1 2 PROLEGOMENA. comedy, and the dramatic outburst of the fifteenth belongs chiefly to its latest years. At this time, however, comedy began to be popular. Of the four varieties of late mediaeval drama in France — mystery, morality, sotie, and farce — the last three belong to comedy. The morality is a comedy with a purpose, the sotie a political comedy, the farce a comedy pure and simple. The morality and the sotie con- tribute less to the main stream of comic progress than the farce. Not only did the moral purpose of the first and the political purpose of the second interfere with them, but each was, according to a survival of mediaeval fashions, burdened with formal peculiarities which were unfavourable to its development. The morality, as its name almost implies, had to a great extent abstract personifications of moral qualities for its characters ; and thus allegorising, the bane of the later mediaeval literature, affected it very strongly. The sotie was still more artificial, the parts being played some- what like those of the Italian Commedia delP Arte by a set of stock characters composing the supposed court of the Prince des Sots ; but the farce was subject to no such restrictions, and (in an immature and rude form of course) it deserves already the description of la vraie comedie. It admitted of the widest licence of arrangement. Sometimes indeed there was only one character, in which case it was properly called a monologue. There were never very many, nor was the piece ever of much length, so that it rarely admitted of more than a single situation. But these situa- tions, which, as might be expected, belong for the most part to the region of low comedy, not to say the broadest farce, are often treated with an adroitness which foreshows the remarkable dramatic achievements of the language. A plot to get a dinner gratis, to outwit a husband or a father, to gull a tradesman, to play a practical joke, is the staple of most of these pieces ; and the action is very often carried off very smartly and well, not without appropriate diction, and showing occasionally, within the somewhat narrow limits allowed, lively pictures of manners, and even an attempt at character-drawing. As on the whole the subjects of the farces partook of the general and obvious commonplaces
