Date of Award

6-1927

Degree Type

Bachelors Essay

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Literatures, Languages, and Cultures

First Advisor

Thomas P. Whelan

Second Advisor

William M. Magee

Abstract

The early history of English Comedy is a record of successive effort and experiments apparently leading to no result. In the early moralities as in the Miracle plays, there are flashes of humour; in the later moralities there are scenes in which "the effort to paint the riotous course of Youth, though not very amusing to modern readers, is sufficiently faithful to bring us within sight of a possible comedy of manners. But the morality-writer was far from entertaining any conception of comedy as an end in itself. His aim remained to the last purely didactic. It did not, indeed, occur to him, as it occurred to didactic writers of a later period, to represent dissipation as so unattractive as to make it miraculous that it should attract. He would show it as bitter of digestion, but neither play-wright nor audience were concerned that it was pleasant in the mouth, and it is improbable that readiness to acqiese in the sober moral of a play diminished in the least the applause with which we may be sure, any approach the gayety in the tavern scenes would be attended. After all, though we may sometimes be inclined to doubt it, audienced both at miracle plays and moralities were human. To the very real strain imposed on their emotions in the miracle plays they needed what seem to us these incongruous interludes of humour by way of dramatic relief, and in the moralities it is difficult not to believe that the humous supplied the gilding without which the didactic pill, at a much earlier date, must have been found nauseating. It remains, however, certain that alike in the miracle plays, the moralities, and the moral interludes such as humour as can be found is merely incidental, and therefore, Alfred Pollard, and English Critic feels justified in assigning to John Heywood the position of "Father of English Comedy."

Comments

A Thesis submitted partially to fulfill the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Philosophy

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