28 - English drama: from ungodly ludi to sacred play

Summary

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars imagined that a dramatic tradition which had virtually disappeared with the fall of the Late Roman Empire was reintroduced into the West as an embellishment of the liturgy. Initially the interpolations were sung responses – Quem quaeritis – but by accretion they gathered dramatic qualities such as impersonation, costume and imitative gesture. These burgeoning scenes gradually evolved into more complex organisms, one result of which was that the choirs could no longer contain the action and the dramas moved first into the nave, then on to the steps and finally into the streets and on to pageant wagons. As these dramas were emerging from the church – the best example being the Jeu d’Adam which was performed on the steps – they passed into the hands of the laity, one consequence of which was that vernacular religious drama became increasingly contaminated by comic intrusions and low-life scenes. Some scholars who promoted this history expressed puzzlement that the drama should have (re-)originated in monastic choirs, given the thunderbolts directed against the theatre in the late empire and early Middle Ages. Equally puzzling was the almost total absence of an anti-theatrical polemic in the late Middle Ages after the reinvention of the drama. Gerhoh of Reichersberg and Herrad of Landsberg, both from the twelfth century, were cited by everyone as representative of what little anti-theatrical sentiment remained, and the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (early fifteenth century) was given as the only sustained polemic between the late empire and the Puritan attacks of the late sixteenth century.