Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 -
1936), 1915, Library of Congress. Catalog: https://lccn.loc.gov/2014686602. Image
download: https://cdn.loc.gov/service/pnp/ggbain/06600/06610v.jpg.
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The Humour of King Herod
IF I SAY that I have just
been very much amused with a Nativity play of the fourteenth century it is
still possible that I may be misunderstood. What is more important, some
thousand years of very heroic history will be misunderstood too. It was one of
the Coventry cycle of mediaeval plays, loosely called the Coventry Mysteries,
similar to the Chester Mysteries and the Towneley Mysteries.
And I was not amused at
the blasphemy of something badly done, but at a buffoonery uncommonly well
done. But, as I said at the time, the educated seem to be very ignorant of this
fine mediaeval fun. When I mentioned the Coventry Mystery many ladies and
gentlemen thought it was a murder in the police news. At the best, they
supposed it to be the title of a detective story. Even upon a hint of history
they could only recall the story of Godiva; which might be called rather a
revelation than a mystery.
Now I always read police
news and I sometimes write detective stories; nor am I at all ashamed of doing
either. But I think the popular art of the past was perhaps a little more
cheerful than that of the present. And in seeing this Bethlehem drama I felt
that good news might perhaps be as dramatic as bad news; and that it was
possibly as thrilling to hear that a child is born as to hear that a man is
murdered.
Doubtless there are some
sentimental people who like these old plays merely because they are old. My own
sentiment could be more truly stated by saying that I like them because they
are new. They are new in the imaginative sense, making us feel as if the first
star were leading us to the first child.
But they are also new in
the historical sense, to most people, owing to that break in our history which
makes the Elizabethans seem not merely to have discovered the new world but
invented the old one. Nobody could see this mediaeval play without realizing
that the Elizabethan was rather the end than the beginning of a tradition; the
crown and not the cradle of the drama.
Many things that modern
critics call peculiarly Elizabethan are in fact peculiarly mediaeval. For
instance, that the same stage could be the place where meet the extremes of
tragedy and comedy, or rather farce. That daring mixture is always made a point
of contrast between the Shakespearean play and the Greek play or the French
classical play. But it is a point of similarity, or rather identity, between
the Shakespearean play and the miracle play.
Nothing could be more
bitterly tragic than the scene in this Nativity drama, in which the mothers
sing a lullaby to the children they think they have brought into safety the
moment before the soldiers of Herod rush in and butcher them screaming on the
stage. Nothing could be more broadly farcical than the scene in which King
Herod himself pretends that he has manufactured the thunderstorm.
In one sense, indeed, the
old religious play was far bolder in its burlesque than the more modern play.
Shakespeare did not express the unrest of King Claudius by making him fall over
his own cloak. He did not convey his disdain for tyranny by letting Macbeth
appear with his crown on one side. This was partly no doubt an improvement in
dramatic art; but it was partly also, I think, a weakening of democratic
satire.
Shakespeare's clowns are
philosophers, geniuses, demigods; but Shakespeare's clowns are clowns.
Shakespeare's kings may be usurpers, murderers, monsters; but Shakespeare's
kings are kings. But in this old devotional drama the king is the clown. He is
treated not so much with disdain as with derision; not so much with a bitter
smile as with a broad grin. A cat may not only look at a king but laugh at a
king; like the mythical Cheshire cat, an ancient cat as terrible as a tiger and
grinning like a gargoyle. But that Cheshire cat has presumably vanished with the
Chester Mysteries, the counterpart of these Coventry Mysteries; it has vanished
with the age and art of gargoyles.
In other words, that
popular simplicity that could see wrongful power as something pantomimically
absurd, a thing for practical jokes, has since been sophisticated by a process
none the less sad because it is slow and subtle. It begins in the Elizabethans
in an innocent and indefinable form. It is merely the sense that, though
Macbeth may get his crown crookedly, he must not actually wear it crooked. It
is the sense that, though Claudius may fall from his throne, he must not
actually fall over his footstool.
It ended in the
nineteenth century in many refined and ingenuous forms; in a tendency to find
all fun in the ignorant or criminal classes; in dialect or the dropping of
aitches. It was a sort of satirical slumming. There was a new shade in the
comparison of the coster with the cat; a coster could look at a king and might
conceivably laugh at a king; but most contemporary art and literature, was
occupied in laughing at the coster.
Even in the long lifetime
of a good comic paper like Punch we can trace the change from jokes against the
palace to jokes against the public-house. The difference is perhaps more
delicate; it is rather that the refined classes are a subject for refined comedy;
and only the con1mon people a subject for common farce. It is correct to call
this refinement modern; yet it is not quite correct to call it contemporary.
All through the Victorian time the joke was pointed more against the poor and
less against the powerful; but the revolution which ended the long Victorian
peace has shaken this Victorian patronage. The great war which has brought so
many ancient realities to the surface has re-enacted before our eyes the
Miracle Play of Coventry.
We have seen a real King
Herod claiming the thunders of the throne of God, and answered by the thunder
not merely of human wrath but of primitive human laughter. He has done murder
by proclamations, and he has been answered by caricatures. He has made a
massacre of children, and been made a figure of fun in a Christmas pantomime
for the pleasure of other children. Precisely because his crime is tragic, his
punishment is comic; the old popular paradox has returned.
~G.K. Chesterton: The
Uses of Diversity.
SOURCE : http://gkcdaily.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-humour-of-king-herod.html
