Were There Theatres in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries?

Abstract

IT has been the almost universal judgment of literary historians that in the twelfth century the only dramas that were enacted by impersonators of the several parts were the dramas of the Church. They dealt only with sacred subjects and were performed within the sacred edifice or immediately outside or in a monastic refectory or cloister.' There were, to be sure, the Latin comedies collected and edited by Professor Gustave Cohen,2 but these, except the Babio, were probably intended for reading or recitation by a single person to some group of profane-minded clerics. Though the thirteenth century brought many innovations and many new types of dramatic performance, including secular plays for lay audiences,3 the authorities seem to agree that as yet there were no theatres, buildings dedicated to the production of secular drama. Only when we come to the fourteenth century is the existence of theatres recognized. Sir Edmund Chambers noted the reference of Bishop Grandison in the years 1348 and 1352 to a theatrum in the city of Exeter, where a mock order of monks held their revels, and where a group of artisans proposed to enact publicly 'quendam ludum noxium' at the expense of the leather-dressers.4 And Eustache Deschamps in his Miroir de Mariage (1381-1396) mentions the theatre twice as a place of popular resort.5 Though Chambers observed the occurrence of the word theatrum in Ailred of Rievaulx's Speculum Charitatis (1141-1142), he remarked:6 'an actual theatre in the twelfth century is hardly thinkable, and with a learned ecclesiastic one can never be sure that he is not drawing his illustrations rather from his knowledge of classical literature than from the real life around him.' Some further uses, however, of the noun theatrum or the adjectives theatricus and theatralis in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries have recently been noted by Professor Laura Hibbard Loomis and myself which seem to require that the question be re-opened. Several of these passages have been reproduced by Chambers and Young, but they have not been brought together nor has their significance been fully realized. Five have never been cited in connection with dramatic history.