THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

variously tempted by the vices and the grotesquely comic devil, Titivillus. Mankind is increasingly drawn by spiritual
sloth to despair of his salvation (‘A rope, a rope, a rope! I am not worthy’) but, having learned to be wary of his
‘ghostly enemies’ - the world, the flesh, and the devil - he is ultimately delivered up to God’s justice by Mercy. The
most elaborate, and the earliest, of the surviving morality plays, The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1405) demands a cast
of 36 actors and a grand, diagrammatic open-air staging in order to dramatize the life of Humanum Genus
(Humankind) from birth, via a staged tournament between vices and virtues, to a concluding pageant of death and
judgement.
The popular significance of the performances of religious drama is witnessed by their relatively long survival.
Although the texts of the plays were systematically revised, excised, and amplified long before the impact of the
Reformation was felt, certain plays which grated on new Protestant sensibilities in the 1540s and 1550s (notably those
representing the posthumous triumphs of the Virgin Mary) were quietly suppressed. By the 1560s the civil and
ecclesiastical authorities were clearly intent on a wholesale extinction of the plays, regarding their performance as
offensive to the dignity of God and his saints. The York cycle was last performed in 1569, the Chester cycle in 1575,
and the Coventry plays in 1580. It is theoretically possible, therefore, that Shakespeare (born in nearby Stratford in
1564) could have had his first experience of the theatre by seeing the far-famed Coventry mysteries before their texts
were consigned to a Protestant dustbin. The powerful emotional impact of performances of the surviving cycles and
morality plays had otherwise to wait to be released by their revival in the less religiously susceptible, but infinitely
more secular, twentieth century.
Late Medieval Religious Writing
The texts of the mystery and morality plays provide firm evidence of a flourishing religious dramatic literature written
in English for the instruction and entertainment of a wide, largely uneducated though discriminating audience. The
writings of Richard Rolle, of the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, of Walter Hilton, and of Julian of Norwich are,
by contrast, an expression of an intensely private religious experience. All four writers were, at some point in their
lives, recluses. At the age of 18, Rolle (c. 1300-49) had abruptly broken off
[p. 77]
his studies at Oxford and, appalled by the vanity of the world, retreated to a hermitage in his native Yorkshire. He
ended his days living in seclusion near a convent of Cistercian nuns at Hampole in the West Riding. It was probably
for the spiritual guidance of certain of these nuns, women who were ignorant of Latin, that Rolle wrote the short
English epistles now known as Ego Dormio, The Commandment, and The Form of Living. Rolle consistently lays
stress on a combustive passion for God. In The Form of Living, for example, he defines love as ‘byrnand [burning]
yernyng in God’ and God himself as ‘lyght & byrning’. God‘s light ‘clarifies oure skyll [reason]’; his burning kindles
‘oure covayties that we desyre noght bot hym’ (‘our desire to know nothing but him’). Where secular poets such as
Chaucer and Gower, and before them Dante, had sought to relate human love to its divine origin and had seen earthly
passion as ultimately subsumed in an all-enveloping heavenly love, Rolle yearns exclusively for God, rapturously
concentrating his heart and mind on the divine wooer of his soul. ‘I sytt and syng of luf langyng that in my breste es
bredde’, he writes in one of the love-poems interpolated into the text of Ego Dormio, ‘Jhesu, Jhesu, Jhesu, when war I
to the ledde?’ (‘when shall I come to thee?’). Elsewhere in his work, as the incantatory lyrics ‘A Song of Lovelonging
to Jesus’ and ‘A Salutation to Jesus’ suggest, he seems to repeat the sacred name almost as a comfortingly
amorous mantra.
It is possible that the unnamed author of The Cloud of Unknowing (written c. 1380) deliberately chose anonymity
as a self abnegatory statement. Working in a mystical tradition derived from the sixth-century theologian known as
Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, and pointedly suspicious of what he calls the ‘curiouste of ymaginacion’, he begins
with the negative proposition that the reason can never ‘know’ God. Neither meditative evocations of the Passion nor
ideas of a divine light clarifying human reason seem to him to have the force of the ‘blinde steryng [stirring) of love’
which wondrously enlightens the contemplative. It is, he indicates, essentially to the affective quality of the soul rather
than to the intellect that God reveals himself. The darkness or the ‘cloud of unknowing’ that lies between the human
and the divine can, the writer implies, be pierced only by ‘a sharp dart’ of love from heaven. This dart, which he
otherwise pictures as a ‘beme of goostly light’, mystically links the contemplative soul to the godhead. In this blessed
state, God unveils his secrets to the ‘enflaumid’ (‘enflamed’) soul, showing a ‘privete’ of which ‘man may not, ne kan
not, speke’. A similar sense of pierced darkness and intensified spiritual experience marks the work of Walter Hilton
(d. 1396). Hilton, who spent a period as a hermit before becoming an Augustinian canon at Thurgarton in
Nottinghamshire, is best known for his Scala Perfectionis or The Scale of Perfection. The treatise, written for a