The Frank Muir book : an irreverent companion to social history by Muir Frank

Author:Muir, Frank [Muir, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Quotations, English
Publisher: London : Heinemann
Published: 1976-06-25T19:00:00+00:00

of stories which gave a more general moral instruction. These were not great pageants but static, wordy plays whose characters had names like Ignorance, Good Deeds, Bad Angel. Everyman is the best known of these productions, which were called Morality plays:

Their very name is like a yawn.

Anon.

The secularization of drama was completed by the success of Interludes, short dramatic pieces played at court, and in country houses, probably between the immense and prolonged courses of early-Tudor meals. Interludes had nothing to do with the Bible or with moral instruction, they were purely pieces of entertainment and could well have been the real starting point of English drama.

An Interlude was performed at court to divert Queen Elizabeth in the second month of her reign. She was not amused:

The sam day at nyght at the quen['s] court ther was a play a-for her grace, the wyche the plaers plad shuche matter that they wher commondyd to leyff off and continently the maske cam in dan-syng.

Henry Machyn (1498?-1563?) Diary: Jan. 1559

The Queen could well have taken offence at some satirical remark about the Church. Some of the best Interludes then written were by John Hey-wood, one of the first English dramatic writers. He had been a minstrel to Henry VIII and a court jester to Edward VI and Mary. He was a Catholic. The danger in making a satirical remark about the Church under the Tudors was that a jibe at, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury could win him a purse of gold from Henry, lose him his ears under Edward, earn him a pension from Mary and then get him sent to the Tower by Elizabeth. In fact, Heywood prudently went abroad after Queen Mary's death 'for the security of his person, and the preservation of his religion'.

By the late 1400s England had a number of acting troupes, attached to a nobleman's household and wearing his livery. When they were not required by his lordship they usually went on a profitable tour of the countryside, setting up and playing in halls, barns and innyards.

There was also a large number of more disreputable groups-much more like the old mimi-vt\vo slept rough between performances and had no master.

By the time of Elizabeth 'masterless men' had become a considerable problem. A plague of vagrants-soldiers and retainers adrift after the break-up of the great feudal households, monks, clerks, farm labourers homeless from the dissolution of the monasteries, beggars, poor scholars-infested the highways and made travel very dangerous.

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