Produced by Suzanne Lybarger, Melanie Lybarger, Curtis Weyant and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Illustration: POETS ARE THE TRUMPETS WHICH SING TO BATTLE POETS ARE THE UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGISLATORS OF THE WORLD SHELLEY] "EVERYMAN" WITH OTHER INTERLUDES, including EIGHT MIRACLE PLAYS [Illustration: EVERY MAN I WILL GO WITH THEE BE THY GVIDE IN THY MOST NEED TO GO BY THY SIDE] LONDON: PUBLISHED by J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. AND IN NEW YORK BY E. P. DUTTON & CO First Issue of this Edition 1909 Reprinted 1910, 1912, 1914 INTRODUCTION By craftsmen and mean men, these pageants are played, And to commons and countrymen accustomably before: If better men and finer heads now come, what can be said? The pageants of the old English town-guilds, and the other mysteries and interludes that follow, have still an uncommon reality about them if we take them in the spirit in which they were originally acted. Their office as the begetters of the greater literary drama to come, and their value as early records, have, since Sharp wrote his _Dissertation on the Coventry Mysteries_ in 1816, been fully illustrated. But they have hardly yet reached the outside reader who looks for life and not for literary origins and relations in what he reads. This is a pity, for these old plays hide under their archaic dress the human interest that all dramatic art, no matter how crude, can claim when it is touched with our real emotions and sensations. They are not only a primitive religious drama, born of the church and its feasts; they are the genuine expression of the town life of the English people when it was still lived with some exuberance of spirits and communal pleasure. As we read them, indeed, though it be in cold blood, we are carried out of our book, and set in the street or market-square by the side of the "commons and countrymen," as in the day when Whitsuntide, or Corpus Christi, brought round the annual pageantry to Chester, Coventry, York, and other towns.