as for comic, since the former only required that Mankind should
sometimes fail to reach heaven, seem nevertheless to have developed
mainly the lighter side, setting the hero right at the finish and in the
meantime discovering, to the relief of otherwise bored spectators, that
wickedness, in some unexplained way, was funny. As long as propriety
forbade that good should be overcome by evil it is hard to see how
tragedy could appear. Had Humankind, in _The Castell of Perseverance_,
been fought for in vain by the Virtues, or had Everyman found no
companion to go with him and intercede for him, there had been tragedy
indeed. But religious optimism was against any conclusion so
discouraging to repentance. The lingering Miracles, it is true, still
presented the sublimest of all tragedies in the Fall of Man and the
apparent triumph of the Pharisees over Jesus. Between them, however, and
the kind of drama that succeeded the Moralities, too great a gulf was
fixed. Contemporaries of those original spirits, Heywood and Udall,
could hardly revert for inspiration to the discredited performances of
villages and of a few provincial towns. Tragedy had to wait until there
was matured and made popular an Interlude from which the conflict of
Virtues and Vices, with the orthodox triumph of the former, had been
purged away, leaving to the author complete liberty alike in character
and action. When that came, Tragedy returned to the stage, a stranger
with strange stories to tell. Persia and Ancient Rome sent their tyrants
and their heroines to contest for public favour with home-born knaves
and fools. Nor were the newcomers above borrowing the services of those
same knaves and fools. The Vice was given a place, low clownish fellows
were admitted to relieve the harrowed feelings, and our old
acquaintance, Herod, was summoned from the Miracles to lend his aid.

Yet even so--and probably because it was so--Tragedy was ill at ease.
She had called in low comedy and rant to please the foolish, only to