16 How the Church Has Changed the World My guts will burst out If I hang not this lout; If my vengeance he flout, I may live no longer. “Aye, there’s a voice of a man indeed! He does so enjoy playing that murdering rogue of a king.” “So long as the Lord not mistake him for Herod when he shall stand before him!” A shy creature, drama I imagine such a conversation between two wives, in the little English village of Wakefield, in the merry old days of Catholic England. They’re talking about their village plays for the three-day festival of Corpus Christi. It’s something the people of Wakefield have known and loved for many generations. We who go to the movies may suppose there’s always been such a thing as drama. It isn’t so. Drama is the most erratic of the arts, like a wild sweet fruit that grows only in a sheltered place, when the sun and rain are just right. They were just right in Athens, five centuries before Christ, when the old religion of Greece met a new thing called democracy, and the poets invented the play—meditations on man and the gods, complete with dance and song, and what we’d call a civic liturgy, to celebrate all that they revered as holy.
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