allured hym by swete promes.I have sent sore plages, when he hath me neglected,
And then by and by, most confortable swetnes.
To wynne hym to grace, bothe mercye and ryghteousnes
I have exercysed, yet wyll he not amende.
Shall I now lose hym, or shall I hym defende?
And what could be finer than the setting he gives to the antiphon, O Oriens Splendor, at the end of the second act?
To turn from Bayle's play to the heart-breaking realities of Everyman is like turning from a volume of all too edifying sermons to the last chapters of one of the gospels. Into the full history of this play, opening a difficult question about the early relations between Dutch and English writers and printers, there is no room here to go. The Dutch Everyman--Elckerlijk--was in all probability the original of the English, and it was certainly printed a few years earlier. Richard Pynson, who first imprinted the English play at the Sign of the George in Fleet Street, was printing at his press there from the early years of the sixteenth century. The play itself may have been written, and first performed, in English, as in Dutch, a generation or more before.
It was written, no doubt, like most of the plays in this volume, by a churchman; and he must have been a man of profound imagination, and of the tenderest human soul conceivable. His ecclesiastical habit becomes clear enough before the end of the play, where he bids Everyman go and confess his sins. Like many of the more poignant scenes and passages in the miracle-plays that follow it, this morality too leaves one exclaiming on how good a thing was the plain English of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
The relation of the several miracle-plays here printed to the town-cycles from which they come will be seen at a glance on reference to the tables of pageants that appear in the Appendix. We may take it that all these town and country plays represent continually used and frequently tinkered texts, that must in some cases have passed through many piecemeal changes. In making them easy to the average reader of to-day, who takes the place of the mediæval playgoer at a Corpus Christi festival, their latest copyists have but followed in the wake of a series of Tudor scribes who renewed the prompt-books from time to time. In this process, apart from the change of spelling, the smallest possible alteration has been made consistent with the bringing of the text to a fair modern level of intelligibility. Old words that have been familiarised in Malory or Shakespeare, or the Bible, or in the Border Ballads and north-country books, or in Walter Scott, or the modern dialect of Yorkshire, are usually allowed to stand, and words needed to keep the rhyme, are left intact. But really hard words, likely to delay the reader, are glossed. One Towneley play, the Extractio Animarum, another and a most spirited example of the "Harrowing of Hell," mysteries that thrilled the people long ago, is given in the original spelling, as some test of the change effected in the others. Further, in the Appendix will be found a late example of a St. George and the Dragon doggerel Christmas play, which comes from Cornwall, and which in a slightly varying form has been played in many shires, from Wessex to Tyneside, within living memory. This shows us the last state of the traditional mystery, and the English folk-play as it became when it was left to the village wits and playwrights to produce it, without any co-operation from the trained eye and hand of a parson or a learned clerk. Of some other forms of our earlier drama, not omitting the Welsh interludes of Twm o'r Nant, it may be possible to give illustrations in a later book, companion to this. Only so much is given here as may interest the reader, who is a playgoer first of all, and asks for entertainment and a light in these darker passages of the old British drama.
Finally the amplest acknowledgments are due to those who have worked upon these present plays, including Mrs. C. Richardson, M.A., Mr. O'Brien, Mr. Roberts, Miss Hawkins, G. R., and Mr. Ezra Pound; and to the various editors of the "Early English Text Society," who have made this book possible. Especially should tribute be paid to Dr. Furnivall for his permission to make use of the Society's texts, and his interest in this uncertain attempt to capture the outer public too, and attract it to that ever-living literature to which he has devoted so many days of his young old-age.
E. R.
Everyman: a moral play otherwise called: A Treatyse how the hye fader of heven sendeth dethe to somon every creature to come and gyve a counte of theyr lyves in this worlde], translated from the Dutch play, Elckerlijk, 1520 (?); published in Dodsley's Select Collection of Old English Plays, etc., vol. I., 1874; reprint of one of Skot's editions, collated with his other edition and those of Pynson, Ed. H. Logeman, 1892; with an introduction by F. Sidgwick, 1902; reprinted by W. W. Greg from the Edition by John Skot preserved at Britwell Court, 1904; set to music by H. Walford Davies, etc. (with historical and analytical notes), 1904; J. S. Farmer, Six Anonymous Plays (Early English Dramatists), 1905; with designs by Ambrose Dudley, 1906; in Broadway Booklets, 1906; with introduction, note-book, and word list, J. S. Farmer (Museum Dramatists), 1906.
Miracle Plays: Towneley Mysteries, ed. by Surtees Society, 1836; Pollard, Early English Text Society, 1897. York Mysteries, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith, 1885. Chester Mysteries, ed. Th. Wright, Shakespeare Society, 1843–47; Deimling, Early English Text Society, 1893, etc.; T. H. Markland (two plays), Roxburghe Club, 1818. Coventry Mysteries, ed. Halliwell, Shakespeare Society, 1841. See also Sharp, Dissertation on the Coventry Mysteries. For other Mysteries see Davidson, Modern Language Notes, vii.; E. Norris, Ancient Cornish Drama, 1859.
Selections, or Separate Plays: Harrowing of Hell, ed. Halliwell, 1840; Collier, Five Miracle Plays, 1867; Dr. E. Mall, 1871; A. W. Pollard, English Miracle Plays, 1895; Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, 1897, 2 vols. (a third vol. to come), Prof. Manly. See J. H. Kirkham (Enquiry into Sources, etc.), 1885. Abraham and Isaac, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (Brome Hall MS.), 1886; R. Brotanek (Dublin MS.), Anglia, xxi.
General Literature: Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature, 1875–6; Payne Collier, The History of English Dramatic Poetry, 1879; K. Hase, Miracle Plays, trans. A. W. Jackson, 1880; C. Davidson, Studies in English Mystery Plays, 1892; A. W. Pollard, English Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes, Specimens of pre-Elizabethan Drama, etc., 1895; K. Chambers, The Mediæval Stage, 1903; A full bibliography is given in F. H. Stoddard, References for Students of Miracle Plays and Mysteries, 1887.
CHARACTERS
Everyman
God: Adonai
Death
Messenger
Fellowship
Cousin
Kindred
Goods
Good-Deeds
Strength
Discretion
Five-Wits
Beauty
Knowledge
Confession
Angel
Doctor
EVERYMAN
