drama in the
aptitude with which they grafted into the sacred story pastoral and city
manners taken straight from life. The shepherds who watched by night at
Bethlehem were real English shepherds furnished with boisterous and
realistic comic relief. Noah was a real shipwright.

"It shall be clinched each ilk and deal.
With nails that are both noble and new
Thus shall I fix it to the keel,
Take here a rivet and there a screw,
With there bow there now, work I well,
This work, I warrant, both good and true."

Cain and Abel were English farmers just as truly as Bottom and his
fellows were English craftsmen. But then Julius Caesar has a doublet and
in Dutch pictures the apostles wear broad-brimmed hats. Squeamishness
about historical accuracy is of a later date, and when it came we gained
in correctness less than we lost in art.

The miracle plays, then, are the oldest antecedent of Elizabethan drama,
but it must not be supposed they were over and done with before the
great age began. The description of the Chester performances, part of
which has been quoted, was written in 1594. Shakespeare must, one would
think, have seen the Coventry cycle; at any rate he was familiar, as
every one of the time must have been, with the performances;
"Out-heroding Herod" bears witness to that. One must conceive the
development of the Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its
accessibility to new impressions and new manners and learning and modes
of thought that for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think
of modern Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and
inrushing Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the
strangest contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle
plays stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare till Puritanism frowned
upon them. But when the end came it came quickly. The last recorded
performance took place in London when King James entertained Gondomar,
the Spanish ambassador. And perhaps we should regard that as a "command"
performance, reviving as command performances commonly do, something
dead for a generation--in this case, purely out of compliment to the
faith and inclination of a distinguished guest.

Next in order of development after the miracle or mystery plays, though
contemporary in their popularity, came what we called "moralities" or
"moral interludes"--pieces designed to enforce a religious or ethical
lesson and perhaps to get back into drama s