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.
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