e
in Fleet Street, was printing at his press there from the early years of
the sixteenth century. The play itself may have been written, and first
performed, in English, as in Dutch, a generation or more before.

It was written, no doubt, like most of the plays in this volume, by a
churchman; and he must have been a man of profound imagination, and of
the tenderest human soul conceivable. His ecclesiastical habit becomes
clear enough before the end of the play, where he bids Everyman go and
confess his sins. Like many of the more poignant scenes and passages in
the miracle-plays that follow it, this morality too leaves one
exclaiming on how good a thing was the plain English of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries.

The relation of the several miracle-plays here printed to the
town-cycles from which they come will be seen at a glance on reference
to the tables of pageants that appear in the Appendix. We may take it
that all these town and country plays represent continually used and
frequently tinkered texts, that must in some cases have passed through
many piecemeal changes. In making them easy to the average reader of
to-day, who takes the place of the mediaeval playgoer at a Corpus Christi
festival, their latest copyists have but followed in the wake of a
series of Tudor scribes who renewed the prompt-books from time to time.
In this process, apart from the change of spelling, the smallest
possible alteration has been made consistent with the bringing of the
text to a fair modern level of intelligibility. Old words that have been
familiarised in Malory or Shakespeare, or the Bible, or in the Border
Ballads and north-country books, or in Walter Scott, or the modern
dialect of Yorkshire, are usually allowed to stand, and words needed to
keep the rhyme, are left intact. But really hard words, likely to delay
the reader, are glossed. One Towneley play, the _Extractio Animarum_,
another and a most spirited example of the "Harrowing of Hell,"
mysteries that thrilled the people long ago, is given in the original
spelling, as some test of the change effected in the others. Further, in
the Appendix will be found a late example of a _St. George and the
Dragon_ doggerel Christmas play, which comes from Cornwall, and which in
a slightly varying form has been played in many shires, from Wessex to
Tyneside, within living memory. This shows us the last state of the
traditional mystery, and the English folk-play as it became when