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Music in Mediaeval Drama

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 1957

John Stevens
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Extract

Music in mediaeval drama is, to some extent, a ghost subject. I hope in the course of this paper to enable you to hear nearly all the surviving music from the vernacular drama of late mediaeval England—from the cycles of religious plays known variously as the Miracle Plays, the Mystery Cycles, the Corpus Christi plays. My chief endeavour will be to build up a picture of a lost musical world. But—and this is why it must be described as a ‘ghost subject’—the actual musical remains are tantalizingly small: two English songs in the ‘true-Coventry’ plays; some Latin polyphony in the York cycle; a snatch of plainsong in the Chester cycle. The paucity also of stage-directions about music in some plays (especially of the Towneley cycle) is much to be regretted. But as there are over thirty clear directions in the Chester cycle and the same number in the Hegge plays, we do not work entirely in the dark.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 84 , 1957 , pp. 81 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1957

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References

1 The liturgical drama, sung throughout to Latin texts, is excluded from present consideration. The Moralities and Interludes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are mentioned only in passing. The puzzling fragments in the actor's part-book, Shrewsbury School Library MS VI (Mus. iii. 42), also lie outside the scope of this paper. The musical text of the fragments will be published in an appendix to the forthcoming re-issue of The Non-Cycle Mystery Plays, first published as Extra Series CIV (1909) of the Early English Text Society (E.E.T.S.).Google Scholar

2 I refer throughout to the following editions of the plays: ‘Coventry’ = Hardin Craig, ed., Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, E.E.T.S. 1957 (2nd edn.)—these are the true Coventry plays; ‘Hegge’ = K. H. Block, ed., Ludus Coventriae, E.E.T.S. 1922—these are the so-called Coventry plays, now usually referred to as the Hegge or N-Town plays (probably from the Lincoln area); ‘York’ = L. T. Smith, The York Plays, 1885—a new edition of these plays is in preparation for the E.E.T.S. by Arthur Brown, with a musical appendix; ‘Chester’ = H. Deimling and G. W. Matthews, eds., The Chester Plays, E.E.T.S. 1893, 1916 (2 parts); ‘Towneley’ = G. England and A. W. Pollard, eds., The Towneley Plays, E.E.T.S. 1897, repr. 1952—otherwise known as the Wakefield cycle; ‘Cornish’ = E. Norris, ed., The Ancient Cornish Drama, 1859 (2 vols.).Google Scholar

3 York, p. 2.Google Scholar

4 Chester, p. 12. The rubric seems to refer to the Palm Sunday antiphon (Sarum Gradual, ed. W. H. Frere, p. 82). See also Hegge, p. 17.Google Scholar

5 The opposite point of view is assumed by Fletcher Collins, ‘Music in the Craft Cycles’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, xlvii, September 1932, p. 260: ‘Like the orchestra in a modern theatre they heightened the intensity of the action …’Google Scholar

6 See p. 87 below.Google Scholar

7 Chester, p. 36.Google Scholar

8 It has to be remembered that the oldest of the five full Chester MSS was not written until 1591; it seems nevertheless to represent a sound tradition (see Craig, Hardin, English Religious Drama, 1955, p. 178).Google Scholar

9 Chester, p. 367.Google Scholar

10 Hegge, pp. 80, 81.Google Scholar

11 See Southern, R., Medieval Theatre in the Round, 1957, p. 100 and plate 4 (from Jean Fouquet's miniature of the martyrdom of St. Apollonia).Google Scholar

12 Hegge, p. 108. For the sequence, see Young, Karl, Drama of the Medieval Church, 1933. ii. 180 (footnote 3).Google Scholar

13 Hegge, p. 199.Google Scholar

14 Chester, pp. 326–9, 367–9, 381, 427, 445.Google Scholar

15 Hegge, p. 107—no doubt a visual spectacle of some sort.Google Scholar

16 See p. 93 below.Google Scholar

16a But see the Cornish plays, i. 43—Beelzebub and Satan; ii. 175ff.—the same, with Lucifer and Tulfric; and also the Cornish saint's play St. Meriasek (ed. Whitley Stokes, 1872), p. 198—torturers sing. The music of hell was, of course, discord—clamor vel sonitus materialis magnus (see Chester, p. 323—Harrowing of Hell), i.e. probably pots and pans.Google Scholar

17 York, p. 479. This may be, as Mr. J. R. Moore (Journal of English and Germanic Studies, xxii, 1923) has suggested, a practical demonstration of the truth, ‘the devils also believe and tremble’. On the other hand, it may simply mean that four angels, all the play requires, were not sufficient to sing a five-part antiphon.Google Scholar

18 Towneley, p. 294. And in the Last Judgment plays we may presume that the saved souls joined in the ‘mirth and lovyng’ which welcomed them to heavenly bliss.Google Scholar

19 Coventry, pp. 9–10.Google Scholar

20 Coventry, p. 10 (and see p. 91 below for music).Google Scholar

21 Coventry, p. 12.Google Scholar

22 Chester, p. 58. An anthem beginning with these words was popular in Elizabethan times.Google Scholar

23 Cornish plays, ii. 59ff.Google Scholar

24 Waterhouse, O., ed., Non-Cycle Mystery Plays, E.E.T.S. 1909, p. 10.Google Scholar

25 York, p. 207.Google Scholar

26 Hegge, p. 152.Google Scholar

27 Hegge, p. 174.Google Scholar

28 Hegge, p. 176 (translated).Google Scholar

29 The place of music in the moralities and interludes is further discussed in the author's forthcoming book, Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (Methuen). An account of music, not in but before and after, the miracle plays, in the form of jigs and ‘after-dances’, can be read in J. R. Moore's article, ‘Miracle plays, Minstrels and Jigs’, P.M.L.A. xlviii, 1933, p. 943 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30 See p. 83 above, footnote 5.Google Scholar

31 This stage-direction occurs in the play of Christ's Burial and Resurrection which was published in The Digby Plays (ed. F. J. Furnivall), E.E.T.S. e.s.lxx, 1896 (p. 223). It is not a ‘Digby’ play, however (see Craig, Religious Drama, p. 311).Google Scholar

32 Nan Cooke Carpenter, ‘Music in the Secunda Pastorum’, in Speculum xxvi, 1951, p. 696ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 A recent transcription of the shepherds’ song is given by J. P. Cutts in ‘The Second Coventry Carol’, Renaissance News, x, Spring 1957, p. 3ff. Contrary to what Mr. Cutts claims (‘Neither shepherds’ song has received any attention …’), the song has been several times performed and once broadcast. (See also Richard L. Greene's correction in the Autumn number).Google Scholar

34 Reconstructed from T. Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries, 1825, p. 115. The MS was burnt in 1879.Google Scholar

35 Ibid. p. 118.Google Scholar

36 Ibid. p. 116–7.Google Scholar

37 Towneley, pp. 137, 113.Google Scholar

38 See note 32.Google Scholar

38a Chester, p. 147ff.Google Scholar

39 Chester, p. 151: were the ‘others helping them’ on or off the stage?Google Scholar

40 Sarum Gradual (ed. Frere), p. 227.Google Scholar

41 Hegge play no. 41, p. 354ff.Google Scholar

42 For a summary of the play see Craig, Religious Drama, p. 233.Google Scholar

43 In L. T. Smith's edition of the York plays three pages of the music were reproduced in facsimile, one only being in colour. The transcriptions of the songs and the note on the music by W. H. Cummings cannot be relied upon.Google Scholar

44 Sarian Gradual (ed. Frere), p. 227. See also C. F. Hoffman on the source of the words in this play in Modern Language Notes lxv, 1950, p. 236ff. For help with the liturgical side of this paper I wish to thank my friend Br. Michael Waters of Downing College.Google Scholar