Wrathful Darius comes, and finding Daniel saved, his envious accusers are now given to be eaten by the lions, and the king, taking Daniel by the hand, places him on his throne, and orders all the people to adore the true God. Daniel then delivers a rhymed version of the prophecy (ch. vii. 13, 14) of the coming of the Son of Man, and to close the piece a third angel appears, singing, Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, &c.," "which being finished, if it was done at matins, Darius shall begin 'Te Deum laudamus;' but if at vespers, 'Magnificat anima mea Dominum.'"

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This larger work, which contains no refrains in the vulgar tongue, and seems by its close to have been intended as a Christmas spectacle, does not appear to have been written throughout by Hilarius, but, together with two collaborators Jordanus and Simon; for sometimes one of these two names, and sometimes his, is placed over different parts of the play in the MS.

Such pieces, then, as these lie at the foundation of the modern drama. In Hilarius we see the miracle-play of the middle ages in an early form. It was acted in the church; for the excitement of devotion it was to a large extent choral, and it seems to have been throughout either sung or chanted. Although, in the directions to the actors, there seems to be a distinction expressed between singing and saying, this may be partly or wholly accidental; for it is to be observed that the direction is "dicet," not " cantabit," before the lament of Martha, set to a popular songtune with its refrains of "Dol en ai ; "Bais frere perdu vos ai."

The Church

Hilarius was far from being the inventor of this form of play. The earliest drama founded upon Scripture of which any part or record remains is a repre- and the stage. sentation of the Exodus, by Ezekiel, a tragic Suppression poet of the Jews, in which the principal characters cient Drama. were Moses, Sapphora, and God from the Bush. remain of it some fragments in Greek iambics, and it is

of the An

There

I-VOL. III.

supposed to have been written in imitation of the classical Greek drama at the close of the second century.

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The old classical drama was swept away by the denunciation of the early Fathers of the Church. Theophilus of Antioch said, in the second century, "The tragical distractions of Tereus and Thyestes are nonsense to us. The stage adulteries of the gods and heroes are unwarrantable entertainments; and so much the worse because the mercenary players set them off with all the charms and advantages of speaking." By the first Council of Arles, A.D. 314, players were excommunicated so long as they continued to act. Cyril taught that when Christians, in baptism, renounced the devil and all his works and pomps, those pomps" are the stage-plays; and Tertullian taught that, for this reason, baptized Christians could not go to a play without turning apostate. The censure was upon the celebration of the heathen gods by popular representation of fables connected with them in a form of entertainment that had its origin in rites of the heathen Bacchus, and was habitually connected with pagan religious festivals. "We keep off your public shows," said Tertullian, "because we cannot understand the warrant of their original. There is superstition and idolatry in the case; and we dislike the entertainment because we dislike the reason of its institution."* Again, he says, "the design is notably suited to the patronage of Bacchus and Venus. These two confederate devils of lust and intemperance do well together." Minutius Felix said of the absence of Christians from the theatres : "And good reason we have for our aversion. These things have their rise from idols, and are the trains of a false religion."

Thus sternly fought Christianity spread the

against by Christian teachers, as old Greek and Roman theatres

* Jeremy Collier, in his "View of the Stage," saved after-comers all trouble of searching the Fathers for these testimonies.

*

were deserted, and, in the time of St. Augustine-who repented bitterly that he had enjoyed Virgil in his youth —were everywhere falling into ruin. But the power of imitation with which men are born, and by which they learn all that they know, must needs have its literary expression; and the drama, in its healthy form, is an inevitable product of the mind of man. In the fourth century Apollinarius the Elder, a priest of Laodicea, not only turned Old Testament history into Homeric verse, but also converted portions of Scripture into plays, after the manner of Menander and Euripides; while Bishop Apollinarius, his son, formed the New Testament into dialogues after the manner of Plato. Even one of the Fathers of the Church, Gregory Nazianzen, as `Patriarch of Constantinople, attacked the paganism of the Greek theatre, there flourishing, by substituting for the heathen plays, plays of his own, or stories of the Old and New Testament, written to the pattern of those of Sophocles and Euripides, Christian hymns taking the place of the old choruses. One of these plays, on the Passion of our Lord, survives among his works. Its prologue professes it to be an imitation of Euripides, and a piece which for the first time brings the Virgin Mary on the stage. Words were given to her from the Baccha of Euripides by transferring to her Agave's lament for her son, which words having been thus transferred to sacred use were afterwards omitted from all texts of Euripides. Where heathen songs and dances were most freely transferred for satisfaction and instruction of the ruder crowd to Christian use, especially in France, the priests, as much for their own intellectual amusement as for that of the people, produced also scriptural dramas. We have seen how, in Charlemagne's time, these also were denounced by Alcuin; but they held their ground.

*It may be read in Alban Butler's "Lives of the Saints" how Jerome was scourged by angels for reading the heathen Cicero.

That Latin miracle-plays were enacted by the French clergy, even before the Conquest, is testified by the record of Matthew Paris, that, in William the Conqueror's time, Geoffrey, a learned Norman, was sent for by Richard Abbot of St. Alban's to establish a school there, but came too late, and settling at Dunstable to await the possible reversion of the office which had then been given to another, there composed a miracle-play of St. Catherine. When it was ready, he borrowed copes from St. Alban's for the decoration of it; but, on the following night, his house, with the copes and all his books, was burnt. This Geoffrey succeeded Richard in 1119 as the Abbot of St. Alban's.* Here is evidence that Latin miracle-plays were not unfamiliar to the Norman clergy in England immediately after the Conquest. The lately-discovered plays of Hilarius show that in, or a little before, Henry II.'s time, they were still written in Latin, with an occasional refrain in the vernacular to catch the public ear; and Fitzstephen testifies that they were familiar sights in London. Matthew Paris, writing about 1240, gives the name of this manner of play. He says that, "We commonly call them Miracles'Miracula vulgariter appellamus;'" and William of Wadington, writing at about the same time, in French rhymes that have been quoted by Warton, describes while he denounces them as follies of the clergy, who, with masks over their faces, represent, to excite devotion, the most sacred subjects even in the streets and churchyards. They were not long, therefore, in seeking an audience outside the church, with a design like that of Aldhelm when he sang, blending devotion with attractive liveliness, songs of his own to his harp upon the bridge at Malmesbury. But the first plays

* Thomas Warton repeats the story in his " 'History of English Poetry," Diss. II., putting Dunstable Priory, then not built, for that of St. Alban's, a mistake that Douce corrected.

of our modern drama were performed, as we have seen, within the church itself.

Old Latin pieces, in which the origin of mystery-plays is to be traced from the Good Friday and Easter services of the Roman Church, are not among the remains of early English literature. There are fourteen in France and thirteen in Germany. There is also one in Holland. In Germany they have been studied critically by many writers,* and their origin found in the development of a passage in the Gospel read as part of the Church service from the sixteenth chapter of Mark, verses 3-7, with an addition from the corresponding part of Matthew (xxviii. 5-7). In Mark, in our English translation, this is the passage: "And they said among themselves, who shall roll away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? And when they looked, they saw that the stone was rolled away: for it was very great. And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, clothed in a long white garment : and they were affrighted. And he saith unto them, Be not affrighted: ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified; he is risen; he is not here: behold the place where they laid him. But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter that he goeth before you into Galilee: there shall ye see him, as he said unto you." The slight development of this passage in the twelfth century from the form of anthem

* Especially by Heinrich Hoffman von Fallersleben, in "Fundgruben für Geschichte Deutscher Sprache und Literatur,” ii. 239–336, and "Göttinger gelehrte Anzeigen," 1838; by Jacob Grimm, in his "Deutsche Mythologie" (1835, and 3rd edition, 1854); by F. J. Mone, in his "Schauspiele des Mittelalters" (Karlsruhe, 1846); by Gustav Freytag, in his "De initiis scenicæ poesis apud Germanos " (Berlin, 1838); by Ernst Wilken, in his "Geschichte der geistlichen Spiele in Deutschland" (Göttingen, 1872); and by Gustav Milschsack, in his Monograph, "Die Oster- und Passionspiele: I. Die Lateinischen Osterfeiern" (Wolfenbüttel, 1880).