Locke's political philosophy has generally been presented and assessed in terms of certain conclusions drawn from a few basic premises. Since Locke's political theory was not constructed according to the presuppositions of analytical philosophy, such an interpretive approach to his political thought seems better designed to portray Locke as an inconsistent or unclear thinker than to provide the reader of the Two Treatises of Government with an understanding of what Locke was attempting to do in writing that work.

I propose in this essay to follow another interpretive path by beginning with Locke's conclusion, namely, that “it is lawful for the people . . . to resist their King” (T II.xix.232: 437), and ask how and why did he come to that conclusion? If, as I shall argue, it was part of Locke’s intentional objective in writing the Two Treatises to persuade his readers that they should resist the king, then putting the question in this form will assign considerable importance to determining the relationship between political theorizing and engagement in political actions.

John Locke was born on August 28, 1632, into a family of very minor Somerset gentry. His father, John Locke senior, owned some houses and land in and around Pensford, a small town some seven miles south of Bristol. He supplemented his income from this by practicing as an attorney and by taking a series of minor administrative posts in local government.

Locke's family seems to have had puritan sympathies, and after the outbreak of the Civil War his father served as a captain in one of the parliamentary armies, in a cavalry regiment commanded by a very much more substantial figure among the Somerset gentry, Alexander Popham. Popham's regiment served under Waller, was defeated at the Battle of Devizes in July 1643, and subsequently dispersed.

Locke's father's association with Popham, whom he continued to serve in his professional capacity and from whom he leased part of his land, had one consequence of enormous benefit to his son. Popham, since 1645 the member of Parliament for Bath, had sufficient influence to recommend boys for places at Westminster School, at that time the foremost school in England. Locke entered Westminster in 1647. The education there was centered almost entirely around the ancient languages, first Latin, then Greek, and finally, for the most academically proficient pupils, Hebrew. Locke made sufficient progress with the last of these to be able to compose an oration in Hebrew shortly before he left the school.

The topics to be covered in this chapter are as follows: (I) Locke's acceptance of Descartes's view that there is a radical separation, a perhaps unbridgeable gap, between the world's mental and its physical aspects; Locke's view of (II) the cognitive aspects and (III) the conative aspects of the mind; (IV) what Locke said about the possibility that “ matter thinks” that is, that the things that take up space are also the ones that have mental states; (V) the question whether all thought could be entirely caused by changes in the physical world; (VI and VII) what it is for a single mind to last through time; and (VIII) what it is for a mind to exist at a time when it is not doing anything.

PROPERTY DUALISM

Descartes held a position that is sometimes called “property dualism.” According to it, the properties that things can have fall into two classes - those pertaining to materiality and those pertaining to mentality - with no overlap between them. This is best understood as involving also a dualism of concepts: the concepts that can be applied to things fall into two classes, with no concept in either class being reducible to or explainable through any belonging to the other class.

Locke's first reference to language in the “Epistle to the Reader” at the outset of his Essay concerning Human Understanding suggests merely a pragmatic, Baconian insistence that we must strive for clarity in language because obscurity of speech is a frequent but avoidable source of theoretical confusion: “The greatest part of the Questions and Controversies that perplex Mankind [depend] on the doubtful and uncertain use of Words, or (which is the same) indetermined Ideas, which they are made to stand for” (E Epis: 13). Such a statement does not imply that one needs any theory about language in order to avoid such problems, but just a special degree of care in its ordinary use. Later passages might also be taken to suggest such a Baconian stance, free of any specific linguistic theory:

John Locke's philosophy of religion is one of the great creative achievements in the history of philosophy of religion in the West. It has also proved powerfully influential; at least until recently, probably most modern Western intellectuals have thought about the interconnections among reason, responsibility, and religious conviction along Lockean lines. It should immediately be added, however, that in his day Locke was by no means alone in thinking about these matters as he did; genius though he was, Locke was not a solitary genius. The truth is that Locke articulated better than anyone else a philosophical way of thinking about religion that was gaining currency around the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century in northwest Europe.

Locke's philosophy of religion was almost entirely an epistemology of religious knowledge and belief; and in this epistemology of religion he regularly distinguished between natural religion and revealed religion - Christianity being of course the “revealed religion” on which he mainly reflected. The distinction between natural and revealed religion was current in Locke's day among those who wrote and spoke about religion,- no doubt the distinction should be seen as a descendant of the distinction between the preambles of faith and the articles of faith found in medieval philosophers such as Aquinas. But why the concentration on epistemology? Because, apart from his political philosophy, Locke’s general philosophical reflections were oriented almost entirely around two questions: (i) what is the scope of human knowledge? and (2) how ought we to govern our assent when we lack knowledge? In turn, the fact that Locke’s philosophical thoughts were focused almost entirely on politics and on epistemology reflects the social and cultural situation of his day.

The main subject of this book is Locke's philosophy, in the current academic sense of that term. So construed, philosophy is a special field of inquiry, marked off, even if not very clearly, from other fields and in particular from the various empirical sciences. Locke certainly practiced philosophy understood in this way. But he did not think of himself as any kind of intellectual specialist. He rarely even used the word “philosophy,” as many seventeenth-century thinkers did, to signify the whole domain of intellectual endeavor: his favorite word for that was “science.” And in addition to his work in philosophy, he pursued substantial inquiries in other disciplines: chemistry, medicine, economics, public policy, education, and theology. Still, there is no doubt that Locke's most significant as well as his most influential achievements were in philosophy; and it is as a philosopher that he is chiefly interesting to scholars today.

Philosophy, in our current view of it, is divided into various more or less distinguishable subfields, yielding, at the first level of division, logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy, and then, by subdividing these, such specializations as the philosophies of language, science, mind, and religion, ethical theory, and political philosophy. Locke worked actively in nearly all of these areas. It is true that the overall subject of his two most important books, the Essay concerning Human Understanding and the Two Treatises of Government, is, in the one case, epistemology and, in the other, political philosophy. But there are also significant excursions, in the Two Treatises, into general moral philosophy, and in the Essay, into ethical theory and the philosophies of language, science, and religion, and especially into what we call metaphysics, though Locke would have been uneasy with that label, reeking as it did to his nose of the stale hallways of medieval schools.

INTRODUCTION

Only five medieval English morality plays survive: The Pride of Life (85, pp. 90-105), The Castle of Perseverance, Wisdom, Mankind (83) and Everyman (86, 87), to give them their common titles, together constitute the entire corpus of an apparently influential native dramatic genre. The identification of the genre has been retrospective and depends largely on the perceived influence of these plays on the more abundantly surviving Tudor interlude. It is possible on the basis of the few surviving texts to construct a working definition of a characteristic dramaturgy for the morality play, yet their absolute cohesion as a group is bound to be questioned in any attempt to define that form in its individual manifestations and theatrical contexts, particularly as The Pride of Life is a corrupt Anglo-Irish text and Everyman a translation from a Dutch original.

What these plays have in common most obviously is that they offer their audiences moral instruction through dramatic action that is broadly allegorical. Hence they are set in no time, or outside historical time, though their lack of historical specificity is generally exploited by strategically collapsing the eternal with the contemporary. The protagonist is generally a figure of all men, reflected in his name, Everyman or Mankind, and the other characters are polarised as figures of good and evil.

INTRODUCTION

'Corpus Christi plays', 'cycle plays': these are just two of the more familiar boxes in which modern critics have tried to contain the resisting diversity of much late medieval English drama. Indeed, such pigeon-holing has a long pedigree. Whoever wrote 'The plaie called Corpus Christi' on the first page of the play manuscript that concerns this chapter, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian D. viii, is the earliest known member of this critical family tree. He would hardly have foreseen that his sixteenth-century attempt to sum up the plays in front of him would have provided the title for one of the most successful studies of medieval drama in recent years, a study whose equally unforeseen consequence has been the encouragement of some homogenised ways of thinking about what a 'Corpus Christi cycle' might be (130). The fact is, however, that the plays of Cotton Vespasian D. viii are not tidily compliant, and resist the totalising project that the idea of a 'Corpus Christi cycle' has sometimes risked becoming. There is no evidence that these plays ever had anything to do with Corpus Christi, at least not in the most basic sense of their having been performed then; on the contrary, some were originally intended for performance on a Sunday. Nor has the Creation-to-Doom scope of the manuscript's content, which superficially invites comparison with the other three major mystery play collections of Chester, Wakefield and York, come about for comparable reasons. The former independence of some of its principal component parts has been suppressed: originally, these parts were never arranged according to any grand Creation-to-Doom design whatsoever. So in sum, it is juster to recognise the fascinating difference of this manuscript, and this sense of difference will, I hope, be an undertow to my introduction of it and of the plays of which it is no neutral transmitter.

CRITICAL APPROACHES

NINETEENTH- AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY OUTLINES

The English drama that preceded Shakespeare was held in such disrepute for four centuries that it has been necessary for the twentieth to invent the concept 'medieval drama'. Both words show the needs and aspirations of our time, the adjective reflecting a concept of medieval society which need not be either romanticised or patronised, and the noun embodying the profound experiences of the twentieth-century theatre. The latter have been influential in both the performing of the early plays and the redefinition of drama.

The invention of the term 'medieval drama' cannot be attributed to one person, but it is the business of the first part of this guide to consider a number of authors whose work forced a revaluation of the plays and made them seem, as they now do, one of the riches of English culture in spite of their rather chancy survival. The second part deals with a number of special topics indispensable to the study of the plays, and embracing in differing ways the changing corpus of ideas which forms the basis of our understanding and appreciation of the early plays.

INTRODUCTION

In chapter 12 of the book of Exodus, God's final vengeance upon the Egyptians for the enslavement of the children of Israel is the death of the firstborn. Called upon to mention the incident in the play of Moses and Pharaoh, a writer in medieval York chose to substitute 'grete pestelence' for the biblical episode, a striking alteration to the canonical source, for in later medieval England 'the grete pestelence' had come to be the customary way of referring to the Black Death of 1348-9. Upon hearing the grim words, the tyrannous and verbose Rex Pharaoh is immediately deflated, capitulates and orders the release of the Israelites – in performance, a moment of chill stasis after the pell-mell black comedy with which the reports of the preceding plagues of Egypt would probably have been presented. When the play was new, this may also have been a moment of remembrance for survivors of the Black Death and those born in the succeeding generation, for the York Hosiers' play of Moses and Pharaoh was probably composed when the memory of this, the most destructive of all the plague's visitations, was still a living memory. The earliest possible documentary reference to the existence of cycle drama in York dates to 1376, though our extant copy of Moses and Pharaoh was not set down until much later. In its subsequent career in the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century the cycle changed in many ways, but there is no evidence to suggest that the Hosiers did other than bring forth the same pageant, more or less annually, through to the last recorded performances in the late 1560s.

INTRODUCTION

Critics of medieval drama locked into an evolutionary thesis of dramatic development that valued 'realism' and 'comedy' as marks of later and more highly developed dramatic 'organisms' found Chester's less exuberant style reflective of a primitive, undeveloped form of drama characteristic of an early date of composition. They were strengthened in this view by a persistent tradition in Chester that the plays were the oldest in England. Since the 1950s, however, the myth of early composition has been exposed and, after re-examining the internal and external documentary evidence relating to the plays, recent critics believe that Chester's cycle in its present form was the product of the sixteenth century and hence probably the latest of the English cycle texts. Moreover, there are indications in the prefatory Banns of the post-Reformation period that the cycle was even then considered different both from 'sophisticated' contemporary drama and from the cycle plays of other towns that were falling under disapproval because of their association with Roman Catholic doctrine.

Chester's distinctive interpretation of cyclic form and function should therefore be recognised as a conscious creation with its own goals and strengths. Freed from the condescension of earlier critics, Chester's achievement can now be appreciated as an attempt to articulate the mystery cycle as a coherent dramatic genre rather than as a conveniently loose chronological framework for the containment of dramatic and thematic diversity.

Medieval plays were not written for the theatre. They were put on in city streets, in churches, on playing fields, in college halls and in private houses, and they exploited each of these venues in its own distinctive way. The shape and acoustics of the venue, the skills of the actors, the nature of the audience and of the occasion, all presented certain constraints and certain opportunities. Add to this a variety of types of subject matter, and we have not one but a whole range of theatricalities.

Plays are for performing, and one recent branch of medieval theatre research has specialised in the informed 'recreation' of medieval performance conditions. This has been an eye-opening and salutary exercise. Because medieval theatre is so different from modern commercial theatre both in setting and intention, we modern investigators have had to break down our prejudices about the practical limits of staging and acting style. We have discovered, among other things, that actors can perform on a stage eight feet by ten feet; that twenty-foot-high pageant wagons are not necessarily doomed to overbalance; that long rhetorical speeches are not by definition 'boring'; that spectacle can speak more strongly than words; that it is possible to look the audience full in the face. Above all we have learnt to trust the plays themselves: that if we take them seriously as theatre, they will work. Medieval theatre has emerged not as childlike or primitive, but as different, and often highly sophisticated.

The casual reader of academic journals given over to medieval matters could be forgiven for thinking that more medieval drama has been produced in the twentieth century than was in its own time. Notices of future and reviews of past productions occupy a significant section of journals such as Medieval English Theatre (METh) and Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama (RORD) in proper recognition of the current academic and theatrical interest in the performance of medieval plays. Although the casual reader's impression is almost certainly false, created as much by the modern exercise of practical criticism as by the limited number of surviving medieval texts and records of performance, it is true that this century has seen an unprecedented interest in the revival of medieval drama. Indeed, the committed theatre-goer, as opposed to the casual reader, could probably have seen, within the last decade or two, a performance of almost every extant medieval English play text.

The occurrence of medieval drama revivals in the twentieth century may seem an historical phenomenon that encapsulates in time a single purpose, but it would be misleading to assume that the motives of revivalists were always the same, even though it may be possible to detect three generally distinct phases within the movement. The earliest productions of William Poel and Nugent Monck owed much to the antiquarian spirit of the time and the desire of these two actor/producers to extend their practical exploration of Elizabethan theatre texts and conventions of staging into what they and scholars of the time saw as the period of Shakespearean ancestry.

The bibliography is intended to serve two purposes: first, to support the system of brief reference used in the text and in many of the notes to the chapters; and second, to give a classified overview of the more important current work in the field of medieval English theatre. The arrangement of the bibliography is determined largely by the structure of the book and the likely needs of the majority of its users. Systematic bibliographies of medieval drama, general surveys, listings of documentary materials, editions and ancillary research works, such as facsimiles and concordances, are followed by a series of sections which reflect the bibliographical underpinning of the chapters on the plays themselves, in the order in which they appear. A series of special sections towards the end, such as 'Folk drama', Staging, Music and drama, Art and drama, and so on, answer to the topics discussed in chapter 12.

The bibliography includes all the works cited by bracketed serial number within the text, together with many other significant items, most of them published since around 1970. The detailed bibliographies in the first section provide ample reference to earlier work. For the editions of the plays cited within the text see pp. xviii-xix.

The earliest surviving dramatic use of Cornish is part of what may or may not be a play written on the back of a charter dated 1340, and the last is a single line in Richard Brome's The Northern Lasse, printed in 1632. The latter need not delay us; the somewhat garbled Cornish is used simply as something foreign. The former, however, has been seen as evidence for early secular drama in Cornwall and in England. In forty-one lines of rhymed strophic verse similar to that of later plays, a speaker offers a young lady to someone as a wife, and then the girl herself is given some advice on handling a husband: agree to his wishes without any intention of carrying them out. It has been suggested that the Charter Fragment represents the bawd's part in a comedy, but there is too little of it for any certainty, and even the inclusion of a Cornish place-name is not particularly helpful. There is evidence for the performance of genuinely secular plays (most notably of Robin Hood) in Cornwall, but texts have not survived and what language they were performed in is unclear.