¹ The Middle English text of The Castle of Perseverance is found in Furnivall, F. J. and Pollard, Alfred W., eds., The Macro Plays, Early English Text Society, Extra Series, No. 91 (London: Kegan Paul, 1904), pp. 75–186.Google ScholarParts of a more modern textual translation may be found in Richard|Southern, The Medieval Theater in the Round (London: Faber & Faber, 1958).Google Scholar

² The stage convention was a suit of white leather.

³ Prudentius' Psychomachia had omitted man altogether and simply staged a battle between Virtues and Vices. In the twelfth century, Alanus de Insulis' treatise Anticlaudianus, in speaking of such a contest, had for the first time placed man in the central role. Adam also pre figured Mankind in some of the mystery plays, notably the Anglo-Norman Jeu d' Adam, where Adam actually offers considerable resistance to the Devil's temptations. See Wickham, Glynne, Early English Stages, 1300 to 1600, Vol. 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 82.Google Scholar

⁴ ‘There is a note of hysteria in this preaching and this art, as if despair lay hauntingly behind its urgency. Was the God whose presence had once seemed so real, who in his house of Byzantine or Romanesque design had seemed near enough to come to view at any moment, who in his darker, more lofty Gothic house had still seemed comfortably within earshot, was this God deserting his Creation in disgust? The prospect of a second disillusionment on this scale seems to me to have stolen unawares upon the religious conscience of the fifteenth century and to have provoked a terror in its heart and soul which expressed itself partly in morbid concern with Death and sensationalism, partly in the paralyzing of the will to reveal the truth by further effort’, Wickham, , op. cit., p. 319.Google Scholar

⁵ In the fourteenth century, the Mystery Cycles had represented an effort to humanize Biblical figures, thus preparing the way for the morality play's emphasis on the microcosm. The liturgical plays of the thirteenth century had stressed the Resurrection ; the mystery plays of the fourteenth century stressed the Passion and made the Crucifixion bloodily explicit, with an emphasis on Jesus' sufferings taken from Pseudo-Bonaventura. Mary became the human mother, while her marriage to old man Joseph was the all-too-human story of January and May. The mystery plays introduced the genre figures of contemporary art. Joseph boiled water at the Nativity, and the Shepherds of Wakefield gave the infant Jesus a spoon that held one hundred peas. Similarly, supernatural figures were now clothed not in transcendent white robes (as they had been in Latin liturgical plays), but in the human clothes of emperors or clerical dignitaries. See Owst, Gerald R., Preaching in Medieval England: An Introduction to Sermon Manuscripts of the Period ca. 1350–1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), p. 507.Google Scholar See also Male, Emile, Religious Art in France, XIII Century (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1913), pp. 150Google Scholar While the mystery plays did humanize characters, these remained types, and every event was only an aspect of an ideal. Once ‘Mankind’ appeared to represent the human individual, there developed a tendency, becoming marked after 1500, to particularize characters into representatives of particular social classes or into historical figures or allegories of special vices or virtues. Thus, in the Elizabethan morality, King John, by John Bale, ‘The Vices, Sedition, Private Wealth, and Dissimulation find names and local habitations as Stephen Langton, Cardinal Pandulph, and Raymond of Toulouse, and King John himself is a sort of Mankind, now leaning towards vice, now toward virtue, which are papal and anti-papal respectively’. Williams, Arnold C., The Drama of Medieval England (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1961), p. 172. After about 1530, writers of morality plays, under the influence of humanism, felt that they must historicize their allegories. The later moralities abandoned the theme of man's eternal salvation and dwelt mostly on man's inhumanity to man. Emphasis shifted from man's fall from grace to an examination of the characteristics of man in his fallenness. Religious themes merged into social or political themes, and the morality lived a half-life in the second part of the sixteenth century as social or political satire. When people found effective methods of protest in the social or religious world, they no longer needed to act out such protests on the stage, and the morality gradually died.Google Scholar

⁶ Postan, M. M., ed., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. I: The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 562.Google Scholar

⁷ See Postan, , op. cit., pp. 550–6, 569.Google Scholar

⁸ Some estates had been ‘farmed’ out to tenants for money rents since their founding and had never had demesne lands requiring services. This was true of the Templars' estates in Lincolnshire, where The Castle of Perseverance took place. Postan, op. cit., pp. 566–7, 578, 581.Google Scholar

⁹ In the late fourteenth century, the cloth industry diffused into the countryside around York, Colchester, and Norwich, offering new opportunities for employment.

¹⁰ In some places not only the peasants but the burghers strove with the landowning classes, especially in the market towns owned by the great abbeys like St. Alban's and Bury St. Edmund's, where the monks had refused to grant the municipal liberties given by kings to cities on royal land.

¹¹ Postan, , op. cit., p. 610.Google Scholar

¹² Social recreation is another source of drama, but in the Middle Ages it divided social classes. ‘In medieval society, religion by uniting people of high and low degree located an audience universal to Christendom which was open to exploitation by actors, if, by their talent, they could help to reveal the particular pattern of creation which Christianity asserted. Being hierarchical in form, however, medieval society could not offer, within terms of social recreation, a similarly universal audience. Here, power and wealth served to create a variety of potential audiences faithfully reflecting the hierarchical orders of society‘, Wickham, , op. cit., p. 260.Google Scholar

¹³ ‘In the sense that communities can exist and survive without the services of the professional actor, he is a parasite upon society, only able to turn his talent to remunerative ends when possessed of a commodity which society wished to buy. A community has first to discover that it needs the commodity; the professional actor can then exploit the need‘, Wickham, , op. cit., p. 258.Google Scholar

¹⁴ The amateur executants were first officiating priests, then secular clergy and schoolboys in their care, laymen, and finally university wits, as education turned from clerical to secular hands in Tudor times.

¹⁵ Wickham, , op. cit., p. 260.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Chambers, Edmund K., The Medieval Stage, Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p.58.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The record of the Church' relation to the professional actor is a long one. The balance established between pagan festival and Christian interpretation always verged on upset, because actors were always tempted to burlesque the established order. The Church, which never objected to theatre itself, but only to abuses, finally reached a compromise. ‘The effective conscience of the thirteenth century Church had clearly come to recognize degrees in the ethical status of minstrels. The profession of an histrio, St. Thomas Aquinas declares, is by no means in itself unlawful. It was ordained for the reasonable solace of humanity, and the histrio who exercised it at a fitting time and in a fitting manner is not on that account to be regarded as a sinner’, Chambers, , op. cit., p. 58.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Oberman, Heiko A., The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 269.Google Scholar