And if stories changed, the language changed just as quickly.  Caxton tells us that the language was changing so fast that he found it hard to read books written at the time he was born.  His own language is very Frenchy, perhaps because he translated so many of his books from French.  He not only uses words which are almost French, but arranges his sentences in a French manner.  He often, too drops the e in the, just as in French the e or a in le and la is dropped before a vowel.  This you will often find in old English books.  “The abbey” becomes thabbay, “The English” thenglish.  Caxton writes, too, thensygnementys for “the teaching.”  Here we have the dropped e and also the French word enseignement used instead of “teaching.”  But these were only last struggles of a foreign tongue.  The triumphant English we now possess was already taking form.

But it was not by printing alone that in the fifteenth century men’s eyes were opened to new wonder.  They were also opened to the wonder of a new world far over the sea.  For the fifteenth century was the age of discovery, and of all the world’s first great sailors.  It was the time when America and the western isles were discovered, when the Cape of Good Hope was first rounded, and the new way to India found.  So with the whole world urged to action by the knowledge of these new lands, with imagination wakened by the tales of marvels to be seen there, with a new desire to see and do stirring in men’s minds, it was not wonderful that there should be little new writing.  The fifteenth century was the age of new action and new worlds.  The new thought was to follow.

YEAR 8

Chapter XXXII ABOUT THE BEGINNING OF THE THEATER

MANY of you have, no doubt, been to the theater.  You have seen pantomimes and Peter Pan, perhaps; perhaps, too, a play of Shakespeare, — a comedy, it may be, which made you laugh, or even a tragedy which made you want to cry, or at least left you sad.  Some of you, too, have been to “Pageants,” and some may even have been to an oratorio, which last may have been sung in a church.

But did you ever wonder how plays and theaters came to be?  Did you ever think that there was a time when in all the length and breadth of the land there was no theater, when there were no plays either merry or sad?  Yet it was so.  But at a very early time the people of England began to act.  And, strange as it may seem to us now, the earliest plays were acted by monks and took place in church.  And it is from these very early monkish plays that the theater with its different kinds of plays, that pageants and even oratorios have sprung.

In this chapter I am going to talk about these beginnings of the English theater and of its literature.  All plays taken together are called the drama, and the writers of them are called dramatists, from a Greek word dran, to act or do.  For dramas are written not to be read merely, but also to be acted.