tury populace. And the Vice of the morality play
degenerates into the clown of the performance, while even the Devil
himself is made a cause for laughter.

Another significant step in the advance of the drama was made when the
crafts took over the representations; for it democratized the show,
without cheapening it or losing sight of its instructional nature. When
the booths, or pageants as they were called, drew up at the crossing of
the ways and performed their part in some story of didactic purport and
broadly human, hearty, English atmosphere, with an outdoor flavor and
decorative features of masque and pageantry, the spectators saw the
prototype of the historic pageants which just now are coming again into
favor. The drama of the future was shaping in a matrix which was the
best possible to assure a long life, under popular, natural conditions.
These conditions were to be modified and distorted by other, later
additions from the cultural influence of the past and under the
domination of literary traditions; but here was the original mold.

The method of presentation, too, had its sure effect upon the theater
which was to follow this popular folk beginning. The movable van, set
upon wheels, with its space beneath where behind a curtain the actors
changed their costumes, suggests in form and upfitting the first
primitive stages of the playhouses erected in the second half of the
sixteenth century. Since but one episode or act of the play was to be
given, there was no need of a change of scene, and the stage could be
simple accordingly. Contemporary cuts show us the limited dimensions,
the shallow depth and the bareness of accessories typical of this
earliest of the housings of the drama, for such it might fairly be
called. Obviously, on such a stage, the manner and method of portrayal
are strictly defined: done out of doors, before a shifting multitude of
all classes, with no close cohesion or unity, since another part of the
story was told in another spot, the play, to get across--not the
footlights, for there were none--but the intervening space which
separated actors and audience, must be conveyed in broad simple outline
and in graphic episodes, the very attributes which to-day, despite all
subtleties and finesse, can be relied upon to bring response from the
spectators in a theater. It must have been a great event when, in some
quiet English town upon a day significant in church annals, the players'
booths began