A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland Read Free Book Online Page A

the Bethlehem hills (definitely Yorkshire rather than Palestine hills) watching their sheep by night.
    December is a bitterly cold month to be out tending sheep. The first shepherd angrily bemoans the weather, and goes on to rail against the oppressions, including taxes, that poor folk like themselves must bear while the rich are snug, well-fed and warm in theirbeds. (Taxes were imposed by the guilds as well as the town authorities. It's a little in-joke.)
    We're so burdened and banned,
Over-taxed and unmanned,
We're made tame to the hand
Of these gentry men.
Thus they rob us of our rest, may ill-luck them harry!
These men, they make the plough tarry,
What men say is for the best, we find the contrary –
Thus are husbandmen oppressed, in point to miscarry,
In life,

Thus hold they us under
And from comfort sunder.

    It's an extraordinary outburst. And it speaks to us with a directness and force which carries across the centuries and resonates to the present day. Talk to citizens standing outside the job centre in Wakefield today and they might well complain in much the same way as does their distant predecessor, the first shepherd. And certainly with the same rich Yorkshire accent.
    The play, however, does not continue in this angry vein. There follows a hilariously comic episode. Mak, another shepherd, has stolen one of the lambs that his three comrades have been out all night guarding, frozen to their bones. Mak takes his booty home and hides it in a crib, disguising it as a newborn baby.
    The other shepherds come to Mak's cottage (like the three kings in the biblical story) to give the baby a silver piece – a very sizeable sum for them. After much comic knockabout they discover what exactly the ‘newborn’ in the crib is. Sheep-stealing was a capital crime, punishable by death (hence the proverb, ‘As well be hung for a sheep as a lamb’). But it is Christmas, a time for the forgiveness of sins. That mercy, the play implies, is what Christ died for. The shepherds merely toss Mak in a blanket.
    The play then reverts to familiar religious doctrine. The Angel of the Lord appears and instructs the three good shepherds toworship the true newborn, who is lying between two animals in a Bethlehem manger.
    The Second Shepherds' Play is a highpoint of this pioneering form of street theatre. But the same energy, vivacity and ‘voice of the people’ animates all the cycles. They died out, as a vital part of town life, in the late 1500s and there is some uncertainty as to why. One reason may be that reformers never liked them. Did they evolve into something much greater than themselves, the London theatre of the seventeenth century, dominated as it would be by Shakespeare? Or did they wither away under the pressures of urbanisation, mass movements of population, the decay of the guild system, the construction of permanent theatres (‘out of the wet’) in towns, and easier access to the Bible in its printed form? The Bible found other ways of getting to the people over the following centuries. Mystery plays were no longer needed.
    Whatever the answer, there is one important conclusion to be drawn from the two-centuries-long flowering of this street theatre. Namely the fact that the way in which we respond to literature on the stage – whether that stage is a trundling procession of carts or the boards of a modern theatre – is very different from the way in which we respond to printed literature on the page.
    You can pick up a book any time and put it down when you want. It is different in a theatre: the curtain goes up at a precise moment and comes down at specifically timed intervals. The audience does not move from its seats while watching the play. People, even in the twenty-first century, tend to ‘dress up’ to go to the theatre. They generally do not, as when watching TV, eat meals or talk during the performance; if you so much as rustle sweet wrappers, or, worse still, your mobile goes off, you will get furious