The oldest form of regular dramatic representation in England was the Miracle Plays, improperly called Mysteries, after the French.  To these plays the people of England, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, owed a very large portion of what religious knowledge they possessed, for the prayers were in an unknown tongue, the sermons were very few, and printing was uninvented.  The plays themselves, introduced into the country by the Normans, were, in the foolish endeavour to make Normans of Anglo-Saxons, represented in Norman French[14] until the year 1338, when permission was obtained from the Pope to represent them in English.

The word Miracle, in their case, means anything recorded in Scripture.  The Miracle Plays had for their subjects the chief incidents of Old and New Testament history; not merely, however, of this history as accepted by the Reformed Church, but of that contained in the Apocryphal Gospels as well.  An entire series of these Miracles consisted of short dramatic representations of many single passages of the sacred story.  The whole would occupy about three days.  It began with the Creation, and ended with the Judgment.  That for which the city of Coventry was famous consists of forty-two subjects, with a long prologue.  Composed by ecclesiastics, the plays would seem to have been first represented by them only, although afterwards it was not always considered right for the clergy to be concerned with them.  The hypocritical Franciscan friar, in “Piers Ploughman’s Creed,” a poem of the close of the same century, claims as a virtue for his order—­

  At markets and miracles we meddleth us never.

They would seem likewise to have been first represented in churches and chapels, sometimes in churchyards.  Later, when the actors chiefly belonged to city-guilds, they were generally represented in the streets and squares.

It must be borne in mind by any who would understand the influence of these plays upon the people, that much in them appearing to us grotesque, childish, absurd, and even irreverent, had no such appearance in the eyes of the spectators.  A certain amount of the impression of absurdity is simply the consequence of antiquity; and even that which is rightly regarded as absurd in the present age, will not at least have produced the discomposing effects of absurdity upon the less developed beholders of that age; just as the quaint pictures with which their churches were decorated may make us smile, but were by them regarded with awe and reverence from their infancy.

It must be confessed that there is in them even occasional coarseness; but that the devil for instance should always be represented as a baffled fool, and made to play the buffoon sometimes after a disgusting fashion, was to them only the treatment he deserved:  it was their notion of “poetic justice;” while most of them were too childish to be shocked at the discord thus introduced, and many, we may well hope, too childlike to lose their reverence for the holy because of the proximity of the ridiculous.