Hildegarde

So, I was thinking about it–it has been mentioned here before that the split in “taste” between the more highly educated and the less highly educated, or maybe the general public and the high art tradition–is of relatively recent vintage.  Everybody in classical Greece heard Homer and saw the plays of Sophocles, who was a popular as well as a high art author.

But it occurs to me that this may be something of a trick of the light.  The vast majority of people in the classical world, in Rome as well as in Greece, could not read or write.  The Jews were the only civilization in the ancient Mediterranean who even attempted something like universal literacy, and from what has come down to us, it looks like they concentrated on scripture, commentaries on scripture, and disputations on law, with the odd secular history thrown in.  I know of no store of Jewish comedic plays or love poems in the era of the  Roman Empire or the years immediately afterwards.

It occurs to me, then, that this idea of two cultures–a high art tradition existing next to a popular art enterprise (if not tradition–more on that later)–might be older than we think, or than we can know.

If I look at the England of the Middle Ages, for instance, if I look at everything we know about it, instead of just those works that have come down to us in written form, there does seem to be a lot more going on than there might seem to be at first glance.

In the first place, what works do come down to us as part of the canon almost necessarily reflect the preferences of relatively priveleged people.  They would have to, because only such people could read.

What’s more, the aristocracy and the group we would now call the educated upper middle class–the professionals whose literacy skills made them invaluable to the running of the Court and the Kingdom–were the only ones with the money to pay for manuscripts, which were difficult to produce and expensive to come by.  Chaucer had a vast audience among these people, but if his numbers were reproduced in the publishing world of today, he’d probably look like a “literary” author with a very small audience indeed.

Some of what was produced for the entertainment and edification of the classes underneath these two has come down to us, but not really very much.  If there were songs and stories performed in homes and in the streets, they have largely been lost.  We don’t know what they were like.

The art in churches was commissioned for those members of the public who were illiterate, in the hopes of teaching them through pictures what they were unable to read for themselves in their Bibles.  But that art reflected the tastes and preferences of the educated people, in and out of the clergy, who paid for it and commissioned it.  

We also have reports of street entertainments that are both bizarre and repulsive, but I think we can safely rule them out as art.  I doubt if they were intended as art.

Of what has come down to us that we can accurately identify as “popular” art, we’re basically left with two things:  morality plays, and nativity scenes.

For those of you who have never seen or heard of a morality play, it’s difficult to know where to start.  The plays were written by authors who have remained anonymous to this day, usually members of traveling theater groups who went from town to town to put on shows. 

A number of these have come down to us, and a few years ago the Modern Library, I think, put out an edition with eight or ten of them.  It might have been Penguin. 

The most famous of them, and certainly the most complex of the ones we have left, is called Everyman, and tells the story of a man named Everyman, who journeys through the world and its snares until he finally heeds True Friendship and fixes his sights on Virtue.

I’m not capitalizing all that in order to be sarcastic.  In morality plays, characters have names like Lust, and Chastity, and Greed, and Gluttony, and the serve as representatives  of ideas rather than as characters in the sense we use the term.

What’s more, there are really only two available plots-either Our Hero meets the challenges placed before him on his journey to Heaven and Eternal Life, and gets there, or he doesn’t, and he falls into the pit of hell and is condemned to burn forever. 

One of the things that distinguishes morality plays, and that upsets modern readers or viewers of them, is the utter lack of individuality of any of the “characters” that supposedly inhabit them.  There are no actual people in morality plays, only incarnated ideas, and the ideas are as bald and unsubtle as it was possible to get and remain in the Christian tradition.

This is very odd in a number of ways.  Certainly individuation was not unknown in the dramatic tradition the Middle Ages inherited from antiquity.  Sophocles, Euripedes and Aristophanes created very distinct and memorable characters

And even if we accept the argument that such ancient authors would have been unknown to the sort of poor authors who wrote for the traveling troupes, either because they were temporarily lost altogether or else existed only in a learned language like Latin, we know that there were troupes who performed other kinds of plays at royal courts, plays that corresponded much more closely to what we think of as theater. 

The morality play, then was in its way a genre, and from what we can tell, the single most popular genre of its time.  People who had very little, who were often close to starvation, paid good money to see these things.

And it’s impossible to know, really, why they disappeared.  Chaucer lasted bcause generation after generation discovered his work and passed it along, but his work was written and aimed at a literate audience.  Most of the audience for morality plays couldn’t read or write, and once the troupes began to be replaced by acting companies working in formal theaters–theaters which had to attract wider audiences in order to stay solvent–it was the tastes of the educated (and more monied) that survived. 

Would the morality play as a genre, or its equivalent in secular temrs (an allegory whose “characters” are really ideas), have survived if its audience had been literate and there had been the equivalent of the penny press to keep them available?

I don’t know.  I only know that they didn’t.  These days, morality plays are a curiosity interesting to scholars of the Middle Ages and literary historians, but they are not part of the canon as it is usually understood.  Certainly, by any standard of what makes “good” literature used by anybody, highbrow or middlebrow or low, in the twenty-first century, these plays are God awful.  Their plots are formulaic, their dialogue is wooden, and their characters are nonexistent.  The most avid fan of the worst kind of modern formula novel wouldn’t be able to sit through ten minutes of a morality play without getting disgusted, even if the morality on offer was the twentieth century variety.

But.

If “standing the test of time” is the first requirement for making it into the canon–and it is–then it would be a good thing to know just why the morality play as a genre did not stand the test of time, and why no individual morality play made it either.

If it is because the work is inherently weak, and weak work doesn’t lst–which it doesn’t–that’s one thing.  If it is because the work wasn’t available to be cherished and built on by people who would have cherished it and built on it if they had had the chance, well, that’s something else again.

It’s interesting to think that there might have been a different and parallel literary tradition in English, with different assumptions and a different canon than we have now. 

And no, I’m not going over into relativism, so don’t start.

I’m going to go find something comforting to drink.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll go on and on about nativity scenes, which have more to do with the literary tradition in English than you’d think.