CHAPTER III

THE TUDOR INTERLUDE

It is not possible to distinguish clearly between the morality and the interlude. Both titles are applied, it would seem interchangeably, and from a very early date, to the symbolic class of drama. However, the term "interlude" came more and more to be employed during the Tudor period, as the plays grew shorter and more courtly, and as the gradual disappearance of the religious element rendered the expression "moral play " increasingly a misnomer. By the commencement of Elizabeth's reign, "interlude" and "comedy" are practically the only living terms. If a distinction between morality and interlude is at all to be drawn on the ground of contemporary usage, it will apply, probably, rather to the mode of performance than to the subject matter. Papers in a law-suit concerning John Rastell the printer, about 1530, discriminate between "stage-plays" in summer and "interludes" in winter;1 where it is evident that the former term designates plays acted in the old morality fashion on fixed out-ofdoor stages, before a large public, while interludes were performed indoors, generally in private houses and before a limited circle. As might be expected, the profits are mentioned as being considerably greater in the former case. We learn that the same stage costumes were employed in both instances, and it is very likely that a popular morality — if not too long or didactic — 1 Cf. A. W. Pollard, Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse. 316.

might be acted in summer in the ancient manner, and in winter might be made to do double service as interlude at state banquets and upon similar occasions.

This difference is much the same as that which a little later existed between performances in the public theatres and quasi-private performances in the inns of court or the great palaces. The play and the actors might be the same, — many of Shakespeare's plays, for instance, were acted both publicly and privately,—but the ideal requirements differed, and tended to diverge further as time went on. It is interesting that, whereas the great drama of Shakespeare's time developed itself mainly as an answer to the demands of popular performance, the Tudor interlude is directly the product of the private, indoor representations. The essential requisites of the interlude were brevity and wit. The precise original sense of the word is disputed, but there is no doubt that it was understood in Tudor times to mean a short play exhibited by professionals at the meals of the great and on other occasions where later masques would have been fashionable.1 Normally the interlude inherited and continued the abstractions of the morality, but there was a tendency toward the introduction of concrete dramatis persona, which in some of the later instances supplant altogether the older allegorical figures. No better account of the circumstances and manner of presentation of a typical interlude can be found than that contained in the fourth act of the play of "Sir Thomas More."

The mystery play, largely in the hands of the civic middle class, was distinctly bourgeois in spirit, and the primitive morality tended strongly to plebeianism. The interlude, on the contrary, is throughout its career an essentially aristocratic species. As a result, this last type of drama responds with the greatest fidelity to all the conflicting waves of feeling raised by ebb or flow of Tudor Renaissance and Reformation, — manifestations which, as we have seen, hardly affected the conservative mystery. The interlude possessed no vis inertice. It yielded to the slightest pressure of public opinion, and while keeping in greater or smaller degree the plot outlines inherited from the morality, developed them in the spirit most popular at the moment with its enlightened and progressive public.

It is obvious that the occasions which called into existence this particular modification of the allegorical drama — occasions of special revelry or rejoicing — desired no retention of the grim tone of the strict moral play. Nor would they be satisfied with the crude patchwork of didacticism and obscenity offered to rustic audiences. Very early in the Tudor period, therefore, we find the nature of the morality radically altered. The change was gradual, but it made for catholicity and variety: it substituted for the single interest in abstractions of good and evil a number of different secular interests.

The first stage in the development of the interlude, manifesting itself in the reign of Henry VII contemporaneously with the earliest indications of the Revival of Letters, consists in the mere shift of attention from moral to intellectual abstractions. The play of "Nature," written by Henry Medwall, chaplain to Cardinal Morton, and acted before the latter some time previous to his death in 1500, is essentially a morality of the old type; but it shows variations which are significant. The fact of presentation before an audience alive to the value of time and impatient of boredom has obliged the somewhat prolix author to divide his piece summarily in the middle, deferring the later half to another occasion. There is no artistic reason for the break, which would seem to have been distasteful to the poet, since he closes his first instalment of fourteen hundred lines with the plaintive remark: —

"And for thys seson
Here we make an end,
Lest we shuld offend
Thys audyence, as god defend
It were not to be don.
Ye shall vnderstand neuer the lease
That there ys myche more of thys processe
Wherein we shall do our besyness
And our true endeuure
To shew yt vnto you after our guyse.
When my lord shall so deuyse
I shalbe at hys pleasure." 1

"Nature" purports to deal with man's passage through the world from infancy to old age, with his vari1 That Medwall was by no means unduly solicitous concerning the patience of his hearers is shown by an anecdote relating to his lost play of The Finding of Truth performed before Henry VIII some fifteen years later (at Richmond, Christmas, 1514-1515). On this occasion an extant document informs us that "Inglyshe, and the others of the Kynges pleyers, after pleyed an Interluyt, whiche was wryten by Mayster Midwell, but yt was so long yt was not lykyd. . . . The foolys part was the best, but the kyng departyd befor the end to hys chambre." Cf. Collier, i, 69 (ed. 1879).

ouslapses into sin and his ultimate repentance; but the theme is discussed from a purely ethical, not religious standpoint. There is no question here of God or Devil, Heaven or Hell, in the Christian sense. Rather, the supreme power— under "Th' almighty god that made eche creature" — is Nature, who begins with a long preamble describing mundane phenomena and exhorting Man to study "Arystotell, my phylosopher electe." As in "Mind, Will, and Understanding," man is said to be governed by the hostile forces of Reason and Sensuality; but these powers no longer appear absolutely good or evil, symbols of God and sin respectively, as in the earlier play.1 To the author of "Nature," Reason and Sensuality are both necessary, but the force of Reason is to be kept in the ascendancy. Man sins, not because he alienates himself from God, but because he dethrones Reason. "Nature" is an elaborate piece, doubtless performed by choir-boys. The first half contains ten speaking parts, the second eighteen, of which, however, those representing the seven virtues and the less prominent vices are very slight. The prevailing dreariness of the play is mitigated by some fairly good scenes of low comedy.

In "Nature," which dates from about the middle of the reign of Henry VII, we note the substitution of semi-pagan, renaissance ethics for the religion of the morality. In a slightly later play of the same type the new influences in scholarship are reflected even more strongly. "A new interlude and a merry of the Nature of the Four Elements, declaring many proper points of philosophy natural, and of divers strange lands, and of divers strange effects and causes," was written by John 1 Cf. p. 62.