THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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The yettis [gates] of hell ar brokin with a crak,
The signe triumphall rasit is of the croce,
The divillis trymmillis [tremble] with hiddous voce,
The saulis ar borrowit [redeemed] and to the blis can go
Chryst with his blud our ransonis dois indoce [endorse]:
Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro.
The vitality of Dunbar’s religious lyrics is balanced by the resignation which informs his meditation on human
mortality, the Lament for the Makaris. The poet, ‘trublit now with gret seiknes’, and seemingly haunted by the
reiterated refrain with which he closes each of his twenty-five four-line stanzas (‘Timor mortis conturbat me’, ‘the
fear of death troubles me’), links himself to a line of dead English and Scots poets (‘makars’ or ‘makers’). The poem
is both a muted celebration of his art and a preparation for a death which he sees as rendering negative the
pretensions of princes, prelates, potentates, physicians, and poets alike. It would not have been lost on Dunbar’s first
readers that he heads his list of names of distinguished poets with those of ‘noble Chaucer, of makeris flour’, of
Lydgate, and of Gower. The poem may end with the suggestion that the hope of heaven may raise the eyes of the
believer from a contemplation of dust, but the Lament itself seems to raise the more earthly hope that poetry can be
instrumental in alerting the human soul to its potential.
Late Medieval Drama
‘I am sent from God: Deth is my name’, the figure of Mors announces as he ominously intrudes into King Herod’s
feast and prepares to strike the over-confident king: ‘To hym wyl I go and geve hym such an hete | That all the lechis
[doctors] of the londe his lyf xul [shall] nevyr restore’. Mors’s unwelcome intrusion probably delighted certain
members of the original audiences of the cycle of English mystery plays in which the incident occurs (Herod had been
portrayed as a ranting villain and his sudden demise may have stimulated a certain sense of satisfaction). To other
observers, the entry of the figure of death may have provoked an acute and chilling unease. At the end of the cycle of
plays, God proclaims the Day of Judgement. A virtuous soul welcomes the event and the opening prospect of heaven;
the sinful souls, by contrast, dread the ‘hydous horne’ that summons them to judgement: ‘Allas! for drede sore may
we quake, | Oure dedis (deeds] beis oure dampnacioune’. The texts of the four surviving cycles of religious dramas are
none of them earlier than the mid-fifteenth century, though all four would seem to have originated in the late
fourteenth century when vivid memories of the Black Death must have rendered the idea of the four last things -
death, judgement, heaven, and hell - perilously familiar. The cycles stress the goodness and the grace of God, but they
also point to his awesome power and the justice of his purposes. They trace the history of the divine will from the fall
of Lucifer, through the creation of the world and the fall of Adam, to Christ’s acts of redemption. They end with a
calculated bang as God’s ‘for-thoght’ is fulfilled in the ending of ‘all erthely thyng’.
English theatre had its formal beginnings in the Latin liturgical enactments of the Church, certain of which were
dramatized for particular effect on major feast-days. On Palm Sunday, for example, the faithful processed bearing
palms
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in imitation of the people of Jerusalem and they heard the great passion narrative chanted by various voices, each
playing a distinctive role (as Jesus, Pilate, Peter, etc.). On the greatest of all feasts, Easter, an instructive prelude to
the main Mass of the day acted out the visit of the three Maries to the empty tomb of Christ (though the Maries were
decorously played by men vested in albs and copes). It would seem that the greatest stimulus to non-liturgical
religious drama was provided by the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi in the Western Church in 1264. The new
feast, generally observed in England from 1318, required that the Blessed Sacrament be ceremoniously carried round
the streets of the parish. In greater towns the procession would have been accompanied by guildsmen, representative
of various established trades, dressed in livery and bearing the banners of their craft. In England, as in other European
countries, this summer feast-day also became the focus of urban street theatre organized under the auspices of these
same, largely secular, guilds. The guilds added to their prestige not only by commissioning and maintaining the texts
of the plays that they engaged to perform, but also by making and storing the costumes, the stage-properties and,
above all, the movable platforms which the performances required. Records survive of the annual productions of the
cycles in many British cities, from Aberdeen to Canterbury, but the complete texts of the plays exist only for York