age. They are headed by the great
and simple tragic masterpiece, in which they say their last word: the
morality of _Everyman_, the noblest interlude of death the religious
imagination of the middle ages has given to the stage. The two following
Old Testament plays, _The Deluge_ and the _Sacrifice of Isaac_, are the
third and fourth pageants in the Chester series; played respectively by
the Water-Leaders and Drawers of the river Dee, and by the Barbers and
Wax-Chandlers. The next is from Coventry, a Nativity play, played by the
Shearmen and Tailors. From the Wakefield series, preserved in the
Towneley collection, we have three plays, the famous second shepherds'
play, with the _Crucifixion_ and the _Harrowing of Hell_, or extraction
of souls from Hell (_Extractio Animarum ab Inferno_). Two Cornish
mysteries of the Resurrection are included: _The Three Maries at the
Tomb_, and _Mary Magdalen bringing the News to the Apostles_. Then
follows Bishop Bale's oracular play of _God's Promises_, which is in
effect a series of seven interludes strung on one thread, united by one
leading idea, and one protagonist, the _Pater Coelestis_.

In these religious and moral interludes, the dramatic colouring, however
crude, is real and sincere. The humours of a broad folk-comedy break
through the scriptural web continually in the guild plays like those in
which Noah the shipbuilder, or the proverbial three shepherds, appear in
the pageant. Noah's unwilling wife in the Chester _Deluge_, and Mak's
canny wife in the Wakefield shepherd's play, where the sheep-stealing
scenes reveal a born Yorkshire humorist, offer a pair of gossips not
easy to match for rude comedy. Mak's wife, like the shepherd's in the
same pastoral, utters proverbs with every other breath: "A woman's avyse
helpys at the last!" "So long goys the pott to the water, at last comys
it home broken!"

Now in hot, now in cold,
Full woeful is the household,
That wants a woman!

And her play upon the old north-country asseveration, "I'll eat my
bairn,"--

If ever I you beguiled,
That I eat this child
That lies in this cradle,

(the child being the stolen sheep), must have caused towns-folk and
country-folk outrageous laughter. Mak's wife is indeed memorable in her
way as the Wife of Bath, Dame Quickly, or Mrs. Gamp.

There is nothing so boldly drawn in the Coventry _Nativity_. But there
you have a startlingly realistic treatment joined to an emot