If The Conflict of Conscience deserves mention as an approach to Tragedy, Tom Tiler and his Wife equally deserves it as an early sprout of Comedy.  It contains a mixture of allegorical and individual persons, the latter, however, taking the chief part of the action.  Tom Tiler has a spouse named Strife, who is not only a great scold, but hugely given to drinking with Sturdy and Tipple.  Tiler meets his friend Tom Tailor, an artificer of shreds and patches, and relates his sufferings.  Tailor changes clothes with him; in this disguise goes to Strife as her husband, and gives her such a drubbing that she submits.  Tiler then resumes his own clothes, goes home, and pities his wife, who, ignorant of the trick, vows she will never love him again:  to appease her, he unwarily owns up; whereupon she snatches a stick, and belabours him till he cries out for life; and she declares that Tailor had better eaten her than beaten her.  Tiler flies to his friend Tailor, and tells him what has happened; Tailor then falls to beating him; and the lady, coming up just at the time, goes to playing her batteries on them both, until Patience arrives and restores harmony all round, charming the discontent out of Tiler, and the fury out of Strife.

Jack Juggler, “a new interlude for children to play,” is somewhat remarkable, not only in that it carries still higher the effort at individual character, but as being one of the oldest pieces founded on a classic original; the author claiming, in his prologue, to have taken “Plautus’ first comedy” as his model.  Master Bongrace sends his lacquey Jenkin to Dame Coy, his lady-love; but Jenkin loiters to play at dice and steal apples.  Jack Juggler, who enacts the Vice, watches him, gets on some clothes just like his, and undertakes to persuade him “that he is not himself, but another man.”  The task proves too much, till he brings fist-arguments to bear; when Jenkin gives up the point, and makes a comical address to the audience, alleging certain reasons for believing that he is not himself.  The humour of the piece turns mainly on this doubt of his identity.

We have many other specimens in the class of Moral-Plays; but, as they are all cast in much the same mould, any further dwelling upon them would accomplish little towards illustrating the progress of the Drama.

COMEDY AND TRAGEDY.

We have seen how the old Miracle-Plays gradually gave way to Moral-Plays, first borrowing some of their materials, then thrown into the background, and finally quite displaced by them.  Yet both these forms of the Drama were radically different from Comedy and Tragedy in the proper sense of these terms:  there was very little of character or of human blood in them; and even that little was rather forced in by external causes than a free outgrowth from the genius of the thing.  The first, in their proper idea and original plan, were but a mechanical collocation of the events of Scripture and old legend, carried on by a sort of personal representatives; the second, a mere procession of abstract ideas rudely and inartificially personified, with something of fantastical drapery thrown around them.  So that both alike stood apart from the vitalities of nature and the abiding interests of thought, being indeed quite innocent of the knowledge of them.