The English Drama.* BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE. The English drama, like the Greek, has a purely religious origin. The same is true of the drama of every civilized people of modern times. It is worthy of particular remark that the theatre, denounced by churchmen and by laymen of eminently evangelical profession, as base, corrupting, and sinful, not in its abuse and its degradation, but in its very essence, should have been planted and nourished by churchmen, having priests for its first authors and actors, and having been for centuries the chief school of religion and of morals to an unlettered people. Theatrical representations have probably continued without interruption from the time of Eschylus. Even in the dark ages, which we look back upon too exclusively as a period of gloom, tumult, and bloodshedding, people bought and sold, and were married and given in marriage, and feasted and amused themselves as we do now; and we may be sure that among their amusements dramatic representations of some sort were not lacking. The earliest dramatic performances in the modern languages of Europe of which we have any record or tradition were representations of the most striking events recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the Christian Gospels, of some of the stories told in the Pseudo Evangelium, or Spurious Gospel, or of legends of the saints. On the continent these were called Mysteries; In England both Mysteries and Miracle-plays. * An account of the Rise and Progress of the English Drama to the time of Shakespeare. The ancient Hebrews had at least one play. It was founded upon the exodus of their people from Egypt. Fragments of this play in Greek iambics have been preserved to modern times in the works of various authors. The principal characters are Moses, Zipporah, and God in the Bush. The author, one Ezekiel, is called by Scaliger the tragic poet of the Jews. His work is referred by one critic to a date before the Christian era; others suppose that he was one of the Seventy Translators; but Warton, my authority in this instance, supposes that he wrote his play after the destruction of Jerusalem, hoping by its means to warm the patriotism and revive the hopes of his dejected countrymen. The Eastern Empire long clung to all the glories to which its name, its language, and its position gave it a presumptive title; and the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides were performed after some fashion at Constantinople until the fourth century. At this period Gregory Nazianzen, archbishop, patriarch, and one of the fathers of the church, banished the pagan drama from the Greek stage, and substituted plays founded on subjects taken from the Hebrew or the Christian Scriptures. St. Gregory wrote many plays of this kind himself; and Warton says that one of them, called Xproтos Пαoxov, or Christ's Passion, is still extant. In this play, which, according to the Prologue, was written in imitation of Euripides, the Virgin Mary was introduced upon the stage, making then, as far as we know, her first appearance. St. Gregory died about A. D. 390. His dramatic productions more than rivalled his other theological writings in the favour of the people; for, as Warton also mentions, St. Chrysostom, who soon succeeded Gregory in the see of Constantinople, complained that in his day people heard a comedian with much more pleasure than a minister of the gospel. St. Chrysostom held the see of Constantinople from A. D. 398 to A. D. 404. In this quarter also another kind of dramatic representation—that of mummery or masking-developed itself in a Christian or a and enormous shoutings, modern form. It is known that many of the Christian festivals which have come down to us from the dark ages were the fruits of a grafting of Christian legends upon pagan ceremonies-a contrivance by which the priests supposed that they had circumvented the heathen, who would more easily give up their religion than their feasts and their holidays. And the introduction of religious mumming and masking by Theophylact, patriarch of Constantinople, about the year 990, has been reasonably attributed to a design of giving the people a Christian performance which they could and would substitute in place of the Bacchanalian revels. He is said by an historian of the succeeding generation to have "introduced the practice which prevails even at this present day of scandalizing God and the memory of his saints, on the most splendid and popular festivals, by indecent and ridiculous songs, diabolical dances, exclamations of ribaldry, and ballads borrowed from the streets and brothels." The Feast of Fools and the Feast of Asses-the latter of which was instituted in honour of Balaam's beast-had this origin. Such mingling of revelry and religion as these Feasts, and of amusement and instruction in the faith as the Mysteries, suited both the priestly and the popular need of the time; and they soon found their way westward, and particularly into France. There, not long after, the Feast of Asses was performed in this manner: The clergy walked on Christmas day in procession, habited to represent Moses, David, the prophets, other Hebrews, and Assyrians. Balaam, with an immense pair of spurs, rode on a wooden ass, which enclosed a speaker. Virgil was one of the procession, which moved on, chanting versicles and dialoguing in character on the birth of Christ, through the body of the church, until it reached the choir. The fairs of those days, which were the great occasions of profit and amusement, offered opportunities for the performance of these "holy farces," or of the soberer mysteries or miracleplays, of which the priests did not fail to avail them |