CHAPTER VI. THE AGE OF ELIZABETH (1550-1620)ence insisting, like children at "Punch and Judy," upon see-
ing the same things year after year. No originality in plot
or treatment was possible, therefore; the only variety was in
new songs and jokes, and in the pranks of the devil. Childish
as such plays seem to us, they are part of the religious de-
velopment of all uneducated people. Even now the Persian
play of the "Martyrdom of Ali" is celebrated yearly, and the
famous "Passion Play," a true Miracle, is given every ten years
at Oberammergau.
- THE MORAL PERIOD OF THE DRAMA.@@These three
periods are not historically accurate Theauthor uses them to
emphasize three different views of our earliest playsrather
than to suggest that there was any orderly or chronologi-
caldevelopment from Miracle to Morality and thence to the
Interludes Thelatter is a prevalent opinion, but it seems
hardly warranted by the factsThus, though the Miracles pre-
cede the Moralities by two centuries (thefirst known Moral-
ity, "The Play of the Lord’s Prayer," mentioned by Wyclif,was
given probably about 1375), some of the best known Moral-
ities, like"Pride of Life," precede many of the later York Mir-
acles And the termInterlude, which is often used as symbol-
ical of the transition from themoral to the artistic period of
the drama, was occasionally used in England(fourteenth cen-
tury) as synonymous with Miracle and again (sixteenthcen-
tury) as synonymous with Comedy That the drama had these
three stagesseems reasonably certain; but it is impossible to
fix the limits of any oneof them, and all three are sometimes
seen together in one of the laterMiracles of the Wakefield cy-
cle^109 The second or moral period of the drama is shown by
the increasing prevalence of the Morality plays. In these the
characters were allegorical personages,–Life, Death, Repen-
tance, Goodness, Love, Greed, and other virtues and vices.
The Moralities may be regarded, therefore, as the dramatic
counterpart of the once popular allegorical poetry exempli-
109