As another of our slippery genres, there’s a lot of overlap with Morality plays here – some of these plays are Moral Interludes. However, whereas the plays listed on the Morality plays page are mostly moral and follow features that come from the medieval morality tradition, this page will focus on more secular and a slightly more wide ranging selection of plays. An Interlude can be a lot of things, and so will stretch our definition pretty much to breaking point.

At its simplest, interlude is a synonym for a show. It is used throughout the Tudor period (and beyond) to describe a host of different plays, including playhouse drama. Obviously, that’s too broad a use of the word. Generally it is used today to mean plays from the early Tudor world, up to the point where the playing companies have established a separate locus of activity in playhouses. So, generally, it’s pre-Elizabethan. Though there are blurred lines towards the end of the genre.

Additionally, there is a blur to the beginning of the Interlude. The generally used starting point is the play Fulgens and Lucrece, because it is Tudor. But the Tudor Interlude clearly existed prior to the coming of Henry the Seventh to the throne in 1485. The reason we see this as a Tudor artifact is partly the invention of the printing press. Most Interludes survive in print, and we can only see an older tradition through a glass, darkly. But it is there.

Things called interludes go back as far as Interludium de Clerico et Puella, which is from around 1300. Though whether it connects meaningfully with the later tradition is debatable as it is only a fragment. Lydgate will also use the word a hundred years later, but for things even further removed from what we might sensibly call a play.

Occupation and Idleness is a play that dates from around 1450, and is linked in manuscript with another text Lucidus and Dubius (full cast audio adaptation here). Both texts are structured around a debate, but only Occupation and Idleness passes the test of being definitely a play. And a play that is full of action. Direct address to the audience, a proto-Vice figure, sermonising, and a renaming of the central character of Idleness – see our bingo card. Whilst Occupation and Idleness is about religion on one level, it is as much about the question of how-do-you-get-the-yoof-to-learn-things? There is some flex away from the morality play focus.

So, Interludes exist, they have a shape, they are playing with ideas in a more secular way. They seem to be reflecting their production conditions too. These are (mostly) indoor plays. They are not plays designed to be bellowed on the street. And because the playwright has confidence that their words can be heard, then they have room to develop ideas and complex arguement. This might be because they come from a school room setting – many of the early performers and writers of interludes are boys, or teachers of boys – and there might be something of a feedback loop of plays for boys, by boys, for boys – with ideas and arguements being used to teach. But there are other events that feed into the form.

Around 1490, Henry Medwall writes some entertainments for Archbishop Morton. Two plays survive from those festivities – Fulgens and Lucrece and Nature (playlist). Nature is your more old school morality play, but Fulgens and Lucrece is playing with ideas, mixed with meta-theatrical jokes and broad comedy. The second part of the play is a lengthy disputation between two suitors for the hand of Lucrece, and the ideas and rhetoric is given full throatle.

The other surviving plays in these opening years of Henry the Sevenths reign are moral interludes, The World and the Child, or Mundus et Infans and The Summoning of Everyman, discussed elsewhere.

It should be noted that, though there aren’t many surviving interlude type plays at this time, the king is clearly interested in drama. Henry creates his own company, the King’s Men, who perform under his livery and who will continue in some form into the reign of Elizabeth (though her later Queen’s Men were quite different). Four, soon to be five men, would be the core of this company.

There is more grist for the mill as we step over into the reign of Henry the Eighth. Two interludes, often collected together, are Youth and Hick Scorner, which seem to be related to each other. Here the moral interlude is connected more with real world figures. The youth in the plays are grounded in the social reality of the time, they have an internal great hall logic to their staging, and are associated with noble patrons and London – as is Magnificence by John Skelton, which is connected even closer to the court in semi-personating the king in allegorical form.

Whilst there is a scale and a grandure to Magnificence which Youth and Hick Scorner do not possess, they do have the same basic staging logic. A small company of five or six actors, and mostly no set. Henry Medwall’s productions are more lavish, and might have more actors, but there is a sense that these productions have a core of a few really good actors, which might be added to the shape of things. If any of these texts were performed by The King’s Men, then they fit the company size perfectly well.

A significant shift happens as we move into the 1520’s, as a set of writers and producers rise to prominence. Via the printing press and stage of John Rastell come a number of works, including his own play The Four Elements, and Calisto and Melebea which he perhaps commissioned. John, and William, Rastell would print numerable plays, and John built his own stage at Finsbury Fields. More on Rastell here.

With his stage Rastell may have encouraged, as well as printed the early works of John Heywood, who appears as something of a dead end to the interlude. His burst of writing in the 1620’s and 30’s is playful and skilled. His plays Witty and Witless, John John, Gentleness and Nobility (possibly with John Rastell), The Four PP, The Play of Love, The Pardoner and the Friar, and The Play of the Weather, come to us because they were printed, and his later plays were not so lucky. All seven works mix ideas, debate, storytelling, and occasional bursts of silliness. These plays were perhaps performed with a mix of Heywood and maybe Rastell themselves, and also boy actors/singers in Heywood’s charge. Again, that connection between teaching, boy performers, and debate all come together in drama.

The looseness of the term interlude covers a work like Godly Queen Hester from the early 1630’s, which is a Biblical tale, but again is perhaps more interested in points of law and debate than religious instruction.

A great deal of information can also be drawn from fragments – Old Christmas or Good Order, Temperance and Humility, Albion Knight, The Four Cardinal Virtues, Detraction, Somebody and Others, are all bits of plays, but they demonstrate how the shape of an interlude is what is important, rather than the individual plot. A Vice character disrupts the status quo, a virtuous force dispenses with the Vice, and order is restored. You can lay these fragments over that schema in various places and it would make a kinda sense. One day, we will do that.

Nicholas Udall, writing from the later 1530’s into the 50’s continued the connection between students, education, drama, and interludes. Of his attributed plays Thersites, Ralph Roister Doister, Jack Juggler all call for young performers, and might cross over into something we might think of more as school plays. Respublica has a core company of six, with smaller roles in addition who would have all been boys; and Jacob and Esau just about fits within that logic too. But as we drift into the reigns of Edward and Mary that simple interlude play is mixing now with things that are perhaps more properly school plays. The Play of Wit and Science by John Redford, Nice Wanton by the Unknown, The Disobedient Child by Thomas Ingelend, Lusty Juventus by Wever are all concerned with the young, and what to do with them, but some of them are small and tourable – like the Disobedient Child – and some are not – like The Play of Wit and Science. Do we say the larger ones are not Interludes? Their plots feature a variation on the traditional pattern, and feature many of the elements of our Moral Interlude Bingo card, so do they still count?

What about other outliers? An Satire of the Three Estates is a spralling epic with a large cast and complex staging – but the shape is that of a moral interlude. Gammer Gurtons Needle by Mr S is a larger scale show that has no interest in a moral schema at all.

And what about John Bale? He effectively touted religious mystery and morality plays, but he did so for five actors – are these not interludes? And his play King John (or King Johan, if you must) fits the shape of an interlude well – apart from the scope and the ambition of the piece that feels like it’s striving for something different.

As we move into the reign of Elizabeth in 1558, the definition of interlude is stretched to breaking point. Plays might have a moral schema, but the debate pattern beloved of Medwall and Heywood has all but disappeared from sight – though possibly it has meerly gone underground, remaining in dialogues for the print only market. Can we sensibly call plays like Patient Grissell by John Phillip, The Pedlar’s Prophecy, Tom Tyler and his Wife, The Virtuous and Godly Susanna by Thomas Garter, or even (heaven help us all) King Darius interlude plays with any sense of meaning anymore? By the 1570’s, the professional theatre has got itself organised in different ways to before, and debating ideas is not something Elizabeth encourages much, so the size of the acting company no longer fits, and the shape of the entertainment has lost definition. Playwrights, with more actors to play with, can expand upon the kinds of plots they can drive, and the limits of a five or six person narrative can be bypassed.

The term Interlude will continue to be used to refer to a show of some kind well into the seventeenth century, but by now it has run it’s course. Plays are produced at playhouses by players. Interludes, associated more with the private hall, or a small touring group of interluders of but a handful, are no longer the norm. Whilst playing that would be on this scale will continue, it’s now part of that wider world of the theatre.

The great thing about most of the Tudor Interludes referenced here is that they are mostly short, and require a relatively small cast. There are, of course, as many examples of large and long plays on this page, but… well… nobodies perfect.

Below is a big spawling mess of a playlist of our exploring sessions of anything we think might be an interlude. It includes things that probably aren’t, and excludes things that possibly are. Make your own adventure.