of proof is with those who assert that the Latin comedy of the Middle Ages made no impression upon the earlier drama of England. That the former was one of the tributaries of the farce interlude and the principal source of the romantic play of domestic intrigue I have no doubt whatever. And, considering the influx of French clerics and culture during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, and the French affiliations of Geoffrey of St. Albans and Hilarius, our earliest recorded writers of saints' plays, not to speak of the latinity of our Maps, Wirekers, and other scholars of Henry II.'s reign, and their familiarity with the literature of the Continent, which was Latin,—it would be unreasonable to assume that the authors of our saints' plays, whether in Latin or not, did not derive something of their technique from the elegiac comedies of their contemporary latinists in France and England, or indeed from the adaptations of Plautus and Terence in previous centuries, or from the originals themselves.

When the religious drama passed into the hands of the crafts, it carried with it such individual plays, of both scriptural and legendary kinds, as were suitable to the collective character which it was assuming. The Corpus Christi, Whitsuntide, Easter, or Christmas cycle, though it aimed to illustrate sacred history and so justify God's ways to man, drew its materials, not only from the scriptures of the canon, but from the Apocrypha, the pseudo-Gospels, and mediæval legends of scriptural and sometimes non-scriptural saints. There was no real ground for distinction, and there is none now, dramatic or didactic, between the non-scriptural stories of scriptural characters, St. Joseph, and St. Thomas, stories of the Death, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin, stories of St. Paul and St. Mary Magdalene, which happened to be absorbed into this or the other miracle cycle, and the non-scriptural stories of extra-biblical saints in plays which have retained their independence: that of Nicholas, for instance, or of Katharine or Laurence or Christina, except that these and their heroes are concerned with events later than those which conclude the earthly career of our Lord and of the Virgin Mary. All religious historical plays, biblical or legendary, cyclic or independent, of events contemporaneous with, or subsequent to, the scriptural, were miracles, properly so called by our forefathers; and as the didactic intent of the species waned, one was as likely as another to develop material for amusement. Indeed, the authors of the Manuel des Pechiez and The Handlynge Synne,—the preacher of that fourteenth-century attack upon miracle plays which has been preserved in the Reliquiæ Antiquæ,—these, and Chaucer, Langland, and Wyclif make no distinction between miracles of the central mystery from the Old and New Testaments and miracles worked and suffered by saints, whether legendary or biblical. The distinction, if any, made by them, is between miracles acted to further belief by priests and clerks in orders in the church, and those acted for amusement by these or by laymen in the streets and on the greens. And it is safe to say that as soon as a play became more amusing than edifying, it fell under the censure of the church. This happened as early as 1210, when a decretal of Innocent III. forbade the acting of ludi theatrales in churches. Indeed much earlier, for Tertullian and St. Augustine and the Councils had consistently condemned the performances of histriones, mimi, lusores, and others who perpetuated the traditions of the pagan Roman stage. In 1227 the Council of Treves took such action. Gregory IX. attempted to put a stop to the growing participation of the clergy, "lest the honour of the church should be defiled by these shameful practices."[8] And during the succeeding decades more than one Synod issued orders of the same tenor. Now, even though it is practically certain that these fulminations were directed against perversions of divine worship, mock festivals and profane plays with the monstrous disguisings or mummings involved,[9] there is also no doubt that the prohibition came speedily to apply to the use of masks and other disguises in sacred plays, and then to the presentation of plays in church for any other than devotional purposes. Such for instance was the animus with which William of Wadington, in the Manuel des Pechiez, about 1235, called attention to the scandal of the foolish clergy who, in disguise, acted miracles 'ky est defendu en decré.' To play the Resurrection in church, pur plus aver devociun, was permissible; but to gather assemblies in the streets of the cities after dinner, when fools more readily congregate, that was a sacrilege. At this early date, we may be sure that the kind of drama which was extruded from the church had already invested such of its subjects as were biblical or legendary with the realistic and comic qualities which made for popularity, and so was fitting itself for adoption by the crafts. Indeed, we are told by a thirteenth-century historian of the Church of York,[10] that, at a date which must be set near 1220, there was a representation as usual of the Lord's Ascension by masked performers, in words and acting; and that a large crowd of both sexes was assembled, led there by different impulses, some by mere pleasure and wonder, others for a religious purpose. This was the play in the churchyard of St. John's, Beverley, to which I have referred before. The miracula of the story cited by Wright[11] and conjecturally assigned to the thirteenth century, had also passed beyond the sheer didactic stage, for the auditors, who resorted to the spectacle in the "meadow above the stream," expressed their appreciation nunc silentes nunc cachinnantes. When, after the reinstitution of the festival of Corpus Christi, in 1311, these plays began to be a function of the gilds, their secularization, even though the clerks still participated in the acting, was but a question of time; and the occasional injection of crude comedy was a natural response to the civic demand. It would be erroneous, however, to imagine that the church abandoned the drama when the town took it up: the church maintained a liturgical drama, in some places, until well into the sixteenth century; and as late as 1572 individual clergymen are condemned for playing interludes in churches.[12]

If the writers of saints' plays, with their attempt to satisfy the yearning for ideal freedom which is natural in all times and places, took, in their fictions of the religious-marvellous, a step towards what may be called romantic comedy,—a step no less important, though nowadays often unnoticed, was taken toward the comedy of ridicule, satire, and burlesque, at a date quite as remote, by the contrivers of religious parodies. It is curious, though not at all unnatural, that some of the earliest efforts at comic entertainment should proceed from the revolt against ecclesiastical formality