rhyme from popular
song. These hymns swing, unlike quantitative classical verse. There is a large litera-
ture of Latin song, sacred and profane, from every century.
Vernacular songs often adapt secular themes. For example:
Where beth they beforen us weren, are they who were before us
Houndes ladden and havekes beren with hounds on leash and hawk on wrist
And hadden feld and wode? owned field and wood

‘Where are they now’is an old question, asked sadly in the Old English Wanderer
(see p. 33). Now a sharp answer is provided:

Men kneleden hem biforen. knelt before them

They beren hem wel swithe heye, bore themselves very proudly indeed

And in a twincling of an eye,

Hoere soules weren forloren. their lost

Pride comes before a fall. Equally ‘medieval’ is the doctrine of Adam’s ‘happy fault’
leading to the Redemption.

Adam lay y-bownden, bound

bownden in a bond,

Fower thousand wynter years

thought he not to long. too

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 67