The Middle English Resurrection Play and Its Dramatic Antecedents Robert A. Brawer The representation of the. resurrection in medieval drama is the focal point of contemporary scholarly efforts to reassess long-established views concerning the origin, development, and critical evaluation of the earliest religious theater in the West. For early historians of the theater, the dramatization of the resurrection in the Latin church drama was regarded as the kernel or nucleus out of which evolved a vernacular drama that encompassed the whole of Christian redemptive history. The earliest Latin plays of the resurrection were said to be not only different from, but dramatically inferior to the vernacular plays which purportedly refined them by supplying more elaborate dialogue, characterization, and spectacle; indeed, the Latin plays could hardly be distinguished from the liturgical rites that sup posedly gave birth to them and within which they were origi nally incorporated. Contemporary scholars have reversed this notion of the evolution of religious drama and the judgment im plicit in it. O. B. Hardison, V. A. Kolve, and, most recently, Rosemary Woolf have, in their extended treatments of the sub ject, denied that there is any organic connection between the Latin drama of the church and the Corpus Christi plays or their vernacular antecedents, the Anglo-Norman plays of the twelfth century. Arguing that the Latin and vernacular plays belong to two distinct theatrical traditions, they have provided a basis for evaluating each type of drama according to criteria proper to it. Distinctions between the Latin and cycle plays are not only quantitative—the scope of the latter is immeasurably greater— but, even more significantly, qualitative: the original liturgical plays are decorous and formal in their iconic quality of repre sentation, processionally stylized mode of performance, and use of sung dialogue borrowed from Scripture and the liturgy; the 77 78 Robert A. Brawer cycle plays, more fully representational in their development of naturalistic dialogue, character, and circumstantial detail. Ac cordingly, any attempt at a comparative evaluation of their art must acknowledge such differences.! Yet despite the thoroughness with which these scholars have discredited the notion of an organic relationship or even indi vidual points of similarity between the Latin and vernacular religious plays,2 they have not exhausted all the possibilities for the discovery of significant analogies between them. For Rose mary Woolf, the direct influence of the Latin drama upon the cycles is “negligible”; yet she allows that the “vernacular re ligious drama would have been inconceivable as a form had not the liturgical offices of Easter and Christmas come to include passages of drama . . and further, that “the liturgical drama, rather than literary sources, provided an abiding authoritative model for the mystery cycles.”3 Such a statement needs more specific amplification than Miss Woolf gives it, for it requires us to consider the principles on which drama, as a distinctive form of art, is based. Before distinguishing particular modes of stag ing, representation, and dialogue, we must ask what the general function of the medieval resurrection play as a dramatic action of a certain kind really is. The term “action” as used here means more than the simple physical sequence of events on the stage. As the dynamic principle of organization behind the play as a whole, this action may be described as one in which Christ demonstrates, by his successive manifestations and actual appearances to his grieving and spiritually faltering disciples, the efficacy of his mission to redeem mankind and thus instills in them an enduring belief and faith in his royal sovereignty and in the success of their own apostolic mission. So defined, this action is essential to both liturgical and vernacular dramatizations of the resurrection, since it gives dramatic form to the representation of essentially borrowed materials. Within the play there is introduced and developed a moral conflict that is universal in scope, since the problem of belief and faith that besets the disciples in their humanity is one which is perennially faced by mankind in general. Hence, the resurrection play has an inherent emotional power for the spec tator. This emotional power is enhanced by its movement, or what Mary Marshall has called its dramatic peripety, from sor row...
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Mar 7, 2023
Kate Helsen + 2
Open Access
