Free Shakespeare by Peter Ackroyd Page A

plays in performance convey perhaps the atmosphere of the period—
A Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom, Cambises, Horestes, Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Damon and Pithias, The Longer Thou Livest The More Fool Thou Art
are only some of a number of dramas that poured forth from the newly secularised profession of play-writing. The playwrights took their material from anything and everything—from histories to collections of romance, from the classical plays performed at the Inns of Court to popular burlesque, from spiritual allegory to fantastic legend. It was a world of witty repartee and declamation, but it was also a world of imaginary countries and mysterious islands, of strange seas and caverns, of unvarnished evil and unearthly goodness, of dramatic lament and generally exaggerated feeling. The young Shakespeare could watch these plays unfolding before him. He would inevitably, if unconsciously, acquire a sense of dramatic space and an ear for heightened dialogue or for declamations. It is appropriate that the English drama was coming to slow maturity in the same period as Shakespeare himself; they were both children of their time, sharing a newly awakened sense of possible achievement.
    There were other forms of dramatic entertainment in Stratford. Whitsun “pastimes,” for example, were still being devised in 1583 by Davy Jones, a relative of the Shakespeares by marriage. These were mumming plays with plenty of ritual and symbolic action. Costumes and masks were worn; the characters were given names such as Big Head or Pickle Herring, while the action itself was concerned with slayings and miraculous healings. In
Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy describes what must have been one of the last true mummers’ plays, with a battle between St. George and a Turkish knight.
    It is also likely that John Shakespeare took his son to Coventry, only twenty miles away, to witness the celebrated cycle of mystery plays performed inthat city. They were not formally discontinued until Shakespeare had reached his fifteenth year. In five separate dramatic passages Shakespeare mentions the performances of the popular stage villain of these religious entertainments, King Herod. He also uses the expression “All hail” as a harbinger of unfortunate events. In the New Testament Jesus uses this form of address as a blessing. But in the mystery plays it is given to Judas as a sign of threat, on greeting Christ before betraying him. We can infer that Shakespeare has picked up the unhappy connotations of the phrase from watching the mystery plays. So he was acquainted with the pageant wagons and their epic cycle, from Creation to Judgement. He heard the vulgar comedy of the “low” characters and the refined sentiments of their superiors. He saw the characteristic mingling of farce and spirituality, piety and pantomime; he listened to the mixture of lyrical songs and pounding pentameter, of Latinate diction and Anglo-Saxon demotic. It was an inclusive drama containing no less than the history of the world and the character of its peoples, played out against the background of eternity. It has often been suggested that some of the power of Shakespeare’s history plays is derived from his use of the elements of Christ’s Passion that he would have witnessed in the mysteries; the whole notion of his cyclical dramas, taking in so much of the history of the kingdom, seems a direct reflection of his earliest dramatic experiences.
    Shakespeare himself refers to the “Death Mouth,” the portal of Hell constructed for the mingled fascination and alarm of the populace. The “Porter of Hell,” who played a large part in the mystery plays, re-emerges as the Porter in
Macbeth
. Critics have discerned parallels between the mystery plays and the plots of
Lear, Othello
and
Macbeth
. The baiting of Jesus reappears
in Julius Caesar
and
Coriolanus
. Shakespeare’s was the last era of the medieval mysteries. Yet throughout the history of English culture