[Bibliographical Note.—The best general account of the vernacular religious drama of Europe is that of W. Creizenach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas (vol. i. 1893), Books 2-4; and this may be supplemented by K. Hase, Das geistliche Schauspiel (1858, trans. A. W. Jackson, 1880); R. Proelss, Geschichte des neueren Dramas (1880-3), vol. i. ch. 1; C. Davidson, English Mystery Plays (1892), and G. Gregory Smith, The Transition Period (1900), ch. 7. There is also the cumbrous work of J. L. Klein, Geschichte des Dramas (1865-86). The nearest approach to a general bibliography is F. H. Stoddard, References for Students of Miracle Plays and Mysteries (1887).—For Germany may be added R. Froning, Das Drama des Mittelalters (1890-1); K. Pearson, The German Passion Play (in The Chances of Death and Other Studies in Evolution, 1897, vol. ii); L. Wirth, Die Oster- und Passionsspiele bis zum 16. Jahrhundert (1889); J. E. Wackernell, Altdeutsche Passionsspiele aus Tirol, 1897; R. Heinzel, Beschreibung des geistlichen Schauspiels im deutschen Mittelalter (1898), and the articles by F. Vogt on Mittelhochdeutsche Literatur, § 73, and H. Jellinghaus on Mittelniederdeutsche Literatur, § 5, in H. Paul, Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, vol. ii (2nd ed. 1901). F. Vogt gives a few additional recent references. Older works are F. J. Mone, Schauspiele des Mittelalters (1846); H. Reidt, Das geistliche Schauspiel des Mittelalters in Deutschland (1868), and E. Wilken, Geschichte der geistlichen Spiele in Deutschland (1872). Many of the books named print texts. Lists of others are given by Pearson and by Heinzel, and full bibliographical notices by K. Goedeke, Grundriss zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung (2nd ed.), vol. i (1884), §§ 67, 92, and vol. ii (1886), § 145.—For France, L. Petit de Julleville, Les Mystères (1880), is excellent and exhaustive, and contains many bibliographical references, although the ‘Liste des ouvrages à consulter’ intended as part of the work seems never to have been printed. M. de Julleville is also the writer of the article on Théâtre religieux in the Hist. de la Langue et de la Littérature françaises, vol. ii (1896). G. Gröber’s article on Französische Litteratur, §§ 129, 362 in his Grundriss der romanischen Philologie, vol. ii (1901-2), brings the subject up to date and adds some recent authorities. Mortensen, Medeltidsdramat i Frankrike (1899), is beyond my range. G. Paris, La Littérature française au moyen âge (2nd ed., 1890), is a brief summary, and L. Clédat, Le Théâtre au moyen âge (1897), a useful popular account. G. Bapst, Essai sur l’Histoire du Théâtre (1893), is good on matters of stage arrangement. Older works are O. Le Roy, Études sur les Mystères (1837), and J. de Douhet, Dictionnaire des Mystères (1854). Only fragments of C. Magnin’s investigations are available in the Journal des Savants (1846-7) and the Journal général de l’Instruction publique (1834-6). Texts are in A. Jubinal, Mystères du 15ᵉ siècle (1837); Monmerqué et Michel, Théâtre français au moyen âge (1842); E. Fournier, Le Théâtre français avant la Renaissance (1872), and the series published by the Société des Anciens Textes français. The most recent text of Adam is that by K. Grass, Das Adamsspiel (1891). M. Wilmotte, Les Passions allemandes du Rhin dans leur Rapport avec l’ancien Théâtre français (1898), deals with the interrelations of the French and German texts. C. Hastings, Le Théâtre français et anglais (1900, trans. 1901), is a compilation of little merit.—For Italy there is A. D’Ancona, Origini del Teatro italiano (2nd ed. 1891), with texts in the same writer’s Sacre Rappresentazioni (1872), in Monaci, Appunti per la Storia del Teatro italiano (Rivista di Filologia Romana, vols. i, ii), and in F. Torraca, Il Teatro italiano dei Secoli xiii, xiv, e xv (1885).—For Spain, A. F. von Schack, Geschichte der dramatischen Litteratur und Kunst in Spanien (1845-54), and G. Baist, Spanische Litteratur, §§ 19, 63, in Gröber’s Grundriss, vol. ii (1897).—For the minor Romance dramatic literatures, Provençal, Catalan, Portuguese, I must be content to refer to the last-named authority, and for that of Holland to the similar Grundriss of H. Paul.]

The evolution of the liturgic play described in the last two chapters may be fairly held to have been complete about the middle of the thirteenth century. The condition of any further advance was that the play should cease to be liturgic. The following hundred years are a transition period. During their course the newly-shaped drama underwent a process which, within the limits imposed by the fact that its subject-matter remained essentially religious, may be called secularization. Already, when Hilarius could write plays to serve indifferently for use at Matins or at Vespers, the primitive relation of repraesentatio to liturgy had been sensibly weakened. By the middle of the fourteenth century it was a mere survival. From ecclesiastical the drama had become popular. Out of the hands of the clergy in their naves and choirs, it had passed to those of the laity in their market-places and guild-halls. And to this formal change corresponded a spiritual or literary one, in the reaction of the temper of the folk upon the handling of the plays, the broadening of their human as distinct from their religious aspect. In their origin officia for devotion and edification, they came, by an irony familiar to the psychologist, to be primarily spectacula for mirth, wonder, and delight.

It is, however, the formal change with which I am here mainly concerned; and of this it will be the object of the present chapter to trace as briefly as possible the outlines. The principal factor is certainly that tendency to expansion and coalescence in the plays which has been already seen at work in the production of such elaborate pieces as the Quem quaeritis of the Tours or that of the Benedictbeuern manuscript, the Fleury Stella, the Rouen Prophetae and the Antichristus. This culminates in the formation of those great dramatic cycles of which the English Corpus Christi plays are perhaps the most complete examples. But before we can approach these, we must consider a little further the independent development of the Easter and Christmas groups.

It is noteworthy that, during the period now under discussion, the importance of Christmas falls markedly into the background when compared with that of Easter; and a reason for this will presently suggest itself. The Stella, indeed, as such, appears to have almost reached its term⁠[244]; for such further growth as there is we must look chiefly to the Prophetae. The process by which little episodic dramas, as of Balaam and Nebuchadnezzar at Rouen, bud out from the stem of the Prophetae, is one capable of infinite extension. By 1204 the play had found its way to Riga, on the extreme border of European civilization, and the ludus prophetarum ordinatissimus there performed included scenes from the wars of Gideon, David, and Herod⁠[245]. The text of the Riga play is unfortunately not preserved, but the famous Norman-French Ordo repraesentationis Adae is an example of a Prophetae, in which the episodes, no longer confined to the stories of the prophets in the stricter sense, have outgrown and cast into the shade the original intention⁠[246]. Most things about the Adam are in dispute. Scholars differ as to whether the manuscript belongs to the twelfth or the thirteenth century, and as to whether it is the work of a Norman or of an Anglo-Norman scribe. The piece is manifestly incomplete, but how far incomplete it is hard to say. What we have consists of three sections. There is a long play of nearly six hundred lines on the Fall and Expulsion from Paradise, in which the speakers are Adam and Eve, the Figura of God and the Diabolus. Then comes a much shorter one of Cain and Abel; and finally a Prophetae, which breaks off after the part of Nebuchadnezzar. Of the general character of this interesting piece something further will be said presently, but the point to notice here is that, although Adam and Abel may of course be regarded as prophetic types of Christ, if not exactly prophets, yet there is a real extension of the dramatic content of the Prophetae in the prefixing to it of a treatment of so momentous a subject as the Fall⁠[247]. For with the addition of the Fall to the already dramatized Redemption, the framework of a structural unity was at once provided for the great cosmic drama of the future. And the important motive seems to have been still further emphasized in a lost play performed at Regensburg in 1195, which treated, besides the Prophets and the Creation and Fall of Man, the Creation of the Angels and the Fall of Lucifer⁠[248].

Yet another step towards the completion of the Christmas cycle was taken when the Prophetae and the Stella were brought together in a single drama. Such a merging is represented by two related texts from German sources⁠[249]. One is from a fourteenth-century manuscript now at St. Gall⁠[250]. The structure is of the simplest. The setting of the pseudo-Augustine sermon has altogether disappeared. Eight prophets deliver a speech apiece, announcing their own identities after a naïve fashion—Ich bin der alte Balaam, and so forth—which strongly recalls the ‘folk’ or ‘mummers’’ plays. Then follows without break a Stella, whose scenes range from the Marriage of the Virgin to the Death of Herod. Far more elaborate is the Christmas play found in the famous repertory of the scholares vagantes from Benedictbeuern⁠[251]. A peculiarity of this is that for the first time Augustine appears in propria persona. He presides over the prophecies, taking the place of the Precentor of the Limoges Prophetae, and the Appellatores or Vocatores of Laon and Rouen. The only prophets are Isaiah, Daniel, the Sibyl, Aaron, and Balaam, and there is once more a special episode for Balaam’s ass.

‘Quinto loco procedat Balaam sedens in asina et cantans:

vadam, vadam, ut maledicam populo huic.

Cui occurrat Angelus evaginato gladio dicens:

cave, cave ne quicquam aliud quam tibi dixero loquaris.

Et asinus cui insidet Balaam perterritus retrocedat. Postea recedat angelus et Balaam cantet hoc:

orietur stella ex Iacob, etc.’

A long disputatio follows between Augustine, an Archisynagogus, and the prophets, in which at one point no less a person intervenes than the Episcopus Puerorum, affording an interesting example of that interrelation between the religious plays and the festivities of the triduum and the Feast of Fools, about which something has already been said⁠[252]. Presently the prophets retire and sit in locis suis propter honorem ludi. The Stella extends from the Annunciation to the Flight into Egypt. Here the original play seems to have ended; but a later writer has added a scene in Egypt, in which the idols fall at the approach of the Holy Family, and some fragments adapted from the Antichristus, and hardly worked up into anything that can be called a scene.

The form of Christmas play, then, characteristic of the transition century, consists of a version of the Prophetae extended at the beginning by a dramatic treatment of the Fall, or extended at the end by the absorption of the Stella. It so happens that we do not, during the period in question, find examples in which both extensions occur together. But this double amplification would only be the slightest step in advance, and may perhaps be taken for granted. The Rouen Mystère de l’Incarnation et la Nativité of 1474 offers, at a much later date, precisely the missing type⁠[253].

The Easter cycle, also, received memorable accretions during the period. The Quem quaeritis of the Tours manuscript, it will be remembered, included a series of scenes beginning with the Setting of the Watch before the Sepulchre, and ending with the Incredulity of Thomas. Important additions had still to be made, even within the limits of this cadre. One was a more complete treatment of the Resurrection itself through the introduction of the figure of Christ stepping with the labarum out of the sepulchre, in place of a mere symbolical indication of the mystery by the presence of angels with lighted candles and the dismay of the soldiers⁠[254]. Another, closely related to the Resurrection, was the scene known as the Harrowing of Hell. This was based upon the account of the Descensus Christi ad Inferos, the victory over Satan, and the freeing from limbo of Adam and the other Old Testament Fathers, which forms part of the apocryphal Gospel of Nichodemus⁠[255]. The narrative makes use of that Tollite portas passage from the twenty-fourth Psalm, which we have already found adapted to the use of more than one semi-dramatic ceremonial⁠[256], and naturally this found its way into the Harrowing of Hell, together with the so-called canticum triumphale, a song of welcome by the imprisoned souls:

‘Advenisti, desirabilis, quem exspectabamus in tenebris, ut educeres hac nocte vinculatos de claustris.

te nostra vocabant suspiria.

te larga requirebant lamenta.

tu factus es spes desperatis, magna consolatio in tormentis.’

I cannot share the view of those who look upon the East Midland English Harrowing of Hell as intended for dramatic representation. The prologues found in two of the three manuscripts leave it clear that it was for recitation. It is in fact of the nature of an ‘estrif’ or débat, and may be compared with an Anglo-Saxon poem of the eighth or tenth century on the same subject⁠[257]. But there is evidence that the scene had found its way into the Easter cycle at least by the beginning of the thirteenth century, for it occurs amongst the fragments of a play of that date from Kloster Muri; and in later versions it assumed a considerable prominence⁠[258].

The liturgical drama proper abstained in the main from any strictly dramatic representation of the Passion. The nearest approach to such a thing is in the dialogued versions of the Planctus Mariae and in the Benedictbeuern Ludus breviter de Passione, which extends very slightly beyond these. The central event of the transition period is, therefore, the growth side by side with the Quem quaeritis of a Passion play, which in the end rather absorbs than is absorbed by it. A marked advance in this direction is shown in an Anglo-Norman fragment, probably written in the twelfth century, which includes, not indeed the Crucifixion itself, but the Descent from the Cross, the Healing of Longinus, and the Burial of Christ⁠[259]. The first recorded Passion play is in Italy. It took place at Siena about 1200⁠[260]. In 1244 the Passion and Resurrection were played together at Padua⁠[261]. The earliest text of a Passion play is contained in the Benedictbeuern manuscript⁠[262]. It opens with the Calling of Andrew and Peter, the Healing of the Blind, Zacchaeus and the Entry into Jerusalem. Then follows a long episode of Mary Magdalen. She is represented with her lover, buying cosmetics of a Mercator—we have had the Mercator in the Quem quaeritis and in the Sponsus—and with a profane song upon her lips:

She is converted in a dream, puts on black, buys ointments from the same Mercator, and adores the Lord in the house of Simon. Then come, far more briefly treated, the Raising of Lazarus, the Betrayal by Judas, the Last Supper, the Mount of Olives, the Passion itself, from the Taking in Gethsemane to the Crucifixion. The introduction here of some planctus Mariae points to the genesis of the drama, which closes with the Begging of the Body of Christ by Joseph of Arimathaea. And so, at a blow, as it were, the content of the Easter play is doubled. Certain episodes, such as the Conversion of Mary Magdalen and the Raising of Lazarus had, as we know, received an independent dramatic treatment; but in the main the play before us, or its source, bears the character of a deliberate composition on the lines of the pre-existing Quem quaeritis. That it was to be followed in representation by a Quem quaeritis may perhaps be taken for granted. Indeed there is one personage, the wife of the Mercator, who is named in a list at the beginning, but has no part in the text as it stands⁠[263]. She may have come into the Benedictbeuern Quem quaeritis, of which a fragment only survives, and this may have been intended for use, as might be convenient, either with the Ludus breviter de Passione, or with the longer text now under consideration. At all events, Passion and Resurrection are treated together in two slightly later texts, one from the south of France⁠[264], the other from St. Gall⁠[265]. The St. Gall Passion play takes the action back to the beginning of the missionary life of Christ, giving the Marriage at Cana, the Baptism, and the Temptation. It also includes a Harrowing of Hell.

Certain forms of the Passion play, as the conjoint Passion and Resurrection may now be termed, show an approximation to the type of the Christmas play. It is obvious that the Fall and the Prophetae would be as proper a prologue to the Passion which completes the Atonement as to the Nativity which begins it. And the presence of Adam and other Old Testament characters in the Harrowing of Hell would be the more significant if in some earlier scene they had visibly been haled there. The first trace of these new elements is in the St. Gall play, where the Augustine of the Prophetae is introduced to speak a prologue. A long Frankfort play of the fourteenth century, of which unfortunately only the stage directions and actors’ cues are preserved, carries the process further⁠[266]. Again Augustine acts as presenter. A Prophetae begins the performance, which ends with the Ascension, a Disputatio Ecclesiae et Synagogae and the baptizing of the incredulous Jews by Augustine. On the other hand, the Fall forms the first part of an early fourteenth-century Passion play from Vienna⁠[267]. Both the Fall of Lucifer and that of Adam and Eve are included, and there is a supplementary scene in hell, into which the souls of a usurer, a monk, a robber, and a sorceress are successively brought. Lucifer refuses to have anything to do with the monk, an early use of the Tomlinson motive.

The dramatic evolution is now within measurable distance of the ‘cosmic’ type finally presented by the English Corpus Christi plays. Two further steps are necessary: the juxtaposition of the Nativity and Passion scenes behind their common Old Testament prologue, and the final winding up of the action by the extension of it from the Ascension to the second coming of the Christ in the Last Judgement. The eschatological scenes of the Sponsus and the Antichristus are already available for such an epilogue. That the whole of this vast framework was put together by the beginning of the fourteenth century may be inferred from the notices of two performances, in 1298 and 1303 respectively, at Cividale⁠[268]. The first included the Passion, Resurrection, Ascension, Advent of the Holy Spirit, and Advent of Christ to Judgement: the second added to these the Creation, Annunciation, Nativity, with much else, and the Antichrist. Any further development could now be merely episodic. The text could be amplified at the fancy of the individual writer, or upon the suggestion of the great epic narratives, such as the Cursor Mundi, the Passional, the Erlösung⁠[269]. An infinity of new scenes could be added from the Old Testament⁠[270], from the apocryphal gospels and acts, from the historic narratives of the vengeance of the Crucified One upon Rome and Jewry⁠[271]. But beyond the limits of the fixed cadre it was now impossible to go, for these were coincident with the span of time and eternity.

It is now necessary to consider briefly some modifications in the general character of the religious plays which accompanied or resulted from this great expansion of their scope. These all tend towards that process of secularization, that relaxing of the close bonds between the nascent drama and religious worship, which it is the especial object of this chapter to illustrate. Of capital importance is the transference of the plays from the interior of the church to its precincts, to the graveyard or the neighbouring market-place. This must have been primarily a matter of physical necessity. The growing length of the plays, the increasing elaboration of their setting, made it cumbrous and difficult to accommodate them within the walls. It is a big step from the early Quem quaeritis, Pastores or Stella, with their simple mises-en-scène of sepulchrum and praesepe to the complicated requirements, say, of the Fleury group, the tabernaculum in similitudinem castelli Emaus for the Peregrini, the half-dozen loca, domus, or sedes demanded by the Suscitatio Lazari or the Conversio Pauli. Still more exigent is the Antichristus with its templum domini and its seven sedes regales, and its space in between for marchings and counter-marchings and the overthrowing of kings. Yet for a long time the church proved sufficient. The Tours Quem quaeritis and some, if not all, of the Fleury plays were demonstrably played in the church. So was the Rouen Prophetae, and an allusion of Gerhoh of Reichersberg makes it extremely probable that so was the Antichristus⁠[272]. One must conceive, I think, of the performances as gradually spreading from choir to nave, with the domus, loca, or sedes set at intervals against the pillars, while the people crowded to watch in the side aisles. It is in the twelfth century that the plays first seek ampler room outside the church. Of the transition plays dealt with in the present chapter, the Adam, the Benedictbeuern Christmas play, the Anglo-Norman Resurrection, were certainly intended for the open, and the contrary cannot be affirmed in any case with the same assurance. Again, the Riga Prophetae of 1204 was in media Riga, the Padua Passion play of 1244 was in a meadow, the Pratum Vallis, while in England an early thirteenth-century biographer of St. John of Beverley records a miracle wrought at a Resurrection play in the churchyard of the minster.

Of the type of performance now rendered possible, a very good notion is given by the full stage directions of the Adam. These are so valuable a document for the history of stage management that I must take leave to excerpt from them somewhat liberally. The opening rubric recalls at once the minute stage directions of Ibsen and the counsel to the players in Hamlet.

‘A Paradise is to be made in a raised spot, with curtains and cloths of silk hung round it at such a height that persons in the Paradise may be visible from the shoulders upwards. Fragrant flowers and leaves are to be set round about, and divers trees put therein with hanging fruit, so as to give the likeness of a most delicate spot. Then must come the Saviour clothed in a dalmatic, and Adam and Eve be brought before him. Adam is to wear a red tunic and Eve a woman’s robe of white, with a white silk cloak; and they are both to stand before the Figure, Adam the nearer with composed countenance, while Eve appears somewhat more modest. And the Adam must be well trained when to reply and to be neither too quick nor too slow in his replies. And not only he, but all the personages must be trained to speak composedly, and to fit convenient gesture to the matter of their speech. Nor must they foist in a syllable or clip one of the verse, but must enounce firmly and repeat what is set down for them in due order. Whosoever names Paradise is to look and point towards it.’

After a lectio and a chant by the choir, the dialogue begins. The Figura instructs Adam and Eve as to their duties and inducts them into Paradise.

‘Then the Figure must depart to the church and Adam and Eve walk about Paradise in honest delight. Meanwhile the demons are to run about the stage (per plateas), with suitable gestures, approaching the Paradise from time to time and pointing out the forbidden fruit to Eve, as though persuading her to eat it. Then the Devil is to come and address Adam.’

The diabolus thinks he is prevailing upon Adam. He joins the other demons and make sallies about the plateae. Then he returns hylaris et gaudens to the charge. But he fails.

‘Then, sadly and with downcast countenance, he shall leave Adam, and go to the doors of hell, and hold council with the other demons. Thereafter he shall make a sally amongst the people, and then approach Paradise on Eve’s side, addressing her with joyful countenance and insinuating (blandiens) manner.’

Eve, too, is hard to persuade, and is scolded by Adam for listening to the diabolus. But when a serpens artificiose compositus rises hard by the trunk of the forbidden tree, she lends her ear, is won over, takes the apple and gives it to Adam.

‘Then Adam is to eat part of the apple; and after eating it he shall immediately recognize his sin and debase himself. He must now be out of sight of the people, and shall put off his solemn raiment, and put on poor raiment sewn together of fig-leaves, and with an air of extreme dolour shall begin his lament.’

When the Figure ‘wearing a stole’ comes again, Adam and Eve hide in a corner of Paradise, and when called upon stand up, ‘not altogether erect, but for shame of their sin somewhat bowed and very sad.’ They are driven out, and an angel with a radiant sword is put at the gate of Paradise. The Figure returns to the church.

‘Then Adam shall have a spade and Eve a hoe, and they shall begin to till the soil and sow corn therein. And when they have sown, they shall go and sit down a while, as if wearied with toil, and anon look tearfully at Paradise, beating their breasts. Meanwhile shall come the devil and shall plant thorns and thistles in their tillage, and avoid. And when Adam and Eve come to their tillage and see the thorns and thistles sprung up, they shall be smitten with violent grief and shall throw themselves on the earth and sit there, beating their breasts and thighs and betraying grief by their gestures. And Adam shall begin a lament.’

Now the last scene is at hand.

‘Then shall come the devil and three or four devils with him, carrying in their hands chains and iron fetters, which they shall put on the necks of Adam and Eve. And some shall push and others pull them to hell; and hard by hell shall be other devils ready to meet them, who shall hold high revel (tripudium) at their fall. And certain other devils shall point them out as they come, and shall snatch them up and carry them into hell; and there shall they make a great smoke arise, and call aloud to each other with glee in their hell, and clash their pots and kettles, that they may be heard without. And after a little delay the devils shall come out and run about the stage; but some shall remain in hell.’

The shorter play of Cain and Abel is similarly conceived. The sacrifices are offered on two great stones ‘which shall have been made ready for the purpose’; and at the end of the performance the devils hale off Cain and Abel also to hell ‘beating Cain often; but Abel they shall lead more gently.’ The prophets, who have been prepared in a secret spot, now advance one by one and deliver their prophecies. Their appearance is described much as in the earlier Prophetae, and it is noted that each in turn at the finish of his harangue is to be led off to hell by the devils.

Unless the Adam extended much beyond the text left to us, a comparatively small number of loca would suffice for its representation. The contemporary Anglo-Norman Resurrection play required thirteen, as is set out at length in a versified prologue:

I have ventured to arrange these lius (loca) and mansions (domus) or estals (sedes), upon the indications of the prologue, in the following plan:

And I would point out that such a scheme is simply a continuation of the arrangement down the choir and nave of a church suggested above⁠[273]. The crucifix is where it would stand in the church, above the altar. The place of the monument corresponds to that most usual for the sepulchrum on the north side of the chancel. The positions of heaven and hell are those in the former case of the stairs up to the rood-loft, in the latter of the stairs down to the crypt; and what, in a church, should serve for hell and heaven but crypt and rood-loft⁠[274]? The Galilee answers to the porch at the west end of the church, which we know to have been so called⁠[275]; and the castle of Emmaus stands in the middle of the nave, just as it did in the Fleury Peregrini. With my conjectural plan may be compared this actual plan of a sixteenth-century stage from Donaueschingen, in which a similar principle is apparent, the three divisions formed by cross-barriers corresponding to the three divisions of a church—sanctuary, choir, nave⁠[276].

The Anglo-Norman Resurrection play was pretty clearly out of doors⁠[277]; and the double line of sedes may be thought of as stretching from the west door of the church right across the market-place. In Adam the Figura comes and goes from and to the church, which thus serves for a ciel; in the Benedictbeuern Christmas play, the chair of Augustine is set in fronte ecclesiae. This arrangement, also, can be paralleled from later plays, both French and German. At Freiburg in 1504 the stage was built across the cathedral yard from the south door to the Kaufhaus, a space of some 110 feet long⁠[278]. At Rouen, in 1474, the establies went across the market-place from the Axe and Crown to the Angel⁠[279]. It must not, however, be supposed that the rectangular stage survived as the invariable type. In particular a round type was sometimes preferred. The Cornish guary-plays were given in rounds, and a round is figured in a fifteenth-century miniature by Jean Fouquet, representing a play of Saint Apollonia⁠[280].

I have spoken of a stage, but I am not sure that there was any stage in the sense of a platform. There is certainly no such scaffold in Fouquet’s miniature, and the plateae of the Fleury Suscitatio Lazari and the Adam are probably only the open spaces kept free for the actors between the sedes⁠[281]. In the Adam the devils are able to make sallies from the plateae amongst the spectators. The latter probably crowded upon barriers between the sedes. In the miniature, however, the sedes stand close together and are considerably raised, with ladders running up to them. The spectators stand beneath. The prologue to the Anglo-Norman Resurrection speaks of la gent as seated, and possibly raised scaffolds for the audience were already in use. These were certainly known later, and the descriptions of some of them as no less than nine stories high have given rise to an erroneous theory that the plays were performed upon a many-storied stage⁠[282]. It is clear that this was not really the case. All the sedes were on the same level, except that, for greater dignity, the Calvary, the Heaven, the Paradise might be, as in Adam, loco eminentiore, and that the infernum or hell, conventionally represented by the head and open gullet of a monstrous dragon, was low down, as if in the bowels of the earth⁠[283]. It should be added that, as early as the first quarter of the twelfth century, plays had begun to make their way from the church, if not into the open, at any rate into buildings of domestic use. The authority for this is Gerhoh of Reichersberg, who speaks of performances in the refectory of Augsburg, when he was magister scolae there about 1123⁠[284]. Some of the Fleury or other early plays may conceivably have been intended for the refectory.

The expansion of the cycles caused difficulties of time, as well as of space. Without a compression of manner alien to the long-winded Middle Ages, it was sometimes impossible to get the whole of the matter to be treated within the limits of a single day. The problem was amenable to more than one solution. The performance could be spread over two or more sittings. The first recorded example of such an arrangement is at Cividale in 1298⁠[285], but it is one that would naturally suggest itself, especially for the Easter cycle, which fell naturally enough into the two dramas of Passion and Resurrection, from which, indeed, it sprang. In the Frankfort cue-book of the fourteenth century, it is carefully noted, that if the audience are being kept too long, the rectores of the play shall defer the Resurrection to a second day⁠[286]. Another device, which does not occur so early, was to divide the cycle into parts and play them in successive years. This method was adopted with the play of the Seven Joys of Mary at Brussels⁠[287], and English examples will be found in a later chapter⁠[288].

The cycles required in many cases a larger number of actors than the ecclesiastical bodies, even with the aid of wandering clerks and the cloister schools, could supply. It was necessary to press the laity into the service. The Easter play, of which the thirteenth-century anchoress Wilburgis was disappointed, was acted tam a clero quam a populo⁠[289]. It was a further step in the same direction when the laity themselves took over the control and financing of plays. For this one must look mainly to that most important element in mediaeval town life, the guilds. Just as the Feast of Fools passed from the hands of the clergy into those of the sociétés joyeuses, so did the religious drama into those of more serious confraternities. The burgenses of Cahors, who in 1290 and 1302 played a ludum de miraculis beati Marcialis in the graveyard of St. Martial of Limoges, not improbably belonged to a guild formed to do honour to the patron⁠[290]. The primary purpose of such guilds as these was devotional, and if they acted plays, it was doubtless with the countenance and assistance of the clergy to whose church they were affiliated. But those more secular and literary guilds, the puys, also undertook to act religious plays no less than sotties and farces; and in them it may be suspected that the influence of the clergy would have to contend shrewdly with that of the minstrels⁠[291]. It is not surprising to come in time upon signs of a rivalry between lay and clerical actors. Thus, in 1378, the scholars of St. Paul’s are said to have presented a petition to Richard II, praying him to prohibit a play by some ‘unexpert people’ of the History of the Old Testament, a subject which they themselves had prepared at great expense for the ensuing Christmas. It may have been some similar dispute which led about the same date to the formation of the Parisian Confrérie de la Passion, which received from Charles VI a privilege to perform in and about the city, and became a model for many similar confréries throughout France. The charter bears the date of 1402. In 1398 the provost of Paris seems to have been moved to forbid dramatic performances without special sanction in the city or suburbs, a prohibition which, by the way, was flouted on the day of its proclamation at Saint-Maur. Exactly what led to this interposition of authority is not clear; but it probably induced the confrérie, who may have had a previous less formal existence, to apply for their privilege⁠[292]. The confrérie de la Passion seem to have acted, as a rule, in closed rooms. It is not unlikely that the puys did the same.

The altered conditions of representation naturally reacted upon the style and temper of the plays themselves. This is not a subject that can be discussed in detail here, but a few points may be briefly noted. The first is the gradual substitution of vernacular tongues for the Latin of the liturgical drama. This was almost inevitable, where laymen performed to a lay audience. But the liturgical drama itself did not absolutely exclude the vernacular. In the Sponsus, and in the Suscitatio Lazari and the Nicholas play of Hilarius, fragments of French are inserted, just as they are in the ‘farced’ epistles used at the feasts of certain saints, notably at that of St. Stephen⁠[293]. It was a step further when in the fourteenth century the nuns of Origny Ste.-Benoîte rewrote their liturgical Quem quaeritis, leaving indeed some of the more solemn parts, such as the dialogue of the Maries with the angel, or that of the Magdalen with the risen Christ, in Latin, but turning the rest into French⁠[294]. Such an arrangement as this of Origny Ste.-Benoîte became in the transition plays, intended for out-of-door performance to a popular audience, the rule. There was naturally some local variation. Of the two longer scholars’ plays in the Benedictbeuern manuscript, the Christmas play is wholly, the Passion play mainly, in Latin. A large proportion of Latin seems to have been retained in the Frankfort Passion play of the fourteenth century. But on the whole, as the texts grow, and especially as they draw upon the apocryphal books or the great mediaeval vernacular epics for matter not in the liturgical plays, the vernacular steadily gets the upper hand, until in the latest versions the traces of Latin must be regarded as mere survivals.

In some cases where Latin and vernacular appear together, the latter is of the nature of a translation, or rough and often much expanded paraphrase, of the former. This type of mixed and obviously transitional text can, as it happens, be illustrated from French, German, and English sources. It occurs, for instance, in the Adam. Here the Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel scenes are wholly, but for the preliminary lectio and the interpolated chants by the choir, in Norman-French. The prophecies, however, are given in the double form. Thus Isaiah says:

‘Egredietur virga de radice Jesse, et flos de radice eius ascendet, et requiescet super eum spiritus domini.

‘Or vus dirrai merveillus diz:

Jessé sera de sa raïz.

Verge en istra, qui fera flor,

Qui ert digne de grant unor.

Saint espirit l’avra si clos,

Sor ceste flor iert sun repos.’

There are many similar examples in German plays, of which the most complete is a Quem quaeritis in a fourteenth-century manuscript at Trèves⁠[295]. In England Professor Skeat discovered at Shrewsbury a fragmentary text of this type in a manuscript of the early fifteenth century⁠[296]. It is written in a northern, probably Yorkshire, dialect, and contains the part, with cues, of a single actor in three plays, a Pastores, a Quem quaeritis, and a Peregrini. In the first he played the Third Shepherd, in the second the Third Mary, in the last probably Cleophas. The fragment shows clearly enough the way in which the Latin text was first sung by a group of performers together, and then expanded by them separately in the vernacular. The two documents last quoted mark not only the transition from Latin to the vernacular, but also that from the sung drama of the liturgies to the spoken drama of the great cycles. In Professor Skeat’s Shrewsbury fragments the Latin alone is musically noted. In the Trèves Quem quaeritis the Latin and portions of the German are noted, and a careful distinction is made between the lines to be spoken and those to be sung by the use of the terms cantat and dicit in the rubrics⁠[297].

Again, the laicization of the drama was accompanied by a further development of the secular and even comic elements, of which the germs already existed in the plays. A more human and less distinctively ecclesiastical handling became possible⁠[298]. The figure of Herod offered a melodramatic type of ranting tyrant which the tradition of the stage did not readily forget. The life of the unconverted Magdalen in gaudio gave the dramatist his opportunity to paint scenes of wholly secular luxury and romance. Naturally the comic developments attached themselves largely to personalities not already defined in the Testament narratives. The Mercator, for instance, whose domesticities with his wife and his apprentice do so much to enliven the later German plays, is a thoroughly characteristic production of the mediaeval folk spirit, for the delectation of which Rutebeuf wrote the Dit de l’Erberie⁠[299]. It is not, perhaps, altogether unjustifiable to trace a relation between him and the inveterate quack doctor of the spring folk drama itself⁠[300]. This would not be the only point of contact between the ludi of the Church and those of the folk. The significance, from this point of view, of Balaam’s ass has already been touched upon⁠[301]. And in the growth of the devil scenes, from their first beginnings in the Sponsus or in the devil-deacon of the Tollite portas⁠[302], to their importance in the Adam or the various treatments of the Fall of Lucifer and the Harrowing of Hell, may we not trace the influence of those masked and blackened demon figures who from all time had been a dear scandal of the Kalends and the Feast of Fools⁠[303]? It is certain that the imps who sallied amongst the spectators and haled the Fathers off to their limbo of clashed kettles and caldrons must have been an immensely popular feature of the Adam; and it is noteworthy that in more than one place the compagnies joyeuses who inherited the Feast of Fools joined forces with more serious confréries and provided comic actors for the religious plays⁠[304].

In yet another way the coming of the vernacular affected the character of the religious drama. It had been cosmopolitan; it was to be national: and from the fourteenth century, in spite of a few lendings and borrowings, and of a certain uniformity in the general lines of development, it really requires separate treatment in each of the European countries⁠[305]. In Italy the divergence from the common type was perhaps most marked of all, although I think that Signor D’Ancona and others have perhaps pushed the doctrine of the independence and isolation of Italian drama to an extreme. They consider that it almost began afresh with the religious stirrings of the Umbrian Flagellants in 1260. The compagnie or associations of disciplinati, who were the outcome of this thoroughly folk movement, were wont, as they lashed themselves, to sing hymns of praise, laudes, whence they got the secondary name of laudesi. The lauds were mostly sung in the chapels of the compagnie after mass and a sermon on Sundays. Several fourteenth-century collections are extant, and contain examples intended for use throughout the circle of the ecclesiastical year. Many of them were dialogued, and appear to have been recited in costume with scenic accessories. The dramatic lauds were specifically known as devozioni, and by the end of the fourteenth century were in some cases performed rather elaborately upon a talamo or stage in the nave of a church, with luoghi deputati for the accommodation of the chief actors. According to Signor D’Ancona, the devozioni, which were composed by poor folk, were taken direct from the liturgy and owed little more than the initial hint or impulse to the liturgical drama; while at the other end of these developments, they became the source of the out-of-door and splendidly-staged sacre rappresentazioni which originated in Florence in the fifteenth century and thence spread to other Italian cities⁠[306]. On this theory it must be observed that the devozioni have not been shown to be independent of the liturgical drama, and that the derivation of the sacre rappresentazioni from the devozioni is purely conjectural. The sacre rappresentazioni were out of doors and produced by the clergy or laity; the devozioni, which have not been traced to Florence, were produced indoors by religious guilds of a very distinct type. The sacre rappresentazioni, moreover, included subjects, such as the profeti, which are not within the cycle of the devozioni, but do belong to the liturgical drama. It is at least a tenable view, that the devozioni were merely a backwater of the drama, and that the sacre rappresentazioni were derived, like the fifteenth-century plays of other countries, from the liturgical drama through the medium of such transitional types as those already noted at Padua, Siena, and Cividale. The fact that the only transitional texts preserved are those of the devozioni has perhaps led to an exaggerated estimate of the importance of these. Even liturgical dramas are rare in Italy, although there are sufficient thoroughly to establish their existence. The chroniclers, however, mention one or two events which point to another dramatic tradition in Italy than that of the devozioni. At Florence itself, in 1306, there was a show of Heaven and Hell upon the Arno, which though merely pantomimic, may have been based on some dramatic representation of the Last Judgement⁠[307]. At Milan, in 1336, was a Stella, in which the Magi rode through the streets, and Herod sat by the columns of San Lorenzo⁠[308]. Both of these performances, like those at Padua and Cividale and the sacre rappresentazioni themselves, were out of doors. It is true that the sacre rappresentazioni fell less into big cycles than did the contemporary plays of other countries: but cycles were not unknown⁠[309], and it must be borne in mind that the extreme beauty and elaboration of the Florentine mise-en-scène made a limited scheme, on grounds both of time and expense, almost imperative.

With out-of-door plays climatic conditions began to be of importance. Even in sunny France, Christmas is not exactly the season to hang about the market-place looking at an interminable drama. It is not to be denied that Christmas plays continued to be occasionally acted well through the fifteenth century⁠[310], but the number of these, compared with the Passions, is small⁠[311]. Even Easter weather is not invariably genial. Nor, as the cycles lengthened, was the attachment of them to any one of the feasts, whose events they commemorated, a matter of first-rate importance. A tendency set in towards playing them as far as possible in the long warm days of the summer months. The first Whitsuntide performances are those at Cividale in 1298 and 1303; and Whitsuntide became a very favourite date⁠[312]. At Florence the great patronal feast and procession of St. John the Baptist on June 24 was a natural occasion for sacre rappresentazioni⁠[313]. Another high day for the cyclical drama from the fourteenth century onwards, notably in England⁠[314] and Spain⁠[315], and to a much less degree in Germany⁠[316] and France⁠[317], was the recently-established feast of Corpus Christi. This, the most materialistic of all the Church’s celebrations, is in honour of the mystery of the transubstantiated sacrament. It originated locally in an alleged revelation to Juliana, a Cistercian religious of Liège. Pope Urban IV designed in 1264 to make it a universal festival, but he died in the same year, and the bull which he had issued remained inoperative until it was confirmed by Clement V at the council of Vienne in 1311. Corpus Christi day was the Thursday after Trinity Sunday. An office was compiled for it by St. Thomas Aquinas, and the leading ceremony was a great procession in which the host, escorted by local dignitaries, religious bodies and guilds, was borne through the streets and displayed successively at out-of-door stations⁠[318]. When the plays were transferred to Corpus Christi day, they became more or less attached to this procession. Sometimes, perhaps, the procession served as a mere preliminary parade for the actors, such as sometimes preceded plays at other times⁠[319]. The play itself would follow on a fixed stage of the ordinary type. But the method of the great English cycles seems to point to a more complete merging of play and procession than this. The domus, loci, or sedes were set upon wheels, and known as ‘pageants⁠[320]’; and the performance was gone through during the procession, being repeated at the various stations made by the host. If the cycle was a very long one, time could be saved by making an early play at one station coincident with a later play at that in front of it. It is, however, easy to see that with the arrangement here suggested the popularity of the pageants might throw the strictly religious aspect of the procession rather into the shade. The two would then be severed again, but the play might still retain its processional character. This is not, I think, an unreasonable conjecture as to how the type of play found, say at York, may have come into existence⁠[321]. To Chester, where the plays were not on Corpus Christi day, but at Whitsuntide, the method must have been transferred at a later date.

During this brief survey of the critical period for the religious drama between the middle of the thirteenth and the middle of the fourteenth century, I have attempted to bring into relief the tendencies that were at work for its remodelling. But it must not be supposed that either the tendency to expansion or the tendency to secularization acted universally and uniformly. The truth is quite otherwise. To the end of the history of the religious drama, the older types, which it threw out as it evolved, co-existed with the newer ones⁠[322]. The Latin tropes and liturgical dramas held their place in the church services. And in the vernaculars, side by side with the growing Nativities and Passions, there continued to be acted independent plays of more than one sort. There were the original short plays, such as the Stella, the Annunciation, the Sponsus, the Antichrist, by the running together of which the cycles came into being. There were plays, on the other hand, which originated as episodes in the cycles, and only subsequently attained to an independent existence. The majority of these were Old Testament plays, budded off, like the Daniel, from the Prophetae. And finally there were numerous plays drawn from hagiological legends, many of which never came into connexion with the cycles at all. Thus in the transition period we find, not only plays on St. Nicholas and St. Catherine for which liturgical models existed, but also the great French series of Miracles of the Virgin, and plays on Saints Theophilus, Dorothy, Martial, and Agnes⁠[323]. The natural tendency of great churches to magnify their own patron saints led to further multiplication of themes. In the same way, long after the lay guilds and corporations had taken up the drama, performances continued to be given or superintended by the clergy and their scholars⁠[324]. Priests and monks supplied texts and lent vestments for the lay plays. To the last, the church served from time to time as a theatre. All these points, as well as the traces of their liturgical origin lingering in the cycles, will be fully illustrated, so far as England is concerned, in the following chapters.

The question presents itself: What was the official attitude of the high ecclesiastical authorities towards the growing religious plays? It is not precisely answered, as the history of the Feast of Fools has shown, by the fact that the chapters and inferior clergy encouraged and took part in them. The liturgical drama had its motive, as St. Ethelwold is careful to point out, in a desire for devotion and the edification of the vulgar⁠[325]. The hope of affording a counter-attraction to the spring and winter ludi of hard-dying paganism probably went for something. Herrad of Landsberg, in the twelfth century, utters a regret that the Stella rightly instituted at Epiphany by the Fathers of the Church had given place to a shameless revel⁠[326]. But a contrary opinion to Herrad’s arose almost contemporaneously amongst the reforming anti-imperial clergy of Germany. This finds expression more than once in the writings of Gerhoh of Reichersberg⁠[327]. He scoffs at the monks of Augsburg who, when he was magister scolae there about 1122, could only be induced to sup in the refectory, when a representation of Herod or the Innocents or some other quasi-theatrical spectacle made an excuse for a feast⁠[328]. And he devotes a chapter of his De Investigatione Antichristi, written about 1161, to an argument that clergy who turn the churches into theatres are doing the work of that very Antichrist of whom they make a show⁠[329]. Evidently Gerhoh has been stung by the lampooning of his party as the Hypocritae in the pro-imperialist Antichristus which is still extant. But he includes in his condemnation plays of a less special and polemical character, referring especially to the Nativity cycle and to a lost play of Elisaeus. He repeats some of the old patristic objections against larvae and spectacula, and tells tales, such as Prynne will tell after him, of how horrors mimicked by actors have been miraculously converted into verities⁠[330]. Literary historians occasionally commit themselves to the statement that Innocent III forbade the clergy to participate in miracle-plays⁠[331]. It is more than doubtful whether this was so. The prohibition in question is familiar to us, and it is clear that the ludi theatrales which Innocent barred from the churches were primarily the Feasts of Fools, and the like⁠[332]. And as a matter of fact the glossa ordinaria to the decretal by Bernard de Bottone, which itself dates from about 1263, so interprets the words of the Pope as expressly to allow of Christmas and Easter representations calculated to stimulate devotion⁠[333]. Yet there would have been no need for the gloss to have been written had not an opposite interpretation also been current. It was perhaps on the strength of the decree that another reformer, Robert Grosseteste, justified his action when in 1244 he directed his archdeacons to exterminate, so far as they could, the miracula, which he put on the same level as May-games and harvest-Mays, or the scotales of the folk⁠[334]. And it is certainly appealed to before the end of the thirteenth century in the Manuel des Péchés of the Anglo-Norman William of Waddington⁠[335]. Robert Grosseteste presumably, and William of Waddington specifically, objected to miracula even out of doors, which is surely stretching the words of Innocent III beyond what they will reasonably bear. In any case the austere view of the matter was not that which prevailed. The lax discipline of the ‘Babylonish captivity’ at Avignon, which allowed the Feast of Fools to grow up unchecked through the fourteenth century, was not likely to boggle at the plays. The alleged indulgence, not without modern parallels⁠[336], of Clement VI to the spectators of the Chester plays and the performance of a Stella given by the English bishops in honour of their continental colleagues at the council of Constance in 1417⁠[337] are two out of many proofs that the later mediaeval Church found no difficulty in accommodating itself to the somewhat disconcerting by-product of its own liturgy⁠[338]. Such opposition to the religious drama as can be traced after the thirteenth century came not from the heads of the Church but from its heretics. It is chiefly represented by a curious Tretise of miraclis pleyinge which dates from the end of the fourteenth century and may safely be referred to a Wyclifite origin⁠[339]. The burden of it is the sin of making ‘oure pleye and bourde of tho myraclis and werkis that God so ernestfully wrouȝt to us.’ On this note the anonymous preacher harps rather monotonously, and adds that ‘myraclis pleyinge ... makith to se veyne siȝtis of degyse, aray of men and wymmen by yvil continaunse, eyther stiryng othere to letcherie and of debatis.’ Like Gerhoh of Reichersberg, he thinks the plays ‘gynnys of the dyvul to drawen men to the byleve of Anti-Crist.’ He elaborately confutes the views that they are for the worship of God, or the more compassion of Christ, or lead to conversion. He will not allow that ‘summe recreatioun men moten han, and bettere it is or lesse yvele that thei han theyre recreacoun by pleyinge of myraclis than bi pleyinge of other japis.’ The analysis of the piece need not, perhaps, be pushed further. The opinions expressed do not appear to have had any weight either of popular or of ecclesiastical sentiment behind them; but they curiously antedate the histriomastic tracts of many a sixteenth and seventeenth-century Puritan.

This chapter may be fitly closed by a few words on the subject of nomenclature⁠[340]. The old classical terms of tragoedia and comoedia are not of course normally used of the religious plays until the Renaissance influences come in towards the end of the fifteenth century. Their mediaeval sense, in fact, implies nothing distinctively dramatic⁠[341]. The liturgical plays have often a purely liturgical heading, such as Processio Asinorum⁠[342], or Officium Sepulchri⁠[343], or Ordo Rachaelis⁠[344]. Perhaps officium may be taken to denote the thing itself, the special service or section of a service; ordo rather the book, the written directions for carrying out the officium. Or they have a title derived from their subject, such as Visitatio Sepulchri⁠[345], or Suscitatio Lazari⁠[346]. Or they are introduced in terms which cannot be said to have a technical signification at all, ad faciendam similitudinem⁠[347], ad suscipiendum⁠[348], ad repraesentandum⁠[349]. Similitudo I do not find outside Fleury, nor the corresponding exemplum outside the Benedictbeuern manuscript⁠[350]. From ad repraesentandum, however, a technical term does arise, and repraesentatio must be considered, more than any other word, as the mediaeval Latin equivalent of ‘dramatic performance⁠[351].’ This the Italian vernacular preserves as rappresentazione. A synonym for repraesentatio, which naturally came into use when the intention of recreation began to substitute itself for devotion, is ludus, with its vernacular renderings, all in common use, of jeu, Spiel, ‘play.’ But ludus, as already pointed out⁠[352], is a generic term for ‘amusement,’ and the special sense of ‘dramatic play’ is only a secondary one⁠[353]. ‘Clerks’ play’ as a variant for miracle-play is occasionally found⁠[354]. Yet another synonym which makes its appearance in the twelfth century, is miraculum; and this, originally a mere convenient shorthand for repraesentatio miraculi, came, especially in England, to stand for ‘religious play’ in general⁠[355]. Mystère, or ‘mystery,’ on the other hand, is not English at all, in a dramatic sense⁠[356], and in France first appears as misterie in the charter given by Charles VI in 1402 to the Parisian confrérie de la Passion⁠[357]. This term also acquires a very general signification by the end of the fifteenth century. Its radical meaning is still matter of dispute. Probably it is derived from ministerium, should be spelt mistère, and is spelt mystère by a natural confusion with the derivative of μυστήριον. Even then the question remains, what sort of ministerium? M. Petit de Julleville would explain it as a ‘religious function,’ and thus equate it precisely with officium⁠[358]. Only it does not appear in connexion with the liturgical plays⁠[359], and perhaps it is more plausible to regard it as denoting the ‘function’ of the guild of actors, just as its doublet menestrie, the English ‘minstrelsy,’ denotes the ‘function’ of the minstrels⁠[360], or its doublet métier, which in English becomes in fact ‘mystery,’ denotes the ‘function’ of the craft guilds. Perhaps the theory of M. de Julleville finds a little support from the term actio, which appears, besides its meaning in connexion with the Mass⁠[361], to be once at least used for a play⁠[362]. At any rate actus is so used as a Latin equivalent of the Spanish auto⁠[363].