Liturgical Dramas

11 Key excerpts on "Liturgical Dramas"

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  eBook - ePub

  English Drama Before Shakespeare

  • Peter Happe(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I

  The Medieval Drama

  Passage contains an image

  Chapter 3

  Worship, Instruction and Entertainment: Liturgical Drama

  Since the bulk of English drama before 1500 is religious, and since a very considerable portion of that surviving from the sixteenth century is either specifically didactic or substantially influenced by religious matters, we shall attempt in this chapter to give an account of the religious contexts in which the plays were written and performed. This will include a consideration of the liturgical drama, which is closely linked.

  In describing or contemplating medieval drama we ought not to impose distorting modern norms upon a varied corpus of plays, neither in terms of time, nor in terms of types of play, nor in terms of what the twentieth century has come to see as drama. For us the drama takes place on a stage, or on television, or on film or on radio. We may experience drama in a theatre with a proscenium arch, or in an arena, or in a village hall. Today a large part of the appreciation and understanding of drama also takes place by studying the texts of drama in printed books. All of these modes may help us to come closer to the medieval drama, but they all contain obstacles as well.

  Life in medieval times was much more orientated towards religion, both in outward forms like people’s occupations and also with regard to the inner life. There was a very strong sense of human impermanence, and religion was seen as a way of meeting many difficulties and misfortunes. Instability in society, and the proximity of life-threatening experiences such as the plague or childbirth are constant themes of preaching as well as of the various forms of consolation and instruction which the Church developed. On the other hand, worship also comprised joy and celebration and gave cause for hope. The work of the Church was concerned with both fear and the hope which transcended it. Thus to regard the religious content of the early plays as being about moral instruction alone is to narrow its scope too far.

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  To Chester and Beyond: Meaning, Text and Context in Early English Drama

  Shifting Paradigms in Early English Drama Studies

  • David Mills, Philip Butterworth(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  13 Yet the liturgical context is the determining factor in this process, limiting the amount of development possible and providing the wider context in which the plays should be seen and understood. The result is that these plays cannot be considered as independent dramatic units, each with its own central theme and self-contained internal structure. If we compare even the most extensive Liturgical Dramas with the later play-cycles, it is evident that the later works show a new concept of drama as an independent form, with its own thematic and structural organisation which is not dependent upon a wider setting.

  The evolutionary approach to literature necessarily minimises such basic distinctions, but it also sustains its argument by using critical terminology in a special way. It is generally agreed, for example, that the Resurrection play the Visitatio Sepulchri is the earliest liturgical drama, and it may be used to indicate the general characteristics of the genre. Its setting is the concrete symbolic focal point of the service, the Easter sepulchre, and its action is simple and processional movement towards that focal point. Its dialogue is a development of a chant appropriate to the service of the day. Yet, to apply terms such as setting, action and dialogue to this play is to use these terms with a meaning somewhat different from that which they have in modern dramatic criticism. The setting contributes much to the meaning of the dialogue and action, but its importance is extra-dramatic; its symbolic significance is independent of the action which focuses upon it and belongs to the wider pattern of church symbolism. The action is only minimally significant and hardly underlines the symbolic significance of the play or the humanity of its participants. The dialogue is a simple exchange of information; it does not involve a revelation and interplay of character and emotion. Both action and dialogue are further limited in scope by the liturgical situation since the stylised chant produces an effect very different from that usually suggested by the term dialogue

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  The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics in Early Modern Europe

  Calvin's Reformation Poetics

  • William A. Dyrness(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This tradition worked on the viewer in decidedly different ways from classical drama. To understand this difference, one needs to recall medieval notions of drama to which I referred earlier. By the early Middle Ages classical drama had been supplanted by the rise of the medieval liturgy. O. B. Hardison concluded that “religious ritual was the drama of the early Middle Ages, and had been ever since the decline of the classical theatre.” Already in the ninth century, he notes, the Mass “was consciously interpreted as drama.” 25 Hardison, in his classic treatment of these things, ascribes the ultimate source of this dramatic sensitivity to Pope Gregory the Great, who in the early seventh century formulated what became the dominant interpretation of the Mass. I quote Gregory’s description in full, not only because of its influence on the Middle Ages but also because it bears centrally on Calvin’s very different understanding of drama. Gregory writes in his Dialogues: See, then, how august the Sacrifice that is offered for us, ever reproducing in itself the passion of the only begotten Son for the remission of our sins. For, who of the faithful can have any doubt that at the moment of the immolation, at the sound of the priest’s voice, the heavens stand open and the choirs of angels are present at the mystery of Jesus Christ. There at the altar the lowliest is united with the most sublime, earth is joined to heaven, the visible and invisible somehow merge into one. 26 The Mass then in the medieval period was presented as a symbolic repre- sentation and elaborate drama of the renewal of redemption through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

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  Reading in the Wilderness

  Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England

  • Jessica Brantley(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of Chicago Press

    (Publisher)

  Moreover, the idea of communal literary entertainment, however pious, conflicts with the premise of solitude fun-damental to Carthusian life. To uncover the implications of this dramatic text in a thoroughly meditative book, we must ask what sort of place per-formed drama had in late-medieval monasteries. The evidence is mea-ger, and the extent and nature of monastic drama remains incompletely known. 76 The traditional story of the rise of religious drama locates its ori-gins in such places as the monasteries of Winchester, Fleury, and St. Gall. But the cycle dramas of late-medieval England are more closely connected to civic structures than to ecclesiastical or monastic ones. 77 An important exception to this general rule in England is the late fourteenth-century Easter celebrations undertaken by the nuns at Barking Abbey. 78 Records of the performance are preserved in University College, Oxford, MS 169, a fifteenth-century manuscript, but the event is attributed to Lady Kather-ine de Sutton, who was abbess between 1363 and 1376. This kind of produc-tion, still closely connected to the origins of the drama in Easter tropes, demonstrates that such spectacle had not fallen entirely out of use, and was even welcomed within the monastic community. There is also evi-dence that nuns at Canonsleigh Abbey in rural Devon sometimes strayed outside of their foundational walls in search of dramatic shows. In 1329 the nuns were expressly forbidden “for any reason whatever to go outside the boundaries of your convent for a distance too great to allow them to return on the same day without our special license so that they, cut off entirely from common and worldly shows in this way [vt sic a publicis & mundanis spectaculis omnino separate], may be able to serve God more freely and, with the opportunity for unrestrained play removed [lasciuiendi oportu-nitate sublata], guard their hearts and bodies more diligently for Him.” 79

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  Performing Christ

  South African Protest Theatre and the Theological Dramatic Theory of Hans Urs von Balthasar

  • Marthinus Havenga, Norbert Hintersteiner, Declan Marmion, Gesa Thiessen, Norbert Hintersteiner, Declan Marmion, Gesa Thiessen(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Peter Lang Group

    (Publisher)

  144 With time, some of these dramatic expressions gradually began to fade away, not least because of the Church’s enduring words of condemnation against the theatre. But even after this happened, Balthasar argues, many of the theatre pieces that were written and performed throughout Europe remained ‘under the cultic mystery play’s field of influence’ and were informed by Christian sensibil- ities. 145 The work of Shakespeare, of whom more will be said shortly, serves as a revealing example in this regard. When reading Balthasar’s narration of these developments, it becomes apparent that what particularly interests him here is how it was often the Christ-event, as conveyed in Scripture and through tradition, that gave rise to different dramatic activities within the Church. Balthasar, for example, points out that, from the beginning, the Church’s dramatic liturgies centred on the performance of the Eucharist, where bread, as the Body of Christ, was dramatically broken, shared among and consumed by the faithful. This eucharistic ‘drama’ anchored and directed the remainder of the liturgical service, and, moreover, served as ‘the dramatic source of all Christian life’ outside of the ecclesial setting. 146 The whole liturgical year also culmin- ated in and emerged out of the dramatic sequence of Holy Week, where, from early on, the passion of Christ was performed in church buildings. We have, for example, fragments of a liturgical ‘passion play’ that stems from the fourth century and is attributed to the Cappadocian theologian, Gregory Nazianzus. This is rather remarkable, as Gregory himself had some harsh words to say about the stage. 147 Later, with the religious plays that 144 Balthasar, TD I, 108–9. 145 Balthasar, TD I, 69. 146 Balthasar, TD I, 105. 147 Balthasar, TD I, 107 n.

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  Requiem and an Epilogue

  • Glynne Wickham(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  13 In England, this theme was widened still further—both backwards and forwards in historical time—to span God the Father’s creation of the world with the final day of judgement in plays that we now describe as Mysteries, or Miracle Cycles. All of them are anachronistic, both in their scripting and their theatrical representation, since their devisers were of one mind in electing to prefer relevance to daily life, as then lived in the secular world of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to either strict historical accuracy or any lingering attachment to earlier liturgical treatments.

  In this, they were rewarded by the enthusiasm that greeted these changes, not only among illiterate laymen but in powerful ecclesiastical and civic circles alike, which made it relatively easy to finance, police and stage biblical plays at midsummer in market places and other open spaces for at least an entire day or even longer. Likewise, because these plays called for the active involvement of greatly enlarged companies of actors and craftsmen needed to stage them, they secured the collaboration of laymen on an unprecedented scale in the evangelistic objectives of both the Vatican itself and the priesthood at large.

  From this there could be no looking back. The art of drama, as first reborn within the liturgies of the Christian Church, had escaped—albeit while still under strictly authoritarian ecclesiastical control—not only into market places and onto village greens, but into baronial and civic banquet halls, all of which lay under secular control. Thenceforward, its future legitimacy would inevitably have to be determined by arguments advanced from these quarters rather than from sources emanating from the Church alone.

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  Do This

  Liturgy as Performance

  • Richard D. McCall(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • University of Notre Dame Press

    (Publisher)

  Altars were reoriented, pews were added, worshippers sat rather than knelt. Such theological enactments did, in fact, become self-conscious in the Anglican debate over the “black rubric,” Pe r f o r m i n g D r a m a , L i t u r g y, a n d B e i n g -a s -E ve n t . 47 but how many other theological changes throughout the centuries have been reflected unintentionally in liturgical practice? How many theological changes have been the results of changes in liturgical practice? The fact is that definitions of drama and play and liturgy are di ffi cult because they require a degree of abstraction from powerful, often uncon-scious, patterns of behavior. Like the practitioner of yoga becoming aware of breathing or of the movement of thought, whoever would define play or liturgy must do so against the background of actions accepted as either “natural” or beyond analysis. How, that is, does one know that one is play-ing? How would one not know? Such questions lead us into the realm of lan-guage, which we will examine more fully below. More specifically, they force us to confront the question of how actions communicate. Gregory Bate-son uses the concept ( borrowed from Richard Bauman) of performance as “marked” in order to be interpreted in a particular way. His “A Theory of Play and Fantasy” ( 1954 ) is concerned with “how living organisms distin-guish between ‘seriousness’ and ‘play.’ In order for play to exist .

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  A Literary History of the English People, from the Origins to the Renaissance

  • J. J. (Jean Jules) Jusserand(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  Conventional, liturgical, ritualistic as the imitation was, still there was an imitation in the ceremony of mass; and mass led to the religious drama, which was therefore, at starting, as conventional, liturgical, and ritualistic as could be. Its early beginning is to be sought for in the antiphoned parts of the service, and then it makes one with the service itself. In a similar manner, outside the Church lay drama had begun with the alternate chansons, debates, poetical altercations of the singers of facetious or love-songs. A great step was made when, at the principal feasts of the year, Easter and Christmas, the chanters, instead of giving their responses from their stalls, moved in the Church to recall the action commemorated on that day; additions were introduced into the received text of the service; religious drama begins then to have an existence of its own. "'Tell us, shepherds, whom do you seek in this stable?—They will answer: 'Christ the Saviour, our Lord.'" [771] Such is the starting-point; it dates from the tenth century; from this is derived the play of Shepherds, of which many versions have come down to us. One of them, followed in the cathedral of Rouen, gives a minute account of the performance as it was then acted in the midst of the religious service: "Be the crib established behind the altar, and be the image of the Blessed Mary placed there. First a child, from before the choir and on a raised platform, representing an angel, will announce the birth of the Saviour to five canons or their vicars of the second rank; the shepherds must come in by the great gate of the choir.... As they near the crib they sing the prose Pax in terris

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  Glimpses of the New Creation

  Worship and the Formative Power of the Arts

  • W. David O. Taylor, Jeremy Begbie(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Eerdmans

    (Publisher)

  HAPTER 8

  Worship and the Theater Arts The story of God is theatrical. Every part of it could be its own play.

  Alison Siewert, Drama Team Handbook

  The theater of God in which the drama of Jesus Christ was played out was already in existence before the church fathers began to exhort the Christians to go to the theater of God: Christian drama had begun with the memorial act of the breaking of bread of the Last Supper.

  Christine C. Schnusenberg, The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama

  I’m baptizing you here in the river, turning your old life in for a kingdom life. The real action comes next: The main character in this drama—compared to him I’m a mere stagehand—will ignite the kingdom life within you, a fire within you, the Holy Spirit within you, changing you from the inside out.

  Matthew 3:11 (The Message)

  In his introduction to Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics, Samuel Wells suggests that the disciplines and practices of improvisation “resemble the disciplines and practices of Christian ethics sufficiently closely.”1 Improvisation, he explains, is a matter of steeping oneself years “in a tradition so that the body is so soaked in practices and perceptions that it trusts itself in community to do the obvious thing.”2 What does this have to do with corporate worship? Wells answers: “For Christians the principal practice by which the moral imagination is formed, the principal form of discipleship training, is worship.”3

  In worship “Christians seek in the power of the Spirit to be conformed to the image of Christ—to act like him, think like him, be like him.”4

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  Permanent Revolution

  The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism

  • James Simpson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  In powerful ways, late medieval is early modern theater. 19 When we set these finally simultaneous performances (mystery plays and sixteenth-century evangelical theater) in tandem, we are struck by something hidden in plain sight. Despite our deep-set persuasions about the identity of magic and the medieval, we understand that medieval drama manages performative magic with confident and sometimes comic ease, whereas early modern, Protestant drama is frequently tortured by it. Religion, Dramicide, and the Rise of Magic 207 II The intimate connection between sacramentality and theater was the premise of the vast, most ambitious and enduring theatrical phenomenon of the later Middle Ages, the Corpus Christi cycle drama that stood imme-diately behind Elizabethan theater. That cycle drama seems certainly to have emerged from liturgical drama—the Quem Quaeritis? (Whom do you seek?) of the Easter service, in which Mary Magdalen seeks the now risen body of Christ. 20 The cycle drama as it evolved was played annually; it was staged and played by amateurs (including women actors); it lasted for at least two hundred years in a number of northern cities; it took over the streets of entire cities as the theatrical space; it was free; it performed the entirety of salvation history in one or a few liturgically significant mid- summer days (Corpus Christi Day, or Whitsunday); and it was performed by the set of manufacturing and trade organizations—the crafts, or mys-teries, or guilds—who could lay plausible claim to representing a very sig-nificant proportion of the working men of a given city. 21 Like almost all other surviving medieval drama, the cycle plays stood in synergetic, though not at all wholly overlapping, relation with formally ecclesiastical, sacramental practice.

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  Discoveries on the Early Modern Stage

  Contexts and Conventions

  • Leslie Thomson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The influence of this Christian version of the idea that Truth is the daughter of Time is especially apparent in secular drama when a fifth-act discovery is used, but it might be said to be present every time a discovery leads to these effects and outcomes in early modern plays. Early Christian Drama In addition to the religious ceremonies in Latin performed in churches by the clergy, which came to be dramatized over time, the pre-history of early 32 These details are from the Web Gallery of Art. 33 See www.lorenzolottomarche.it/en/annunciazione-15271529/. 34 Saxl, “Veritas Filia Temporis,” 217. Religious Rites and Secular Spectacle 93 modern drama includes medieval mystery cycles based on biblical texts and morality plays with a Christian message, which were performed outside the church in the vernacular by laymen. As with the evolution of liturgical performances, the relationships between the explicitly Christian medieval Figure 3.6 Holy Family with Young Saint John the Baptist, attributed to Marcello Venusti, nd 94 Discoveries on the Early Modern Stage works and the drama that followed are difficult to chart. To be sure, both disguises and curtains are found in medieval performance contexts, so the potential for physical revelations existed; however, the surviving texts include only a few examples of performed discoveries of disguises or scenes. Evidence for the use of curtains in mystery plays is mostly continental and their presence does not necessarily indicate that a discovery was part of the action; but a few of the extant examples seem to include one. The records for a Passion play at Mons in 1501 include payment for “one iron upright supporting two cross pieces and a ring used for hanging a curtain to enclose God the Father on his throne in Paradise”; and for a Passion play at Semur in 1488, “God the Father is in Paradise on a throne and angels on each side .

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