I wrote this during some ante-deluvian epoch when things were a bit funnier. Not perfect, not bad. It was interesting to root around in the the history of drama for a while, a wonderful art form, and one that will be with us for a long time to come. Don't slip on any banana peels!
Cheers, Jake.
IN THE SECULAR COMEDY OF THE ELIZABETHAN PERIOD, A number of dramatic elements and conventions survived from earlier medieval religious dramas. One of the most important of these is plot structure. In medieval mystery plays, (see definitions below) there is a basic design that has a representative Everyman figure journeying through three stages of life. In the play, "Castle of Perseverance", for example, Everyman is ‘born’; he introduces himself to the audience and then gives a history of his life.
This FIRST STAGE for medieval drama was considered to be one of innocence and a natural state for the characters. In later Elizabethan dramas this stage or phase is seen as ignorance. For eamaple, in the comedy, "Love’s Labour Lost", the “endeavor of our present breath” (I.i.5) is an oath of allegiance that, to Elizabethan audience, is seen as plainly unnatural. It is, in fact, antithetical to life, is celibate and non-celebratory. In "Love", the main characters will spend three years in secluded study, removed from the society of women and other earthly experiences. They will forego gaining knowledge of the world for this period of time. Like their medieval dramatic counterparts, they are innocent of reality, but to the Elizabethans, they are also ignorant.
For the earlier, medieval audience—a Christian audience—Everyman, at this stage, is deceived: he is innocent; he does not know that he must undertake trials and struggles as a necessary
part of life in order to achieve spiritual salvation. And the plot centres around him being made to understand this necessity, which he will hopefully learn by the end of the
play. The same structure can be seen in Elizabethan plays, such as Shakespeare's "Love’s
Labour Lost" or John Lyly's "Gallathea", with the threat of virgin sacrifice and
the necessity of disguising the girl as a boy. Her disguise is obviously a false front, as is Navarre’s pact with
his courtiers; it is also celibate (as a 'male' she cannot have sex) and anti-life (in the sense there is no chance for procreation), and a confrontation must follow. In the tradition of Elizabethan drama, ignorance is not the same as innocence: ignorance must be confronted and overcome by knowledge. This is an important distiction between the early medieval dramas and the Elizabethans: in the mystery plays, ignorance is accepted or at least understood (in the Christian sense, for fallen, fallible creatures in a fallen world are born ignorant, and live their lives as such--as farce--until they battle with life's temptations and find salvation in God's grace. Perhaps the best way to understand the difference between the two dramatic traditions is to see that the goal in a medieval mystery play is for the characters to achieve the grace of God and gain knowledge or an awareness of his presence in the world. On the other hand, later secular comedies have as goals the achieving of self-knowledge and/or a better understanding of the human condition--"Humanistic" goals, in other words.)
In the earlier, mystery dramas, the character of Mankind (the Everyman character in "Castle", for example) is innocent, and his innocence is seen as natural. But natural though it may be, Mankind nevertheless is still seen to live a partial and limited existence. For the medieval Christian, an innocent life is one that has not yet progressed through the challenges and trials of a fallen world. This initial stage of innocence in medieval drama is, in later, secular dramas, translated into the ‘false position’ stage as demonstrated by the self-deceptions of the main characters. In other words, for the Elizabethans, the ignorance of the main characters (how they become or remain self-deceived or deluded) does not excuse them from working to overcome their lack of self-knowledge and confronting the challenges set before them.
A medieval audience would see such characters as living lives of farce, who in the end, if they continue living as such, will not redeem themselves by vanquishing the sins of their fallen natures. They fail in not recognizing that they have, first and foremost, a spiritual challenge to overcome in life. The character of Mankind will accept the challenge and gain salvation in the end.
In the later, secular dramas, farce is also represented by elements of deception, inversion and worldly pleasures. The variant is that in First Stage, Elizabethan characters they have begun their actions with false premises. In other words, they begin, not innocent like Mankind, but in a state of ignorance. In these secular dramas, this state represents a movement away from the humanistic ideals of the Renaissance (reason, understanding, knowledge), not the Christian ideals of the acceptance of sin, the need for penance and gaining redemption found in the mystery plays. The Second Stage is an intensification of the initial ‘false position’ of the First Stage in Elizabethan drama, with conflicts presented to force the characters to change their positions. The false premises that the characters live by are tested, found wanting and abandoned in the end. In medieval mystery plays, Mankind is tempted, falls, but eventually overcomes his temptations and is saved during the THIRD STAGE. As I will outline shortly, mystery plays operate within a broader scheme of "God's Time". The actions and conflict resolutions found there are less significant than whether or not the characters pass beyond the farcical nature of the temporal world and achieve spiritual salvation by the play's end. In Elizabethan comedies, on the other hand there is only the human or "Humanistic" time frame. The resolutions at the end only reflect the conflicts and challenges fround at the beginning. And perhaps the best that can be said for the dénouements found there is that any spiritual resolutions remain works in progress.
Both mystery plays and secular
comedies have similarities in their dénouements dramatic presentations of recognition and penance . In "Love’s
Labour Lost", the men recognize their false-love conventions and perform a meaningful trial or rite-of-passage (or penance), in order to achieve union with the women. Note that the goal of
secular comedies is, of course, secular i.e. marriage and intimate human relationships. On the other hand, in medieval mysteries and related dramas (see below), while having the same over-all, three-part structure, their goal is
the recognition of sin, the need for penance, and the reward of God’s grace.
As I've previously mentioned, it is important to realize that medieval mystery plays and secular Elizabethan comedies have two distinct sets of time frames. In mysteries, it is Farce Time and God's Time. In other words, the farcical, temporal trials that Everyman goes through occur within the broader context of God’s Time, as experienced by the audience. Through such characters as Mercy, for example, or the Doctor, or the Vexillators in "The Castle of Perseverance", this broader, all-encompassing God's Time framework is introduced so the audience clearly sees how futile and false such temptations are within this larger framework. The audience knows that in the end, Mankind will be saved.
In Elizabethan comedies, the false positions that characters adopt at the beginning of the play (the "complication" or "conflict") must be overcome by the end, for the character to succeed. The two time frames for secular comedy can be characterized as "Farce Time" and (the broader, all-inclusive) "Humanistic Time", replacing God's Time. Thus, the sacrifice of virgins, the need for disguise and the wooing-by-proxy in Robert Green's "Friar Bacon" were all false positions adopted by the main characters. The plot involves working out these farcical positions within the Humanistic framework of relationships, i.e. marriage (which promotes life, procreation and social stability.)
Shakespeare carries this further by over-laying an even broader perspective on the play when he seems, at the end, to question marriage itself as a potentially false and farcical ideal. Is marriage, he asks, a suitable ending for the characters in "Love’s Labour Lost"? It's an open question, and one left unanswered by the play's end. In the final scene, the nobleman Berowne tells the King that to continue with his disguise, for a "twelvemonth and a day" (V.ii 951), as he plans to do, is "too long for a play" (V.ii 952). In other words, he says it's too long to wait in order to answer the question of whether marriage is a suitable outcome for the two couples in the play. The process of answering the question will not fit within the time frame of the play. Thus, by following the king's timetable, the answer's discovery would extend beyond the play's frame.**
Other surviving
traits of early medieval drama include the "Vice" figures who emerge later as clowns in
Shakespeare’s work, characters such as Cosmid and Holefernes, or Miles and Rafe in Green's "Friar Bacon".
They act as ‘inverters’, much like their medieval counterparts. They invert the social hierarchies of the human world. In addition, the
'distance'+ that farce provides in both the mysteries and comedies allows the
audience to more readily examine how a character acts. The audience in both traditions ‘knows' the outcome. Farce allows characters to be
seen less as individuals and more as types representating various human characteristics and traits. Therefore, we can more clearly understand them as they encounter challenges in various situations. It is their reactions
that are important, not so much external matters of conflict and plot.
Both genres make use of rhetorical language, colloquialisms (scatological and obscene, as well). In the medieval mystery plays there is also direct dialogue with the audience (Mankind’s obscene song and collecting money from the audience, for example). In Elizabethan comedy, we see this transformed into the soliloquies and monologues, as well as in the spying and disguises used, where the audience directly participates, in a sense, as in "Love’s Labour Lost" sonnet-under-the-tree scene.
In summary, the mystery plays and related liturgical plays (see below) of the medieval age, with their ever-present elements of farce, were precursors of Elizabethan secular comedies, particularly with respect to their structure.
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* "Inversion" is a medieval concept of the world, social status, one's life situation literally turned 'upside down' or inverted. The "Great Chain of Being" was the Christian conception of life as a hierarchy, from God at the top on down to the lowliest elements of the universe. Humans, of course, were part of the hierarchy and their sub-catagories or levels included the king at the top on down to the lowliest serf. To invert, or change position on this hierarchy was to destabilize the whole edifice, and was therefore anathema to medieval Christian audiences.
** With this statement, Berowne refers to Aristotle's archetypal dramatic conventions, which dictate that a play must observe the three unities: unity of time, place, and action. He rightly points out that a time span of a year is too long (for all the disguises to be removed and marriages to occur) for a play to be able to observe all three unities.
The fact that Shakespeare draws the attention of the audience to the fact they are watching a play, an 'artiface', with Berowne's reference to "a play" does seem to suggest he feels the question is 'too large' a question for a play to to answer. (Spark Notes)
+ In a farce or comedy, the audience knows the character is in a state of ignorance or is holding a false position, and armed with this awareness, they can examne the play's characters more objectively.
Morality Plays: "were dramatized allegories of the representative Christian life, in the mode of a quest fro salvation in which the crucial events are temptation, sin, and the confrontation with death. The protagonist represents Mankind, or Everyman; among other characters are personifications of virtues, vices and death, asd well as angels and demons..." (Glossary 108)
Mystery Plays: called such in the archaic sense of the "trade" of the medieval guilds who sponsored these plays--is applied to dramas based on the Old and New Testements. The biblical plays originated within the church in about the tenth century." (Glossary 107)
Miracle Plays: "had as their subjects either a story from the Scriptures or else the life and martyrdom of a saint." (Glossary 107)
Farce: "Is a type of comedy designed to provoke the audience to simple, hearty laughter, using...exaggerated or caricatured types of characters...in improbable and ludicrous situations. Farce was a component in the comic episodes in medieval miracle plays, such as the Wakefield plays "Noah" and the "Second Shepherd's Play..." (Glossary 29)
Works Cited
Cawley, E. C. ed. Everyman and Other Medieval Plays. NY: Everyman Paperback Classics Ltd., 1993.
Shakespeare, William. Love's Labours Lost in The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G.B. Evans. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
Abrams., M.H.,
ed. A Glossary of Literary Terms, fifth edition. Fort Worth, Chicago: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1988
https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/labours/section7/
PROF COMMENTS: Strongly argued and well organized. the discussion of the 2nd stage…weakest; you seemed to shy away from offering specific examples of mischief, inversion and tempting absurdities in Elizabethan drama. This final page seems to be a rushed effort to include everything else that might seem relevant. Remember, "quality, not quantity". Good Work. B+/A- A
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[I include the short essay, below, because it is on the same plays. Somewhat helpful in understanding Medieval Mystery plays.]
IN CLASS ESSAY: Topic may have been: "What is the role of Evil in Comedy?"
In the introduction to the Townley Shepherd’s Play, it [What?] states that comedy “illuminates the world of suffering.” And as we shall see, comedy also acts to illuminate evil. In several Corpus Christi plays, we have comedy side-by-side with evil. In The Second Shepherd’s Play, Mak, a character that we associate with evil, casts a spell over the three shepherds who asleep after their hard day’s work:
“Bot abowte you a serkyll, as rownde as a moyn,
To I have done that I wyll, Ayll that it be noyn,
That ye lyg stone styll…” (276).
Mak is also seen as a spirit of the pre-Christian pagan world, seeming to evoke magic to accomplish his ends. It is significant that he emerges or is introduced to us during the high point of the shepherds’ celebrations. The pastoral setting, the use of wine and the resulting intoxication* of the shepherds have strong echoes of the pagan Bacchanalian rituals. That Mak is introduced to us here, suggests his strong connection with such earlier, primitive rites.
What follows Mak’s introduction is the comic plot of the play. The first part provides us with the introduction to the three shepherds and a comic portrayal of the cares of the world:
Chystys crosse me spede, and Sant Nycholas!
Ther of had I need; it is wars then it was… (270).
This is followed by what might be interpreted as a sub-plot of the play, but as we shall see, it is rather a progression through the play’s main thematic elements rather than a digression. Again, Mak’s character is humorous; a medieval audience would see his clownish “spell” as artifice. The shepherds remain asleep—not through any magical power of Mak’s—but rather because they are drunk. Mak’s self-deception, [?] or more simply, sheer clowning, would also signal to the audience that this character, comic but corrupt and mischievous, a trickster, is also an ineffectual one. His “magic” is powerless. Mak’s magic fails in keeping the shepherds asleep. Nor do his tricks and deceits prevent them from journeying to Bethlehem. Had his “magic” succeeded, a major re-interpretation of the power of good versus evil, and the strength of the Christian community (as represented by the shepherds) would have been necessary. As it is, Mak’s humour in herding the sleeping shepherds’ flock (from which he will steal) adds to his comic, buffoon-like character:
“If the flek be skard, yit shall I nyp nere.
How, dreawes herderwad…” (276).
The dialogue with his equally corrupt wife Uxor gives the audience the necessary information that Mak will fail at whatever he attempts to do.
Returning to Mak’s introduction, the appearance of such an obviously mischievous, comically-corrupt character would signal that the events the shepherds were participating in, namely, drunken revelry, was corrupt. Or, perhaps more subtly, it can be put that evil participates in such events. The shepherds are seen as participating in evil, albeit that the “evil” is commonplace. We all drink, and hence the message is given that we all participate in evil. One of Mak’s strongest thematic purposes is to bring this point to the audience. From their drunkenness, their first song emerges. It is not the same as the song at the end of the play. It is corrupt, earthly and “Mak-like”.
Mak’s plot comes between the shepherd’s introduction and the ultimate completion of their journey to Bethlehem. The comic “maze” of deceits Mak and Uxor attempt to impose would have been seen by a medieval audience as representative of their own journey in life, a journey made through error, mistaken identities and worshipping false idols, until they at last achieve grace.
The shepherds emerge from Mak’s spells of deceit or evil and are tempted to seek revenge against him: “Get Wepy” [“get weapons!” (289). However, there is no bloodshed; only the symbolic removal of Mak (wrapped in a blanket) from their community. It is interesting to note that the shepherds’ ritual is effective in a way Mak’s is not. This would be seen as portraying the Christian journey (the acquisition of grace) as the only effective ritual to practice or believe in. In the end, as part of a Christian community, the shepherds succeed where Mak fails.
The importance of the clown figure, Mak, is two-fold. First, to the medieval mind, evil would be seen as comic in the sense that it is ultimately futile and ineffectual. The second purpose that Mak’s character fulfils (similar to the portrayal of Cain, Noah’s wife Uxor, Caliphas and even Satan) is for identification. We identify with the evil [careful!] we see because it is illuminated by the comic. Characters like Mak are like us (eg. Cain’s blustering complaints, Uxor’s laziness, etc.). They are human and understandable. Evil, then, is seen as a human trait and part of our makeup, not some grand and abstract notion.
The comic portrayal of evil acts as a bridge between the audience’s everyday experiences and what the playwright portrays in his interpretations, thematically. A “comic-less” Cain or an “epically complaining” Uxor would be seen as artificial, removed from everyday experience. Hence, the audience would not appreciate their own participation in evil found in such characters. With characters such as Mak, the audience can identify with evil and understand the playwright’s emphasis on rejecting those characters in which it is embodied.
The grotesque humour of the soldiers in The Scourging works, paradoxically, to remove any identification with such characters the audience might initially have. The soldiers’ emphasis on the minute details of their job and, most importantly, their failure to acknowledge their own participation in evil, works against identifying with them. As it should. They lack self-reflection; they fail to acknowledge that what they do is evil. We therefore reject the soldiers because the irony of the scene is too great: We cannot identify with those who deny they are like us.
Comedy acts both as a venue for identification and rejection (of evil), but in either case it illuminates the evil of the world, effectively and powerfully.
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* I am not sure about this part; I thought the shepherds went to sleep after a long day of work, IIRC. There may be wine—I think the play has a scene with them eating their supper—but I am not sure if they are “drunk”. There may be mention of others celebrating and drinking, but again, I’m not sure if it is the shepherds. Ed.
PROF COMMENTS: An interesting answer—thoughtful and suggestive. Mark= A-
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