Medieval Theatre
A theatrical performance in the Middle Ages was much more than just an example of a literary genre; it was often a social, religious, and commercial event affecting a whole community and involving not only the spoken word, but also spectacle, music, and even dance. Moreover, drama was arguably the most pervasive of all literary genres, since the illiteracy of the public was no barrier to a play's reception. Although much medieval literature had a dramatic or para-dramatic dimension— lyric poetry was sung at seigneurial courts,
The popularity of drama in France in the Middle Ages is attested by the survival of some 600 texts and by archive records of thousands of performances from the late 11th to the mid-16th c. These texts reflect a wide range of types of dramatic literature: liturgical drama, miracle plays, mystery plays, farces, soties, morality plays, etc. Traditional criticism divides medieval French drama into two types, religious and comic.
Religious drama in Europe is generally believed to have its origins in the liturgy of the medieval Catholic Church. Tropes (musical and verbal embellishments) introduced into first the Easter, then the Christmas, Mass grew into semi-independent units called an Ordo or a ludus dramatizing the story of the Resurrection or the Nativity. This Latin liturgical drama, sung by monks in abbeys and churches across Europe, developed in complexity between the 9th and the 15th c., and drew on an increasingly wide range of material, including saints' lives [see Hagiography] and the Bible. Some of these dramas contained refrains or interpolated passages in the vernacular.
The earliest dramas in French, the 12th-c. Jeu d'Adam and the Seinte Resurreccion, are often held to owe much to the traditions of liturgical drama, although these plays were written at the same time as, if not before, some of the most complex liturgical dramas. The theatre of medieval France stands out from that of its European neighbours in that a number of important early (pre-14th-c.) texts have survived. In particular, a remarkable group of plays were composed in Arras in the 13th c. The first two of these, Courtois d'Arras and the
It was the confréries, associations of lay people meeting to worship a particular saint or to celebrate a special feast, who were largely responsible for the development of the French miracle play, the genre which dominated the 14th c. These plays, usually between 1, 000 and 3, 000 lines long, dramatize some of the vast quantity of narrative literature based on miracles allegedly accomplished by the Virgin Mary or by the saints; though clearly religious in inspiration, the plots of miracle plays are set in the real world. They thus contribute to a secularizing tendency already seen in the Arras plays. About 50 French miracle plays survive, 40 in one major collection, the Miracles de Nostre Dame par personnages, performed by a confrérie of the Parisian goldsmiths. Performances often took place indoors, in a guild-hall, with a system of staging, now called décor simultané, which was used in all religious drama from the 12th to the 16th c.: all the sets required by a play were placed in the playing area at the beginning of the performance; there was no curtain, no scene changes. This system greatly influenced not only the shape of medieval theatres (never permanent, but always constructed ad hoc), but also dramaturgical writing and other practices.
Mystery plays flourished in the 15th and early 16th c. Their subject-matter included not only that of the earlier miracle plays, especially saints' lives, but also biblical material; the life and crucifixion of Christ was the subject of a special type of mystère, the Passion play. Their most striking features are an increasing length and a tendency to mix extremes of tone. The average mystery play is about 10, 000 lines long, many are around 30, 000, and a few almost 60, 000. These enormous dimensions meant that a performance was an exceptional event, the organization of which was beyond a small confrérie. Normally the cooperation and financial subsidy of a town's administration were required; preparations were costly, involved hundreds of people, and extended over many months. They frequently made a financial loss, but attracted trade from the spectators coming from afar. Stages were normally constructed in a town square or other similar large, open space, and audiences had to pay; but virtually all members of the community were able to attend. To attract such an audience for a long period of time, plays needed variety of tone; serious episodes were interspersed with comic scenes and characters, as well as violence and vulgarity.
Historically, one notes two parallel developments. As the stage used for medieval religious drama moves from the church to the guild-hall, and finally out into the town square, so the content and style of the plays change from the sobriety of the earliest texts to extreme variety. It is thus a mistake to see mystery plays merely as religious drama; indeed, they anticipate the mixing of genres later to be characteristic of the Romantic period.
Of the so-called comic genres, the farce and the sotie clearly see laughter as their principal aim; this is less obvious in the morality play. These genres do not appear before the 15th c. and their origins are problematic. If the soties, with their apparently plotless, disordered conversations between sots, have a strong satirical undercurrent, the farces, usually dramatizations of fabliau-like situations based on deceit or trickery set in a ménage à trois, have no moralizing purpose. These plays, rarely longer than 500 lines (though the Farce de Maistre Pierre Pathelin is an outstanding exception), were normally performed by small groups of travelling professional players like the Enfants Sans Souci or by societies of law students known as the Basoche. Moralities, however, sit uneasily across the religious-comic divide, their function being the teaching of a moral lesson by means of a dramatic action involving abstractions or personified virtues and vices. It is their treatment of this subject-matter which makes them comic, and, of course, the fact that the conclusion is always a happy one. Evil characters provoke mockery and laughter, as do the devils in mystery plays.
Such problems of classification did not preoccupy the medieval public, who enjoyed all of these genres, as well as such para-dramatic works as sermons, sermons joyeux, dits, and dramatic monologues. The theatre's popularity reflects the largely oral and visual culture of the Middle Ages, appealing to all social and intellectual groups. The large-scale medieval spectacles strengthened the sense of social cohesion. The intellectuals wrote the texts; the artists provided the sets; aristocrats and bourgeois commissioned, organized, and acted in the plays; the local artisans built the stages; and the whole community watched.
[Graham Runnalls]
Bibliography
- G. Frank, The Medieval French Drama (1953)
- E. Konigson, L'Espace théâtral médiéval (1975)
