6 Key excerpts on "Medieval Drama"

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  eBook - ePub

  Performing the Sacred (Engaging Culture)

  Theology and Theatre in Dialogue

  • Johnson, Todd E., Savidge, Dale, Johnston, Robert K., Dyrness, William(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Baker Academic

    (Publisher)

  That the medieval Church integrated theatre, whether for illustration or instinctively, is beyond question. This fact, together with ongoing performances of folk plays and court revels, generated new and lively theatre in Western European countries from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. Here we are necessarily summarizing and generalizing a progression quite vast in terms of time and geography.

  Much has already been said about the “rebirth” of theatre as a genre of literature and as a performance medium during the Middle Ages in Europe. By the fifteenth century a robust body of work was in evidence in nearly every European country, from cycles of plays based on the Bible to morality plays to folk dramas. Because of the pervasive influence of the Church, in no period in the history of Christianity or the theatre was a closer relationship between the two more in evidence than in the Middle Ages.

  In the discussion of ritual theory, we suggested that theatre arose in the church for two reasons: as a natural outgrowth of religious ritual and due to the inherent human tendency toward mimesis. The first takes into consideration the interest of priests to illustrate, by way of liturgical drama, the truths of the Scripture. The second takes into consideration the ongoing tradition of popular entertainment that toured the rural areas uninterrupted throughout this period.

  The liturgical drama performed by the priests in the sanctuary, spoken in Latin and usually accompanied by music, soon gave way to dramatic adaptations of biblical stories. These “mystery” plays were performed outside the doors of the church and were staged by citizens of the towns sponsoring them. The English word “mystery” derives, circa 1375, from misterium, which in turn derives from the Latin ministerium, “service, occupation, office, ministry,” influenced in form by mysterium. The plays were ministries (not strictly in a religious sense, but also in a communal sense) of the medieval guilds. There is also a connection to the Greek mysterion, a “secret rite or doctrine,” from mystes, “one who has been initiated,” from myein, “to close, shut,” perhaps referring to the lips (in secrecy) or to the eyes (only initiates were allowed to see the sacred rites). Mysterion is the Greek word used in the Septuagint for the “secret counsel of God” and translated by Tertullian into Latin as sacramentum

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  Medieval English Drama

  • Katie Normington(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  There are a great number of other terms used in modern-day society to embrace a range of performance activities such as ritual, entertainment, show, or sometimes even game. The Middle Ages offered no such distinctions between types of dramatic entertainment. While there is evidence of separate terminology for what today would be distinguished as drama and music, or players and musicians (‘ludentes’ or ‘histriones’, 1 and ‘ministralli’ respectively), it is difficult to determine how early performances were categorized by contemporary audiences, or if indeed they were. This book includes reference to a broad range of entertainments. Although some written texts have survived from the period it is important to acknowledge that within Medieval England there was a huge variety of festivities which included summer games, festive processions, and ritual practices for which no spoken texts exist. One major difference between performance in the Middle Ages and that of the modern-day was the influence of religious practices and beliefs. As shall be shown in the chapters that follow, early drama held a close relationship with liturgical practice both through the services conducted within the Church and the celebration of the ecclesiastical calendar within the parish

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  Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage

  Collected Studies in Mediaeval, Tudor and Shakespearean Drama

  • Glynne Wickham(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Section One

  The Mediaeval Heritage of Shakespearean Drama

  Passage contains an image

  I

  Drama and Religion in the Middle Ages

  IF we are to attempt to understand what drama meant to the mediaeval mind or to assess the approach adopted by men and women of the Middle Ages to dramatic entertainment, our first step must be to make several large adjustments in our own current attitudes to both the theatre and religion. Because so much of mediaeval drama was a product of Roman Catholicism, we have got to make allowance not only for the vast blanket of Protestant prejudice in which it has been smothered since the Reformation, but also for the more recent critical pre-conceptions which have their roots in anti-clericalism and scientific scepticism. One or more of these creeds has underlain almost every historical account of the origin and development of drama in the Middle Ages written during the past hundred and fifty years. It is hardly surprising therefore that to the student of today the words ‘mediaeval drama’, if they mean anything at all, carry with them images of quaint pageant-wagons, of crude devils with black faces and fireworks exploding out of their bottoms and of little alliterative playlets suitable for Sunday School but irrelevant to either life or the theatre in the twentieth century: nor have teachers, whether in schools or Universities, helped to dispel these deeply contemptuous and ingrained notions by persistently treating mediaeval drama as if it were at best some primitive, gothic prologue to Shakespearean drama which only merits a place in a curriculum of English studies because it happens to provide some useful Middle English texts for analysis. Needless to say the Latin antecedents of these texts have been almost wholly ignored. The idea has thus taken root that a latin drama of genuinely religious origin grew up in the early Middle Ages, was banished from the church to the market-place, was translated into the vernacular, secularized and vulgarized with superstitious and idolatrous accretions until it died in the late Middle Ages of its own obesity. The Penguin Short History of English Drama

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  A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages

  • Jody Enders, Jody Enders(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Methuen Drama

    (Publisher)

  By contrast, live public performances in the Middle Ages had a prominent and visible role in all Western societies and theatricality permeated the ways in which medieval people thought about their world and created their own place in it. The cultural historian might well identify the period’s most consistent trait as the expectation of performance at every social occasion, with performance as a major marker for the significance of a given event. As we shall see, entries of royalty and other notables into a town typically featured multimedia performances – a procession accompanied by music and featuring speeches, tableaux or plays at stops along the route. A period of affliction like the plague would certainly have called for a procession or even a St Sebastian play. Many large towns staged complex dramas that attracted regional audiences or they designed literary competitions for which plays were written. A favourite post-prandial entertainment of corporate groups from convents and craft guilds to noble households was a play addressed to their special interests, such as a patron saint’s life or a political allegory. Seasonal festivities from Carnival to Midsummer brought forth a variety of improvised local performances, and most liturgical celebrations from Christmas to Corpus Christi were marked by dramatized religious scenes. The aristocracy across Europe, too, turned their martial exercises into theatrically stylized chivalric games. The sheer volume and variety of medieval performances make any single generalization about social functions problematic but that plenitude at the same time compels us to scrutinize dramatic events for their social meanings.

  The centrality of performance to cultural life during the Middle Ages raises fundamental questions: what were the aims of dramatization, and how did the performances function to produce specific social effects? This chapter will take an anthropological approach to medieval performance in order to explore relationships between sponsoring structures and symbolic frames of experience, between group identities and individual responses of participants. While scripted ‘plays’ form a subset of materials to be discussed for our period, the medieval tendency to turn every occasion into a ritual or performance means that we must take a wider cultural view of the dramatic. It was the ‘convergence of anthropology and theatre’ that created the discipline of performance studies, as Marvin Carlson has pointed out.1 More broadly, the anthropologist Milton Singer defines ‘cultural performances’ as occasions on which a society dramatizes its collective myths, defines itself and reflects on its practices and values. Such occasions are concretely located in time and space, have sponsors, performers, audiences and intended purposes.2

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  Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture

  The Word Made Flesh

  • Susannah Chewning, Susannah Chewning(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Dramatic representation is not static, as is representation in a literary text. Each performance of a particular play is different. Although the script may remain more or less static, the actors, and hence performance, do not. Dramatic representation in the medieval English cycles could be problematic because of the familiarity of producer and audience. Because the craft guilds were responsible for producing the pageants, those involved in the productions were probably not professional actors but instead guild members and townspeople, the same people that many in the audience would see daily on the streets. Thus the players were known to many in the audience.

  As a result of this familiarity, the relationship between player and character was undoubtedly an issue for medieval English drama for two reasons. First, as I have already mentioned, some in the audience would have had an everyday relationship with the actors. During a performance, these people would need to suspend their personal knowledge of the actors and see them for the roles that they represent. Second, and perhaps more important for this article, although the same characters appear in succeeding pageants, the actors representing these characters differed from pageant to pageant. Playwrights, then, expected the audience to adjust its visual identification of actor with character with the passing of each pageant wagon. Mary, for instance, appears in seven pageants in the York cycle.2

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  A New History of French Literature

  • Denis Hollier(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  bergerie (shepherd play) or the comic monologue, and whether all these are medieval or Renaissance genres.

  Morality plays apparently were not as popular in France as in England, and few of them were printed. They vary in length from 200 to 30,000 lines. Most can be called exempla, staging the conflict between good and evil either morally or socially. A number dramatize historical or pseudohistorical anecdotes (the woman who tried to betray Rome and whose daughter fed her in prison with milk from her breast) or biblical episodes (Dives and Lazarus). Some, such as Eglise, Noblesse et Pauvreté qui font la lessive (Church, Nobility, and Poverty Doing the Washing ), focus on the social plight of the poor, while others, such as La condamnation de banquet (The Condemnation of Feasting ) and Le coeur et les cinq sens (The Heart and the Five Senses ), are concerned with the moral health of the individual. A few of the best remind us of Everyman: of the two corrupt Enfants de maintenant (Children of Nowadays ), one repents and amends while the other falls progressively a victim to Shame, Despair, and Perdition. Although some of these plays were written by competent poets whose personifications become lively characters, for modern readers they are literary curiosities rather than well-made plays.

  So called because their characters are often sots (fools) in traditional fool costume, the soties delight both in contemporary reference and in assorted verbal pyrotechnics. Many were performed by semiprofessional sociétés joyeuses (merry societies) and have stock characters and situations (a disguised character turns out to be just another fool). The shortest, sometimes called parades , have no action but simply present two or three characters engaging in versified conversation or argument, often with satirical comment on the evils of “nowadays.” Their authors were skillful poets who liked complex rhyme schemes and playful fragmentation of the octosyllabic line. In the longer plays the allegorical action is frequently based on untranslatable ambiguities: the New Men lead a wretched character called The World round the stage from a bad lodging to a worse one (“le logent de mal en pire”), or the Fools are trompeurs (both “deceivers” and “trumpet players”). The satirical emphasis is usually on the calamitous state of contemporary society. The best-known sotie is the Jeu du prince des sots (1511; Play of the Prince of Fools ), by the well-known poet Pierre Gringore. It is a fierce satire (tolerated if not encouraged by the king) on the intrigues and corruption of the papacy, played by the stock character Mother Folly. It is preceded by a cri , a charming enumeration of all the varied fools (sots and sottes

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