The English Moral Plays 359 
realism that soon submerged the ethical purpose of the play. Even 
the story of the Dance of Death introduced among the abstractions 
real characters—the king, the queen, and the bishop, in our earliest 
play—which also would eventually lead to the disintegration of the 
type. Similar, too, was the trend of the other lines of development 
that will be discussed in the next chapter. For these reasons the 
moral play was destined to disappear in the freer spirit and broader 
knowledge of the Renaissance. But as long as men were moved 
by allegorical representation of human life, as long as they were 
satisfied with old religious truths slightly seasoned with the spice 
of realism, the theme of conflict, extended and diversified by these 
other contributory allegorical incidents, gave matter sufficient for 
a popular drama.} 
CuapreR VI.—Puays oF THE REFORMATION. 
But in the sixteenth century the Revival of Learning brought to 
England new interests that broadened the mental horizon, reawakened 
the artistic instinct in literature, and thereby challenged the ab- 
solute sway of religion in the world of thought. Henry was the 

1 The French drama admitted a wider range of allegory. The nar- 
rative of a pilgrimage along the way of life was given dramatic form in 
Bien-Avisé, Mal-Avisé, one of the most worthy of the French plays, and in 
other moralities. The theme was doubtless taken by the playwrights 
from Raoul de Houdan’s Songe d’Enfer and Voie de Paradis, poems of the 
late thirteenth century ; but its ultimate source, of course, is in strictly 
ecclesiastical literature and the New Testament. Lactantius, in the Divine 
Institutes (Bk. 6, chap. 3), compares the course of human life to the letter 
Y; for every youth comes to such a fork in his progress, where he must 
choose to follow either good counselors along the road to salvation or 
evil advisers along the way to hell. Later writers gave the lesson in 
allegory. A religious treatise of the thirteenth century, De Tribus Dietzs, 
marks out the road from Penitence to Paradise in three relays, or dzetae, 
Contrition, Confession, and Satisfaction, in connection with the story of 
the Prodigal Son (cf. Dante, Pur. 9. 94 ff. and Peter Lombard, Senz. 4. 16 A.). 
If the treatise was originally a sermon, as Lecoy de la Marche conjectures 
(97), we may postulate another direct influence of the pulpit upon the 
stage. It is strange that this strictly Biblical allegory was not used by 
the English dramatists. Other themes employed by the French play- 
wrights are not religious at all. Za Condamnation des Banquets is purely 
worldly, a tract of the dietarian ; Honneur des Dames is romantic, showing 
the influence of the Roman de la Rose (see Repertoire, 47,73). Such themes 
were not known on the English stage. 
