I cannot doubt that my readers will be
interested in such fragments as the scope and design of my book will
allow me to offer. Had there been no such passages, I might have regarded
the plays as but remotely connected with my purpose, and mentioned them
merely as a dramatic form of religious versification. I quote from the
_Coventry Miracles_, better known than either of the other two sets in
existence, the Chester Plays and those of Widkirk Abbey. The manuscript
from which they have been edited by Mr. Halliwell, one of those students
of our early literature to whom we are endlessly indebted for putting
valuable things within our reach, is by no means so old as the plays
themselves; it bears date 1468, a hundred and thirty years after they
appeared in their English dress. Their language is considerably
modernized, a process constantly going on where transcription is the
means of transmission--not to mention that the actors would of course
make many changes to the speech of their own time. I shall modernize it a
little further, but only as far as change of spelling will go.
The first of the course is _The Creation_. God, and angels, and Lucifer
appear. That God should here utter, I cannot say announce, the doctrine
of the Trinity, may be defended on the ground that he does so in a
soliloquy; but when we find afterwards that the same doctrine is one of
the subjects upon which the boy Jesus converses with the doctors in the
Temple, we cannot help remarking the strange anachronism.
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