MORALITY PLAY

Morality playthat developed in the late 14th cent. and flourished through the 16th cent. The , form of medieval drama characters in the morality were personifications of good and evil usually involved in a struggle for a man's soul. The form was generally static, but it contributed significantly to the secularization of European drama. The first known moralities were called the greatest English morality is Everyman.

The morality. The play nearest the mystery in manner of production, costumes, and general tone was the morality, which might almost be classed as a religious play. In the age-long attempt to portray the dual nature of Man, in whom good and evil perpetually fight for supremacy, the playwrights lighted on the allegorical method. They conceived the different desires and appetites of Man as personalities, named them Greed, Pride, Vanity, Good Will, Patience, and the like, and caused them to weave their plots so as to capture the soul of the hero, who was called Everyman, Humanum Genus, or Man. Besides the personified desires, there were also in most plays other characters such as the Doctor, the Priest, or a public officer. God and the Devil were usually present.
The first English morality of which there is record was on the subject of the Lord's Prayer, and was given at York sometime during the fourteenth century. It is now lost, but it made so profound an impression upon the spectators that a company was immediately formed for the purpose of providing frequent and regular performances. At the end of the fourteenth century the company numbered one hundred members and their wives.
The earliest extant morality in English is the castle of perseverance, which belongs to the fifteenth century. In it the whole life of Man, called Humanum Genus, is portrayed from birth to death. There are two other very early English moralities, one entitled Spirit, Will and Understanding, the other Humanity. By their very nature, the moralities were all obliged to use the same or similar abstractions for their allegories; but a French writer, Nicolas de la Chesnaye, was inventive enough to make a slight variation. His play is called The Condemnation of Banquets, and is nothing less than a tract on temperance in both eating and drinking. It is very long, having more than 3,600 lines and employing thirty-nine characters. By far the most interesting extant morality is Everyman, ascribed by many scholars to the Dutch Dorlandus. It appeared in English translation four times between 1493 and 1530, and opens with these lines: "Here beginneth a treatise how the High Father of Heaven sendeth Death to summon every creature to come and give an account of their lives in this world, and is in manner of a moral play".
Even from the first, the morality was nearly always sprawling in construction and long-winded. Moreover, all advance in dramatic conception has been towards the concrete rather than the abstract; so it would seem that the allegorical manner was a turn in the wrong direction. On the other hand, such fables were popular and quickly understood; and the abstract qualities, personified by living actors, took upon themselves something of the nature of reality. Furthermore, the moralities mark the end of the biblical cycle of drama, and, with the interludes, form the link between the medieval and the modern play. In them can be recognized the seeds of the romantic and later schools. The habit of using qualities for names is a stock device of comedy, and has long persisted, the Mrs. Sneerwell and Mrs. Backbite of Sheridan being a direct continuation of the tribe of Greed and Vanity.
Varieties of medieval secular plays. Coexistent with biblical plays and the moralities, there grew up during the late Middle Ages several kinds of plays of a more or less secular nature. In a rough classification we discover the following branches:

Carnival or Shrovetide plays

Interludes

Farces

Puppet shows

"Feasts" of various sorts, being travesties of Church rituals

Some of these types are as ancient as the sacred play, while others developed from it. There are naturally no hard and fast lines between these groups; but the existence of such a variety of forms proves anew the enormous appetite for theatrical entertainment in the late Middle Ages.
In these secular plays there were, generally speaking, four classes of performers: strolling players (successors of the ancient mimes and pantomimic actors); roystering citizens out for revel; the Fool companies; and people connected with the schools and universities. The first of these were what might be called professional performers. They belonged to the lowest stratum of society and were classed as vagabonds. Besides keeping alive the ancient Roman skits, they probably picked up for their own use such contemporaneous pieces as served their purpose. They were often jugglers, acrobats, minstrels and magicians as well as actors. No doubt it is due to this class that certain stock comic situations and "business" have been handed down in an unbroken tradition from early Roman days.
The second group of actors was composed of ordinary citizens, merchants, petty officers, journeymen and the like, who banded themselves together during carnival season for purposes of revelry and mumming. The third class, the Fool companies, consisted of bands of youths--a sort of under-ground clique--sometimes organized under a secret code, whose chief business it was to play gross comedies and to execute nonsensical and often ribald travesties on the Mass. These companies existed all over Europe and England, and gained immunity for their ribaldry by their popularity, their anonymity, and their audacity. Mantzius says: "They satirized the Mass, turned the church into a ballroom, and the altar into a bar." These boisterous "Feasts" antedate most of the mysteries, and may have been reverent in their origin. Remnants of pagan ceremonies seem to be embedded in their rites. Theophylact, Patriarch of Constantinople in 990, ordered the Feast of Fools and the Feast of the Ass, with other "religious farces," to be played in the Greek Church. In France one group of these youthful mummers was called Enfants sans souci, another the Société des Sottes, still another La Bazoche du Palais. The fourth group was composed of school and choir boys, with an admixture of university men. These would naturally give their attention to plays of a more scholarly nature, imitations of Seneca and Terence, dramatic exercises in Latin, and adaptations more closely allied to the classic stage.
Shrovetide plays. It is likely that the Shrovetide or carnival mummers were in many cases the same people who participated in the mysteries. Sometimes the same stage was used both for the sacred play and the farce, which were often given in immediate succession, with the same audience sitting through both performances. The Shrovetide plays--also called interludes, sotties, Fastnachtsspiele--for some centuries made a specialty not only of the comic, but of the indecent aspects of society. The fables, found upon the lips of the Crusaders and Spanish Moors, in the pages of French fabliaux, in the novelle of the Italian Renaissance--had become current throughout Europe. We must allow, of course, for a difference of standard in language and manners; but even granting all that, one can but grimace at the nastiness of many of these so-called comic plays.
Sex and digestion were the two subjects which particularly excited the mirth of these lovers of medieval farces. In plays on the first topic, the joke usually turned on the deceived husband, who, to the medieval mind, was always a ludicrous object. The other unfailing source of comedy was even more intimate--the vicissitudes, distresses, and experiences accompanying digestion. Mantzius says that the subject of sex was peculiarly Gallic, while that pertaining to digestion was typically Teutonic. Both themes were bandied about all over Europe to the last shred of vulgarity.
At its best, however, the humor of the secular plays is naive and diverting. The farce of Mak the Sheep Stealer may have been taken from the French; but as we have it, it forms an interlude in the second Shepherd play of the Towneley cycle. The French farce of The Wash Tub introduces the henpecked husband whose wit, combined with his wife's misfortunes, restores him to his masculine prestige. The most famous of all the medieval farces, Pierre Pathelin, is entirely innocent, without vulgarity of any sort, and has a well rounded plot. It is fairly long, consisting of about 1600 lines; and like all medieval pieces was played through without intermission. Its author is unknown; but it is of French origin, and was played by the Fraternity of the Bazoche in 1480. It was immensely popular in its day, going through six different editions in the fifteenth century, and no less than twenty-four in the sixteenth. In the eighteenth century it was adapted for use in the repertory of the Théâtre Français, and restored to a form much nearer the original in 1872. It was also used as the libretto for a comic opera by Bazin.
These farces picture authentic types of character, and have comedy situations which were native to the participants, not borrowed from Greece or Rome. They smack of the soil and carry on the true dramatic tradition. The Brotherhood of the Passion gave a play in the fifteenth century on the subject of Griselda, a story which came through the Moors from Spain, was part of the Italian stock of tales, and was used by Chaucer and Spenser. An English sixteenth century play is still in existence, with Friar Tuck, Little John, and all the other characters of the immortal Robin Hood legend. The story goes that Bishop Latimer's own church was closed on a festal day, because all the congregation had gone to see Robin Hood.
Hans Sachs. 1494-1576. The name of Hans Sachs should be placed in an honorable niche with the writers of early secular plays. He touched upon more subjects, had more wit and charm, and developed a better technique than any other play-maker of his time. He lived as an honored and distinguished citizen of Nuremberg, following the trade of shoemaker and at the same time producing plays, songs, poems and other works to the number of more than six thousand separate pieces. Of these, about two hundred are in dramatic form--tragedies, comedies, Shrovetide pieces, or simple dialogues to which he gave no name. He was at his best in the Shrovetide piece which, under his hand, changed from a formless dialogue to an entertaining, well-constructed, merry and wholesome little play. It was seldom more than four hundred lines, and nearly always inculcated some lesson in morals or manners.

The interlude. The interlude was usually a short, humorous piece, suited for two or three, scarcely ever more than four, actors; and it was, par excellence, the banquet entertainment. Occasionally it was used as a comic diversion between the more serious parts of a sacred play; or as one of the features of medieval vaudeville in a program of juggling acts, necromancy, and wrestling. Gradually the interlude acquired a courtly character; but it was also employed, during the period of religious strife, as a means of propaganda. It was essentially witty and full of action. A fragment of a very early interlude exists, called Interlude de Clerico et Puella, probably belonging to the reign of the first Edward. It is written in dialect, and requires three actors and a puppy. There is no prologue or explanation; but the characters begin at once, Clericus making immediate love to Puella. In the fourteenth century the Society of Parish Clerks, which enjoyed considerable renown in medieval London, played interludes before King Richard, his queen and court. Nicholas Udall and John Bale, both of whom belong to the sixteenth century, wrote religious and political interludes. The most famous of all the writers of this species of play is John Heywood (1497-1580) under whose hand the form became satirical and entertaining. He discarded rustic and biblical subjects, also subjects of controversy, and turned towards Chaucer and the French fables for his themes. With him the medieval secular play changed almost imperceptibly into the English realistic comedy of the Elizabethan age.

Historical, legendary, and puppet plays. There are a few extant plays, generally called mysteries, which are based on non-biblical stories. Two of these are French and have for themes, respectively, the Fall of Troy and the story of Joan of Arc. They were evidently meant for gigantic spectacles, and seem to foreshadow the chronicle play. It is recorded that, in these plays, from three hundred to five hundred people were on the stage at one time.
The puppet show (also called "motions") developed in its humble way side by side with the more pretentious types of drama. Dumb shows, which were pantomimic performances with either living actors or puppets, were performed in Florence early in the fourteenth century, and spread over Europe and into England in the fifteenth. Old stories of cheating merchants, devils in disguise, and of Noah's Ark, were standbys in the way of fables. A letter from Bath, mentioned in the Tatler, relates the appearance of a puppet show featuring Alexander the Great as hero. At Bartholomew Fair in the reign of Queen Anne, a performance of the Creation and Flood was followed by a puppet show called Punch and Sir John Spendall. In it Punch beat his wife, insulted the priest, was frightened by a ghost and was finally carried off to hell.

MIRACLE PLAY

Miracle play or mystery play, form of medieval drama that came from dramatization of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church. It developed from the 10th to the 16th cent., reaching its height in the 15th cent. The simple lyric character of the early texts, as shown in the Quem Quœritis, was enlarged by the addition of dialogue and dramatic action. Eventually the performance was moved to the churchyard and the marketplace. Rendered in Latin, the play was preceded by a prologue or by a herald who gave a synopsis and was closed by a herald's salute. When a papal edict in 1210 forbade the clergy to act on a public stage, supervision and control of presenting the plays passed into the hands of the town guilds, and various changes ensued. The vernacular language replaced Latin, and scenes were inserted that were not from the Bible. The acting became more dramatic as characterization and detail became more important. Based on the Scriptures from the creation to the Second Coming and on the lives of the saints, the plays were arranged into cycles and were given on church festival days, particularly the feast of Corpus Christi, lasting from sunrise to sunset. Each guild was responsible for the production of a different episode. With simple costumes and props, guild members, who were paid actors, performed on stages equipped with wheels; each scene was given at one public square and drawn on to its next performance at another, while a different stage succeeded it. Named after the towns in which they were performed, the principal English cycles are the York Plays (1430–40), the longest, containing 48 plays; the Towneley or Wakefield Plays (c.1450, in Yorkshire); the Coventry Plays (1468); and the Chester Plays (1475–1500). The Passion play is the chief modern example of the miracle play. The French mystère distinguished those plays containing biblical stories from those about the lives of the saints. The auto, the medieval religious drama in Spain, was acted concurrently with the secular drama throughout the Golden Age and into the 18th cent. Calderón was the greatest composer of the auto sacramental, which dealt with the mystery of the Mass in allegory. In Italy the laudi were basically choral in form and so distinguished from the later sacre rappresentazioni, which became lavish artistic productions comparable to the French mystère.

PAGEANT

Pageant, modern dramatic spectacle or procession celebrating a special occasion or an event in the history of a locality. In medieval times the word pageant had meant the wagon or the movable stage on which one scene of a mystery or miracle play was performed. The pageant was built on wheels and consisted of two rooms, the lower one being used as a dressing room and the upper used as a stage. The word also referred to the complex wooden machine-structures built for the Tudor masque. The modern form of the pageant came into general use in England and America since the production, in 1905, of L. N. Parker's Sherborne pageant in England. Pageants include such celebrations as the Mardi Gras and annual local festivals.

MYSTERIES AND PAGEANTS IN ENGLAND

IT is probable that the sacred play was brought to England from France after the Norman conquest. Throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries there was a constant supply of mysteries and miracles. More than one hundred English towns, some of them very small, are known to have been provided with these entertainments, which in some places were given every year. Usually, however, an interval of a few years elapsed between productions. Corpus Christi day, which falls in early June, was the most popular time, though Whitsuntide and occasionally other Church festal days were marked by performances. On one occasion the Parish Clerks gave a pageant which lasted for three days, and again one lasting for eight days. The boy choristers of Saint Paul's in London became celebrated for their histrionic ability, and in 1378 they begged Parliament to issue an injunction against "unskilled performers." In 1416 Henry V entertained the Emperor Sigismund at Windsor with a play on the subject of Saint George; and in the following year the English bishops who were delegated to the Council of Constance--the same Council which promised safe conduct to John Huss and then burned him at the stake--entertained their hosts with a Christmas play in three parts, the Nativity, the Visit of the Magi, and the Slaughter of the Innocents. Two performances were given, one for their fellow councillors and themselves, the other for the burghers of the town.

Some of the extant manuscripts. The usual name for these plays in England was miracle, or the Latin ludus, or sometimes the word history. The name mystery is said to have been first applied, in England, in the early eighteenth century by Dodsley, the editor of a volume of old plays. Of the extant manuscripts, the earliest is probably the Harrowing of Hell, in three versions, all of which were probably taken from the French. It is simply a dramatic dialogue in verse, in which Christ and Satan argue over the ownership of the souls in hell; and it belongs naturally with the Easter group of plays. Two plays were discovered during the twentieth century, one on the subject of Abraham and Isaac; the other, belonging to the lost Newcastle Cycle, on the Building of the Ark, both probably surviving from the fourteenth century.

The Cycles. The greater part of the important manuscripts of biblical drama belongs to the cycles--a medieval product in a sense peculiar to England--which attempted to cover the history of Man from his creation to the Day of Judgment. In these cycles there appeared, almost unconsciously, something like the principle of unity: first came the creation, then the fall of Man, which necessitated his redemption. This redemption, after being foretold by the prophets, was accomplished by the birth and passion of Christ, with his resurrection. The series, taken as a whole, formed a true dramatic sequence, in which the soul of Man was the hero.

There are commonly counted four important English cycles: Chester, York, Coventry, and Towneley (also called Wakefield). Cycles are also known to have been produced at Newcastle, Canterbury, and Lincoln. Of those that survive, the Chester cycle is probably the earliest. Of the Newcastle cycle but one play remains, The Building of the Ark, in which there are five characters, and Noah's wife is represented as a vixen. Such is her stubborn temper that Noah is constrained to say to her,

"The devil of hell thee speed

To ship when thou shalt go!"

The cycles vary in quality, and the plays are not always the work of one hand, nor even of one century. The manuscripts, as we have them, have been revised, edited, and arranged, probably from several earlier models, possibly in some cases from the French. In the different cycles there is naturally great similarity both in subject matter and in the sequence of plays; but there are also interesting differences of treatment.

The Pageant. Doubtless biblical plays were often given in England in the continental manner, on a stationary platform with the "mansions" arranged in proper order. Gradually, however, the pageant became specially associated with the English play. The word first meant the movable scaffolding upon which the play was given, but was afterward applied to the play itself. Reduced to its simplest elements, the pageant was a play on wheels. This of course was not a new thing. Tradition assigns a cart to Thespis; there were "carriage plays" in Spain; and traveling shows in Japan. In England, as a rule, each play of the cycle had its own carriage, and all moved along in procession, each wagon giving its play in turn at each stopping place. Usually the pageant began very early in the morning. In the proclamation of the York performances in 1415, it was announced that the plays would begin between four and five o'clock in the morning.

All our knowledge concerning the method of presenting the pageant comes from a report left by one Archdeacon Rogers, who wrote of it in quaint English about the year 1517. He said that each carriage had a higher and a lower room, the lower "where they appareled themselves," and the higher where they played. Temporary stands were built for spectators, and good seats sold for high prices. Sometimes the action of the play called for horsemen, in which case obviously the action would spread out beyond the limits of the stage. The celebration opened with a procession, and after its close there was an orderly round-up by the councilmen and mayor. One writer says:

"To a medieval town the performance of a mystery was an event of immense interest. . . . the magistrates ordered all the shops to be closed, and forbade all noisy work. The streets were empty, the houses locked up, and none but solitary armed watch-men, specially engaged for the occasion, were seen about the residences. All were gathered in the public square".

The Guilds. We have seen how in France the production of plays, once having left the hands of the clergy, passed into the care of certain Brotherhoods. In England the production was managed by the tradesmen's guilds. Each play was arranged, acted, costumed, and financed by its own guild. A study of the distribution of the plays among the guilds forms one of the diverting features of this medieval carnival. In the York cycle the tinners began with God Creating Heaven; the plasterers followed with God Creating the Earth; and then came the card-makers, with God Creating Man. Of course, the ship-builders and seamen played Noah and the Ark, while the goldsmiths enacted the Three Kings, because they could furnish gold crowns. The guilds took pride in making a good showing, being inspired doubtless by both the spirit of good workmanship and the desire to advertise their wares. The smiths had the task of affixing the body of Christ to the cross. A dialogue between the torturers in one of the Towneley plays indicates how one holds down the limbs with all his might. They then congratulated themselves that neither "lewde man ne clerke nothing better shuld."

Scenery, costumes, and finance. In the larger towns considerable time and care were spent in preparation for the pageants. The scenery and stage appliances must have been somewhat scant, if all were accommodated in a rolling greenroom and stage combined. The splendor of the costumes perhaps made up for anything that was lacking in the setting. It was the custom for God to wear a white coat and have his face gilded. Herod, and miscreants generally, were dressed in Saracens, they being the stage villains of the Middle Ages. The expenses, which were often large, were sometimes partly met by a nobleman or other public spirited benefactor; but in general the citizens or guilds financed the production. A collection was taken up at the time of the procession; and, in addition, a tax, ranging from a penny to fourpence and called pageant silver, was imposed upon each member of the guilds. It was paid over to the pageant master, who was elected each year. Today he would be called the business manager, or impresario. The actors and "drawers" were paid for their services; but there was a fine for bad acting or undue forgetfulness of the parts, also fines for guilds which were slow in handing over their pageant silver.

The most impressive of all the mysteries was the Passion of Christ; and this was, as we have seen, also the earliest to be dramatized. In England it took shape about the fourteenth century, gradually showing the conflict between the spiritual strength of Jesus, on the one hand, and on the other the combined forces of the Jewish and Roman worlds. Of all the ecclesiastical plays, this alone can still be seen enacted in modern times.

Lack of artistic quality in biblical plays. Theoretically, the escape of the liturgical plays from the control of the Church, the extension of subjects and the possibility of greater freedom of treatment, ought to have enabled the dramatists to produce at least one masterpiece; but none such exists. Here and there are passages of such sturdy simplicity, so sincere and pleasing, that they for a moment seem to lift the play out of a dull and commonplace atmosphere into one of life and reality; but there is not one genius of the first rank, not one play of the quality of Macbeth or Oedipus in all the enormous output of the Middle Ages. One mystery is just about as good, and just about as dull, as another. So poor did the plays become that a celebrated French writer, Du Bellay, publicly advocated the importation of Greek and Roman tragedy to take the place of the native mysteries. There was none of that struggling with the problems of life and destiny which marks the tragedy of the Greeks; no attainment of an artificial but beautiful conventional form, such as appeared in the No plays of the Japanese; only an occasional naïve touch, interesting because of its spontaneous simplicity.

The decline and disappearance of the biblical play. The next phase of the sacred play is just what might be expected, namely, its condemnation by the Church under whose protection it had risen. It was condemned, however, not only by the Church. The time came when the hollowness, the absence of all religious feeling, made the performance a disgrace and a scandal. A pious habit had become a conventionalized and empty show. Both Romanists and Protestants ultimately frowned upon the mysteries, and denounced them for their childishness and coarseness. The guilds, which had once gladly given time and money for their preparation, now felt the yearly tax a burden. The cycle of sacred drama had run its course. In France, performances were forbidden during the latter part of the sixteenth century. In Spain and in Catholic Germany, as well as in Italy, they persisted somewhat longer. In England they were forbidden by Henry VIII, but were restored again for a brief time under Mary. There were few performances after 1600. The last York play was in 1597, the last Newcastle play in 1589. The Chester plays died out with the sixteenth century. The most important result of all this dramatic activity was perhaps the fostering of a love for the theater, and the shaping of native material into rough dramatic form.

MASQUE

Masque, courtly form of dramatic spectacle, popular in England in the first half of the 17th cent. The masque developed from the early 16th-century disguising, or mummery, in which disguised guests bearing presents would break into a festival and then join with their hosts in a ceremonial dance. As the form evolved, the important elements retained were the use of the mask and the mingling of actors and spectators. Reaching its height in the early 17th cent., the masque became a magnificent and colorful spectacle, presented in public theaters and, with more splendor, in the royal courts. The actors personified pastoral and mythological figures, with great emphasis placed on music and dance. The foremost writer of the masque was Ben Jonson. However, it was his collaborator Inigo Jones, the theatrical architect, famous for his elaborate costume designs, settings, and scenic effects, who gave the masque its greatest popularity. Some of their more successful masques include The Masque of Blackness (1605) and Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618).

PASSION PLAY

Passion play, genre of the miracle play that has survived from the Middle Ages into modern times. Its subject is the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Passion plays were first given in Latin. By the 13th cent. they included German verses, and 200 years later the entire play was performed in German. Toward the end of the 15th cent. passion plays had become far more secular in content, having been degraded, in a religious sense, through their contact with carnival plays. Their production was forbidden by ecclesiastical authorities and only a few were revived after the Counter Reformation. The chief survival among the passion plays is the one performed at Oberammergau in the Bavarian Alps. This entirely amateur performance has been given every 10 years (last in 1990, originally in 1634, with only three interruptions caused by war) in fulfillment, it is said, of a vow that was made during a plague. Passion plays have been revived in a few cities in W Europe.

ALLEGORY

Allegory, in literature, symbolic story that serves as a disguised representation for meanings other than those indicated on the surface. The characters in an allegory often have no individual personality, but are embodiments of moral qualities and other abstractions. The allegory is closely related to the parable, fable, and metaphor, differing from them largely in intricacy and length. A great variety of literary forms have been used for allegories. The medieval morality play Everyman, personifying such abstractions as Fellowship and Good Deeds, recounts the death journey of Everyman. John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, a prose narrative, is an allegory of man's spiritual salvation. Spenser's poem The Faerie Queene, besides being a chivalric romance, is a commentary on morals and manners in 16th-century England as well as a national epic. Although allegory is still used by some authors, its popularity as a literary form has declined in favor of a more personal form of symbolic expression.

SYMBOLISTS

Symbolists, in literature, a school originating in France toward the end of the 19th cent. in reaction to the naturalism and realism of the period. Designed to convey impressions by suggestion rather than by direct statement, symbolism found its first expression in poetry but was later extended to the other arts. The early symbolists experimented with form, revolting against the rigidity of the Parnassians with a free verse that has outlived the movement itself. The precursors of the school, all influenced by Baudelaire, included Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud. They were accused of writing with a decadent morbidity, partly as the result of their utilization of imagination as a reality. The movement was continued in poetry by Laforgue, Moréas, and Régnier; in drama by Maeterlinck; in criticism by Remy de Gourmont; and in music by Debussy. Among the later symbolists were Claudel, Valéry, Jammes, and the critic Camille Mauclair. The influence of the French symbolists not only gave rise to similar schools in England, Germany, and other countries, but also may be traced in the development of the imagists and decadents; it is likewise evident in the work of Arthur Symons, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O'Neill, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner, and E. E. Cummings.

BEN JONSON

Ben Jonson, 1572–1637, English dramatist and poet, b. Westminster, London. The high-spirited buoyancy of Jonson's plays and the brilliance of his language have earned him a reputation as one of the great playwrights in English literature. After a brief term at bricklaying, his stepfather's trade, and after military service in Flanders, he began working for Philip Henslowe as an actor and playwright. In 1598 he was tried for killing another actor in a duel but escaped execution by claiming right of clergy (that he could read and write).

His first important play, Every Man in His Humour, was produced in 1598, with Shakespeare in the cast. In 1599 its companion piece, Every Man out of His Humour, was produced. In The Poetaster (1601) Jonson satirized several of his fellow playwrights, particularly Dekker and Marston, who were writing at that time for a rival company of child actors. He collaborated with Chapman and Marston on the comedy Eastward Ho! (1604). A passage in the play, derogatory to the Scots, offended James I, and the three playwrights spent a brief time in prison.

Jonson's great period, both artistically and financially, began in 1606 with the production of Volpone. This was followed by his three other comic masterpieces, Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614). Jonson became a favorite of James I and wrote many excellent masques for the court. He was the author of two Roman tragedies, Sejanus (1603) and Catiline (1611). With the unsuccessful production of The Devil Is an Ass in 1616 Jonson's good fortune declined rapidly. His final plays were failures, and with the accession of Charles I in 1625 his value at court was less appreciated.

Jonson's plays, written along classical lines, are marked by a pungent and uncompromising satire, by a liveliness of action, and by numerous humor characters, whose single passion or oddity overshadows all their other traits. He was a moralist who sought to improve the ways of men by portraying human foibles and passions through exaggeration and distortion. Jonson's nondramatic poetry includes Epigrams (1616); The Forrest (1616), notable for the two beautiful songs: “Drink to me only with thine eyes” and “Come, my Celia, let us prove”; and Underwoods (1640). His principal prose work Timber; or, Discoveries (1640) is a collection of notes and reflections on miscellaneous subjects.

Jonson exerted a strong influence over his contemporaries. Although arrogant and contentious, he was a boon companion, and his followers, sometimes called the “sons of Ben,” loved to gather with him in the London taverns. Examples of his conversation were recorded in Conversations with Ben Jonson by Drummond of Hawthornden.

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro

Pedro Calderón de la Barca, 1600–1681, Spanish dramatist, last important figure of the Spanish Golden Age, b. Madrid. Educated at a Jesuit school and the Univ. of Salamanca, he turned from theology to poetry and became a court poet in 1622. His more than 100 plays were carefully contrived, subtle, and rhetorical. The earlier plays, of the cloak-and-dagger school, include La dama duende [the lady fairy] and Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar [the house with two doors is difficult to guard]. His finest work is in his more than 70 autos sacramentales (one-act religious plays), among them El divino Orfeo and A Dios por razón de estado [to God for reasons of state]. Of his philosophical dramas the best known are El mágico prodigioso [the wonderful magician] and La vida es sueño [life is a dream], which deals with the themes of fate, prognostication, and free will. Calderón took holy orders in 1651 and thereafter wrote few plays except the autos, of which he supplied two a year for the Corpus Christi festival.

Everyman
everyman

Everyman is the best surviving example of the type of Medieval drama known as the morality play. Moralities evolved side by side with the mystery plays, although they were composed individually and not in cycles. The moralities employed allegory to dramatize the moral struggle Christianity envisions universal in every individual.

Everyman, a short play of some 900 lines, portrays a complacent Everyman who is informed by Death of his approaching end. The play shows the hero's progression from despair and fear of death to a "Christian resignation that is the prelude to redemption."¹ First, Everyman is deserted by his false friends: his casual companions, his kin, and his wealth. He falls back on his Good Deeds, his Strength, his Beauty, his Intelligence, and his Knowledge. These assist him in making his Book of Accounts, but at the end, when he must go to the grave, all desert him save his Good Deeds alone. The play makes its grim point that we can take with us from this world nothing that we have received, only what we have given.

The play was written near the end of the fifteenth century. It is probably a translation from a Flemish play, Elckerlijk (or Elckerlyc) first printed in 1495, although there is a possibility that Everyman is the original, the Flemish play the translation. There are four surviving versions of Everyman, two of them fragmentary.

The Parable of the Talents therefore refers to the metaphor "life is a precious possession." If you have many talents, you must "invest" them wisely--use them as you should use material goods, in a charitable way. If you have a few talents, you must invest them wisely as well. Even if you have only one talent, you must invest it wisely and do good in the world with that talent.

In an important way, the play Everyman demonstrates the ways in which a person who does have talents (Good Deeds that are trapped in the ground) wastes them, like the servant who buries his one talent in the ground and is cast into the dark, the "place of wailing and grinding of teeth." According to the play's allegory, what forces in everyday human life cause us to Every persons to waste our talents?

Plot Everyman, English morality play written anonymously in the late 15th century. The play is an allegory of death and the fate of the soul. Summoned by Death, Everyman calls on Fellowship, Goods, and Strength for help, but they desert him. Only Good Deeds and Knowledge remain faithful and lead him toward salvation. It is generally considered the finest of the morality plays.

Scene 1: God tells Death to go down to earth and retrieve Everyman. God orders Death to do this because God feels that it is time or Everyman to go to the "afterlife." Death wants Everyman to show God weather or not he is good enough for heaven. In this scene, Everyman asks Death many various questions, trying to persuade him to allow him to stay on earth. Everyman wants to know if he can bring certain things with him. He also wants to know if he would be able to stay on Earth for a longer time. Death says that he will take no bribes. Should he go to Heaven or to hell?

Scene 2: Everyman asks Fellowship to join him on his journey. Fellowship, being the friend that he was says "sure, I will go". When Everyman tells Fellowship that this journey is to either Heaven or hell, Fellowship changes his mind. He refuses to go with Everyman. He explains that he will not spare his own life for the sake of Everyman. All in good faith, fellowship said goodbye and apologized to Everyman as he leaves.

Scene 3: After Everyman’s first rejection, he stoops low enough to ask Kindred and his cousin to go with him. At first his cousin says "yea , Everyman and to us declare If ye be disposed to go any whither; For, wit you well, we will live and die together." Later in the scene Cousin and Kindred change their minds and reject Everyman. The say that Everyman is committing a selfish act by asking them to go with him. Everyman is still alone.

Scene 4: Goods. Everyman wants Goods to go with him to the afterlife. Goods does not go because materials are not what make a person. The idea of heaven or hell is to see what kind of a person that you were in your life. Goods to do not decide what sort of a person someone is. Goods does not care about going with Everyman because goods can just be passed on to someone else. Goods is rejected to accompany Everyman.

Scene 5: Everyman asks good Deeds to go with him to the afterlife. Good Deeds refuses because Everyman has not done very many good deeds in his life. Good Deeds, hence the name, does a good deed and leads Everyman to Confession.

Scene 6: Everyman meets up with Knowledge, Good Deed’s cousin. Knowledge accompanies Everyman to Confession where he is joined by Five Wits, Beauty, Strength, and Discretion. Everyman confesses all of his bad deeds to the priest. After Everyman is forgiven, he looses all of his characteristics, but Knowledge and Good Deeds. Knowledge leaves. The priest releases Everyman.

Scene 7: Everyman and Good Deeds descend into the grave. Knowledge hears the angels sing. The angel welcomes Everyman and tells him his "reckoning is clear."

Characters: Every character represents a different characteristic of the main character, Everyman. The characters are used as symbols. Beauty, Strength, and Discretion are examples of some different characteristics that were expressed in Everyman .These characteristics are assumed to make up a person. However, it is proven that these characteristics make up a person, but they are not the most important. The most important characteristic in a person is doing good deeds. Knowledge also makes up who a person can be. Everyman had many important characteristics in his life. When Everyman went to the Afterlife, the only thing that went with Everyman was his knowledge, and his Good Deeds.

Death was an important character in Everyman . Death symbolized a messenger of god. He was the figure that went down to Earth to retrieve Everyman and take him to the afterlife. Death was a significant part of Everyman because he was the deliverer of Everyman’s initiative to find something to accompany him to his forever journey, to heaven or to hell. Death is the character that changes lives.

Miracle, Mystery, and Morality Plays, generic terms given to the English dramas of medieval times (from the 5th century to about the 15th century). These plays developed from the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church after 1210 when a papal edict forbade members of the clergy from appearing on a stage in public. Such plays had considerable influence on the work of the great English dramatists of the 1500s and 1600s.

When the simple scenes from the Bible that had become part of the liturgy could no longer be performed by the priests early in the 13th century, the miracle plays came into existence. These plays had as subject matter the miracles performed by the saints or, more frequently, scenes from the Old and New Testaments. Miracle plays, also known as Saint Plays, in crude form were presented at Easter and on other holy days. They gained a formalized structure in the late 13th or early 14th century and reached the height of their popularity in the 15th and 16th centuries. Miracle plays dealing with the legends of the saints were less realistic and more religious in tone than those concerned with biblical episodes, and were eventually superseded by the latter.

The plays were generally given in cycles, or sequences of related scenes, each of which required only a short time to perform. Each scene was acted by members of one of the trade guilds of the town. The cycles presented the Christian history of God and humanity, from the creation of human beings and the world to final judgment. The important cycles, named after the towns in which they were notably performed, are the Chester (25 scenes), the Wakefield (30 scenes), the York (48 scenes), the Norwich, and the Coventry plays. The cycles were generally performed outdoors on festival days and particularly on the feast of Corpus Christi. Each guild acted its assigned scene on its own wagon or float on wheels, which could be moved from one place to another for repeated performances.

To the scenes from the Bible the anonymous playwrights added interludes consisting of realistic comedy based on situations and ideas of a contemporary nature. The miracle play, therefore, was not only a biblical drama or scene, but also included scenes of realistic medieval comedy. The best-known miracle play is the Second Shepherd's Play of the Wakefield Cycle. This story of the shepherds watching their flock in the fields on the night of Christ's birth is enlivened by the comic episode in which one of the sheep is stolen; the thief hides the sheep in a cradle in his home and, brought to bay, pretends the little animal is a baby girl.

The term mystery play, also called a Corpus Christi play or simply mystery, is sometimes used synonymously with miracle play. Some literary authorities make a distinction between the two, designating as mystery plays all types of early medieval drama that draw their subject matter from Gospel events and as miracle plays all those dealing with legends of the saints.

Sometimes known simply as a morality, the morality play was most popular in the 15th and early 16th centuries. It was designed to instruct audiences in the Christian way of life and the Christian attitude toward death. The general theme of the morality play is the conflict between good and evil for the human soul; the play always ends with the saving of the soul. The characters of the morality play are not the saints or biblical personages of the miracle play, but personifications of such abstractions as flesh, gluttony, lechery, sloth, pride, envy, hope, charity, riches, and strength.

Some of the moralities were anonymous; others were by known authors. The best known of the former type is Everyman (late 15th century), which probably was derived from a Dutch source but was thoroughly Anglicized. In the play the protagonist Everyman learns that everything material he has gained in life deserts him as he journeys into the Valley of Death; in the end only the allegorical personage Good Deeds accompanies him .

The author of Everyman had a very unique style of writing. He used a technique called imagery . Imagery is the use o images or symbol’s to help represent a certain character or idea. Imagery is a very good technique to use because it allows the reader to visualize the text as they read the play. Imagery also gives the actor a better understanding of the text which helps them in their acting.

Everyman is a play the teaches a moral. The universal theme or moral in this play is "Do good deeds and obtain as much knowledge that you possibly can because everything good thing that you do and everything that you learn will stay with you for your whole life and you will be recognized or everything that you do, sooner or later".

Everyman at Saltzburg

everyman

VOLPONE di Ben Jonson
volpone - ben jonson

Genre: Comic drama, but also a satire.

Form: blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) mixed with comic song.  Since the "plot" is a low criminal conspiracy (but what was the rebellion against Henry IV or Lear?), the "subplot" is a parody of criminal conspiracy set in Venice but involving an English traveler, an English nobleman and his wife, all of whom are on tour.

Characters and Summary:   This plot closely parallels Horace's satire on legacy hunters (Book II.7) but dramatizes it with characters whose flattened, comic/satiric personas represent various types of human personality as they are distorted by greed, lust, and sheer perversity.   Jonson alerts us to the symbolic order of the action's meaning by means of the names he assigns the primary characters: Volpone (fox--deceiver), Mosca (fly--parasite), Voltore (vulture--scavenger/lawyer), Corbaccio (crow--wealthy but still greedy man), and Corvino (raven, another scavenger--the wealthy merchant who can't get enough).  These characters all seek to be named Volpone's heir in order to gain his treasure, but they offer him gifts to achieve that honor, and he (though nowhere near death) strings them along, more in love with his delight in deceiving them than even his beloved gold.  A love plot is attached to this legacy-hunt, involving Corvino's wife (Celia) and Corbaccio's son (Bonario), but one of the play's puzzles is that they are such relatively lifeless, though moral, characters.  Below these levels, three more sets of characters populate the stage.  Nano (a dwarf), Castrone (an eunuch), and Androgyno (a hermaphrodite) join Mosca as Volpone's courtiers, Sir Poltic Would-be and his wife are deceived by Peregrine (the young English man on the Continental tour), and the elders of Venice alternately try to profit from and to bring justice to the confusion (Commendatori [sheriffs], Mercatori [merchants], Avocatori [lawyers, brothers of Corvino], and Notario [the court's registrar]).

So the plot, in brief, is that the conspirators try to deceive Volpone, but he's really deceiving them, until his agent (Mosca) deceives him (and them) and they bring him to the court, which they all try to deceive, until they are unmasked (while Peregrine is being deceived by and deceiving Sir and Lady Politic Would-be).

Many critics of Jonson's Volpone have argued that it is not a true comedy but rather a mix of tragedy, comedy, and satire. Many have also claimed that it follows the traditional beast-fable that can be found in the tales of Aesop. Although Volpone takes on some characteristics of tragedy, it seems to follow closer to the conventions of comedy. But it is not the traditional form of comedy. It is a play that takes on the form of a comical satire as well as a morality play. It also adapts the features of a fable in that it strives to teach a moral. Yet this play, even though it adopts these traditions, puts a different twist on what people would expect from a comedy or morality play. Jonson presents his audience with an unconventional way of approaching the subjects he is satirizing by creating a new form of comedy that embodies aspects of all three genres.

Since we are considering Volpone to be a comedy, What type of comedy is it? Rather than the city comedies that were popular at the time I believe this play to be more like a satirical comedy. Why a satire? Because he is criticizing his age and social atmosphere. He also has as a main influence of his play the satiric works of Juvenal. Like Juvenal, Jonson is satirizing the whole of his country. Whether it is the corruption of the court that we find in Voltore or the immorality of the legacy hunters Jonson is satirizing the importance of money during his time.

But there is a striking difference between Volpone and the traditional idea of comical satire.

The contrast between Volpone and the comical satire is immediately apparent. Gone are the static spokesman, the conveniently formulated ideal, and the easy dispensation of comic justice from a lofty vantagepoint. (Dessen 75)

Instead in Volpone we see an author who is concerned with "conveying an anatomy of the time's deformity through comedy." (Dessen 75) The deformity that Jonson is trying to comment on is the overemphasis on the importance of money. This deformity is seen in the first two lines of the play where Volpone wakes up and says "Good morning to the day; and next, my gold: open the shrine, that I may see my saint" (1.1,1-2).

In this opening scene the audience can see that the world of Volpone is not in order. When God is supposed to be the object of worship it is clear that the greed that envelops most of the characters of the play is the subject of Jonson's comedy. This play is also a satire on the morals of the time. In this first scene Jonson is paving the way for a satire as well as a morality play.

The satire consists of the deformity that exists in Jonson's London. It is a satire on the "very fabric of justice" in London as well as the worth people put on wealth over "such basic concerns as the ties between husband and wife, (and) the ties between father and son." (Dessen 80-81) The main thrust of this satire on social values is addressed in the situation of Corvino and his wife.

In the Mountebank scene we see the traditional values take hold of Corvino. During the scene Corvino's wife, Celia acts out the part of the flirt with Volpone. Corvino witnesses this and thinks it is the "death of mine honor" (2.1, 1). Up to this point in the play he is the jealous husband. But once Mosca presents him with an opportunity to prostitute his wife for the gain of money, he is quick to lose his honor in exchange for the inheritance.

Jonson wants his audience to see what the effect of greed has on traditional values. He shows the audience how disgusting Corvino is in betraying his values in order to gain money. He is criticizing the "materialism of the age" for "elevating gold 'above God." (Dessen, 78) His comedy "makes avarice the prevailing theme." (Baum 85) The characters of Jonson's comedy are so wrapped up in becoming Volpone's heir they completely forget any sense of honor.

In the scene following the speech Corvino gives about his honor being lost because of Celia's flirtation with Volpone (disguised as the Mountebank) the audience sees a complete turnaround of his attitude. Before, he had seen the death of his honor and decided to lock up Celia so that he could be sure of her faithfulness. Now after being presented with the opportunity to profit from his wife, he does not care about his honor but rather about the money he will obtain. Celia's remark about "What spirit is this that hath entered him?" (3.7, 47-48) is Jonson's way of showing the crudeness and ugliness of Corvino's actions.

Jonson uses Celia as a counter example of what people should and would have traditionally done in such a circumstance. Her speech, when confronted with Volpone's proposition, is the way that people would be expected to respond.

Oh God, and his angels! whither, whither is shame fled human breasts? That with such ease, men dare put off your honors and their own? Is that, which ever was cause of life, now placed beneath the basest circumstance? And modesty an exile made for money? 3.7. 132-138

She can not believe that people would sell their honor. Jonson uses Celia as his voice to comment on the upside down morality that is in the play.

Jonson further satirizes his society by showing how "Corvino and Corbaccio are willing to sacrifice their dearest possession in hope of gain." (Baum, 85) The relationship between father and son is something that is traditionally sacred. But once Corbaccio finds out that the only way he can become Volpone's heir is to disinherit his son, Bonario, and name Volpone his heir he is quick to do so. Through Corbaccio's action Jonson is giving the audience a glimpse at how greed effects traditional social values.

The corruption of the court that is seen in the open contempt for the court that Voltore has when he lies is also a satire on London's corrupt justice system. In the first trial scene we see the court’s inability to see that Celia and Bonario are innocent while their accusers are the ones that are guilty. In this scene "Jonson is showing us how the disease which until now had been largely confined to Volpone's chambers is literally being carried in to . . . infect the halls of justice." (Dessen 93)

Jonson, in Volpone, is looking at the state that he sees exists around him. Through the relationships between Corvino and Celia and Corbaccio and Bonario he is showing his audience the ugly effect money has on traditional values. These people are willing to give up their most sacred traditions and values in exchange for money. By making the characters of Corvino and Corbaccio so virulent the audience can see Jonson's satire of the social values that were beginning to infect London.

But Volpone is not a true satiric comedy. In this play we see the remnants of the Christian morality play. Like the morality plays of the 1400's and 1500's we see in Volpone "a similarity between Volpone-Mosca and the morality vice." (Dessen 75) But it "is not a morality play" in that it there is no main character that gives a speech "on the major premise of the play." (Dessen 79) Jonson has used the morality play as a partial source for his comedy. By doing so Volpone becomes somewhat of a moral comedy. It mixes the characteristics of satirical comedy with the moralizing of the morality play.

It is a like a morality play because of its "immoral and moralizing vice."(Dessen 76) It uses the characters of Volpone and Mosca to present the vice of greed. But unlike morality plays there is no distinct voice to represent greed. Almost all of the characters are infected with this vice instead of there being one well-defined character of vice. But Volpone and Mosca are clear examples of what this vice is.

In his characterization of gold as an object that is worshipped Jonson has presented the audience with a situation where moral virtue takes a back seat to monetary gain. It is also like a morality play in that it has character types. Where Corvino, Corbaccio and Voltore are clearly characters of vice, the characters of Celia and Bonario are even more distinct as virtuous characters. These characters represent virtue in a world full of vice.

In the rape scene we see the virtuous character of Celia crying out to God to be saved. But unlike the morality play, it is not God who saves Celia but rather the luck that has placed Bonario in a position to rescue her. But even in the speech of Bonario when he interrupts Volpone Jonson is satirizing as well as moralizing.

Forbear, foul ravisher, libidinous swine, free the forced lady, or thou diest, impostor. But that I am loth to snatch thy punishment Out of the hand of justice, thou shouldst yet be made the timely sacrifice of vengeance, before this altar, and this dress, thy idol. Lady lets quit this place, it is the den of villany; fear naught, you have a guard: and he, ere long shall meet his just reward.

3.7, 266-274

In this tiny speech of Bonario's we see both the satire of conventional traditions and the vice that infects Volpone. "His speech is meant to be taken as a straight forward assertion of the play’s values." (Watson 93)

It is a satire of conventional values in that the speech makes Bonario seem rather naive when he is confronted with such a character as Volpone. Calling him a "foul ravisher" and "libidinous swine" shows how strong and sometimes farcical the language of the virtuous can be. Even though it is a satire on the traditional virtues, Jonson is clear to point out that Bonario is a character to be exemplified more so then Volpone.

But more than a satire on the traditional morality it is a satire on the type of drama that was prevalent. In his dedication Jonson makes it clear that he will deal justice out in its’ proper manner rather than what was conventional for the theater at the time. He is trying to "disarm the moral critics of the theater." (Watson 82) Rather than have the rogue escape through the use of his wit Jonson has the rogue brought down by the use of wit.

In the speech by Bonario "Jonson is again exploiting the clash of generic expectation, both to generate a new sort of comedy and to force the audience to recognize that innovation." (Watson 83) It is in this speech that we see a foreshadowing of the downfall of Volpone. Even though he escapes in act four he will "meet his just reward" (3.7, 274) by the end of act five. This would not be what the audience would expect.

By adopting some of the characteristics of the morality play Jonson hoped to "imitate justice" and to "instruct to life" (lines 112-113) through the combination of a satiric comedy and morality play. The harshness of the punishments at the end of the play fall more in line with the morality play than with the comical satire. "The surprisingly blunt exposure and punishment in Volpone pits the indulgent conventions of satiric comedy, in which wit is the sole criterion for success, against the forces of conventional moralism."(Watson 83)

In the conventional play Volpone would have escaped just as he did at the end of Act four. But instead of fitting the expectations of a comical satire Jonson is determined to make this play one based on morals. Throughout the comedy he has satirized both the conventions of his times and the lack of morals that was beginning to infect London at the time. His new form of comedy was more like the ancient fables of Aesop than a comedy of Elizabethan standards.

There has been much discussion of Volpone as a beast fable. This is because it uses animal names for its characters as well as its use of a moral ending. And yet it is not exactly the traditional fable. In the traditional fable we have a character that is similar to the witty character in a comic satire. But in Volpone this character is not as successful as the fable prototype.

By referring to Volpone as a fable we can see that Jonson was certainly influenced by the fable form. In trying to develop a play that would be both satirical and moral Jonson adapts the fable. This genre enables him to combine a satire of man with the moral he is trying to convey to his audience. As stated in his dedication, he is trying to give his audience a play that will show them how to live. The use of the fable is able to do this.

It is common in many fables to have the wit victorious. In a popular beast fable there is a fox that outwits a vulture. He claims to love the singing of the vulture and is able to get the vulture to sing. By doing this the vulture drops the food that was in his mouth. Then the fox runs away with the food. Volpone is like this in that the fox is able to outwit "the birds of prey and finally entraps them by feigning death." (Watson 85)

The fable that Jonson creates in Volpone has two plots. In the main plot we have the fox and the fly that are the wits of the fable. Then there are the 'birds of prey'. The vulture (Voltore), The Raven (Corbaccio), and the old crow (Corvino). These creatures are known for there predatory status. It is the fox (Volpone) who sets the trap for the birds and Mosca is the parasitic fly that lives off the fox.

Volpone's trap is very successful in getting the birds to give him money. This is the satirical element of the fable. By choosing the raven as the person who rejects his son in favor of becoming the fox's heir, Jonson is showing how Corbaccio is failing as a father just as a raven who does not provide for its children is not fulfilling the role of nature. (White, 141-142) The old crow, Corvino, is also betraying his nature by using his wife as a means to monetary gain. Jonson uses the beast fable in the main plot to satirize the upside down nature of society.

By having the plans of the fox fail Jonson is violating the tradition of the fable. Volpone tells them (the audience) that a strictly ethical conclusion in Jonsonian comedy will take the conventional and comfortable form . . . because the real world does not work that way, and Jonson will not yield his realism to any pleasant literary formula. (Watson 96-97)

But this is intentional because Jonson is concerned with creating a new sort of comedy. He is creating a comedy that is at the same time satirical and moral.

This new sort of comedy can best be seen in the sub-plot. The sub-plot is connected with the moral aspect of the fable. It is in the subplot that we see Jonson attempting to show his audience the dangers of living like the characters of the main plot. "It is on the thematic level that the presence of the Would-be's can be justified and their antics related to the major motifs of the play." (Barish 93)

The Would-be's are seen as parrots of the vices seen in the main characters. They are used by Jonson to show the folly that is involved in the English frame of mind in trying to imitate the Venetian court. Jonson uses the sub-plot to show what could happen to England if the country does not watch what it is doing.

Sir Would-be is "a comic distortion of Volpone" (Barish 94) while Lady Would-be is a rather paltry copy of a Venetian lady. But Jonson is clear that this couple is not involved in the vice of the main plot but rather involved in the folly of imitating that vice. Jonson used the Would-be's to show the danger of parroting the decadence of the main characters. In the subplot he shows how it is still possible for England to escape the terrible outcome that befalls the other creatures of the fable.

The play is structured so that the creatures involved in folly may escape while those involved in true vice are punished. Jonson is telling his audience that there is only one possible outcome for society if it succumbs to vice. But he makes it clear that he does not think England has become like the corrupt world of Volpone. His hopes are that the audience will learn from this play and escape public punishment just like the Would-be's have been able to.

In Volpone the audience is presented with a new type of comedy. It is like no other play before it. It is the meshing together of the different forms by Jonson to present a comedy that is both satirical and moral. It deals with social issues, such as the potential danger of putting gold above God, as well as the moral issues that are brought up in the treatment of Celia by Corvino. This comedy is one that challenges the audience to look at their actions critically as well as laugh at the fate of others. It is this combination of the moral and satirical that makes this play so unique for its time. The use of the fable lets the reader treat the subject of moral action in a detached way while the comical action entertains the audience. In Volpone Jonson was successful in combining three genres in order to create a new form of comedy.

volpone - ben jonson

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Geoffrey Chaucer

GEOFFREY CHAUCER, English poet. The name Chaucer, a French form of the Latin calcearius, a shoemaker, is found in London and the eastern counties as early as the second half of the 13th century. Some of the London Chaucers lived in Cordwainer Street, in the shoemakers' quarter; several of them, however, were vintners, and among others the poet's father John, and probably also his grandfather Robert. Legal pleadings inform us that in December 1324 John Chaucer was not much over twelve years old, and that he was still unmarried in 1328, the year which used to be considered that of Geoffrey's birth. The poet was probably born from eight to twelve years later, since in 1386, when giving evidence in Sir Richard le Scrope's suit against Sir Robert Grosvenor as to the right to bear certain arms, he was set down as "del age de xl ans et plus, armeez par xxvij ans." At a later date, and probably at the time of the poet's birth, his father lived in Thames Street, and had to wife a certain Agnes, niece of Hamo de Compton, whom we may regard as Geoffrey Chaucer's mother.

In 1357 Geoffrey is found, apparently as a lad, in the service of Elizabeth, countess of Ulster, wife of Lionel, duke of Clarence, entries in two leaves of her household accounts, accidentally preserved, showing that she paid in April, May and December various small sums for his clothing and expenses. In 1359, as we learn from his deposition in the Scrope suit, Chaucer went to the war in France. At some period of the campaign he was at "Retters," i.e. Rethel, near Reims, and subsequently had the ill luck to be taken prisoner. On the 1st of March 1360 the king contributed £16 to his ransom, and by a year or two later Chaucer must have entered the royal service, since on the 10th of June 1367 Edward granted him a pension of twenty marks for his past and future services. A pension of ten marks had been granted by the king the previous September to a Philippa Chaucer for services to the queen as one of her "domicellae" or "damoiselles," and it seems probable that at this date Chaucer was already married and this Philippa his wife, a conclusion which used to be resisted on the ground of allusions in his early poems to a hopeless love-affair, now reckoned part of his poetical outfit. Philippa is usually said to have been one of two daughters of a Sir Payne Roet, the other being Katherine, who after the death of her first husband, Sir Hugh de Swynford, in 1372, became governess to John of Gaunt's children, and subsequently his mistress and (in 1396) his wife. It is possible that Philippa was sister to Sir Hugh and sister-in-law to Katherine. In either case the marriage helps to account for the favour subsequently shown to Chaucer by John of Gaunt.

In the grant of his pension Chaucer is called "dilectus vallectus noster," our beloved yeoman; before the end of 1368 he had risen to be one of the king's esquires. In September of the following year John of Gaunt's wife, the duchess Blanche, died at the age of twenty-nine, and Chaucer wrote in her honour The Book of the Duchesse, a poem of 1334 lines in octosyllabic couplets, the first of his undoubtedly genuine works which can be connected with a definite date. In June 1370 he went abroad on the king's service, though on what errand, or whither it took him, is not known. He was back probably some time before Michaelmas, and seems to have remained in England till the 1st of December 1372, when he started, with an advance of 100 marks in his pocket, for Italy, as one of the three commissioners to treat with the Genoese as to an English port where they might have special facilities for trade. The accounts which he delivered on his return on the 23rd of May 1373 show that he had also visited Florence on the king's business, and he probably went also to Padua and there made the acquaintance of Petrarch.

In the second quarter of 1374 Chaucer lived in a whirl of prosperity. On the 23rd of April the king granted him a pitcher of wine daily, subsequently commuted for an annuity of 20 marks. From John of Gaunt, who in August 1372 had granted Philippa Chaucer £10 a year, he himself now received (June 13) a like annuity in reward for his own and his wife's services. On the 8th of June he was appointed Comptroller of the Custom and Subsidy of Wools, Hides and Woodfells and also of the Petty Customs of Wine in the Port of London. A month before this appointment, and probably in anticipation of it, he took (May 10, 1374) a lease for life from the city of London of the dwelling-house above the gate of Aldgate, and here he lived for the next twelve years. His own and his wife's income now amounted to over £60, the equivalent of upwards of £l000 in modern money. In the next two years large windfalls came to him in the form of two wardships of Kentish heirs, one of whom paid him £104, and a grant of £71,4s,6p; the value of some confiscated wool. In December 1376 he was sent abroad on the king's service in the retinue of Sir John Burley; in February 1377 he was sent to Paris and Montreuil in connexion probably with the peace negotiations between England and France, and at the end of April (after a reward of £20 for his good services) he was again despatched to France.

On the accession of Richard II. Chaucer was confirmed in his offices and pensions. In January 1378 he seems to have been in France in connexion with a proposed marriage between Richard and the daughter of the French king; and on the 28th of May of the same year he was sent with Sir Edward de Berkeley to the lord of Milan and Sir John Hawkwood to treat for help in the king's wars, returning on the 19th of September. This was his last diplomatic journey, and the close of a period of his life generally considered to have been so unprolific of poetry that little beyond the Clerk's "Tale of Grisilde," one or two other of the stories afterwards included in the Canterbury Tales, and a few short poems, are attributed to it, though the poet's actual absences from England during the eight years amount to little more than eighteen months.

During the next twelve or fifteen years there is no question that Chaucer was constantly engaged in literary work, though for the first half of them he had no lack of official employment. Abundant favour was shown him by the new king. He was paid £22 as a reward for his later missions in Edward III's reign, and was allowed an annual gratuity of 10 marks in addition to his pay of £10 as comptroller of the customs of wool. In April 1382 a new comptrollership, that of the petty customs in the Port of London, was given him, and shortly after he was allowed to exercise it by deputy, a similar licence being given him in February 1385, at the instance of the earl of Oxford, as regards the comptrollership of wool.

In October 1385 Chaucer was made a justice of the peace for Kent. In February 1386 we catch a glimpse of his wife Philippa being admitted to the fraternity of Lincoln cathedral in the company of Henry, earl of Derby (afterwards Henry IV), Sir Thomas de Swynford and other distinguished persons. In August 1386 he was elected one of the two knights of the shire for Kent, and with this dignity, though it was one not much appreciated in those days, his good fortune reached its climax. In December of the same year he was superseded in both his comptrollerships, almost certainly as a result of the absence of his patron, John of Gaunt, in Spain, and the supremacy of the duke of Gloucester. In the following year the cessation of Philippa's pension suggests that she died between Midsummer and Michaelmas. In May 1388 Chaucer surrendered to the king his two pensions of 20 marks each, and they were re-granted at his request to one John Scalby. The transaction was unusual and probably points to a pressing need for ready money, nor for the next fourteen months do we know of any source of income possessed by Chaucer beyond his annuity of £10 from John of Gaunt.

In July 1389, after John of Gaunt had returned to England, and the king had taken the government into his own hands, Chaucer was appointed clerk of the works at various royal palaces at a salary of two shillings a day, or over £31 a year, worth upwards of £500 present value. To this post was subsequently added the charge of some repairs at St George's Chapel, Windsor. He was also made a commissioner to maintain the banks of the Thames between Woolwich and Greenwich, and was given by the earl of March (grandson of Lionel, duke of Clarence, his old patron) a sub-forestership at North Petherton, Devon, obviously a sinecure. While on the king's business, in September 1390, Chaucer was twice robbed by highwaymen, losing £20 of the king's money. In June 1391 he was superseded in his office of clerk of the works, and seems to have suffered another spell of misfortune, of which the first alleviation came in January 1393 when the king made him a present of £10.

In February 1394 he was granted a new pension of £20. It is possible, also, that about this time, or a little later, he was in the service of the earl of Derby. In 1397 he received from King Richard a grant of a butt of wine yearly. For this he appears to have asked in terms that suggest poverty, and in May 1398 he obtained letters of protection against his creditors, a step perhaps rendered necessary by an action for debt taken against him earlier in the year. On the accession of Henry IV a new pension of 40 marks was conferred on Chaucer (13th of October 1399) and Richard II's grants were formally confirmed. Henry himself, however, was probably straitened for ready money, and no instalment of the new pension was paid during the few months of his reign that the poet lived. Nevertheless, on the strength of his expectations, on the 24th of December 1399 he leased a tenement in the garden of St Mary's Chapel, Westminster, and it was probably here that he died, on the 25th of the following October. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, and his tomb became the nucleus of what is now known as Poets' Corner.

The portrait of Chaucer, which the affection of his disciple, Thomas Hoccleve, caused to be painted in a copy of the latter's Regement of Princes (now Harleian MS. 4866 in the British Museum), shows him an old man with white hair; he has a fresh complexion, grey eyes, a straight nose, a grey moustache and a small double-pointed beard. His dress and hood are black, and he carries in his hands a string of beads. We may imagine that it was thus that during the last months of his life he used to walk about the precincts of the Abbey.

Henry IV's promise of an additional pension was doubtless elicited by the Compleynt to his Purs, in the envoy to which Chaucer addresses him as the "conquerour of Brutes Albioun." Thus within the last year of his life the poet was still writing. Nevertheless, as early as 1393-1394, in lines to his friend Scogan, he had written as if his day for poetry were past, and it seems probable that his longer poems were all composed before this date. In the preceding fifteen — or, if another view be taken, twenty - years, his literary activity was very great, and with the aid of the lists of his works which he gives in the Legende of Good Women (lines 414-431), and the talk on the road which precedes the "Man of Law's Tale" (Canterbury Tales, B. 46-76), the order in which his main works were written can be traced with approximate certainty,¹ while a few, both of these and of the minor poems, can be connected with definite dates.

The development of his genius has been attractively summed up as comprised in three stages, French, Italian and English, and there is a rough approximation to the truth in this formula, since his earliest poems are translated from the French or based on French models, and the two great works of his middle period are borrowed from the Italian, while his latest stories have no such obvious and direct originals and in their humour and freedom anticipate the typically English temper of Henry Fielding. But Chaucer's indebtedness to French poetry was no passing phase. For various reasons - a not very remote French origin of his own family may be one of them - he was in no way interested in older English literature or in the work of his English contemporaries, save possibly that of "the moral Gower." On the other hand he knew the Roman de la rose as modern English poets know Shakespeare, and the full extent of his debt to his French contemporaries, not merely in 1369, but in 1385 and in 1393 (the dates are approximate), is only gradually being discovered.

To be in touch throughout his life with the best French poets of the day was much for Chaucer. Even with their stimulus alone he might have developed no small part of his genius. But it was his great good fortune to add to this continuing French influence, lessons in plot and construction derived from Boccaccio's Filostrato and Teseide, as well as some glimpses of the higher art of the Divina Commedia. He shows acquaintance also with one of Petrarch's sonnets, and though, when all is said, the Italian books with which he can be proved to have been intimate are but few, they sufficed. His study of them was but an episode in his literary life, but it was an episode of unique importance. Before it began he had already been making his own artistic experiments, and it is noteworthy that while he learnt so much from Boccaccio he improved on his originals as he translated them. Doubtless his busy life in the service of the crown had taught him self-confidence, and he uses his Italian models in his own way and with the most triumphant and assured success. When he had no more Italian poems to adapt he had learnt his lesson. The art of weaving a plot out of his own imagination was never his, but he could take what might be little more than an anecdote and lend it body and life and colour with a skill which has never been surpassed.

The most direct example of Chaucer's French studies is his translation of Le Roman de la rose, a poem written in some 4000 lines by Guillaume Lorris about 1237 and extended to over 22,000 by Jean Clopinel, better known as Jean de Meun, forty years later. We know from Chaucer himself that he translated this poem, and the extant English fragment of 7698 lines was generally assigned to him from 1532, when it was first printed, till its authorship was challenged in the early years of the Chaucer Society. The ground of this challenge was its wide divergence from Chaucer's practice in his undoubtedly genuine works as to certain niceties of rhyme, notable as to not rhyming words ending in -y with others ending -ye. It was subsequently discovered, however, that the whole fragment was divisible linguistically into three portions, of which the first and second end respectively at lines 1705 and 5810, and that in the first of these three sections the variations from Chaucer's accepted practice are insignificant. Lines 1-1705 have therefore been provisionally accepted as Chaucer's, and the other two fragments as the work of unknown translators (James I of Scotland has been suggested as one of them), which somehow came to be pieced together. If, however, the difficulties in the way of this theory are less than those which confront any other, they are still considerable, and the question can hardly be treated as closed.

While our knowledge of Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose is in this unsatisfactory state, another translation of his from the French, the Book of the Lyon (alluded to in the "Retraction" found, in some manuscripts, at the end of the Canterbury Tales), which must certainly have been taken from Guillaume Machault's Le Dit du lion, has perished altogether. The strength of French influence on Chaucer's early work may, however, be amply illustrated from the first of his poems with which we are on sure ground, the Book of the Duchesse, or, as it is alternatively called, the Deth of Blaunche. Here not only are individual passages closely imitated from Machault and Froissart, but the dream, the May morning, and the whole machinery of the poem are taken over from contemporary French conventions. But even at this stage Chaucer could prove his right to borrow by the skill with which he makes his materials serve his own purpose, and some of the lines in the Deth of Blaunche are among the most tender and charming he ever wrote.

Chaucer's A.B.C., a poem in honour of the Blessed Virgin, of which the stanzas begin with the successive letters of the alphabet, is another early example of French influence. It is taken from the Pelerinage de la vie humaine, written by Guillaume de Deguilleville about 1330. The occurrence of some magnificent lines in Chaucer's version, combined with evidence that he did not yet possess the skill to translate at all literally as soon as rhymes had to be considered, accounts for this poem having been dated sometimes earlier than the Book of the Duchesse, and sometimes several years later. With it is usually moved up and down, though it should surely be placed in the 'seventies, the Compleynt to Pity, a fine poem which yet, from its slight obscurity and absence of Chaucer's usual ease, may very well some day prove to be a translation from the French.

While Chaucer thus sought to reproduce both the matter and the style of French poetry in England, he found other materials in popular Latin books. Among his lost works are renderings of "Origenes upon the Maudeleyne," and of Pope Innocent III on "The Wreced Engendring of Mankinde" (De miseria conditionis humanae). He must have begun his attempts at straightforward narrative with the Lyf of Seynt Cecyle (the weakest of all his works, the second Nun's Tale in the Canterbury series) from the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine, and the story of the patience of Grisilde, taken from Petrarch's Latin version of a tale by Boccaccio. In both of these he condenses a little, but ventures on very few changes, though he lets his readers see his impatience with his originals.

In his story of Constance (afterwards ascribed to the Man of Law), taken from the Anglo-Norman chronicle of Nicholas Trivet, written about 1334, we find him struggling to put some substance into another weak tale, but still without the courage to remedy its radical faults, though here, as with Grisilde, he does as much for his heroine as the conventional exaltation of one virtue at a time permitted. It is possible that other tales which now stand in the Canterbury series were written originally at this period. What is certain is that at some time in the 'seventies three or four Italian poems passed into Chaucer's possession, and that he set to work busily to make use of them. One of the most interesting of the poems reclaimed for him by Professor Skeat is a fragmentary "Compleynt," part of which is written in terza rima. While he thus experimented with the metre of the Divina Commedia, he made his first attempt to use the material provided by Boccaccio's Teseide in another fragment of great interest, that of Quene Anelida and Fals Arcyte. More than a third of this is taken up with another, and quite successful, metrical experiment in Anelida's "compleynt," but in the introduction of Anelida herself Chaucer made the first of his three unsuccessful efforts to construct a plot for an important poem out of his own head, and the fragment which begins so well breaks off abruptly at line 357.

For a time the Teseide seems to have been laid aside, and it was perhaps at this moment, in despondency at his failure, that Chaucer wrote his most important prose work, the translation of the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Boethius. Reminiscences of this helped to enrich many of his subsequent poems, and inspired five of his shorter pieces (The Former Age, Fortune, Truth, Gentilesse and Lak of Stedfastnesse), but the translation itself was only a partial success. To borrow his own phrase, his "Englysh was insufficient" to reproduce such difficult Latin. The translation is often barely intelligible without the original, and it is only here and there that it flows with any ease or rhythm.

If Chaucer felt this himself he must have been speedily consoled by achieving in Troilus and Criseyde his greatest artistic triumph. Warned by his failure in Anelida and Arcyte, he was content this time to take his plot unaltered from the Filostrato, and to follow Boccaccio step by step through the poem. But he did not follow him as a mere translator. He had done his duty manfully for the saints "of other holinesse" in Cecyle, Grisilde and Constance, whom he was forbidden by the rules of the game to clothe with complete flesh and blood. In this great love-story there were no such restrictions, and the characters which Boccaccio's treatment left thin and conventional became in Chaucer's hands convincingly human. No other English poem is so instinct with the glory and tragedy of youth, and in the details of the story Chaucer's gifts of vivid colouring, of humour and pity, are all at their highest.

An unfortunate theory that the reference in the Legende of Good Women to "al the love of Palamon and Arcyte" is to a hypothetical poem in seven-line stanzas on this theme, which Chaucer is imagined, when he came to plan the Canterbury Tales, to have suppressed in favour of a new version in heroic couplets, has obscured the close connexion in temper and power between what we know as the "Knight's Tale" and the Troilus. The poem may have been more or less extensively revised before, with admirable fitness, it was assigned to the Knight, but that its main composition can be separated by several years from that of Troilus is aesthetically incredible. Chaucer's art here again is at its highest. He takes the plot of Boccaccio's Teseide, but only as much of it as he wants, and what he takes he heightens and humanizes with the same skill which he had shown in transforming the Filostrato. Of the individual characters Theseus himself, the arbiter of the plot, is most notably developed; Emilie and her two lovers receive just as much individuality as they will bear without disturbing the atmosphere of romance. The whole story is pulled together and made more rapid and effective. A comparison of almost any scene as told by the two poets suffices to show Chaucer's immense superiority. At some subsequent period the "Squire's Tale" of Cambuscan, the fair Canacee and the Horse of Brass, was gallantly begun in something of the same key, but Chaucer took for it more materials than he could use, and for lack of the help of a leader like Boccaccio he was obliged to leave the story, in Milton's phrase, "half-told," though the fragment written certainly takes us very much less than half-way.

Meanwhile, in connexion (as is reasonably believed) with the betrothal or marriage of Anne of Bohemia to Richard II (i.e. about 1381-1382), Chaucer had brought to a successful completion the Parlement of Foules, a charming sketch of 699 lines, in which the other birds, on Saint Valentine's day, counsel the "Formel Egle" on her choice of a mate. His success here, as in the case of the Deth of Blaunche the Duchesse, was due to the absence of any need for a climax; and though the materials which he borrowed were mainly Latin (with some help from passages of the Teseide not fully needed for Palamon and Arcyte) his method of handling them would have been quite approved by his friends among the French poets. A more ambitious venture, the Hous of Fame, in which Chaucer imagines himself borne aloft by an eagle to Fame's temple, describes what he sees and hears there, and then breaks off in apparent inability to get home, shows a curious mixture of the poetic ideals of the Roman de la rose and reminiscences of the Divina Commedia. As the Hous of Fame is most often remembered and quoted for the personal touches and humour of Chaucer's conversation with the eagle, so the most-quoted passages in the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women are those in which Chaucer professes his affection for the daisy, and the attack on his loyalty by Cupid and its defence by Alceste. Recent discoveries have shown, however, that (besides obligations to Machault) some of the touches about the daisy and the controversy between the partisans of the Flower and of the Leaf are snatches from poems by his friends Froissart and Deschamps, which Chaucer takes up and returns to them with pretty compliments, and that he was indebted to Froissart for some of the framework of his poem.² Both of the two versions of the Prologue to the Legende are charming, and some of the tales, notably that of Cleopatra, rank with Chaucer's best work. When, however, he had written eight and part of the ninth he tired of his scheme, which was planned to celebrate nineteen of Cupid's faithful "saints," with Alcestis as their queen. With his usual hopefulness he had overlooked the risk of monotony, which obviously weighed heavily on him ere he broke off, and the loss of the other ten stories is less to be regretted than that of the celebration of Alceste, and a possible epilogue which might have exceeded in charm the Prologue itself.

Chaucer's failure to complete the scheme of the Legende of Good Women may have been partly due to the attractions of the Canterbury Tales, which were probably taken up in immediate succession to it. His guardianship of two Kentish wards, his justiceship of the peace, his representing the county in the parliament of 1386, his commissionership of the river-bank between Greenwich and Woolwich, all make it easy to understand his dramatic use of the merry crowds he saw on the Canterbury road, without supposing him to have had recourse to Boccaccio's Decamerone, a book which there is no proof of his having seen. The pilgrims whom he imagines to have assembled at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, where Harry Bailey was host, are said to have numbered "wel nyne and twenty in a company," and the Prologue gives full-length sketches of a Knight, a Squire (his son), and their Yeoman; of a Prioress, Monk, Friar, Oxford Clerk, and Parson, with two disreputable hangers-on of the church, a Summoner and Pardoner; of a Serjeant-at-Law and a Doctor of Physic, and of a Franklin, or country gentleman, Merchant, Shipman, Miller, Cook, Manciple, Reeve, Ploughman (the Parson's brother) and the ever-famous Wife of Bath. Five London burgesses are described in a group, and a Nun and Priest³ are mentioned as in attendance on the Prioress. Each of these, with Chaucer himself making the twenty-ninth, was pledged to tell two tales, but including one second attempt and a tale told by the Yeoman of a Canon, who overtakes the pilgrims on the road, we have only twenty finished stories, two unfinished and two interrupted ones. As in the case of the Legende of Good Women, our loss is not so much that of the additional stories as of the completed framework. The wonderful character sketches of the Prologue are carried yet farther by the Talks on the Road which link the different tales, and two of these Talks, in which the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner respectively edify the company, have the importance of separate Tales, but between the Tales that have come down to us there are seven links missing,⁴ and it was left to a later and weaker hand to narrate, in the "Tale of Beryn," the adventures of the pilgrims at Canterbury.

The reference to the Lyf of Seynt Cecyle in the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women gives external proof that Chaucer included earlier work in the scheme of the Canterbury Tales, and mention has been made of other stories which are indisputably early. In the absence of any such metrical tests as have proved useful in the case of Shakespeare, the dates at which several of the Tales were composed remain doubtful, while in the case of at least two, the Clerk's tale of Grisilde and the Monk's tragedies, there is evidence of early work being revised and supplemented. It is fortunately impossible to separate the prologue to the charmingly told story of "yonge Hugh of Lincoln" from the tale itself, and, with the "quod sche" in the second line as proof that Chaucer was here writing specially for his Prioress, we are forbidden to limit the new stories to any one metre or tone. There can be no doubt, however, that what may be called the Tales of the Churls (Miller, Reeve, Summoner, Friar, &c.), and the conversational outpourings of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath, form, with the immortal Prologue, the most important and distinctive additions to the older work. In these, and in the Pardoner's story of Death and the Three Revellers, and the Nun's Priest's masterly handling of the fable of the Cock and Fox, both of them free from the grossness which marks the others, Chaucer takes stories which could have been told in a short page of prose and elaborates them with all the skill in narration which he had sedulously cultivated. The conjugal reminiscences of the Wife of Bath and the Reeve's Tale with its abominable climax (lightened a little by Aleyn's farewell, lines 316-319) are among the great things in Chaucer, as surely as Troilus, and Palamon and Arcyte and the Prologue. They help notably to give him the width of range which may certainly be claimed for him.

In or soon after 1391 Chaucer wrote in prose for an elevenyear-old reader, whom he addresses as "Litel Lowis my son," a treatise on the use of the Astrolabe, its short prologue being the prettiest specimen of his prose. The wearisome tale of "Melibee and his wyf Prudence," which was perhaps as much admired in English as it had been in Latin and French, may have been translated at any time. The sermon on Penitence, used as the Parson's Tale, was probably the work of his old age. "Envoys" to his friends Scogan and Bukton, a translation of some balades by Sir Otes de Granson, and the Compleynt to his Purs complete the record of his minor poetry. We have his own statement that in his youth he had written many Balades, Roundels and Virelayes in honour of Love, and the two songs embedded respectively in the Parlement of Foules and the Prologue to the Legende of Good Women are charming and musical. His extant shorter poems, however, whether early or late, offer no excuse for claiming high rank for him as a lyrist. He had very little sheer singing power, and though there are fine lines in his short poems, witness the famous "Flee fro the prees and dwell with soothfastnesse," they lack the sustained concentration of great work. From the drama, again, Chaucer was cut off, and it is idle to argue from the innumerable dramatic touches in his poems and his gift of characterization as to what he might have done had he lived two centuries later. His own age delighted in stories, and he gave it the stories it demanded, invested with a humanity, a grace and strength which place him among the world's greatest narrative poets, and which bring the England of his own day, with all the colour and warmth of life, wonderfully near to all his readers.

The part played by Chaucer in the development of the English language has often been overrated. He neither corrupted it, as used to be said, by introducing French words which it would otherwise have avoided, nor bore any such part in fixing it as was afterwards played by the translators of the Bible. When he was growing up, educated society in England was still bilingual, and the changes in vocabulary and pronunciation which took place during his life were the natural results of a society, which had been bilingual with a bias towards French, giving an exclusive preference to English. The practical identity of Chaucer's language with that of Gower shows that both merely used the best English of their day with the care and slightly conservative tendency which befitted poets. Chaucer's service to the English language lies in his decisive success having made it impossible for any later English poet to attain fame, as Gower had done, by writing alternatively in Latin and French. The claim which should be made for him is that, at least as regards poetry, he proved that English was "sufficient."

Chaucer borrowed both his stanza forms and his "decasyllabic" couplets (mostly with an extra syllable at the end of the line) from Guillaume Machault, and his music, like that of his French master and his successors, depends very largely on assigning to every syllable its full value, and more especially on the due pronunciation of the final -e. The slower movement of change in Scotland allowed time for Chaucer to exercise a potent influence on Scottish poetry, but in England this final -e, to which most of the earlier grammatical forms by Chaucer's time had been reduced, itself fell rapidly into disuse during the 15th century, and a serious barrier was thus raised to the appreciation of the artistic value of his verse. His disciples, Hoccleve and Lydgate, who at first had caught some echoes of his rhythms, gradually yielded to the change in pronunciation, so that there was no living tradition to hand down his secret, while successive copyists reduced his text to a state in which it was only by accident that lines could be scanned correctly. For fully three centuries his reputation was sustained solely by his narrative power, his warmest panegyrists betraying no consciousness that they were praising one of the greatest technical masters of poetry. Even when thus maimed, however, his works found readers and lovers in every generation, and every improvement in his text has set his fame on a surer basis.

Read it here - Canterbvury Tales of Chaucer - http://www.litrix.com/canterby/cante001.htm

The castle of Perseverance
the castle of perseverance (1350-1399)

The earliest extant morality in English is The Castle of Perseverance, which belongs to the fifteenth century. In it the whole life of Man, called Humanum Genus, is portrayed from birth to death.

everyman
volpone - ben jonson
the castle of perseverance
DOCTOR FAUSTUS - CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

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