Footnote 120:  countenance.

Footnote 121:  dreaded.

Footnote 122:  took off.

Footnote 123:  pity.

Footnote 124:  know.

Footnote 125:  In the nineteenth century men learned again to appreciate
Chaucer.

Footnote 126:  The most dramatic part of the early ritual centered about Christ’s death and resurrection, on Good Fridays and Easter days.  An exquisite account of this most impressive service is preserved in St. Ethelwold’s Latin manual of church services, written about 965.  The Latin and English versions are found in Chambers’s Mediaeval Stage, Vol.  II.  For a brief, interesting description, see Gayley, Plays of Our Forefathers, pp. 14 ff.

Footnote 127:  How much we are indebted to the Norman love of pageantry for the development of the drama in England is an unanswered question.  During the Middle Ages it was customary, in welcoming a monarch or in celebrating a royal wedding, to represent allegorical and mythological scenes, like the combat of St. George and the dragon, for instance, on a stage constructed for the purpose.  These pageants were popular all over Europe and developed during the Renaissance into the dramatic form known as the Masque.  Though the drama was of religious origin, we must not overlook these secular pageants as an important factor in the development of dramatic art.

Footnote 128:  Miracles were acted on the Continent earlier than this.  The Normans undoubtedly brought religious plays with them, but it is probable that they began in England before the Conquest (1066).  See Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shaksperean Drama, I, xix.

Footnote 129:  See Jusserand, A Literary History of the English People, I, iii, vi.  For our earliest plays and their authors see Gayley, Plays of Our Forefathers.

Footnote 130:  These three periods are not historically accurate.  The author uses them to emphasize three different views of our earliest plays rather than to suggest that there was any orderly or chronological development from Miracle to Morality and thence to the Interludes.  The latter is a prevalent opinion, but it seems hardly warranted by the facts.  Thus, though the Miracles precede the Moralities by two centuries (the first known Morality, “The Play of the Lord’s Prayer,” mentioned by Wyclif, was given probably about 1375), some of the best known Moralities, like “Pride of Life,” precede many of the later York Miracles.  And the term Interlude, which is often used as symbolical of the transition from the moral to the artistic period of the drama, was occasionally used in England (fourteenth century) as synonymous with Miracle and again (sixteenth century) as synonymous with Comedy.  That the drama had these three stages seems reasonably certain; but it is impossible to fix the limits of any one of them, and all three are sometimes seen together in one of the later Miracles of the Wakefield cycle.