ABSTRACT
Skelton's Magnificence has been accessible to students of the drama longer than almost any play of its class; but this advantage, due to the reputation of its author, has proved of doubtful value. While the other moral plays have one by one been brought to light and studied, Magnificence has been left almost entirely to one side. The undeniable intrinsic dulness and monotony of the play affords much to justify this neglect. Although in bulk the most considerable production of a famous if unjustly neglected poet, it is less interesting than most of his other poems to a cursory reader. It also falls short in many respects when compared with other specimens in its own department. Beside the universality and transparency of the plot of the Castle of Perseverance, its allegorical framework seems narrow and forced. The peculiar achievement of the morality was perhaps the sincerity and real dignity with which it could present some of the Church's most solemn lessons. In one scene, which has been selected as a favorable specimen, Magnificence gives a picture of the coming of Adversity that does attain some measure of this high seriousness. But it nowhere reaches the impressive level kept throughout in Everyman. On the other hand, its contrasted scenes of vice and low life have little of the racy realism and less of the humor so notably present in Mankind and Hickscorner. To the Tudor audience doubtless the chief interest lay in its political satire; but this is obscure and dull beside that of the Scottish political morality, Lyndsay's Three Estates. The play's one point of incontestable superiority, the dramatic construction of its plot, is well hidden under tedious monologues and unduly protracted discussions. One is not surprised at the depreciative, account given in general treatises on the moralities and in the single brief study devoted wholly to it (Heinrich Krumpholtz, John Skelton und sein Morality Play Magnificence; Programm, Prossnitz, 1881: 6 pages) or even at the dictum of an eighteenth century critic (quoted by Dyce, intro. I. 1) who pronounced it "the dullest play ever written."
