eing exemplified, though poorly and
incongruously, in the attack of the mothers of the Innocents on Herod's
knights. The different sections of the play, the work no doubt of
different authors, have varying values, that of the Prophets, never very
successfully handled, being much the weakest. On the other hand, in the
simple gifts of the shepherds to the Holy Child we have a very fair
representation of one of the stock incidents of a Nativity Play in which
free scope was given to whatever tender and playful fancy the dramatist
possessed. It should be said that during the fifteenth century the
popularity of these plays increased enormously, records of their
performance being found in all parts of England, including Cornwall and
Wales, where they were acted in the vernacular.

Starting not very much later than the Miracle Plays, since we hear of
them at York in the middle of the fourteenth century, the Moralities
also increased greatly in popularity during our period, offering ample
opportunity for the allegorising and personifying tendency which was one
of its most prominent, and in many respects most baneful,
characteristics. Several plays of this kind of undoubted English origin
have come down to us from the fifteenth century itself, and are well
worth study. Chiefly because of the interest which has been aroused by
its recent performance, I have preferred to give that of _The Summoning
of Everyman_, which, while presenting much less variety than such plays
as _The Castle of Perseverance_, or _Mind, Will, and Understanding_, has
the merit of being in very easy English, short, impressive, and
homogeneous. It is these latter merits, quite as much as the evidence
which can be obtained by comparing the two texts, that offer the best
reason for acquiescing in the verdict that the Dutch play of
_Elckerlijk_, attributed to Petrus Dorlandus, a theological writer of
Diest, who died in 1507, has a better claim than our English version to
be considered the original. Strict adherence to propriety of form was
not a characteristic of the dramatic literature of this period, and had
the play been of native origin its uniform seriousness of tone would
almost assuredly have been broken by some humorous, or semi-humorous,
episodes. While the two plays, with the exception of the Prologue, which
is not found in the Dutch, agree speech by speech from beginning to end,
the English version is not a slavish translation; indeed, the ease and
hap