The Earliest Middle English Interludes

The extant manuscripts of Middle English plays map the poles of medieval manuscript production. At one end stands the magisterial York Register (British Library, MS Additional 35290), a prodigious effort, as Clifford Davidson has shown, in terms of its costly material components as well as in its aspirations to determine the text of the York cycle.¹ At the other pole lies another British Library manuscript (Additional 23986), a small roll of vellum measuring a mere twenty-four inches by three inches.² Originally used to copy down an Old French poem praising Simon de Montfort and his barons (of which its recto side contains eighty lines), its verso side preserves eighty-four lines of a play with the heading "Hic incipit Interludium de clerico et puella." Identified by Andrew Taylor as among the few known "genuine working texts" of medieval performers, this fragmentary Interludium evokes a class of performances almost too ephemeral to have been recorded.³

Such performances—the interludes and other non-cycle plays of late medieval England—are those to which Darryl Grantley refers when he bemoans the "paucity of material" surrounding the origins of English theater, with "the problem being that play texts did not enjoy the status of literary, chronicle or devotional writing and were thus relatively unprotected from the depredations of time."⁴ As a result, Grantley can identify only two English-language dramatic texts that predate 1400. The first is the Interludium de Clerico et Puella, and the second, the fragmentary morality play Pride of Life.⁵ Historical records have, as yet, yielded no additional texts: while the Records of Early English Drama project has uncovered evidence of minstrel performances from this era that might arguably have included interludes, the project has not discovered any interludes per se. Recently, however, Allen J. Frantzen and Carol Symes have each proposed methods by which additional early dramatic works might be identified. Drawing on both approaches, I demonstrate that the corpus of early English interludes should include three additional texts: Dame Siriz, De Clerico et Puella, and Harrowing of Hell.

As a genre, the interlude proves difficult to define. Although Grantley expansively includes all non-cycle medieval drama in English under this rubric, I begin by following the definition of J. A. W. Bennett and G. V. Smithers. Noting that the term interludium appears in England alone during this period, Bennett and Smithers argue that "the nature and the origin of the kind must be deduced from English evidence."⁶ They conclude that the English interlude is the equivalent of the Old French farce, of which Le Garçon et l'aveugle from the late thirteenth century is an example. The earliest extant use of the anglicized form of the term supports their more specific usage. In the final stanza of the first fitt of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, King Arthur reassures his startled queen: "Wel by-commes such craft vpon Cristmasse—/ Laykyng of enterludez, to laӡe & to syng" (Such artistry is well suited for Christmastime—the performing of interludes, in order to laugh and to sing; 471–72).⁷ In occasioning laughter, the interludes referenced in these lines pull away from devotion and point toward farce. Such a description characterizes not only the Interludium but especially Dame Siriz (often labeled a farce) and De Clerico et Puella. The final text here under discussion is, however, a religious one, yet it is one that still fits under Grantley's expansive umbrella of non-cycle religious plays. The only further characteristic uniting the four plays is simply that, like the farces, Harrowing of Hell is short. Since a meaningful generic definition does not obtain, the texts' dramatic qualities must supply the evidence for their status as interludes.

Modern generic definitions of drama tend to emphasize such properties as a stage, costumes, and designated roles for multiple actors. Allen J. Frantzen has recently argued that the critical emphasis on these aspects has distorted our view of medieval dramatic activity. Working from a semiotic perspective, he proposes the expansion of the category of medieval drama to include some poetic texts from the Anglo...