736 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1204-1517.
houses, church windows and convent walls. Among the oldest specimens are those in Minden, 1383, at Paris in the churchyard of the Franciscans, 1425, Dijon, 1436, Basel, 1441, Cro^'den, the Tower of London, Salisbury Cathedral, 1460, Liibeck, 1463. i
Inthe fifteenth century, the religious drama was in its bloom in Germany and England.'^ The acting was now turned over to laymen and the public squares and streets were preferred for the performances. The people looked on from the houses as well as from the streets. In 1412, while the play of St. Dorothea was being acted in the market-place at Bautzen, the roof of one of the houses fell and 33 persons were killed. The introduction of buffoonery and farce had become a recognized feature and lightened the impression without impairing the religious usefulness of the plays. The devil was made a subject of perpetual jest and fun. The people found in them an element of instruction which, perhaps, the priest did not impart. The scenes enacted reached from the Creation and the fall of Lucifer to the Last Judgment and from Abel's death and Isaac's sacrifice to the crucifixion and resurrection.
SetJorth_byLUying_ ac^tors, the miracle plays and moralities were to the jNIiddle Ages what the Pilgrim's Progress was to Puritans. They were performed from Rome to London, at the marriage and visits of princes and for the delectation of the people. We find them presented before Sigismund and prelates during the solemn discussions of the Council of Constance, as when the play of tlie Nativity and the Slaughter of the Innocents was acted at the Bishop of Salisbury's lodgings, 1417, and at St. Peter's, as when the play of Susannah and the Elders was performed in honor of Leonora, daughter of Ferrante of Naples, 1473. At a popular dramatization of the parable of the 10 Virgins in Eisenach, 1324, the margrave,
1 William Dunbar, the Scotch poet, wrote witli boisterous humor, The Dance of the Sevin Deidlie Synnis (1507 ?), perhaps as a picture of a revel held on Shrove Tuesday at the court. Each of the cardinal sins performed a dance. Ward-Waller : Camhr. Hist, of Lit., II. '28!>, etc.
2 In addition to the lit. given in vol. V. : 1, p. 800, see F. E. Schelling : Hist, of the Drama of Engl., 1558-1642, with a liesume of the Earlier Drama from the Beginning., Boston, 1908.
§ 78. POPULAR PIETY. 737
Friedrich, was so moved by the pleas of the 5 foolish maidens and the failure to secure the aid of Mary and the saints, that he cried out, " What is the Christian religion worth, if sinners cannot obtain mercy through the intercession of Alary ? " The story went, that he became melancholy and died soon afterwards.
Of the four English cycles of miracle plays, York, Chester, Coventry and Towneley or Wakefield, the York cycle dates back to 1360 and contained from 48 to 57 plays. Chester and Coventry were the traditional centres of the religious drama. The stage or pageant, as it was called, was wheeled through the streets. The playing was often in the hands of the guilds, such as the barbers, tanners, plasterers, butchers, spicers, chandlers.^ The paying of actors dates from the 14th century.
Chester cycles was Noah's Flood, a subject popular everywhere in mediaeval Europe. After God's announcement to the patriarch, his 3 sons and their wives offered to take hand in the building of the ark. Noah's wife alone held out and scolded while the others worked. In spite of Noah's well-known quality of patience, her husband exclaimed : —
Lord, these women be crabbed, aye And none are make, I dare well saye.
Nothing daunted, however, the patriarch went on with his hammering and hewing and remarked : —
These bordes heare I pinne togither
To bear us saffe from the weither,
That we may rowe both heither and theither
And saffe be from the fludde.^
The ark finished, each party brought his portion of animals and birds. But when they were housed, Noah's help-meet again proved a disturbing element. Noah bade Shem go and fetch her.
Sem, Sonne, loe ! thy mother is wrawe (angry).
1 Pollock gives 48 York guilds with plays assigned to each, pp. xxxi-xxxiv. There are records of plays in more than 100 Engl, towns and villages, Pollock, p. xxiii.
- Text in Pollock, p. 8 sqq. It was common to represent Noah's consort as a shrew. So Chaucer in the Miller'' s Tale. 3b