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Medieval theatre

1. Ritual beginnings and roots of theatre:

a. meaning given to the world through action and playing (cf. children), understanding through play;
b. social aspect of theatre – communal experience
c. theatre as rooted in religious ritual (cf. ancient Greece): the cycles of nature, cycle of human life
d. theatricality of sacred rituals
e. connection with the nature worship;
f. shamanistic practices: domesticating the unfamiliar, exorcising evil forces (e.g. primitive cave

painting representing men dancing in masks).

2. Medieval theatre – introduction.

a. the decadence of the ancient Greek and Roman theatre: traces remained in popular entertainment

(mimes, acrobats, dancers, animal trainers, jugglers, wrestlers, minstrels, and storytellers);

b. Church treated classical theatre with suspicion; maybe not entirely: Hrotzvitha (Hrotsvit), c. 935-

c. 1002, Benedictine nun from Saxony, a poet and a dramatist familiar with the work of Terence
(Terencjusz)

c. a new tradition – liturgical tradition: quem queritis? “whom do you seek?”
d. the ritual of the mass – natural source for medieval theatre
e. visualization of the Scriptures (Biblia pauperum)
f. but also carnivalesque themes: Christianity would incorporate folk traditions (e.g. the Feast of

Fools: lower clergy takes over churches, wearing grotesque masks, dressing as women or
minstrels, electing a mock bishop, censing with stinking smoke etc.).

g. eventually medieval liturgical theatre would merge with the Greek and Roman tradition (in

Renaissance drama), but ancient theatre was not known in the Middle Ages;

Liturgical theatre in the Middle Ages – three chief types of medieval plays: mystery, miracle and
morality plays. Such theatre thrived until the Reformation in England.

3. Mystery Plays – biblical themes, the life of Christ (the earliest forms):

a. plays inspired by Old and New Testament events
b. theatre moving outside churches: production of plays gradually taken over by laymen in the

vernacular;

c. first short individual plays, then organized into great cycles (entire Bible - from the Creation to the

Last Judgment)

d. Christ’s Passion as central: the plays expressed the humanity as well as the divinity of Christ;
e. in England: comprising up to 50 short plays, these cycles were sometimes performed over two or

three days (around important Church festivals). The cycles of York, Wakefield, Coventry, and
Chester survive, but on the Continent there are many more;

f. Secunda Pastorum or Wakefield Second Shepherd’s Play a late example of such a performance

(late 15th c.). A nativity play about naïve shepherds and their stolen sheep, but focus not on the
story of nativity, but on people seen against it. Humorous and frightening.

g. elaborate presentations: civic affairs, trade guilds involved in staging, movable pageant wagons

paraded through towns (not in buildings), elaborate costumes and movable stages designed (some
texts retain stage directions), competition between guilds and towns.

h. later sophisticated machinery involved and realistic effects: scenes of torture and execution or

appearances from Hell's mouth.

i. public entertainment growing in importance: the religious mixed with the secular in theatre

(devils as comic and terrifying characters);

j. compare the contemporary representations of the Passion of Christ (Kalwaria Zebrzydowska in

Poland, Oberammergau Passion Play in Bavaria)

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4. Miracle plays (Saint’s Plays) – present a real or fictitious account of the life, miracles, or martyrdom

of a saint.
a. evolved from 10

th

/11

th

c. liturgical offices related to calendar festivals;

b. belief in the healing powers of saintly relics – miracle plays flourished in such circumstances.
c. the surviving miracle plays concern either the Virgin Mary or St. Nicholas (active cults during the

Middle Ages), was widespread. In this climate, miracle plays flourished;

d. the Mary plays involve her in the role of deus ex machina: coming to the aid of all who invoke

her, worthy or not. (e.g. she saves a priest who has sold his soul to the devil, a woman falsely
accused of murdering her own child etc.)

5. Morality plays (15

th

/16

th

c.) – allegorical drama: characters personify moral qualities (charities or

vices) or abstractions (as death or youth), moral lessons are conspicuously taught.
a. morality plays centre on a hero, such as Mankind, whose inherent weaknesses are assaulted by

such personified diabolic forces as the Seven Deadly Sins but who may choose redemption and
enlist the aid of such figures as the Four Daughters of God (Mercy, Justice, Temperance, and
Truth).

b. Among the oldest of morality plays surviving in English is The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1425),

about the battle for the soul of Humanum Genus. A plan for the staging of one performance has
survived that depicts an outdoor theatre-in-the-round with the castle of the title at the centre.

c. Everyman is considered the greatest of all morality plays and is still performed.
d. traces of such plays in Christopher Marlowe (Doctor Faustus) and William Shakespeare – the

tradition might have continued partly in secret even after the Reformation in England.

6. The tradition of medieval theatre in England was quite abruptly stopped by the English reformation in

the 16

th

c., although some scholars believe that such performances continued in secret well into the

16

th

c. and Shakespeare might have seen a play performed according to the liturgical tradition.

7. Interludes – in theatre, early form of English dramatic entertainment, sometimes considered to be the

transition between medieval morality plays and Tudor dramas
a. Interludes were performed at court or at “great houses” by professional minstrels or amateurs at

intervals between some other entertainment, such as a banquet, or preceding or following a play,
or between acts.

b. Although most interludes were sketches of a nonreligious nature, some plays were called

interludes that are today classed as morality plays.

c. John Heywood, one of the most famous interlude writers, brought the genre to perfection in his

The Play of the Weather (1533) and The Playe Called the Foure P.P. (c. 1544). The earl of Essex
is known to have had a company of interlude players in 1468; the first royal company was
apparently established in 1493.

d. Traces of interludes in Shakespeare’s Tempest.