[This text is from when Beyond was still actively blogging, and has been archived here. Robert Crighton 2026]

Sunday, 11 May 2014, A Speech of ‘Delight’

Sometimes history is a bitch.  A tiny fragment of a play appears from no where and it’s beautiful and lovely and interesting and that’s all you get.  A Speech of ‘Delight’ is one such bittersweet pill.  It is one of two bits of medieval drama known as the Reynes extracts, dating to sometime in the late fifteenth century.  It is a chunk of dialogue by a character in (probably) a morality play – a character called Delight.  He (most probably young, as he is called a lad) is in conversation with other characters about his nature – and another character (female) hopes out loud that he isn’t someone interested in the ‘holy’.  Which he isn’t as Delight tells us how he delights in the world, on physical pleasures and the beauty of the world around it.  This would, in the original play, almost certainly have been a bad thing – being too attached to the physical world rather than the spiritual – his delight in the world probably leading to temptations and sin.  But, whilst a proud figure, it is also a really rather lovely speech – taken out of context it’s a joyful account of what the world has to offer.  Beautiful scenery, animals and, towards the end, beautiful women – which contains my favourite part of the speech.  Sadly, when he has finished introducing himself, he stops talking and, apart from the other fragment which might be connected, we know no more about it.

For the audio, I’ve made some modernisations to the text, trying to leave in as much that is comprehensibly old as possible. It opens with an exchange of dialogue – but without any indications who is speaking what.  Delight obviously enters to other characters already on stage.  The group already onstage is mostly male, but contains a woman.  In my recording I’ve had her speak both the opening lines and the reply, but it is possible that another male of the group speaks the first three lines instead. You could cut it up a number of ways – but this worked for me.