These city actors would have thought it absurd to render shepherds as quiet, well-educated men. Did they not know plenty of shepherds round Chester who had hard times and hard fare, and whose only knowledge was of the diseases of animals? Were they not plagued with mischievous shepherd-boys who were ever ready for fun and play? And if Noah’s wife was a shrew, were they not well acquainted with many such, and was not the scold’s bridle and the ducking-stool kept at the Cross for such offending citizens? And can we blame them for looking upon many of the characters mentioned in the Bible as being ordinary everyday personages? I think not. However, opinions on this point will always be divided, and the following quotations from the writings of two well-educated women, who lived 100 years apart, are interesting:-- “Next he (Mr. Bryant) spoke upon the Mysteries, or origin of our theatrical entertainments, and repeated the plan and conduct of several of these strange compositions, in particular one he remembered, which was called _Noah’s Ark_, and in which that patriarch and his sons, just previous to the Deluge, made it all their delight to speed themselves into the ark without Mrs. Noah, whom they wished to escape; but she surprised them just as they had embarked, and made so prodigious a racket against the door that, after a long and violent contention, she forced them to open it, and gained admission, having first contented them by being kept out till she was thoroughly wet to the skin. “These most eccentric and unaccountable dramas filled up chief of our conversation; and whether to consider them most with laughter, as ludicrous, or with horror, as blasphemous, remains a doubt I cannot well solve.” So wrote that somewhat priggish but clever and witty young authoress, Miss Fanny Burney, in the eighteenth century.[7] [7] It may be interesting to note that her father, Dr. Burney, was educated in Chester. The following twentieth-century opinion is from a paper by the late Mrs. Henry Sandford, a woman of sound judgment and of great educational experience:-- “In the first place, we cannot but observe that, with all their faults, they did keep vividly before the mind of the English nation the leading outlines of Christian teaching, and that, in the historical form suggested by the Apostles’ Creed. Much that was legendary, coarse, incongruous, was there also, no doubt, but _that_ was there above all. “The old religious drama created in the popular mind a high ideal of the true use and purpose of dramatic art, namely, to present to the imagination a living picture of the realities of life and feeling.”