The English Moral Plays 365 
tion! Another play was given the next year to represent the 
release of the Pope.? 
Even this scanty information concerning these lost Catholic plays 
shows that the English religious drama must perforce have come 
into close relationship with Continental influences, especially in 
Lutheran Germany. The influence that inspired the early moral 
plays was largely the teaching of the Catholic church—the church 
universal, whose literature knew no national bounds, and responded 
to no markedly national trend. The wave of Lutheran reform, 
however, shattered this unity, and the Protestant writers borrowed 
not.from one general source, but from one another. Hence, especially 
after Henry VIII’s change of policy had driven many reforming cler- 
gymen to Germany as exiles, the English drama was subject to 
national influences that it had never before felt to such a degree. 
In Germany, where the Lutheran leaders were humanists as well 
as reformers, the moral dramatists of the new school found a number 
of virile writers closely akin to them in spirit and methods. The 
medieval debate, as has been shown, being a literary exercise in 
which the thought occupied but an insignificant position, was quite 
remote from the proper field of the religious drama. But the 
German humanists of the sixteenth century found that the debate 
might be more than a literary pastime; that it could be made an 
effective weapon in their controversy with the old religious order. 
Erasmus and Hutten learned to handle the weapon most deftly and 
effectively ; but many others in the early sixteenth century gave to 
this medieval-classical form a new vigor that widened immensely 
its usefulness.® 
The polemical dialogue grew under such treatment to qualities 
really dramatic. Instead of introducing, as of old, antithetical per- 
sonifications to carry on a perfectly obvious disputation, a greater 
number of characters, representing real life as well as abstrac- 
tions, were used. ‘Not merely the ‘rich’ and: the ‘poor,’ the 
priest and knight, the ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Catholic,’ but peasants, 
scholars, nobles, monks, clerks, courtiers, beggars, fools, pedlars, 
innkeepers, weavers, tailors, Wurst-buben, women and children, young 
and old, pious and froward, pass across the stage.”* Inevitably the 
writers of dialogue sought more and more to give to these varied 
characters and realistic situations a dramatic value. 
The effectiveness of the polemical dialogue did not escape the 

‘ Creizenach, 2. 140; Chambers, 2. 219. 2 Chambers, 2. 220. 
3 Herford, chap. 2, “ Polemical Dialogues ”. “ Ibid. 28. 
