Magnyfycence

A Moral Play

John Skelton, Robert Lee Ramsay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138310704
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429860218
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1906, this edition of Magnyfycence aimed to highlight the true significance of the play within both the canon of John Skelton's work and English drama. Robert Lee Ramsay situates Magnyfycence as a morality play which functioned as a bridge between medieval miracle plays and the modern comedy. He demonstrates the text's significance as the first example of a play by an English man of letters and our first example of a secular and literary rather than theological morality play. This edition features an extensive scholarly introduction exploring areas such as the staging, versification, sources and characterisation, followed by the Middle-English text itself along with glosses.

Introduction

SKELTON'S Magnificence has been accessible to students of the drama longer than almost any play of its class; but this advantage, due to the reputation of its author, has proved of doubtful value. While the other moral plays have one by one been brought to light and studied, Magnificence has been left almost entirely to one side. The undeniable intrinsic dulness and monotony of the play affords much to justify this neglect. Although in bulk the most considerable production of a famous if unjustly neglected poet, it is less interesting than most of his other poems to a cursory reader. It also falls short in many respects when compared with other specimens in its own department. Beside the universality and transparency of the plot of the Castle of Perseverance, its allegorical framework seems narrow and forced. The peculiar achievement of the morality was perhaps the sincerity and real dignity with which it could present some of the Church's most solemn lessons. In one scene, which has been selected as a favorable specimen, Magnificence gives a picture of the coming of Adversity that does attain some measure of this high seriousness. But it nowhere reaches the impressive level kept throughout in Everyman. On the other hand, its contrasted scenes of vice and low life have little of the racy realism and less of the humor so notably present in Mankind and Hickscorner. To the Tudor audience doubtless the chief interest lay in its political satire; but this is obscure and dull beside that of the Scottish political morality, Lyndsay's Three Estates. The play's one point of incontestable superiority, the dramatic construction of its plot, is well hidden under tedious monologues and unduly protracted discussions. One is not surprised at the depreciative, account given in general treatises on the moralities and in the single brief study devoted wholly to it (Heinrich Krumpholtz, John Skelton und sein Morality Play Magnificence; Programm, Prossnitz, 1881: 6 pages) or even at the dictum of an eighteenth century critic (quoted by Dyce, intro. I. 1) who pronounced it "the dullest play ever written."

But a different point of view with regard to the moralities has recently been made practicable, and by this change none of them will gain more than Magnificence. With the E. E. T. S. edition of the Macro Plays (1904), the task of publishing all the known earlier moralities is complete, and an opportunity is afforded to study this central period in the history of the drama as a whole. One effect, indeed, of such comparison is to invalidate the claim that was put forward in behalf of Magnificence by Skelton's latest biographer (Dict. Nat, Biog.): it will hardly continue to "rank with Sir David Lyndsay's Sutire of the Three Estates as one of the two most typical morality plays in existence"; for an examination of the earlier moralities, particularly of the Castle of Perseverance, will show how far both the plays mentioned have departed from the original type. But wider study, if it discredits some premature pretensions, will bring with it an increased appreciation of the true significance of Skelton's contribution to the English drama.

The undeniable right of Magnificence to an important place in the history of the drama rests not on its intrinsic merit but on its peculiar position. It belongs to that essentially intermediate form of the drama known as the morality; the form which dominated the period of transition from the medieval religious to the modern secular drama, or as Creizenach puts it, was the bridge from the miracle play to the comedy. Within this central period Magnificence occupies a central position. It has already been pointed out that English moralities fall naturally into two divisions, an earlier and a later group. Mr. Pollard has suggested the use of the terms "moral play" and "interlude" for this distinction. The rule will be adhered to in this study, although it of course has no basis in contemporary usage. The moral plays (mostly earlier in date than Magnificence) were still purely religious in aim, restricted to a narrow range of plots and characters, peopled with abstractions rather than types, and but little removed from the technique of the miracle in presentation, length, and versification. Such at least is the type adhered to in the main. The later interludes became more and more secularized, freer, shorter, and less abstract; they introduced comic elements; and they absorbed many of the characteristics of the new, largely foreign technique. Though never quite merging with the modern types of drama which partly sprang from them, partly grew up around them, they kept their place on the stage throughout the Elizabethan period. Magnificence shares the characteristics of the two groups between which it falls. Far from being a typical moral play, it is precisely its departures from the traditional norm that constitute its real claim to attention.

The key to most of its departures is to be obtained only by a consideration of the character and aims of its author. The starting-point in the study of Magnificence, now as always, is the study of the dramatist who wrote it. Skelton was the first English man of letters to become a dramatist. For many as are the restrictions to he made in estimating his literary talent, he cannot be denied the name of man of letters. Most of his contemporaries regarded him, and with almost pathetic conviction he regarded himself, as the legitimate successor of those "auucient poetys" whom he enumerated at such length in his Garland of Laurel. He allows passage through the gate inscribed with the capital A for Anglia only to Grower, Chaucer, Lydgate, and himself. Yet he had ventured on a step for which he could find no sanction in these models when he took up the despised popular form of the drama. Chaucer, with the most dramatic genius in English literature before Elizabeth's reign, never thought of the drama as a possible literary form. It is less to be wondered at that neither Gower, Lydgate, nor Occleve was attracted by the drama; but when Hawes took up the Chaucerian mantle in the reign of Henry VII, and when Barclay began to write in competition with Skelton himself, plays, both miracles and moralities, had been written for more than a century. Skelton was the first professed poet to try his hand at writing a morality.

He is, indeed, the first personality of any sort whom we encounter in the annals of the stage, with the exception of Henry Medwall, author of Nature. Medwall was not a man of letters. He acquired no literary fame apart from his dramatic efforts, and only the accident of his position secured the survival of his name. A chaplain of Archbishop Morton's, he belonged to the class by whom moralities had always been written. The composition of interludes was probably a part of his duties, as it was for the almoner of the Earl of Northumberland. Skelton too had taken orders, but his dramatic venture, though perhaps connected with this fact, cannot be wholly thus explained; for so had Barclay, and so had Lydgate and Occleve in the preceding century. Skelton's priesthood at all times sat lightly on him. His talent was essentially undramatic. His experiment in the new field was both a proof of his audacity and a sign of the times. The drama was at last ready to take its place as a literary form. Skelton was closely followed by Heywood and Lyndsay, Bale and Udall, and a host of others, all professional penmen.

Not only do we have in Magnificence our first example of a professional literary man attempting a play, but also our first example of a moral play written with a secular and literary instead of a theological aim. The morality had hitherto been what the miracle always remained, strictly theological in purpose. Essentially it had always continued a sort of religious service. To make a distinction, it had been laicized but never secularized. Both processes were necessary before the drama could take its place as a form of literature.

It is hardly likely that even Skelton himself took so radical a step abruptly. Besides Magnificence, we know of at least two other plays written by him but not preserved. He mentions in his Garland of Laurel the "souerayne enterlude of Vertu" (1. 1177), and the "commedy called Achademios" (1. 1184). We cannot affirm anything from the mysterious second title, but the first suggests a conventional handling of the stock theme. Magnificence, however, has certainly made the transition, and it has good claims to priority in doing so. It precedes the interludes of Heywood, which show the secularization completed. Whether it precedes the Four Elements is not so certain. But although the Four Elements was also secular in purpose, it merely substituted scientific for religious instruction, and so remained equally outside the bounds of literature. The didactic path which it opened was a false trail, whereas Magnificence was in the main highway of dramatic development.

The literary purpose that prompted Magnificence and animated almost all of Skelton's work was none of the purest, although distinctly a literary purpose. It was the expression of personal satire. Almost the first in our language to cultivate this department, Skelton had to make his own tools and discover by experiment the aptest form. Although acquainted with (Against Garnesche, Dyce, I. 130)

"The famous poettes saturicall,
As Percius and Iuuynall,
Horace and noble Marciall,"

he was unfortunately not enough of a humanist to follow the classical models used by Pope in much the same task at a later date. It is interesting to watch Skelton's attempts to fit his grievances into several of the old cadres before manufacturing a new one. His early Bowge of Court is an experiment with the old courtly allegory. He twists the form inherited from the Romaunt of the Rose, the House of Fame, and the Legend of Good Women, into a satire on court life. Herford has shown how intimately he combined with the old framework new motives, more to his purpose, drawn from the German satirist Sebastian Brant and his epoch-making Ship of Fools, Magnificence is a precisely similar experiment with the other allegorical form, the morality. It was if anything less congenial to the new employment, and Skelton again drew no little inspiration from the Ship of Fools. By this time (1516) his point of attack had become more definite, and his allusions betray more of the bitterness of personal hatred. His best satire, Colin Clout (1518-21), came still later. In this he had at last learned to be direct. He had shaken off all allegorical fetters, and retained but one mark of conscious art, the clever device of the mouthpiece Colin Clout, a typical figure afterwards borrowed by Spenser. In his latest satires, Why Come Ye Not to Court? (1522-3) and the Doughty Duke of Albany (1523-4), even this device is discarded, and we have simply vigorous unadulterated abuse.

Magnificence was thus for Skelton merely one of a series of experiments, the primary object of which was far from being the cultivation of the dramatic form for its own sake. The transformation of the moral play into a secular allegorical drama embodying political satire was for him an incident in a more comprehensive attempt. For us it constitutes the main object of interest, and we shall study the play in its relations to the models that preceded it rather than in its relations to Skelton's other satires.

The transformation cannot be regarded as very successful. It was a first attempt, and naturally kept too much of its originals. The main outlines of the traditional morality plot were all too carefully followed. Skelton's text is no longer the affirmation that the wages of sin is death, but instead that the wages of imprudent spending ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• PART 1.
• PART 2.
• EDITOR'S NOTE
• ERRATA
• TEXT
• NOTES
• GLOSSARIAL INDEX