Innocents, and the Crucifixion. If no formal tragedy resulted, and if in inculcating the triumph of righteousness the stories of the worthies and the martyrdoms of the saints took rather the cast of tragicomedy, it was nevertheless of great significance for later tragedy that, generations before Seneca became known with his bloody stories and sententious philosophy, the drama had been the vehicle for ethical instruction and for the presentation of the most terrible and pitiful events. The miracle plays had long familiarized men with tragic action, tragic conceptions in the drama, and tragic power in the treatment of situation.

The tragic was often mingled with the comic. The dramatists mixed edification with amusement. The restraints of the sacred narrative were thrown aside for a moment, and in Herod, or Noah's wife, or the shepherds awaiting the announcement of the birth of the Messiah, opportunities were taken for the introduction of realistic portraiture of contemporary life. Horse-play and buffoonery or racy comedy often contrasted incongruously with events of momentous importance. This mixture of the comic and tragic survived in the popular drama despite the opposition of the humanists. It was indeed characteristic of medieval and Elizabethan manners and taste, and marks another important departure from classical precedent. We to-day are perhaps as near to the Athenians as to the Elizabethans in this respect. At all events, for the appreciation of Elizabethan tragedy, we sometimes need to reassert a childish and uncultivated disregard for the rapid changes of emotional tone, a liking for tears and laughter close together; or, perhaps there is ground for saying, we need to recognize the validity of the medieval taste for a comic contrast and relief in tragedy, and to accept in art the incongruities and grotesqueness of actual life.

To the moralities, the second important species of drama in the later Middle Ages, the debt of English tragedy is more explicit than to the miracles, but not more essential. It is not more essential, because the moralities were in a way the successors and the substitutes for the miracles and contributed largely to the same effects. They were devoted to a serious purpose and presented tragic situations with a free admixture of comedy, and they continued many of the older traditions of stage performance and undramatic form. They differed from the miracles chiefly in that, like so much of medieval literature, they offered not a direct but a symbolic presentation of life. Instead of the Bible narrative, they presented the strife of vices and virtues; instead of real persons, personified abstractions. This change from individual characters to abstract qualities has usually been regarded as a retrogression by modern students, who deem the study of the motives of individual men and women as essential to the drama. But we have lately been reminded that on the stage it makes little difference whether an actor is called William or Everyman; and the attempt at the symbolization of life offered an opportunity for freedom of invention and freshness of emotional effect that in the miracles had been smothered by the stereotyped repetition of the Bible narrative. The temptation and suffering of the good, the temporary triumph of the evil, and the punishment that overtakes even the mighty were themes which the miracle had confused with many others. The morality gave them dramatic isolation and emphasis.

Moreover, in substituting for a translation of the Bible narrative the symbolization of life as a conflict between folly and wisdom, or the vices and virtues, or the body and the soul, the moralities gave importance to one of the most essential elements in tragedy, that of moral strife. The world is a battlefield, the soul is beleaguered, the play is a conflict; and with this element of conflict there arises the opportunity for dramatic structure. If the story is of strife, there is likely to be a moment when the victory hangs in the balance; a reversal of fortune is implied; there is a chance for a rise and fall, a definite beginning, middle, and end. The moral conflict, moreover, encourages a study of human motive, of cause and effect in human action. In some of these plays, as "The Pride of Life," "Everyman," "The Nice Wanton," the consequences of evil are clearly traced, and the action is representative not only of the conflict of good and evil in the universe, but of the battle of will in the individual. Evidently such plays are near relations of tragedy. They at least made plain to their successors the importance of the conflict of good and evil as a dramatic theme. Their text, the wages of sin are death, has continued to be an essential part of the conception of tragedy.

The moralities, however, on the whole, made little advance, either in escape from conventionality, or in creation of structure, or in dramatic expression of the conflicts of will. They clung in the main to the dominant and already conventionalized allegory of the Middle Ages, the presentation of life as a conflict of body and soul, although they made interesting excursions into the fields of pedagogy and religious controversy. This allegory they treated with intense didacticism, sacrificing all dramatic interest to enforce the lesson, though in their later days the sermons were very generously mixed with farce. Their importance and explicit contribution to English tragedy arose from their historical position just at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. They then served as a transition species, conforming, by a reduction in length and in the number of actors, to the conditions of performance which marked the change from the medieval stage to the Elizabethan theatre; amalgamating under humanistic influence now with this type of play, now with that; and imposing for a time their distinctive form and methods on the emerging types of comedy and tragedy. Some of the earliest tragedies, as we shall see, were direct developments from the moralities, and the influence of the peculiarities of the morality was for a while definite and considerable. But it soon disappeared under the demands of a new theatre and the innovations of a new art.

The inheritance of tragedy from the Middle Ages includes an important legacy from literature entirely apart from the drama. In the separation of the medieval world from the classic, the terms tragedy and comedy ceased to be connected with scenic presentation, and were extended to cover all forms of narrative, whether in dialogue or not. The distinction between the two, though varying somewhat in the different lexicographers and encyclopedists, gradually arrived at an agreement which continued to affect ideas throughout the Renaissance. There was some insistence on the restrictions that tragedy dealt with history, and comedy with fiction; tragedy with exiles, murders, important and horrible deeds, and comedy with more domestic themes or with love and seduction. There was more general agreement that tragedy dealt with persons of rank and importance, kings or great leaders, and comedy with persons of low or middle rank, and that tragedy required a more elevated and ornamented style than comedy. The most important difference, however, was held to lie in the distinction that comedy begins unhappily and proceeds to a happy conclusion, while tragedy begins prosperously and ends miserably and terribly. Thus Dante's poem was a Divine Comedy, and Chaucer in the Monk's Prologue summed up the accepted opinion of the scholarship of his day.