CHAPTER II

THE ORIGINS OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA

IT needs the imaginative sympathy of a good anthropologist to understand the real nature of the various progenitors of the Elizabethan drama; and it needs the intuition of a good psychologist to interpret it. Luckily much of the outer history, names, dates, and facts, together with a good deal of understanding explanation, has been given us by such writers as Professor Creizenach, and, above all, by Mr. Chambers. Subsequent works, such as The Cambridge History of English Literature, merely follow on his lines, sometimes slightly varying relative importances, nothing more. But as one reads the array of facts and the brilliantly powerful generalisations and inductions of Mr. Chambers, or the patient condensations of his successors, it is impossible not to feel the full sea of scepticism. Where we have records, do we really understand? It is hard enough, four-fifths of the books now written on them witness, not to be wholly out of

touch with the Elizabethans themselves. But they are our brothers and fathers. These others, these white-faced savages who seem to beckon and move in the fog of the Middle Ages or the deeper night behind-what have they to do with us? A surface likeness of name and tongue will not hide their foreignness. Their hearts are different, and distant from ours. They live in another universe. The unconscious worshippers of a vegetation-god, the audience of a scop, the spectators of a miracle-play—what was really in their minds? We triumphantly know that the Feast of Fools was celebrated at Tournai on the eve of Holy Innocents, 1498, that an interlude was given at King's Lynn on Corpus Christi 1385, that the processional religious drama was acted on "pageants," and so forth. But what were the people thinking, as the waggons rolled by or the actors came out? How like was it to an Elizabethan's feeling as he watched The Tragedy of Byron? or to ours when we see The Importance of Being Earnest? It is absurd to pretend we know.

Such are the misgivings with which the honest student looks back on "the origins of the drama." He can pretend he sees how the "platform-stage" arose, and passed into the "picturestage"; he can cheat himself into believing he

has established the generations of an English dramatic form; but what, in our time and race, is the history of those complicated states of mind the witnessing of Hamlet breeds in us—that he dare only wonder.

If he looks beyond the Middle Ages he finds at first more familiar things. Seneca's plays fall recognisable on his modern hearing; and if those were never on the stage, other tragedies and farces which we could, it is imaginable, understand, if not applaud, held the Roman ear. And the modern eye greets even more gladly finer, less recorded, performances. The best taste in Rome loved the intricate exquisite tragedies of the xepóσopo, the dancers. We glibly call them, allow literary people to call them, the decadent successors of the drama. They may, we can believe now, have awoken passionate ecstasies of emotion, beyond our dreams; but they could not be handed down. These "choreodrames" have perished. So we comfortably fall in with the assumption of those who practise literature, that drama, that queer and monstrous birth, is the God of the theatre. Literary people are very kind to each other; and all-powerful over civilisation. Through them come our history, facts, ideas, and arguments; and so our valuations. We see all things through their

mists. The feet of the dancers throb "No!", their heads jerk argument and dialectic to us; we do not heed. We have read of Talfourd, and he will outlive Taglioni. The other arts present themselves naked, to be accepted as they are. Only literature continually weaves laurels, and is for ever crowning herself.

But the arts had always an enemy, especially the arts of the theatre. The plays we know of and the dancing we ignore were equally threatened by religion, who brought with her the blind forces of asceticism and morality. Any emotional and absorbing view of the universe that throws the value of life over into the next world, naturally regards things of this world as means rather than ends. And so it always tends to combine with and use that deep instinct in human nature, the instinct to treat all things as means, which is called Puritanism. For eighteen hundred years, religion, when it has been strong enough, has persecuted or starved the arts. At times, when it has grown shallow, it has allowed a thin subservient art to flourish beneath it; an art that, ostensibly educating men to be in some way useful, for this life or the next, couldn't help treating them, for a stolen moment, as ends. Such, perhaps, was the pictorial art of the Middle Ages in Italy. But in general the arts have

been kept pretty well under, especially the arts of the theatre, creeping slowly out when religion has slept, as in the eighteenth century, or sometimes liberated by such splendid bursts of irreligion as produced the Elizabethan drama in England.

The early fathers of the Church embodied the spirit of religion, knew the Will of God, as clearly in this as in most matters. It is amusing to see that Arius alone went so far as pleading for even a Christian theatre. Here, too, he was a lonely light. All the orthodox makers of Christianity were venomous against spectacula. Like children saving up for one great treat, Christians were consoled by Tertullian for the loss of theatres in this world, by the promise of the future spectacle of the exquisite and eternal suffering or richly comic writhing of play-actors and dramatists. The forces of evil triumphed. And the theatre was lost more swiftly and completely than the rest of civilisation, when the double night of barbarism and Christianity settled down over Europe.

The long, long rebirth of the Theatre was a process of roughly the same kind in nearly all European countries. But at present I am chiefly concerned with England. For this country the forces that led to the reappearance of theatrical