Mystery plays

In the late Middle Ages, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, townspeople often watched plays.  Some were bawdy, some were religious.  In an era centuries before TV or movies, they were all highly entertaining.

There had been plenty of plays in the ancient world.  The Greeks had written them for religious festivals, retelling old legends or tales of the gods, sometimes as comedy, more frequently as tragedy.  The Romans had continued in the Greek tradition, although everyone now agrees their weren’t nearly as good (the Romans of course would have disagreed).

Plays disappeared in the early Middle Ages, but they started up again in the tenth century when a woman started writing them, Hrotsvitha of the German nunnery of Gandersheim.  Hrotsvitha wrote both poems and plays, as well as some historical works (such as how Gandersheim was founded).  Some of her plays were comedies, written in imitation of Roman playwrights (especially Terence), but most were religious.

These plays retold Bible stories or else presented moral stories, such as a young woman, who wanted to preserve her virginity for Christ, arranging for her would-be suitor to decide to become a monk himself.  Scholars debate whether Hrotsvitha’s plays were performed during her lifetime, but there is no reason to think that they were not, other than the assumption that nuns never did anything interesting.

For the next few centuries, there are infrequent mentions of modest plays, usually taking place in monasteries.  For example, on Easter morning a few monks might put on white veils, to suggest they were women, and act out going to Christ’s tomb and being told by an angel, “He is risen.” 

Sometimes these dramas would be acted for the congregation as well as the monks; if very popular they might even have to be moved outside, which bothered the bishops.

But in the late Middle Ages so-called mystery plays appeared, much more public events.  They were not “mysteries” in the sense of a whodunnit, but rather in the sense of revealing a great and marvelous religious event.  They were put on by guilds of players.  The English mystery plays are the best known, but they were found throughout Europe.

These plays might be put on over a period of days during great religious festivals.  They would retell a well known Bible story, such as the fall of Adam and Eve, or the life of Mary Magdalene.  They were written in the vernacular, so that everyone could understand them, and were generally in verse.  The plays added a human dimension to the basic biblical account.  For example, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham has been told by God to sacrifice his son, young Isaac becomes understandably upset when he figures out what his father is planning (don’t worry, the story ends happily when an angel shows up with a sheep to be sacrificed instead).

Mystery plays were ended in England during the Protestant Reformation as “too Catholic,” but one must assume Shakespeare was influenced by them.


© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on medieval entertainment and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.