Though the plays were distinctly religious in character, there is hardly one without its humorous element.  In the play of Noah, for instance, Noah’s shrewish wife makes fun for the audience by wrangling with her husband.  In the Crucifixion play Herod is a prankish kind of tyrant who leaves the stage to rant among the audience; so that to “out-herod Herod” became a common proverb.  In all the plays the devil is a favorite character and the butt of every joke.  He also leaves the stage to play pranks or frighten the wondering children.  On the side of the stage was often seen a huge dragon’s head with gaping red jaws, belching forth fire and smoke, out of which poured a tumultuous troop of devils with clubs and pitchforks and gridirons to punish the wicked characters and to drag them away at last, howling and shrieking, into hell-mouth, as the dragon’s head was called.  So the fear of hell was ingrained into an ignorant people for four centuries.  Alternating with these horrors were bits of rough horse-play and domestic scenes of peace and kindliness, representing the life of the English fields and homes.  With these were songs and carols, like that of the Nativity, for instance: 

As I out rode this enderes (last) night,
Of three jolly shepherds I saw a sight,
And all about their fold a star shone bright;
They sang terli terlow,
So merryly the shepherds their pipes can blow. 
Down from heaven, from heaven so high,
Of angels there came a great companye
With mirth, and joy, and great solemnitye;
They sang terli terlow,
So merryly the shepherds their pipes can blow.

Such songs were taken home by the audience and sung for a season, as a popular tune is now caught from the stage and sung on the streets; and at times the whole audience would very likely join in the chorus.

After these plays were written according to the general outline of the Bible stories, no change was tolerated, the audience insisting, like children at “Punch and Judy,” upon seeing the same things year after year.  No originality in plot or treatment was possible, therefore; the only variety was in new songs and jokes, and in the pranks of the devil.  Childish as such plays seem to us, they are part of the religious development of all uneducated people.  Even now the Persian play of the “Martyrdom of Ali” is celebrated yearly, and the famous “Passion Play,” a true Miracle, is given every ten years at Oberammergau.

2.  THE MORAL PERIOD OF THE DRAMA.[130] The second or moral period of the drama is shown by the increasing prevalence of the Morality plays.  In these the characters were allegorical personages,—­Life, Death, Repentance, Goodness, Love, Greed, and other virtues and vices.  The Moralities may be regarded, therefore, as the dramatic counterpart of the once popular allegorical poetry exemplified by the Romance of the Rose.  It did not occur to our first, unknown dramatists to portray men and women as they