Chaucer's England Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XII. FAMILIARITIES OF FAITH. It need not be insisted upon that the simplest and most demonstrative illustration of the spirit of the middle ages in regard to the familiar treatment of religious topics is to be found in the Miracle Plays and Mysteries ; to which we will now pass on, as some points of manners are involved in a curious question relating to the method of their production. I. To this day, and in the most cultivated communities, the most attractive of all the things that can be devised to bring human creatures together in large numbers, away from their own homes, is a dramatic representation. With how much greater force of attraction anything in the nature of a dramatic show must have operated in the middle ages it is easy to see. The only thing, perhaps, that can give us, in modern times, any fair idea of the excitement and interest that might have been created, say in Chester or Coventry, by the setting up of the platform or pulpit in the square, for the performance of the mysteries, is the effect produced in a remote country village or town by the irruption of a band of showmen, with tumbling and dancing perhaps, or wild beasts. And even this is a kind of thing of which the present generation, for the most part, knows little. Of the sort of audience to which the miracle plays would have to be performed, we may gather some idea by noting, when we have the opportunity, the reception of a modern dramatic representation by the common people. It is well known that they laugh, not at the best jokes, but at the worst; loudly at those in which there is a touch of brutality or indecency ; and loudest of all at the kind of jest they call practical,?knocking a man down, or breaking his head with a tea-tray, or emptying a flour-bag over him. Indeed, neit...Read More