Literature
Miracle Plays
Miracle plays are medieval religious dramas that depict the lives of saints and biblical events. They were performed in public spaces and were a popular form of entertainment and religious instruction in Europe during the Middle Ages. These plays often featured spectacular special effects and were performed by members of the local community.
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6 Key excerpts on "Miracle Plays"
- Hudson, Henry Norman(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- pubOne.info(Publisher)
MIRACLE-PLAYS .In its course through several ages the Drama took different forms from time to time, as culture advanced. The earliest form was in what are called Plays of Miracles, or Miracle-Plays. These were mostly founded on events of Scripture, though the apocryphal gospels and legends of saints and martyrs were sometimes drawn upon for subjects or for embellishments. In these performances no regard was paid to the rules of natural probability; for, as the operation of supernatural power was assumed, this was held a sufficient ground or principle of credibility in itself. Hence, indeed, the name Marvels, Miracles, or Miracle-Plays, by which they were commonly known.Our earliest instance of a Miracle-Play in England was near the beginning of the twelfth century. Matthew Paris, in his Lives of the Abbots, written as early as 1240, informs us that Geoffrey, Abbot of St. Albans, while yet a secular person brought out the Miracle-Play of St. Catharine at Dunstaple; and that for the needed decorations he obtained certain articles “from the Sacristy of St. Albans. ” Geoffrey, who was from the University of Paris, was then teaching a school at Dunstaple, and the play was performed by his scholars. Warton thinks this was about 1110: but we learn from Bulæus that Geoffrey became Abbot of St. Albans in 1119; and all that can with certainty be affirmed is, that the performance was before he assumed a religious habit. Bulæus also informs us that the thing was not then a novelty, but that it was customary for teachers and scholars to get up such exhibitions.Our next information on the subject is from Fitzstephen's Life of Thomas à Becket, as quoted by Stowe. Becket died in 1170, and the Life
eBook - ePub- Andrew Pettegree, Paul Nelles(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
They are, in a sense, historical plays, in that they are dramatizations of events that the medieval public perceived as having really occurred. They are thus different from the farces, moralities and sotties, which were seen as fictional and imaginative. About 230 religious plays have come down to us, mostly from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, although two go back to the twelfth, two or three to the thirteenth and about 50 to the fourteenth century. 1 Most religious plays in the fourteenth century were called miracles; mystery plays or mystères are not found before the fifteenth. About 180 mystères have survived; most were composed and performed between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries. Although some of these were relatively short plays, that is about 2000 or 3000 lines long and taking only three or four hours to perform, many were much longer. The performance of these longer plays had to be stretched out over several days or several journées (a journée was the amount of text that could be acted in one session): sometimes both morning and afternoon and lasting up to six or seven hours; sometimes just a three-hour performance during an afternoon. There are several examples of surviving plays which lasted 20 or 25 journées; the longest took up to 40 days, usually a series of Sundays and feast-days. There were no permanent theatres in medieval France, for a play performance, a special theatre had to be built. A small-scale play could be put on indoors, for example in an adapted guild-hall; but most were performed out of doors, in large specially constructed theatres. The performance of such plays was an immensely expensive and complicated activity, and the building of the theatre, the lengthy rehearsals and the performance itself could disrupt the life of a town for almost a year. Mystery plays flourished especially between the mid-fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries
eBook - PDF- Jennifer Bates, Richard Wilson(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
. . attributed to supernatural, esp. divine, agency; esp. an act . . . serving as evidence that the agent is either divine or divinely favoured’ and as a ‘remarkable, wonderful, or (in weakened sense) very surprising phenomenon or event; an achieve-ment or occurrence seemingly beyond human power; an outstanding achievement’. For the iteration goes beyond that: the miracle play of ‘miracle’ here also and above all includes the ecce signum of the play itself. The ‘miracle’ is self-remarking, already marked as play, in a play, counterfeited, in a play within a play. Prince Henry and Poins know, and we know that they know, that Falstaff’s ‘miracle’ is a fiction and that it is the effect of that play-within-the-play which Poins and the Prince have been at once directing and acting in. Falstaff’s ‘miracle’ is always already ironic, preposterous, not his or anyone else’s, a thing of the play in which the play’s the thing. – I know why you have been quoting Hamlet apropos this inscribing of ‘miracle’ in the play and of the play in ‘miracle’, thus of a play over and beyond any neatly enclosed ‘play within the play’, play no longer 290 Nicholas Royle limited by the activities, language or representation of a subject but caught up already, in advance, in the nets of a kind of telephonic or telepathic scenario as a new thinking of the ‘poetics of the event’. It is because of the way, as if by chance, that Hamlet, in soliloquy, draws on the word ‘miraculous’ (one of only three appearances of this word in Shakespeare’s work 43 ): . . . About, my brains. Hum, I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul, that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle.
eBook - ePub- W. Kenneth Richmond(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The Church, however, could not see the force of such an argument. If it did, it refused to admit it.Incidentally scholarship has never really explained what happened to the true Miracle Plays; plays which took as their subject saintly legends and incidents not necessarily recorded in the Bible. Such a one was the “Miracle of St. Catherine” which Matthew Paris records as having been performed at Dunstable in the twelfth century. That they existed quite apart from the liturgical “mysteries” which in England (though not elsewhere) took to themselves the name of “miracles”, is certain, though scarcely a trace of them survives other than a few titles in manuscript. Once again we are left groping at shadows. Possibly the St. George plays, in which the central theme is always a miraculous resuscitation, represent some sort of a survival: if so it would account for the disappearance of this earlier form. Being secular, if not actually pagan, in motive these plays would naturally tend to be regarded as irreverent and so ignored by those who could write (And is not “clerk” a “cleric”?). As with folk-poetry, so here. The true “miracle” was deemed unworthy. It never managed to get by the official censorship. Being oral, its whole purpose was satisfied in the performance: which done, not even a dried husk of words was left to remind posterity that it had ever existed.One thing these rude mechanicals possessed, however, which was not forgotten—the sense of company, men working together. Right from the start they had that gift of close kinship and team-spirit without which no theatre is possible. Had it not been for Kempe, Burbage, Pope, Heminge and all the other stalwarts of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (not forgetting the earlier Ned Alleyn), that active social group in which he traded and had his being, even Shakespeare could never have developed in the ways he did. He would have remained an immense poet—the early “Venus and Adonis” is sufficient proof of that—but not necessarily an immense dramatist. He was lucky in finding the right social environment for his amazing genius. His milieu
eBook - PDFWonderful to Relate
Miracle Stories and Miracle Collecting in High Medieval England
- Rachel Koopmans(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- University of Pennsylvania Press(Publisher)
13 Explaining human experience by means of a miracle was not, of course, a medieval invention. The miracle is an extremely ancient story line, present in the earliest known texts. Somebody at some point must have first had the idea of reading past experience in this way—interpreting positive change as the result of divine intervention—but this happened such a long time ago that we may consider the idea to be, in human terms, timeless. Osbern and the religious elite did not have to work to communicate the elemental miracle plotline to people like the knight of Thanet. Any member of medieval society would have known it from a young age. Indeed, it is so ubiquitous in human To Experience What I Have Heard 31 conversation that, to this day, even in secular societies, it seems just to be known, not heard or learned. 14 The miracle plotline is an extraordinarily powerful cultural concept. The knowledge of this plotline could shape not just how a knight of Thanet might interpret his past, but also what he did in the present and what he hoped for the future. It appears that the vast majority of the miracle stories recounted in medieval collections were created by people who consciously and proactively attempted to acquire miraculous solutions to their problems and make the miracle plotline their own. Osbern’s account of the knight of Thanet’s story suggests how this works. At the outset, the knight of Thanet has a problem: the abbot of St. Augustine’s has seized his inheritance. The knight had a range of options for solving this problem, options suggested by what worked for others in similar situations. He could prepare a fine speech for his defense, bribe the abbot, hope for the best and trust in the workings of the law, and so on. As the knight tried to decide what to do, he remembered how Osbern ‘‘frequently used to extol father Dunstan .
eBook - PDFStreet Scenes
Late Medieval Acting and Performance
- S. Aronson-Lehavi(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
In addition, in performance the live interaction between actors and audience cannot be avoided, whereas paintings com- municate differently to their audiences. In his avant-garde theatre theory, twentieth-century stage designer Edward Gordon Craig envisioned a theatre of “über-marionettes” instead of real actors so that the perfection of images is not ruined by accidental movements of live actors. 23 This is a different context, but the idea is similar. In sum, the quotation and discussion of the six reasons in the ToMP connects the tract with religious and intentionally devotional theatre and also unravels the theoretical and methodological approach of the ToMP to “miraclis pleyinge”—focusing on their eventness, performativity, and liveness. Key Words and Concepts in A Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge “Miraclis” and Miracles Although the word “miraclis” is coupled with the word “pleyinge” in the title of the tract— a combination that linguistically could mean “the playing/gaming/performing of the performance-genre of ‘miraclis’”— and although both words reappear coupled many times throughout the treatise, there are at least thirty instances where the word “miraclis” appears on its own, specifically and unequivocally denoting a “won- drous event.” 24 Let us examine the first few appearances of the word “miraclis” in the opening paragraphs of the text, which set its tone, rhetoric, and logic: Miraclis, therfore, that Crist dude heere in erthe outher in himsilf outher in hise seintis weren so efectuel and in ernest done that to sinful men that erren they broughten forgivenesse of sinne, settinge hem in the weye of right bileve. [Miracles, therefore, that Christ did here on earth either by himself or by his saints, were so effectual (real), and earnestly done, that
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