after Albanus himself. The style and tone in Albon and Amphabell also remind us strongly of the previous legend, although all clearness and simplicity of diction seem gradually evaporating with the advancing years of the valiant, hoary-headed bard.

The great work for St. Alban's did not mark by any means the end of the poet's career; but we can follow him no farther. Lydgate's life and poems can be traced up to the year 1446, and it is possible that he still enjoyed for a considerable time after this date the pension which Henry had granted him—perhaps as a reward for his "Edmund "-from the taxes of Norfolk and Suffolk; in any case it is probable that he survived his patron Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who met his death in February, 1447, at Bury St. Edmunds, too, and in a manner never yet explained.

II.

We shall here interrupt our consideration of the artificial poetry which followed in Chaucer's wake, in order to turn at length to that branch of composition which in the Middle Ages could boast of no very refined cultivation, but which was destined in the first centuries of the modern era to produce its most glorious blossoms-we mean dramatic poetry.

In the period we are here considering the English drama had already a long history behind it. We must now reach back to note the most important epochs of this early drama, which was almost solely occupied with religious plays.

The cradle of the medieval drama was the Church. This is well known. The Roman Catholic Liturgy contained a multitude of germs for the formation of a drama, and still contains them, though in a smaller degree than before songs alternating between the priest and the congregation, or a choir representing the congregation; recitative reading in appointed parts, as in the story of the Passion; plastic decorations and representations; solemn processions; mimic acting, of which the

symbolism had sometimes a very realistic coloring; all the elements were thus present, and by their combination and mutual interblending a dramatic form must necessarily have been produced. This had taken place in the early Middle Ages, and within the Church itself; a drama of an operatic character had thus been developed, and was acted, particularly on great commemoration days and high festivals. The performance made part of the Church service; it was done in Latin; the recitative dialogue was based on the Biblical text or on the prescribed portions of the Ritual, and the ordinary songs were supplied by the traditional passages of Church prose or hymns. Gradually these liturgical dramas received a higher artistic development; their contents were enlarged, their representation was made more lively, and poets began to show their cleverness in giving a more perfect form to the libretto. From being an integral portion of the service, this acting became a sort of accessary ornament; at last it left the service quite behind it, although it still continued to be used in connection with the worship at the celebration of Church feasts and for the edification of the congregation. A greater freedom was then allowed in the choice and arrangement of the material. What had formed at first a part, or merely an episode, might now be elaborated into an independent drama, and actions which had at first been represented disjointedly could thus be brought into their natural connection and run into a whole. An incessant process of separating and uniting, of extending and curtailing, marks the history of the liturgical drama, and indeed of the mediæval drama generally. Even the language of the drama was influenced by this development; the common language of the people was frequently mixed up with the Church Latin.

The short exposition which we have here given refers mainly to the MYSTERIES which grew out of the celebration of the Christmas and Easter festivities. But the MIRACLE PLAYS, which were acted in honor of the saints, were developed in exactly the same way. The Bible, and the apocryphal writings in connection therewith, supplied the material for the Mysteries; the legends

furnished the material of the fables which were worked up dramatically for the Miracle Plays, and which emanated in the same manner from the celebration of the ritual. From the nature of the subject, however, a worldly element was mixed up with the Latin Miracle Plays much earlier than with the Mysteries; indeed the Miracles had a more worldly tone from their very beginning, and were generally represented by young clerics and scholars on the eve of the festival which was about to be celebrated.

But the different stages of development in the Church drama were not related to each other in such a way that any new advance necessarily superseded the older forms. Older forms of the drama frequently continued along with the new. And the same may be said of the Church drama as a whole when compared with the drama outside the Church, whether ecclesiastical or secular; and although the Church drama may have gradually fallen into the background, it was not suppressed by the other which had grown out of its bosom.

The beginnings of a popular ecclesiastical drama are found as far back as the twelfth century. To that period belongs the Anglo-Norman Mystery of Adam, which in an æsthetic sense can well bear comparison with anything done in the same domain during the later Middle Ages, but in respect to form, language, and manner of representation it marks a transition stage, when the drama was only half emancipated from the Church. This emancipation was effected gradually. At first the stage was attached to the church, and had the church in the background: in the Mystery of Adam "God" had his exit through the church door. Afterwards, the plays were enacted in the churchyards, then on village greens, in market-places, and in the streets. At first the most important rôles were acted by the clergy; in the course of time the lay element became more and more prominent in the representation. The changes which took place in the character of the drama itself are of the most importance; the song, the recitative, gave way to spoken

Occasionally even by young girls; see Appendix,

discourse; the Latin ritual yielded to the vulgar tongue, at first in the dramatic dialogue, then also in the epic parts which formed a kind of framework to the dramatic action. But the drama soon freed itself from this frame. work, although some remains of the old custom (a sort of address, or explanation of the action to the audience) survived till recent times. The chorus songs, for the most part, disappeared; and thus the lyrical elements of the drama were also greatly curtailed.

This short, typical sketch of the general development of the drama must serve as an introduction to what we have to say about the medieval stage in England.

We have no record of any spiritual drama in the Anglo-Saxon age. The germs for Church Mysteries must, however, have been present in the Liturgy of early England. But they could scarcely have found a suitable soil for their development. The serious and subjective nature of the people was not favorable to an unprejudiced exercise of the desire for theatrical representations in connection with their worship.

After the Conquest it was different. Indeed, the second half of the eleventh century and the whole of the twelfth formed for the spiritual drama in France the most decisive and fruitful epoch; and the Normans on this side of the Channel, as well as on the other side, played the most important part in the progress of the French nation in this domain, as in most others. The two oldest French Mysteries extant*-Adam, and a later play on the Resurrection-appear to have been both written by Normans and in England; and we may well assume that the English population heard the Mystery, in its derived popular or semi-popular phraseology, almost at the same time as they heard it in its strictly liturgical forms, or perhaps even sooner.

The first dramatic representation in England, however, of which we have any record, took place in a school. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the school at Dunstable, in connection with the Abbey of St. Albans, was

*The Sponsus, or the play of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, which goes back to the first half of the twelfth century, is a mixture of Latin and French (or rather Poitier dialect).

presided over by a Norman clerk named Geffrei, who was expressly brought over from the Continent for the purpose of conducting the convent school at St. Albans. Geffrei wrote at Dunstable a Play of St. Katherine, which he had acted by his pupils. For their costumes he asked and received the choir clothes from the sacristy of St. Albans. By a remarkable accident the play almost met a tragic end; a fire broke out the night after the representation. Geffrei's dwelling was burnt, with the borrowed costumes. The author saw in this the hand of God, and took holy orders. When Richard, the then abbot of St. Albans, died, Geffrei was made his successor (in 1119); he lived till 1146.

The Play of St. Katherine is lost; perhaps even the manuscript was the prey of the flames in that fateful night. We may well assume that it was written in Latin verse-perhaps mixed with snatches of Norman-French.

Geffrei had studied in Paris, and may have there received his introduction to dramatic writing. French scholars very frequently wrote Church dramas. That Hilarius, who on good grounds has been supposed to be an Anglo-Norman, and who was a pupil of Abelard's at Paraclete when Geffrei was abbot of St. Albans, in addition to his two liturgical Mysteries on Lazarus and Daniel, composed about 1125 a Miracle Play on St. Nicholas, which has exactly the character of a school drama.*

In the second half of the twelfth century Miracle Plays began to be acted in England even publicly before the whole people. The classical passage in the Life of the Holy Archbishop and Martyr Thomas, by William Fitzstephen, shows that such representations were common in London between 1170 and 1180 A. D. In a description of the English capital, annexed to his work, the biographer remarks, with a side-glance at Rome: "Instead of theatrical exhibitions, instead of scenic plays, London has plays of a holier kind: viz., representations of the miracles which the holy confessors worked, or of the sufferings in which the constancy of the martyrs was

*See Appendix.