SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 403 



occasion of true folk -holidays. 1 Then it was time for 

 good and evil to be swept away together, and the people 

 ceased to have any genuine religious festivals. 



But there is something more to be learnt from these 

 plays than sympathy with one of the world's great art- 

 epochs, or than the social value of a communal holiday. 

 I refer to their educative influence on the craftsman. 

 If a man has once realised that he is not working solely 

 for bread and butter, but that he is an essential part of 

 the social machine, which would stand still without him, 

 then he has received not only the best education in self- 

 respect, but also in the dignity of his own labour. I 

 cannot now enter upon the consideration of what a vast 

 influence for good the system of guilds exercised so long 

 as the old religious socialistic spirit was the chief factor 

 in its organisation, until, indeed, the growth of religious 

 and economic individualism converted what remained 

 of them after the Keformation into craft monopolies 

 under the control of a limited number of families. Was 

 a fire to be put out, the wall of the town to be defended, 



1 Besides the mass of auti- Roman Catholic sixteenth-century plays in Germany 

 of which those of Bartholomaus Kriiger, and Nicholas Manuel may be taken as a 

 type, I may refer to John Bale's Brefe Comedy or interlude of Johan Baptystes 

 preachynge in the wylderncsse, openynge the crafty e assaultes of the hypocrytes, ^v^th 

 the gloryouse Baptysme of the Lorde Jesus Christ, 1538. The hypocrites are of 

 course popish priests, the Pharisees and Sadducees represent papists, and the 

 whole epilogue is directed against the Catholics. John Bale's A Tragedy . . . 

 manyfestiny the chefe promyses of God unto man . . ., 1538, exhibits the same 

 polemic in the epilogue. Even Edward VI. is reputed to have written a comedy 

 entitled The Whore of Babylon. As a sample of polemic from the other side I 

 may mention the Seebrucker Play Der lustige Jud von Amsteldam. Here the Jew 

 bids the Pastor march to Munich and pay for the sausages Martin Luther and 

 his Katie have devoured in hell (R, p. 142). There is a story that Luther once 

 forgot at Munich to pay the ' Koch in der Hb'll ' for a sausage he had eaten 

 there. Hone (Ancient Mysteries, pp. 225-227) gives the names of a number of 

 English controversial religious plays. 



