Late medieval English comedies are called “Interludes,” a name that suggests they were playful interruptions to something else more serious, like a banquet or a longer devotional play. The name seems to suggest most strongly festivities at a banquet, perhaps like the early French play about Adam de la Halle attempting to leave the city during the annual Arras banquet. We see the word used in royal household accounts; in 1427, some money was paid to players for “jeuues et entreludes.” The games portion might have been juggling or mock jousting, but the “entrelude” was almost certainly a play, short enough to be put on while the servants were clearing away before the next course.
Interludes were a step away from devotional theater, but they still overlapped with it in themes. Like the Second Shepherds’ Play, they showed vice at work to achieve comic effect. It wasn’t moral to laugh at good people, but bad people were fair game. Morality plays had been about temptation, and interludes could be similarly allegorical. I don’t know if there’s a bright line between morality plays and interludes, but my sources say that interludes gave a lot more air time to vice. If they did the Prodigal Son’s story, they’d have a whole mini-plot for the time when he’s fallen into sin and then poverty, gleefully showing the gaudy sins and bitter downfalls.
Some interludes had a bit of political commentary, but kept very moralistic and general, for safety. “The Cradle of Security” showed a wicked prince, who spends the play being rocked in a cradle. But it’s allegorical, lest anyone think the play was pointing to a Tudor sovereign. Three ladies are with the cradled prince: Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury; and two old men judge him, representing the doom at the end of the world. We see in “The Cradle of Security” another feature of interludes: they had much smaller casts than the passion or morality plays. The whole play required just these six roles, though it also needed some special props, like a mask with a pig’s snout and a giant cradle. We don’t really know much more about this play, as the script was lost and we must rely on a contemporary memoir that describes it.
Smaller casts were better for traveling players, as I’ll cover in a later entry. With the interludes, we enter the early modern era of theater, in which we see plays acted over and over, not just once a year, and written by playwrights with real names. Lewis Wager was a Franciscan friar in the period when King Henry VIII banned monasteries. He seems to have carried on in ministry as was possible, becoming a parish priest under the new system and apparently fathering a son who also wrote interludes.
Lewis Wager’s best-known work was “The Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene,” published in 1566 after his death. Mary, the Biblical character and friend of Jesus, is depicted as a contemporary young woman in early Tudor England. Much of the play was a satire on the excesses of the rich, as allegorical figures of vice teach Mary how to be a proper rich young lady. That’s where it was fun: not only did vices teach Mary how to paint her face and look down on the poor, they also showed her how to cover up sins by renaming them. The vice “Infidelity” demonstrates by changing his name to “Legal Justice,” which sounds like a page right out of today’s satires.
The play also gives us a glimpse of the way some theater was funded: mid-play, the vices take up a collection, as they also do in some Morality plays. In “Mankind,” the demons tell the audience that they can’t see the chief devil, Titivillus, until enough money has been taken up. They play up how really terrific the devil is, how truly worth seeing, until they have enough cash to bring him in.
Some interludes turned entirely away from religious imagery and language, though they stayed strictly moral. Henry Medwall, who worked for King Henry VII’s Chancellor, wrote a very early interlude that presented only humanist values. Now we’re stepping back in time; Medwall’s play is one of the earliest interludes, having as its source a translated Latin treatise printed by William Caxton, England’s first movable-type printer. Medwall took the treatise, in which the Roman Senate must decide whether an idle patrician or a worthy plebeian is a better match for a Senator’s daughter, and turned it into a real story. “Fulgens and Lucres” has the first comic subplot in English theater. Servants of the Roman nobles discuss the story as a play they’re going to watch, then they vie for the affections of Lucrese’s maid Joan.
There are more interludes than I can touch on, and the next entry will look in detail at one known as “The Four P’s.” A YouTube channel called “Beyond Shakespeare” reads through and discusses many of these plays, including the ones I’ve written about here. You can look for “Dives and Lazarus,” “The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom,” “The Play of the Weather,” or “Enough Is As Good As a Feast.”