So year after year went on.  By slow degrees times changed, and our literature changed with the times.  But looking backward we can see that the poet is the development of the minstrel, the prose writer the development of the monkish chronicler and copyist.  Prose at first was only used for grave matters, for history, for religious works, for dry treatises which were hardly literature, which were not meant for enjoyment but only for use and for teaching.  But by degrees people began to use prose for story-telling, for enjoyment.  More and more prose began to be written for amusement until at last it has quite taken the place of poetry.  Nowadays many people are not at all fond of poetry.  They are rather apt to think that a poetry book is but dull reading, and they much prefer plain prose.  It may amuse those who feel like that to remember that hundreds of years ago it was just the other way round.  Then it was prose that was considered dull—­hence we have the word prosy.

All poetry was at first written to be sung, sung too perhaps with some gesture, so that the hearers might the better understand the story.  Then by degrees poets got further and further away from that, until poets like Spenser wrote with no such idea.  But while poets like Spenser wrote their stories to be read, another class of poets was growing up who intended their poems to be spoken and acted.  These were the dramatists.

So you see that the minstrel stream divided into two.  There was now the poet who wrote his poems to be read in quiet and the poet who wrote his, if not to be sung, at least to be spoken aloud.  But there had been, as we have seen, a time when the minstrel and the monkish stream had touched, a time when the monk, using the minstrel’s art, had taught the people through ear and eye together.  For the idea of the Miracle and Morality plays was, you remember, to teach.  So, long after the monks had ceased to act, those who wrote poems to be acted felt that they must teach something.  Thus after the Miracle plays came the Moralities, which sometimes were very long and dull.  They were followed by Interludes which were much the same as Moralities but were shorter, and as their name shows were meant to come in the middle of something else, for the word comes from two Latin words, “inter” between and “ludus” a play.  An Interlude may have been first used, perhaps, as a kind of break in a long feast.

The Miracle plays had only been acted once a year, first by the monks and later by the trade guilds.  But the taste for plays grew, and soon bands of players strolled about the country acting in towns and villages.  These strolling players often made a good deal of money.  But though the people crowded willingly to see and hear, the magistrates did not love these players, and they were looked upon as little better than rogues and vagabonds.  Then it became the fashion for great lords to have their own company of players, and they, when their masters did not need them, also traveled about to the surrounding villages acting wherever they went.  This taste for acting grew strong in the people of England.  And if in the life of the Middle Ages there was always room for story-telling, in the life of Tudor England there was always room for acting and shows.