Периоды английской литературы. Карпова В.А - 26 стр.

to the townspeople than what we now look back to as the historical events of
that year.
       Mystery plays were performed outdoors and ultimately upon movable
pageants. The medieval pageant, constructed on wheels for processional use, as
in celebrating Corpus Christi day, was designed for use by a particular guild for
the production of a particular play and usually reflected this special purpose.
Thus the pageant of the fisherman to present the play of Noah, would be
constructed and painted to represent the Ark.
       The historical origins of the plays that have come to form the Mystery
Cycle can, we know, be traced back to the embryo Latin plays which appeared
first as intrinsic parts of the Church services at Easter and at Christmas. Yet the
size and nature of what by the end of the fourteenth century had become the
English Mystery Cycle cannot be entirely accounted for as a straight
development or expansion from these priestly performances. The Mystery Cycle
is a truly communal or national drama. There are things in the Plays of which
the Church became more than doubtful and, indeed, the whole Cycle became,
from the Church's point of view, something which had got entirely out of hand.
       The classical Greek drama was developed, we know, out of earlier
dramatic rituals. The evolution of the English drama – the drama, above all, of
Shakespeare – is perhaps more complex. It is necessary in its case to take
account of the influence of Classical models as the Renaissance. Nevertheless,
the only truly national or English drama before the Shakespearean is the
Mystery Cycle – and that is certainly already the outcome of a union, a unique
combination, of the dramatic rituals of the old religion and the new.
       Other plays in some respect not very different from the Miracles, were the
Morality Plays. Despite surviving elements of paganism, Christianity was
without any serious rival in its profound and pervasive influence on life. The
Moralities keep alive the central theme – the sense of man's responsibility to a
power higher than himself. The Biblical references alone are very numerous.
The morality style derives from the medieval spoken idiom and the thought –
content from the medieval religion. That religion encouraged a readiness to face
the fact of evil in man. However what mattered was not the amount of evil, but
the power of divine mercy to lead man. And without divine aid, man could
achieve nothing.
       The Moralities were distinguished from the Miracles by being a
dramatized allegory in which the abstract virtues (such as Truth, Mercy.
Conscience, Knowledge) or vices (such as Greed, Shame, Flattery, Revenge)
appear in personified form, the good and the bad usually struggling for the soul
of a human being. A man – any or every man – is imagined as faced with two
alternative sets of choices, sharply distinguished as good and evil, right and
wrong. The idea of two sets of alternatives gives rise to the idea of a conflict
between them for possession of the soul of each man. Where there is conflict
there is certainly the potentiality of drama.


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