Item 45 - Letter from Henry Jenner (to W. W. Greg)

1 folded sheet

Bospowes, Hayle, Cornwall.—Discusses the relationship between English miracle plays and Cornish drama.

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Transcript

Bospowes, Hayle, Cornwall
Martinmas, 1922.

Dear Sir,

Very many thanks. It seems evident that though casual allusions to the rood-legend are to be found in the English miracle plays, they do not make it their groundwork or tell it in full, as the Cornish plays do.

The expression “þe Kyngis tree” in the York play is interesting. Of course the “Kyng” may be Christ and the allusion may be to Psalm. XCV. 10, which in the Old Latin, Ambrosian & Mozarabic Psalters reads: “Dicite in gentibus (or nationibus) quia Dominus regnavit (Moz. regnabit) a ligno”. St Jerome cut out a ligno, but it got into the well known hymn of Venantius Fortunatus, “Vexilla Regis prodeunt”. But in the Cornish “Origo Mundi”, King David has the three trees, which had grown up from the three rods which Moses planted on Mount Tabor, which had been cut from the trees which grew from the three pips given to Seth by the angel, transplanted to Jerusalem, and adorned the one tree into into which they grew with a garland of silver. So the “Kyng” may be David.

Your quotation from the Chester Descent into Hell about the Oil of Mercy is Gospel of Nicodemus XIV. 3–5 done into almost literal English verse. I dare say it will be found that the whole of the play is versified Nicodemus, for that is the source of the details of the Harrowing of Hell story, though its foundation is no doubt 1 Pet. III. 18, 19 and the “descendit ad inferos” of the baptismal formula of the local Roman Church, which we commonly call “The Apostles’ Creed”.

What I was trying to get at was whether any of the English plays could be said to be the originals of the Cornish.

[At this point hooters & things went off to announce the eleven o’clock commemoration of St Armistice, who has temporarily deposed St Martin. To resume:] {1}

I think from what you say that it is evident that no such plays exist. But all existing English scriptural plays are Northern or North-East Midland[.] There are none from the South and South-West, none from Exeter, Bristol or even London, as far as I know. If the Cornish 15th century dramatists copied from anything English, it would be from their more immediate neighbours, but as I suggested to Pollard, there might be a French original, or possibly a Breton. The metre of the Cornish plays is a common medieval Latin one. Lines of seven syllables, rhyming in various orders, AABAAB, AAABAAAB, ABABAB &c. or AABCCB &c &c. with sometimes four-syllabled lines alternating with seven-syllabled couplets or triplets, and sometimes whole passages of four-syllabled lines, rhyming variously. The normal metre is that of the Pentecost Sequence “Veni, Sancte Spiritus”. Syllables are carefully counted and there is hardly a faulty line out of the 8734 of the 15th century trilogy. Judging from the specimens given in Pollard’s book {3], the English plays are less monotonously regular, and do not seem to use that metre in any of its forms as a regular thing. The later Cornish plays (St Meriasek, 1504, and the Creation play of 1611) aim at using the same metre, but the St Meriasek is much more varied in its order of rhymes and the Creation much less accurate in counting its syllables. But both aim at lines of seven or occasionally four syllables, and the rhymes are never of two syllables. I think the influence of Latin rhyming verse is evident in the Cornish, but not much in the English plays. But I think the Cornish may well be original compositions founded on legends common to all Christendom, as well as on the Bible. The St Meriasek, which is really three plays, the Life of St Meriadoc, Bishop of Vannes, the Legend of Constantine of Sylvester, and the rather unedifying episode of the Filius Mulieris from the Miracles of Our Lady, is quite original unless part of the first is from a Breton play. The second & third are taken direct as to story from the Legenda Aurea, and passages of the original Latin are quoted in the stage directions.

With renewed thanks

Yours sincerely
Henry Jenner.

There is no alliteration in Cornish mediæval verse, nor any indication [of] the Welsh “cynghanedd” (correspondence of consonants). Nor is there in Breton. Modern Breton verse copies French & I suppose Cornish merely copied Latin.

Do you know anything about French miracle plays? And their verse?

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{1} The square brackets at the beginning and end of this paragraph are in the original.

{2} English Miracles Plays, Moralities, and Interludes, edited by A. W. Pollard, 1927.

Formerly inserted in Greg's copy of Bibliographical and Textual Problems of the English Miracle Cycles (1914) (LL 014 G 101).

This description was created by A. C. Green in 2020.