Medieval Stage Research Articles

Review: The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage

Review: The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage

The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage

The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage

The Mass on the Medieval Stage

The Mass is dramatized or provides a dramatic element in plays from all the main language groups of medieval drama. Two principal types of plays can be distinguished: the sacramental plays where the essential element is the Corpus Domini and the exegesis of the doctrine of Transubstantiation; and the biblical plays of the Last Supper with the types and figures of the Institution of the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday. There are, in addition, three plays which specify an actual on-stage re-enactment of the Mass.l

Of "Stages" and "Types" in Visitatione Sepulchri (Part II)

Of "Stages" and "Types" in Visitatione Sepulchri (Part II) Michael L. Norton The classification for distinguishing variants of the Visitatio Sepulchri proposed by Carl Lange and enhanced by E. K. Chambers was systematized by Karl Young in his 1933 collection, The Drama of the Medieval ChurchA Young's work was an expansion of the third book of Chambers' The Mediaeval Stage. Its subject, as the title makes clear, was the drama of the Church, and its scope encompassed the medieval liturgy, the dramatic manifestations of the liturgy, and the various forms of the liturgical drama. Although Young provided a "sizable addition to the documentary facts made available by Chambers," his primary contribution to Chambers' conceptual framework, as Hardison noted, was "in the direction of definition."2 Building on Chambers ' approach to the liturgical drama, Young saw the crux of the issue in the definition of drama itself.3 It is obvious that no satisfying study of these phenomena can be made without the guidance of a candid and practical definition of the term drama. By some criterion we must be able to discriminate between what is merely dramatic or theatrical, because of its similarity to things familiar upon the stage, and what is authentically a play. ... A play ... is, above all else, a story presented in action, in which the speakers or actors impersonate the characters concerned . (Young, I, 79-80) Like Lange's edition forty-six years earlier, the two volumes of The Drama of the Medieval Church combined a textual edition with commentary. The first volume treated the origin of the liturgical drama and the plays of the Easter season, while the second focused on the plays of Christmas, saints' plays, MICHAEL L. NORTON is a musicologist who lives in Virginia. Part One of this study appeared in the Spring (1987) issue of this journal. 127 128Comparative Drama plays of the Old Testament, plays on the Virgin Mary, and plays from Eschatology. Ostensibly organized along logical lines, Young's study traced the progression of the liturgical drama from its ritual roots to its religious but non-liturgical descendants , and it was Young's definition of drama that gave form to the exposition. Following a brief introduction on the decline of classical drama and on the various dramatic spectacles of the Middle Ages, Young laid the foundation for his edition with an inquiry into the structure and nature of the medieval liturgy. Young's discussion of the liturgy, filling some one hundred and eighty-six pages, was divided into two sections. The first outlined the structure of Roman Mass and Office, while the second investigated the dramatic and literary aspects of the medieval liturgy. Young's emphasis lay not with the dramatic character of the Mass and Office, however, but with those dramatic embellishments that had invaded the liturgy during the Middle Ages, in particular the burial of cross and host, the harrowing of Hell, and, of course, tropes. Of the ceremonies described by Young in these preliminary chapters, though, none could be considered drama. Although all were dramatic, none involved impersonation. Concerning the dramatic elements within the so-called authorized liturgy of the Church, for example, Young remarked: It is clear . . . that [these] dramatic phenomena . . . cannot be regarded as effectual origins of the genuine drama of the Church. The Mass is excluded from the possibility of dramatization because of its fundamental meaning. It is not a representation of an action, but an actual re-creation of it. The horae of the Canonical Office never gave promise of development into drama, since they were designed as devotional exercises, and exhibit no intention of representing actual events. (I, 110) Certain ceremonial aspects of the Holy Week liturgy were also dramatic in nature, and some of these would even be reflected in the later liturgical dramas, but "of the drama of the Church as a whole [these] liturgical observances . . . [were] not the essential beginnings" (I, 111). The burial and removal of the cross and host were more dramatic yet, but still they were not drama, for although "uncommonly tender or vivid or splendid . . . they lack the essential of true drama [i.e., impersonation]" (I, 148). Even tropes, with their occasional use...

Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt. Studies in the Writings of Abd al-Wahhab al-Sharani

The sixteenth century was a watershed in Egyptian history. After being the center of powerful Islamic empires for centuries, Egypt was conquered in 1517 and made an outlying province of the Ottoman Empire. This study illuminates aspects of Egypt's social, intellectual, and religious life in the sixteenth century, as described by the Egyptian Sufi 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha'rani, one of the last original writers before cultural decadence permeated the Arab world in the late Middle Ages. A prominent social commentator, Sha'rani reflected the intense Turkish-Egyptian struggle of the period and provided a vivid and intimate account of the Muslim world during the later medieval stage. Now in paperback, Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt attempts to give a comprehensive analysis of Sha'rani's writings.

Affective artistry on the medieval stage

Although the Brome Abraham and Isaac ends with an explicit moral directed to the audience, rhetorical analysis of the play suggests that the final exemplary concept is but one of four levels of response that the dramatist's artistry aims to evoke.

Women and the medieval stage

(1984). Women and the medieval stage. Women's Studies: Vol. 11, Women in the Middle Ages, pp. 99-113.

A Modern Analogue to Medieval Staging

ON THE FIRST SATURDAY IN OCTOBERfor the past nineteen years, the Southeast Kansas community of Humboldt (population 2,249) has sponsored an event known as the Biblesta. This celebration, consisting of a parade of Biblical floats interspersed with marching bands from area schools and followed by a free ham and bean feed, provides the folklorist with an excellent example of the genesis of a contemporary devotional folk festival.' The roots of the Biblesta are firmly fixed in the ethos of the pioneer West; the celebration is nothing more or less than folklife in

Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy by Leo Salingar

REVIEWS Leo Salingar. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Pp. x + 356. $18.00. In this learned and far-ranging study, Leo Salingar places Shake­ speare “at a meeting-place of medieval, classical and renaissance tradi­ tions” (p. 19) in order to investigate sources, influences, and artistic choices. After an introductory chapter which deals deftly with such topics as Fortune, artifice, disguise, and anomalies in the mirror concept, Salingar provides a series of chapters organized around the three tra­ ditions. Chapter 2, devoted to medieval romance, starts with three preShakespearean plays (Clyomon and Clamydes, Common Conditions, and The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune), then treats some medieval heroines, with particular emphasis upon the links between two four­ teenth-century plays (the Dutch Esmoreit and the French Oton) and The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, and ends with a section on The Comedy of Errors in relation to Apollonius of Tyre and with evidence for the survival of medieval staging. After an introductory section on artificial order and comic errors, Chapter 3 provides a lengthy treatment of the trickster figure in Aristophanes and New Comedy; the next chap­ ter starts with an historical account of the concept of Fortune and then deals with that concept in Aristophanes and New Comedy, concluding with remarks on Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Chapter 5 offers a general account of Italian comedy with detailed treatment of three plays (Gl Tngannati, Ariosto’s Suppositi, and Bibbiena’s Calandria) and dis­ cusses Shakespeare’s indebtedness, with a major section on his comic double plots. The final chapter, which deals with Shakespeare as a pro­ fessional playwright, treats such topics as wit, the play within a play, the conflict between love and law, and the importance for Shakespeare of Italian novelle. “The medieval tradition,” Salingar argues, “was Shakespeare’s start­ ing-point” with a hold “too deep to be shaken off” (p. 75). Classical comedy then provided necessary guidelines and materials, such as the “delineation of Fortune in dramatic plots, the role of the trickster in conditioning the presentation of Fortune, and the tradition of drama as an adjunct to seasonal celebrations” (p. 174); to classical comedy, more­ over, Shakespeare owed “his underlying conception of comedy as a form of theatrical art using logically connected plots to arouse and satisfy expectation and at the same time addressing itself to the spectators’ sense of irony” (p. 174). From the Italians, Shakespeare drew “a famil­ iarity with Plautus and Terence as contributors to the modern stage, a 350 Reviews 351 group of new dramatic motifs, such as that of the heroine in male dis­ guise, and, above all, a taste for varied movement in a comedy and intricate plotting” (pp. 190-91). Salingar also stresses Boccaccio’s im­ portance as “the greatest creative writer whose influence can be felt widely diffused through Shakespeare’s plays, however indirectly” (p. 323). Shakespeare was thereby “using the forms of New Comedy to reshape medieval romance,” while “creating comedies that seem aware of their place in the life of a nation, as perhaps no other comedies had been since the time of Aristophanes” (p. 325). This brief summary cannot do justice to a book which moves easily through medieval, classical, and renaissance materials, providing Sug­ gestive comments about comic traditions and astute insights into in­ dividual plays. All readers will benefit from the author’s breadth and critical skill. Yet the book’s multiplicity, its greatest strength, can also puzzle the reader. As Salingar himself points out, given Shake­ speare’s complexity as a dramatist “it is impossible, or at least, artificial, to isolate one thread in the composition of his plays from the others” (p. 190). Since the chapter divisions necessitate just such isolation of threads, there are difficulties to overcome, difficulties not always mas­ tered. For example, The Comedy of Errors is treated in some detail in three different chapters (and more briefly elsewhere), each time from a different angle, but there is no weaving together of these threads. Occasionally the chapters appear to be discrete units with little rela­ tion to each other; for example, for a fuller discussion of the term “exemplary...

Techniques of Transcendence in Medieval Drama

Techniques of Transcendence in Medieval Drama Robert Edwards Criticism of medieval drama has for the most part been Aristotelian. The categories of the Poetics as well as the struc­ ture Aristotle creates for them have shaped the manner in which not only scholars but the general audience view the plays. Im­ plicit in E. K. Chambers’ The Mediaeval Stage (1903) and Karl Young’s The Drama of the Medieval Church (1933) is a belief that the plays imitate action and character, and even so radical a study as O. B. Hardison, Jr.’s Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages (1965) recurs to Aristotelian bases. Hardison maintains that “in the ninth century the boundary . . . between religious ritual (the services of the Church) and drama did not exist. Religious ritual was the drama of the early Middle Ages and had been ever since the decline of the classical the­ ater.” As the Mass comes to be viewed as a drama by commen­ tators from the ninth century onwards, the framework of liturgy also becomes dramatic so that “in one sense, at least, the Easter liturgy is a transitional phase between the sacred drama of the Mass and liturgical drama.” “Its descending action begins with Lent. The point of crisis is reached on Good Friday, and Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday are devoted to the entombment and Resurrection, respectively.” The model for this larger struc­ ture is Gilbert Murray’s concept of the ritual form of Greek tragedy whose Aristotelian orientation Hardison calls “obvious from its terms.”! Although Hardison does not go so far as to break down his study into such parts as plot, character, thought, diction, music, and spectacle, these Aristotelian elements are consistently ap­ parent in the book. He tends to accept Aristotle’s notion of trage­ dy as the imitation of an action which is “serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude” as well as what was believed to be Aris157 158 Comparative Drama totle’s history of the development of tragedy. At the time Hardi­ son’s study was published, Gerald Else’s The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy (1967) was questioning the authenticity and accuracy of that development. Classical scholarship has moved away from the notion of tragedy’s having arisen from ritual, and this reversal should be a caution to one’s uncritical acceptance of the view that medieval drama arose directly from Church ritual. For Else, Greek tragedy arises out of certain social conditions and the genius of two playwrights—Thespis and Aeschylus. Else does not question the notion of mimesis in tragedy and only implicitly, on historical grounds, does he ques­ tion the hierarchy of the six elements of tragedy. His acceptance of the new date for the writing of The Suppliant Maidens (467 B.C.) counteracts the importance which Aristotle gives to char­ acter and conversely stresses the importance of music and spectacle .2 This reversal is even more apparent in what is thought to be an even later play, Prometheus Bound. Aristotle relegates this play to the fourth and lowest category of tragedy, the tragedy of spectacle. “The interest of such a play,” Hardison rightly notes in his commentary on the Poetics, “is its appeal, written or per­ formed, to the visual imagination.”3 Critics of medieval drama who must deal with the unique event of redemption through Christ’s death and resurrection are forced to go beyond Else’s questioning of the development of drama. They must question drama as an exclusively mimetic form and reconsider the place which Aristotle gives to spectacle. In so doing, it will pay them to view drama along the lines suggested by both phenomenology and structuralism. The absence of expressly articulated theories makes these approaches necessary to understand the affective and intrinsic features of the form. I The drama Aristotle outlines is based upon the belief that the action being imitated can be repeated. His tragedy develops according to the laws of necessity and probability, and its shape follows the demands of credibility rather than veracity. Logical syllogism takes the place of revealed truth as the measure of a work. One might find these terms acceptable for an art that...

The Use of Architectural Space in Medieval Music-Drama

Certain basic principles of medieval staging have their origin in the employment of the chancel and the nave as theatrical spaces. Fortunately, in a limited number of instances it is possible to bring together play text and the precise area for which it was conceived. Here we can reconstruct rather accurate patterns of movement by the actors, and we can determine the placement of scenic elements. Of some eight hundred texts of the music-drama which I have examined, approximately a dozen texts or groups of texts can be assigned on internal evidence to a particular church where medieval architectural details are known. 1 The rubrics of these

Illusion and Reality in the Medieval Drama

The odds are enormous in favour of the supposition that the medieval villagers who used to play in the mystery dramas were pretty poor actors. Up and down the various Christian countries of Europe there must have been thousands of Snugs and Bottoms with histrionic ambitions who were more adept at joinery and weaving than acting. It is more than probable that in these entertainments the Angel of the Annunciation was sometimes played by a saucy bit, and Christ himself by a dumpy little bumpkin. It is some such inept production that the Polish National Theatre last week chose to reenact. This regrettable company seemed intent on showing how badly simple rustics in the Middle Ages must have acted, how incapable they often must have been of communicating to their audiences the joys and sorrows, the larkings and high spirits which welled up in them on feast days.' I do not cite this excerpt from Mr. Hobson's review for what it says about the performance of the Polish National Th atre Company, which I did not have the opportunity to see. I cite it rather because it is the epitome of the misinformed and misguided criticism to which the medieval drama has so widely been subjected in our time. Despite the enlightened re-examination of medieval plays in graduate departments of literature and theatre, the popular view still holds that the medieval stage was nothing more than a crude precursor to the glorious drama of the high Renaissance. Theatre histories typically devote a few pages or a chapter at most to these primitive beginnings, and even yet the only two reasonably inclusive anthologies of the Early English Drama, by John Manly and Joseph Quincy Adams,2 unabashedly proclaim their contents as Pre-Shakespearean. I shall not take time here to challenge Mr. Hobson's erroneous supposition that the mystery plays were performed by inept amateurs before bored audiences. The research of F. M. Salter and Father Harold Gar-

Drama and Doctrine in Gods Determinations

C RITICAL OPINION has tended to link Edward Taylor with the Umorality tradition on the basis of patent similarities between medieval drama and Gods Determinations Touching His Elect.' Nathalia Wright has accordingly interpreted the poem as a recast morality play, but more recently Norman Grabo has noted Taylor's de-emphasis of drama and suggested that the poetic sequence may represent an effort at literary meditation.2 This alternative reading points to the possibility that the poem may derive, not from the morality tradition itself, but from its antecedent-the homiletic tradition of the Middle Ages. Prior to the emergence of the drama, the pulpit made dynamic use of allegorical themes which were later incorporated into miracle and morality plays and have thus become associated with the medieval stage. One such feature was the antic Devil, who enlivened countless sermons long before he became a dramatis persona. And, as the persistence of satanic imagery indicates, the homiletic tradition died hard.3 Those modes of expression used by Taylor to portray man's Fall and Redemption have precedents in the writings of sixteenthand seventeenth-century clergymen who, even in that age of nascent rationalism, still drew on their medieval heritage in an appeal to popular taste. At the same time that Gods Determinations reflects the influence of Du Bartas and Spenser and his early imitators, it bears a closer resemblance to the literature of religious instruction in the method and language of its doctrinal presentation. As Grabo points out, dialogue was a device common to devotional manuals designed for the layman. Inevitably, then, the homiletic and morality traditions

Shakespeare and the Medieval Stage

Journal Article Shakespeare and the Medieval Stage Get access William A. Armstrong William A. Armstrong (Reader in English Literature, King's CollegeUniversity of London) Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar English: Journal of the English Association, Volume 15, Issue 86, Summer 1964, Pages 46–49, https://doi.org/10.1093/english/15.86.46 Published: 01 July 1964

Mimi, Scurrae, Histriones: Entertainers of the Early Middle Ages

A good deal of the evidence for the existence of professional entertainers in the early Middle Ages was collected over a century ago in Heinrich Alt's Theater und Kirche (Berlin, 1846) and Jules de Douhet's Dictionnaire des mysteres, moralites, rites figures et ceremonies singulieres (in J. P. Migne, Nouvelle Encyclopedie Theologique, nouvelle ser., t. unique, XLIII, Paris, 1845). Further evidence was gathered and presented by Hermann Reich in his Der Mimus (Berlin, 1903) and by E. K. Chambers in The Mediaeval Stage (Oxford, 1903). Edmund Faral also dealt with this material in Les Jongleurs en France au Moyen Age (Paris, 1910). Appendix E of Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars (sixth and seventh editions and Anchor Books edition), a list of conciliar actions dealing with the clericus vagus or joculator, contains material ranging from 325 to 1370 A.D., but deals only incidentally with secular entertainers. Allardyce Nicoll, in Masks, Mimes, and Miracles (New York, 1931), presented evidence of manuscript illustrations as well as that of literary allusions. Among recent treatments of this evidence are B. Hunningher's Origin of the Theater (Amsterdam, 1955), and Sister Mary Marguerite Butler's Hrotsvitha: The Theatricality of Her Plays (New York, 1960). Evidence from glosses is presented in M. H. Marshall's Theatre in the Middle Ages: Evidence from Dictionaries and Glosses, Symposium, iv (1950), 1-39, 366-389. Recently, during reading undertaken for an entirely different purpose, I was impressed by the number of allusions to what appeared to be theatrical entertainment in writings scattered from the seventh century to the eleventh an age in which, according to my rudimentary knowledge of theatrical history, there should have been none. The assistance of experts in the period led me to the works listed above, which contained most of the allusions I had noted and many that I had not, but left a small residue of my observations which do not appear in any of these works. Moreover, it seemed that the interpretation of some of the works already noted might be more carefully examined. In this article I shall concentrate on allusions to professional entertainers before 1100. Material after that date, when used at all, is introduced only because it may throw some light on earlier practices, and makes no pretense of completeness. In considering this subject, it is necessary to screen out allusions to popular festivals and folk drama, of which Douhet presents a good many, and of which one or two are used by Nicoll, Hunningher, and Butler in such a way that the reader might take them for references to professional performances. Important as these may be to the history of the theater in general, they are not germane to the subject of this article. No one who examines the works listed above can doubt that there were rather numerous professional entertainers in western Europe during the early Middle Ages. The difficulty lies in deciding just how much of their performances could be called dramatic. If we accept the terminology of our sources in the classic sense,

From Everyman and Elckerlijc to Hofmannsthal and Kafka

ROM its first appearance on the late mediaeval stage, Everyman had the tendency to attract and to assimilate new motifs and to alter their meaning; for allegory, seemingly but a faithful ancilla of thought, tends to develop an independent life of its own. Thus Everyman, after having served religious tenets of the pre-Reformation and Reformation eras, survived into our times and is as poignant now, in this waxing atomic age, as it was in the waning Middle Ages. For the comparatist, it seems a worthwhile task to retrace the history of some of the motifs involved in the play. Not only will this disclose part of man's perennial psychology; it may even heighten aesthetic enjoyment by permitting a clearer distinction between the spontaneous and the conventional.

Mysteries' End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Stage

Mysteries' End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Stage

The Dramatic Tradition Established by the Liturgical Plays

Exactly what was the influence of the liturgical drama, and how did it show itself? A continuous tradition from the Latin church plays through the vernacular religious plays of the later middle ages has been generally recognized since the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially since the publication of Chambers' Mediaeval Stage. The only basic attack upon the accepted historical explanation is too insubstantial to be at all convincing; and our knowledge of the liturgical plays and of their relation to individual vernacular plays or groups of plays has been much increased of late, through Professor Young's presentation of the corpus of the liturgical drama, and through many special studies of French and German texts. At the same time, we must reckon with the cumulatively impressive evidence, offered by such scholars as Emile Roy, Grace Frank, Frances A. Foster, and G. R. Owst, of the use of vernacular narrative and homiletic sources in the vernacular religious plays of the middle ages. With our present fuller knowledge both of the liturgical drama and of the rich non-dramatic material which was utilized in the later plays, we need to distinguish and redefine the specifically dramatic tradition which sprang from the liturgical plays, and the manner in which it persisted.

Lxii: Clerical Drama in Lincoln Cathedral, 1318 to 1561

In 1933, while rummaging about in the mediaeval records of Lincoln, I found a whole series of new entries concerning the Church plays of Lincoln Cathedral for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Previously one could survey the few known items concerning them in the appendix to E. K. Chambers' Mediaeval Stage. One could add to these a few more details by going to Chambers' sources, Mr. A. F. Leach and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, whose Notes on Mediaeval Services in England contains a section devoted to Lincoln customs. The extant records, however, contain a consecutive series of entries which outline with remarkable fullness the drama within the Cathedral Church from 1318 to the accession of Elizabeth.

Reviews

Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship. By J. G. Frazer. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. 1905. 8vo. xi. and 309 pp. The Origin of Priesthood. By Gunnar Landtman. Skennes, Finland. 1905. 8vo. xi. and 207 pp. By F. Pollock. The Mediaeval Stage. By E. K. Chambers. Oxford: at the Clarendon Press. 2 vols. 1903. By Oliver Elton.