The Project Gutenberg EBook of Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays,
with an Introduction, by Anonymous

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Title: Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction

Author: Anonymous

Editor: Ernest Rhys

Release Date: October 6, 2006 [EBook #19481]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EVERYMAN AND OTHERS ***

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[Illustration: POETS ARE THE TRUMPETS WHICH SING TO BATTLE
POETS ARE THE UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATORS OF THE WORLD

SHELLEY]

"EVERYMAN"

WITH OTHER INTERLUDES, including EIGHT MIRACLE PLAYS

[Illustration: EVERY MAN I WILL GO WITH THEE BE THY GVIDE
IN THY MOST NEED TO GO BY THY SIDE]

LONDON: PUBLISHED
by J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
AND IN NEW YORK
BY E. P. DUTTON & CO

First Issue of this Edition 1909
Reprinted 1910, 1912, 1914

INTRODUCTION

By craftsmen and mean men, these pageants are played,
And to commons and countrymen accustomably before:
If better men and finer heads now come, what can be said?

The pageants of the old English town-guilds, and the other mysteries and
interludes that follow, have still an uncommon reality about them if we
take them in the spirit in which they were originally acted. Their
office as the begetters of the greater literary drama to come, and their
value as early records, have, since Sharp wrote his _Dissertation on the
Coventry Mysteries_ in 1816, been fully illustrated. But they have
hardly yet reached the outside reader who looks for life and not for
literary origins and relations in what he reads. This is a pity, for
these old plays hide under their archaic dress the human interest that
all dramatic art, no matter how crude, can claim when it is touched with
our real emotions and sensations. They are not only a primitive
religious drama, born of the church and its feasts; they are the genuine
expression of the town life of the English people when it was still
lived with some exuberance of spirits