If liis rcckoning bc not elear when he dotli come, God will say: ‘ Ite, maledicti, in iguan eternwn And he that hath his account wholc and sound, High in heavcn he shall bc crowned;
Unto which place God bring us all thither,
That we may livc body and soul together. Thcreto help the Trinity!
Amen, say yc, lor saint charity.
TIIUS ENDETII TIIIS MORAŁ PI.AY OE EYERYMAN 915 Depart, yc curscd, into cccrlasting (irc (Matt. xxv. 41).
I. The Cornish Trilogy
The oldest cxamplc of the Cornish drama, prescrved in a fiftccnth-century manuscript, is a trilogy consisting of the Origin of the World, the Passion of Our Lord, and the Resurrcction. These three plays, cach of somc three thousand lines, wcrc intended to bc actcd on three consccutivc days. The Origin of the World is the main source of the Creation of the World with Noalt’s Flood, which is in Cornish but with stage dircctions in English. The lattcr was copicd by William Jordan in 1611 from a much older text, and is the only surviving play of a scąucncc resembling the extant Cornish trilogy. Cornish drama is also represented by a saint’s play (Life of Meriasek), written in 1504.
The Cornish trilogy is particularly interesting bccausc it drarna-tizes legends not found in the English cycles. The most rcmarkablc of these is the legend of the Holy Rood and the Oil of Mercy, which is wovcn through the three plays of the trilogy. Another is the legend of the Dcalh of Pilate, inserted between the Pilgrims and the Asccnsion in the last play of the trilogy.
The manuscripts of the trilogy and of Meriasek contain fivc circular diagrams illustrating the production of the plays; cf. the plan of the Castle of Perseveraitce (Introduction, p. xvi). These diagrams, together with the detailed stage dircctions, givc a good idea of how the plays werc presented in the circular playing-placcs or Tounds,’ two of which can still bc seen at St Just and Pcrranzabuloc in Cornwall. Miraclc plays were still bcing actcd in Comwall at the end of Elizabcth’s reign, some ycars after the last pcrformanccs of the English cycles.
The wholc Cornish trilogy has becn cditcd by Norris, and parts of it (the Rood legend, the Three Marys, and the Dcalh of Pilate) have becn donc into English vcrsc by Halliday, working from the unpublished translation of the Cbrnish plays by R. Morton Nance and R. S. D. Smith. The following literał rendering of the Death of Pilate into English is that of Norris (vol. ii, pp. 121-79), with some errors of translation corrccted by J. Loth (Revue Celtique, xxvi. 261 ff.) and R. L. Thomson, and with cxtcnsive rcvisions madę possiblc by the assistancc of R. Morton Nance.