Tudor Lives: Success & Failure of an Age (33 page)

A few years later when the poet John Skelton began his brave campaign against the rising churchman Thomas Wolsey, he framed his first condemnation in the form of a morality. The cumbersome
Magnificence
, a monument to the eccentric garrulity of the poet, is more static preaching than lively drama, but the author perceived that the stage was a good place for an attack on a public figure and his policy; a play was as useful for satire, criticism or denunciation as it was for moral instruction.

Drama in England began in the Church and most dramatic performances in the Middle Ages were connected with religion. Theatre was a part of religious instruction. Mystery, or miracle, plays, such as the cycles presented in York, Chester and Wakefield, were based on biblical stories and given by the guilds of the town. Later, the morality play reflected the favourite medieval habit of
allegorizing, putting in simple dramatic form the struggle of the virtues and the vices for the soul. Performances of the mystery cycles continued even into the seventeenth century, and moralities were still written in the reign of Elizabeth, but slowly drama began to lose its intimate connection with religion.

Secular plays were not unknown in the Middle Ages. Travelling minstrels and players went their rounds, as Shakespeare has pictured them in
Hamlet
; by 1469 they had formed their own guild with a charter granted by Edward IV. In the countryside, folk festivals and holidays were enlivened by mummery and simple plays. In the towns, expensive pageants, often on mythological or historical themes, were devised for great occasions such as the entertainment of an ambassador or a royal wedding. In the houses of the rich, the lordly amateurs had a passion for the new ‘interlude’, or short play. Special servants were hired whose duties included acting; in 1473 Sir John Paston spoke of one employed ‘to play Saint George and Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham’. The plays themselves have largely disappeared, but some of the subjects have been recorded. Many interludes were about the popular heroes of the romances—Sir Guy, Sir Eglamour, Robert of Sicily and the like. Others were about St George, or Robin Hood—‘very proper to be played in May games’. Sometimes fragments of a play have been preserved, and these show a variety of topics from the bawdy
Interludium de Clerico et Puella
to the incestuous
Dux Moraud
.

Performances of secular interludes were occasional and haphazard. But as settled times came with the reign of Henry VII men began to think more of ease and entertainment, and drama was looked at with new eyes. Since aristocratic patrons—Cardinal Morton and the Earl of Northumberland for example—wanted interludes, writers began to consider the form; they discovered with Medwall and Skelton that the drama had unsuspected virtues. Renaissance scholarship helped by unearthing new sources, new examples, new stories, and new uses for plays. The introduction of printing into England spread this new knowledge. A renewed interest in plays flourished among those who loved the arts, and foremost among the new enthusiasts was Sir Thomas More, so that the beginnings of Tudor drama seemed a family affair, centred round his fine intelligence and genial personality.

The fascination of the theatre had caught More early. As a boy
in Morton’s house he would ‘suddenly sometimes slip in among the players and make a part of his own there presently among them’. He met Henry Medwall and saw the new art Medwall had given to the interlude; perhaps he had acted under the direction of the playwright. In his youth, said his contemporary John Bale, More was a writer of comedies. Although none have survived one may guess at their virtues, for the English works of More abound in both humour and dramatic conversations. Soon More had no time to spend on comedies, and having led by example he was later content to encourage others. His practical interest in drama was taken up first by his brother-in-law John Rastell, and then by his nephew John Heywood.

Rastell was a lawyer from Coventry who eventually became a printer in St Paul’s Churchyard. Law books and plays were the specialities of his press; of the eighteen plays printed before 1534 no less than twelve were printed by him and his son William. From his press came plays by Medwall, Heywood, possibly Skelton, and of course those by Rastell himself. Without the efforts of Rastell and his son the early Tudor drama might have disappeared like that of the Middle Ages. It was natural for a lawyer to print law books, but for the Rastells the printing of plays was a duty of love. John Rastell, despite a busy career as lawyer, printer, then M.P. and later agent for Thomas Cromwell, was active in all kinds of dramatic ventures. He was a deviser and producer of pageants, being entrusted with some of the design for the Field of Cloth of Gold at Guisnes in 1520. When he built a new house in Finsbury Fields, in 1524, he erected a stage in the garden; with the help of his wife and a tailor he designed and made costumes, curtains and hangings which he hired out. And he was a playwright himself, perhaps producing his own pieces on his own stage.

Rastell was not the most skilful writer, but his interludes showed the way drama was going.
The Four Elements
was on the thoroughly secular subjects of astronomy and geography, and included some far-sighted, patriotic remarks on the need for English voyages to the New World. In this interlude the old medieval allegory was still used, but in
Calisto and Melibea
¹
(taken from the famous novel
La Celestina
by Fernando de Rojas) individual characters take the place of the old personifications. While Rastell’s
interludes were rather stiff and, in their desire to teach a lesson, not far from the medieval moralities, the plays of his son-in-law John Heywood were a great advance. With Heywood, pleasure came before instruction and natural events drove out the artifices of allegory. He was among the first, wrote Thomas Warton, who ‘introduced representations of familiar life and popular manners’.

In the course of a long life devoted to drama Heywood suffered many misfortunes, most of them caused by his Catholicism. He was in danger under Henry VIII, prospered under Mary, and fled the country under Elizabeth. He died in exile around 1579, over eighty years old, with his ‘mad merry wit’ intact to the end. Like his father-in-law, he was prepared for any theatrical task, and was actor, orator, pageant-maker and playwright; he was as happy with a rustic farce as with a masque at court. His plays seem to have been written in his middle years. Although he lived forty more years, into another and golden age of literature, his plays are his memorial. In these interludes of limited stage technique (all his pieces are in the medieval form of a debate), he established a strong line of realistic satire and farce; hypocritical rogues, roaring bullies, snivelling priests, termagant wives and hen-pecked husbands were his stock in trade. The anti-clerical satire of
The Pardoner and the Friar
and the domestic discord of
Johan Johan
would amuse today as they did then.

By the middle of the 1530s the early group of Tudor play-wrights, from Medwall to Heywood, had given the idea of the new drama. In many ways it was tied to the past. The plays were short, the characters were few, stage business was at a minimum, and there was little action; allegory was still used, moral lessons were still attached, and the characters tended to declaim. In other respects there had been some remarkable changes. Drama was now finally out of the hands of the Church. The new playwrights, even those who were churchmen such as Medwall and Skelton, were writing on secular subjects, and their intention was to amuse as much as to instruct. Instead of the formal interchange between vices and virtues, as in the old morality, a wealth of new matter appeared in the interludes. Sharp details begin to portray contemporary life; a play will show a prisoner in Newgate, give the names of wines available in London, describe games of chance and ways of cheating, or give the news of shipping and the state of the tide. Social commentary and criticism appeared. Rastell
in particular had an inquiring and reforming mind. He was interested in language and thought ‘our tongue maternal’ was sufficient ‘to expound any hard sentence’. He was a patriot and chided his country for lack of interest in exploration. He scattered his plays with criticisms of education, government and law; he thought that judges should be appointed for short periods and examined for partiality before reappointment. Indeed, the tone of this early drama, not only in plays by known writers but also in anonymous pieces like
Youth, The Holy War
and
Hickscorner
, was pessimistic. The comedy, which often appeared in a sub-plot, was rough and unkind; the drama reflected a time of change when England was worried by the social and religious troubles which More’s
Utopia
set out so poignantly.

A mirror uncleared is this interlude,

This life inconstant for to behold and see

wrote Skelton in
Magnificence
. ‘The weeds overgrow the corn’ was the message of the plays.

Secular drama for a fairly wide public had begun. Many different things influenced its development. Education both at school and university, the rediscovery of ancient literature by the humanists, the practice of the fashionable young men at the Inns of Court, and the life at the king’s court, all had a part to play in forming Elizabethan drama.

The Tudor schoolboy was something of an actor. Schooling was largely an education in Latin and much of the instruction, for want of text-books, was by repetition and practice. The staging of Latin plays, in which the boys took the parts, improved the command of the language and helped to keep the scholars interested. The comedies of Terence and Plautus were particularly recommended; they were good entertainment and they had the approval of the humanists for their elegant Latin. Terence was the first classical dramatist printed in England, just before the turn of the sixteenth century, and thirty years later Rastell published a translation of one of his plays under the title
Terens in English
. The acting that the boys learnt in school made them in demand outside the schoolroom. Courtesy insisted that great visitors to England should be entertained with interludes, naturally given in Latin which was the international language. But Latin was beyond the powers of the professional players and so the boys were
called out to perform. The young players, possibly of St Paul’s, acted a ‘goodly comedy of Plautus’ before Henry VIII at Greenwich in 1519. Under their High Master, John Ritwise, the boys of St Paul’s in 1528 played Terence’s
Phormio
for Cardinal Wolsey and his guests. By the middle of the century most of the famous schools were taking their plays into the houses of the great. The boys of Eton played for Cromwell in 1538; thirty-five years later they were acting for Elizabeth at Hampton Court. At Westminster, the duties of performing were written into the statutes. The students of Merchant Taylors’, under their famous headmaster Richard Mulcaster, were very active. An old pupil of Mulcaster recalled that ‘yearly he presented some players to the court, in which his scholars were only actors, and I one among them, and by that means taught them good behaviour and audacity’. Nor was it only the London schoolboys who acted. There are records of plays by students at Canterbury, Shrewsbury, Beverley and elsewhere.

After their success in Latin, the boys were soon giving performances in English also. At first they gave translations of the classical plays, in particular Terence and Plautus; then they began to act original plays in English, usually comedies influenced by the classics they knew so well. To provide this English fare, school-masters turned playwright, and the most famous of these was Nicholas Udall, one time headmaster of Eton, from where he was dismissed for theft and vice, and later headmaster at Westminster. Udall’s best known comedy,
Ralph Roister Doister
(c. 1553), showed the good influence of Terence and Plautus. At last the native play was given a clear structure; following the classical models,
Roister Doister
was divided into acts and scenes; the comic business was well organized; and the characters, sturdy English versions of the Roman types, had strong personalities. To the broad humour of Heywood’s comedy, Udall added better form, better logic, more ingenuity in plotting and greater variety in handling. Classical principles had aided English humour to good effect.

When Tudor boys turned to youths and went from school to university, they still continued their acting. Oxford and Cambridge had always liked drama. Records of the late Middle Ages reveal plenty of activity. There were Christmas plays, and liturgical dramas; there were pageants and mummeries. The Boy-Bishop held his mock rule on the Feast of the Innocents; Christmas Lords directed the merry-making at many colleges; at Merton College,
Oxford, the
Rex Fabarum
—‘the King of Beans’—was the Lord of Misrule from 19th November until Candlemas on 2nd February. With the coming of the ‘new learning’ of the Renaissance, classical drama was taken up, as it was in the grammar schools, and for the same reason. University men acted, wrote the academic playwright William Gager, ‘to practise our own style in prose or verse; to be well acquainted with Seneca or Plautus; honestly to embolden our path’. Seneca was the master for tragedy, and Plautus the master for comedy. And as the schoolboys often played for the court in London, so the undergraduates played for the royal visits to the university.

The academic playwrights usually wrote in Latin, as befitting the dignity of a scholar. But the most delightful and surprising of the university plays was an English comedy called
Gammer Gurton’s Needle
, acted at Christ’s College, Cambridge around 1563, and written by a certain ‘Mr S. Mr. of Art’. This play was the confirmation that the native comedy first seen in
Ralph Roister Doister
had taken firm root. Though written by an academic playwright for a learned audience,
Gammer Gurton’s Needle
was boisterous village comedy, all entertainment and no moral. The tidy influence of the classical drama was there, but well hidden. It was a confident work, rougher than Udall’s earlier play, but better because closer to English life and character. English comedy had come of age.