YEAR 8


Chapter XXXII ABOUT THE BEGINNING OF THE THEATER

MANY of you have, no doubt, been to the theater. You have seen
pantomimes and Peter Pan, perhaps; perhaps, too, a play of
Shakespeare, - a comedy, it may be, which made you laugh, or even
a tragedy which made you want to cry, or at least left you sad.
Some of you, too, have been to "Pageants," and some may even have
been to an oratorio, which last may have been sung in a church.

But did you ever wonder how plays and theaters came to be? Did
you ever think that there was a time when in all the length and
breadth of the land there was no theater, when there were no
plays either merry or sad? Yet it was so. But at a very early
time the people of England began to act. And, strange as it may
seem to us now, the earliest plays were acted by monks and took
place in church. And it is from these very early monkish plays
that the theater with its different kinds of plays, that pageants
and even oratorios have sprung.

In this chapter I am going to talk about these beginnings of the
English theater and of its literature. All plays taken together
are called the drama, and the writers of them are called
dramatists, from a Greek word dran, to act or do. For dramas are
written not to be read merely, but also to be acted.

To trace the English drama from its beginnings we must go a long
way back from the reigns of Henry VII and of Henry VIII, down to