Opening…

I. MINSTRELSY

CHAP.

I. THE FALL OF THE THEATRES 1

II. MIMUS AND SCÔP 23

III. THE MINSTREL LIFE 42

IV. THE MINSTREL REPERTORY 70

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II. FOLK DRAMA

V. THE RELIGION OF THE FOLK 89

VI. VILLAGE FESTIVALS 116

VII. FESTIVAL PLAY 146

VIII. THE MAY-GAME 160

IX. THE SWORD-DANCE 182

X. THE MUMMERS’ PLAY 205

XI. THE BEGINNING OF WINTER 228

XII. NEW YEAR CUSTOMS 249

XIII. THE FEAST OF FOOLS 274

XIV. THE FEAST OF FOOLS (continued) 301

XV. THE BOY BISHOP 336

XVI. GUILD FOOLS AND COURT FOOLS 372

XVII. MASKS AND MISRULE 390

VOLUME II

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III. RELIGIOUS DRAMA

XVIII. LITURGICAL PLAYS 1

XIX. LITURGICAL PLAYS (continued) 41

XX. THE SECULARIZATION OF THE PLAYS 68

XXI. GUILD PLAYS AND PARISH PLAYS 106

XXII. GUILD PLAYS AND PARISH PLAYS (continued) 124

XXIII. MORALITIES, PUPPET-PLAYS, AND PAGEANTS 149

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IV. THE INTERLUDE

XXIV. PLAYERS OF INTERLUDES 179

XXV. HUMANISM AND MEDIAEVALISM 199

APPENDICES

A. THE TRIBUNUS VOLUPTATUM 229

B. TOTA IOCULATORUM SCENA 230

C. COURT MINSTRELSY IN 1306 234

D. THE MINSTREL HIERARCHY 238

E. EXTRACTS FROM ACCOUNT BOOKS 240

I. Durham Priory 240

II. Maxstoke Priory 244

III. Thetford Priory 245

IV. Winchester College 246

V. Magdalen College, Oxford 248

VI. Shrewsbury Corporation 250

VII. The Howards of Stoke-by-Nayland, Essex 255

VIII. The English Court 256

F. MINSTREL GUILDS 258

G. THOMAS DE CABHAM 262

H. PRINCELY PLEASURES AT KENILWORTH 263

I. A Squire Minstrel 263

II. The Coventry Hock-Tuesday Show 264

I. THE INDIAN VILLAGE FEAST 266

J. SWORD-DANCES 270

I. Sweden (sixteenth century) 270

II. Shetland (eighteenth century) 271

K. THE LUTTERWORTH ST. GEORGE PLAY 276

L. THE PROSE OF THE ASS 279

M. THE BOY BISHOP 282

I. The Sarum Office 282

II. The York Computus 287

N. WINTER PROHIBITIONS 290

O. THE REGULARIS CONCORDIA OF ST. ETHELWOLD 306

P. THE DURHAM SEPULCHRUM 310

Q. THE SARUM SEPULCHRUM 312

R. THE DUBLIN QUEM QUAERITIS 315

S. THE AUREA MISSA OF TOURNAI 318

T. SUBJECTS OF THE CYCLICAL MIRACLES 321

U. INTERLUDIUM DE CLERICO ET PUELLA 324

V. TERENTIUS ET DELUSOR 326

W. REPRESENTATIONS OF MEDIAEVAL PLAYS 329

X. TEXTS OF MEDIAEVAL PLAYS AND INTERLUDES 407

I. Miracle-Plays 407

II. Popular Moralities 436

III. Tudor Makers of Interludes 443

IV. List of Early Tudor Interludes 453

SUBJECT INDEX 462

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III. RELIGIOUS DRAMA

heȝe vpon a doune, þer al folk hit se may, a mile from þe toune, aboute þe midday, þe rode is vp arered; his frendes aren afered, ant clyngeþ so þe clay; þe rode stond in stone, marie stont hire one, ant seiþ ‘weylaway’!

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XVIII. LITURGICAL PLAYS

[Bibliographical Note.—The liturgical drama is fully treated by W. Creizenach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas (vol. i, 1893), Bk. 2; L. Petit de Julleville, Les Mystères (1880), vol. i. ch. 2; A. d’Ancona, Origini del Teatro Italiano (2nd ed. 1891), Bk. 1, chh. 3-6; M. Sepet, Origines catholiques du Théâtre moderne (1901), and by L. Gautier in Le Monde for Aug. and Sept. 1872. The studies of W. Meyer, Fragmenta Burana (1901), and C. Davidson, English Mystery Plays (1892), are also valuable. A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature (2nd ed. 1899), vol. i. ch. 1 deals very slightly with the subject. A good popular account is M. Sepet, Le Drame chrétien au Moyen Âge (1878). Of older works, the introduction to E. Du Méril’s Origines latines du Théâtre moderne (1849, facsimile reprint, 1896) is the best. The material collected for vol. ii of C. Magnin’s Origines du Théâtre is only available in the form of reviews in the Journal des Savants (1846-7), and lecture notes in the Journal général de l’Instruction publique (1834-6). Articles by F. Clément, L. Deschamps de Pas, A. de la Fons-Melicocq, and others in A. N. Didron’s Annales archéologiques (1844-72) are worth consulting; those of F. Clément are reproduced in his Histoire de la Musique religieuse (1860). There are also some notices in J. de Douhet, Dictionnaire des Mystères (1854).—The texts of the Quem quaeritis are to be studied in G. Milchsack, Die Oster- und Passionsspiele, vol. i (all published, 1880), and C. Lange, Die lateinischen Osterfeiern (1887). The former compares 28, the latter no less than 224 manuscripts. The best general collection of texts is that of Du Méril already named: others are T. Wright, Early Mysteries and other Latin Poems (1838); E. de Coussemaker, Drames liturgiques du Moyen Âge (1860), which is valuable as giving the music as well as the words; and A. Gasté, Les Drames liturgiques de la Cathédrale de Rouen (1893). A few, including the important Antichristus, are given by R. Froning, Das Drama des Mittelalters (1891). The original sources are in most cases the ordinary service-books. But a twelfth-century manuscript from St. Martial of Limoges (Bibl. Nat. Lat. 1139) has four plays, a Quem quaeritis, a Rachel, a Prophetae, and the Sponsus. Facsimiles are in E. de Coussemaker, Histoire de l’Harmonie au Moyen Âge (1852). A thirteenth-century manuscript from Fleury (Orleans MS. 178) has no less than ten, a Quem quaeritis, a Peregrini, a Stella in two parts, a Conversio Pauli, a Suscitatio Lazari and four Miracula S. Nicholai. Two later plays and fragments of three others are found in the famous thirteenth-century manuscript from Benedictbeuern (Munich MS. 19,486, printed in J. A. Schmeller, Carmina Burana, 3rd ed. 1894, with additional fragments in W. Meyer, Fragmenta Burana, 1901). This is probably the repertory of travelling goliardic clerks. The twelfth-century manuscript which preserves the three plays of Hilarius (Bibl. Nat. Lat. 11,331, printed in J. J. Champollion-Figeac, Hilarii Versus et Ludi, 1838) is of a similar character.—The tropes are fully dealt with by L. Gautier, Hist. de la Poésie liturgique au Moyen Âge, vol. i (all published, 1886), and W. H. Frere, The Winchester Troper (1894). I have not been able to see A. Reiners, Die Tropen-, Prosen- und Präfations-Gesänge des feierlichen Hochamtes im Mittelalter (1884). Antiquarian data are collected by H. J. Feasey, Ancient English Holy Week Ceremonial (1897), and A. Heales, Easter Sepulchres, in Archaeologia, vol. xlii. I have printed an important passage from the Regularis Concordia of St. Ethelwold (965-75) in Appendix O. The Planctus Mariae are treated by A. Schönbach, Die Marienklagen (1874), and E. Wechssler, Die romanischen Marienklagen (1893). W. Köppen, Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Weihnachtsspiele (1893), and M. Sepet, Les Prophètes du Christ (1878), contain valuable studies of the evolution of the Stella and the Prophetae respectively. The relation of dramatic to iconic art in the Middle Ages is brought out by P. Weber, Geistliches Schauspiel und kirchliche Kunst (1894). A rather primitive bibliography is F. H. Stoddard, References for Students of Miracle Plays and Mysteries (1887).—Authorities for English facts given without references in the present volume will be found in Appendices W and X.]

The discussions of the first volume have often wandered far enough from the history of the stage. But two or three tolerable generalizations emerge. The drama as a living form of art went completely under at the break-up of the Roman world: a process of natural decay was accelerated by the hostility of Christianity, which denied the theatre, and by the indifference of barbarism, which had never imagined it. If anything of a histrionic tradition survived, it took the shape of pitiable farce, one amongst many heterogeneous elements in the spectacula of disreputable mimes. For the men of the Middle Ages, however, peasants or burghers, monks or nobles, such spectacula had a constant attraction: and the persistence of the deep-rooted mimetic instinct in the folk is proved by the frequent outcrops of primitive drama in the course of those popular observances which are the last sportive stage of ancient heathen ritual. Whether of folk or of minstrel origin, the ludi remained to the last alien and distasteful to the Church. The degradation of Rome and Constantinople by the stage was never forgotten; nor the association with an heathenism that was glossed over rather than extinct: and though a working compromise inevitably tended to establish itself, it remained subject to perpetual protest from the austerer spirit in the counsels of the clergy.

It is the more remarkable that the present volume has to describe a most singular new birth of the drama in the very bosom of the Church’s own ritual. One may look at the event as one will, either as an audacious, and at least partly successful, attempt to wrest the pomps of the devil to a spiritual service, or as an inevitable and ironical recoil of a barred human instinct within the hearts of its gaolers themselves. From either point of view it is a fact which the student of European culture cannot afford to neglect. And apart from its sociological implications, apart from the insight which it gives into the temper of the folk and into the appeal of religion, it is of the highest interest as an object lesson in literary evolution. The historian is not often privileged to isolate a definite literary form throughout the whole course of its development, and to trace its rudimentary beginnings, as may here be done, beyond the very borders of articulate speech.

The dramatic tendencies of Christian worship declared themselves at an early period[1]. At least from the fourth century, the central and most solemn rite of that worship was the Mass, an essentially dramatic commemoration of one of the most critical moments in the life of the Founder[2]. It is his very acts and words that day by day throughout the year the officiating priest resumes in the face of the people. And when the conception of the Mass developed until instead of a mere symbolical commemoration it was looked upon as an actual repetition of the initial sacrifice, the dramatic character was only intensified. So far as the Canon of the Mass goes, this point needs no pressing. But the same liturgical principle governs many other episodes in the order of the mediaeval services. Take, for example, the ritual, of Gallican origin, used at the dedication of a church[3]. The bishop and his procession approach the closed doors of the church from without, but one of the clergy, quasi latens, is placed inside. Three blows with a staff are given on the doors, and the anthem is raised Tollite portas, principes, vestras et elevamini, portae aeternales, et introibit Rex gloriae. From within comes the question Quis est iste rex gloriae? and the reply is given Dominus virtutum ipse est Rex gloriae. Then the doors are opened, and as the procession sweeps through, he who was concealed within slips out, quasi fugiens, to join the train. It is a dramatic expulsion of the spirit of evil. A number of other instances are furnished by the elaborate rites of Holy week. Thus on Palm Sunday, in commemoration of the entry into Jerusalem, the usual procession before Mass was extended, and went outside the church and round the churchyard or close bearing palms, or in their place sprigs of yew, box, or withies, which the priest had previously blessed[4]. The introduction of a Palmesel might make the ceremony more dramatic still[5]. Some of the texts used were of a prophetic character, and the singer of these was occasionally dressed as a prophet[6]. At the doors of the church the procession was greeted by boys stationed upon the roof of the porch, and certain French uses transferred to the occasion the dedication solemnity of Tollite portas just described[7]. The reading of the gospel narratives of the Passion, which on Palm Sunday, on the Monday or Tuesday, and the Wednesday in Holy week and on Good Friday preceded the Gospel proper, was often resolved into a regular oratorio. A tenor voice rendered the narrative of the evangelist, a treble the sayings of Jews and disciples, a bass those of Christ himself[8]. To particular episodes of these Passions special dramatic action was appropriated. On Wednesday, at the words Velum templi scissum est, the Lenten veil, which since the first Sunday in Lent had hidden the sanctuary from the sight of the people, was dropped to the ground[9]. On Good Friday the words Partiti sunt vestimenta were a signal for a similar bit of by-play with a linen cloth which lay upon the altar[10]: Maundy Thursday had its commemorative ceremony of the washing of feet[11]; while the Tenebrae or solemn extinction, one after another, of lights at the Matins of the last three days of the week, was held to symbolize the grief of the apostles and others whom those lights represented[12].

These, and many other fragments of ceremonial, have the potentiality of dramatic development. Symbolism, mimetic action, are there. The other important factor, of dialogued speech, is latent in the practice of antiphonal singing. The characteristic type of Roman chant is that whereby the two halves of the choir answer one another, or the whole choir answers the single voice of the cantor, in alternate versicle and respond[13]. The antiphon was introduced into Italy by St. Ambrose of Milan. It had originated, according to tradition, in Antioch, had been in some relation to the histrionic tendencies of Arianism, and was possibly not altogether uninfluenced by the traditions both of the Greek tragic chorus and of Jewish psalmody[14]. At any rate, it lent itself naturally to dialogue, and it is from the antiphon that the actual evolution of the liturgical drama starts. The course of that evolution must now be followed.

The choral portions of the Mass were stereotyped about the end of the sixth century in the Antiphonarium ascribed to Gregory the Great[15]. This compilation, which included a variety of antiphons arranged for the different feasts and seasons of the year, answered the needs of worship for some two hundred years. With the ninth century, however, began a process, which culminated in the eleventh, of liturgical elaboration. Splendid churches, costly vestments, protracted offices, magnificent processions, answered especially in the great monasteries to a heightened sense of the significance of cult in general, and of the Eucharist in particular[16]. Naturally ecclesiastical music did not escape the influence of this movement. The traditional Antiphonarium seemed inadequate to the capacities of aspiring choirs. The Gregorian texts were not replaced, but they were supplemented. New melodies were inserted at the beginning or end or even in the middle of the old antiphons. And now I come to the justification of the statement made two or three pages back, that the beginnings of the liturgical drama lie beyond the very borders of articulate speech. For the earliest of such adventitious melodies were sung not to words at all, but to vowel sounds alone. These, for which precedent existed in the Gregorian Antiphonarium, are known as neumae[17]. Obviously the next stage was to write texts, called generically ‘tropes,’ to them; and towards the end of the ninth century three more or less independent schools of trope-writers grew up. One, in northern France, produced Adam of St. Victor; of another, at the Benedictine abbey of St. Gall near Constance, Notker and Tutilo are the greatest names; the third, in northern Italy, has hitherto been little studied. The Troparia or collections of tropes form choir-books, supplementary to the Antiphonaria. After the thirteenth century, when trope-writing fell into comparative desuetude, they become rare; and such tropes as were retained find a place in the ordinary service-books, especially the later successor of the Antiphonarium, the Graduale. The tropes attached themselves in varying degrees to most of the choral portions of the Mass. Perhaps those of the Alleluia at the end of the Graduale are in themselves the most important. They received the specific names, in Germany of Sequentiae, and in France of Prosae, and they include, in their later metrical stages, some of the most remarkable of mediaeval hymns. But more interesting from our particular point of view are the tropes of the Officium or Introit, the antiphon and psalm sung by the choir at the beginning of Mass, as the celebrant approaches the altar[18].

Several Introit tropes take a dialogue form. The following is a ninth-century Christmas example ascribed to Tutilo of St. Gall[19].

‘Hodie cantandus est nobis puer, quem gignebat ineffabiliter ante tempora pater, et eundem sub tempore generavit inclyta mater.

Int[errogatio].

quis est iste puer quem tam magnis praeconiis dignum vociferatis? dicite nobis ut collaudatores esse possimus.

Resp[onsio].

hic enim est quem praesagus et electus symmista dei ad terram venturum praeuidens longe ante praenotavit, sicque praedixit.’

The nature of this trope is obvious. It was sung by two groups of voices, and its closing words directly introduce the Introit for the third mass (Magna missa) on Christmas day, which must have followed without a break[20]. It is an example of some half a dozen dialogued Introit tropes, which might have, but did not, become the starting-point for further dramatic evolution[21]. Much more significant is another trope of unknown authorship found in the same St. Gall manuscript[22]. This is for Easter, and is briefly known as the Quem quaeritis. The text, unlike that of the Hodie cantandus, is based closely upon the Gospels. It is an adaptation to the form of dialogue of the interview between the three Maries and the angel at the tomb as told by Saints Matthew and Mark[23].

‘Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, [o] Christicolae?

Iesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicolae.

non est hic, surrexit sicut praedixerat. ite, nuntiate quia surrexit de sepulchro. Resurrexi[24].’

This is the earliest and simplest form of the Quem quaeritis. It recurs, almost unaltered, in a tenth-century troper from St. Martial of Limoges[25]. In eleventh-century tropers of the same church it is a little more elaborate[26].

‘TROPUS IN DIE.

Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, Christicolae?

Ihesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicole.

non est hic, surrexit sicut praedixerat, ite, nuntiate quia surrexit. Alleluia.

ad sepulchrum residens angelus nuntiat resurrexisse Christum: en ecce completum est illud quod olim ipse per prophetam dixerat ad patrem taliter inquiens, Resurrexi.’

Here the appended portion of narrative makes the trope slightly less dramatic. Yet another addition is made in one of the Limoges manuscripts. Just as the trope introduces the Introit, so it is itself introduced by the following words:

‘Hora est, psallite. iube, dompnus, canere. eia, eia, dicite.’

As M. Gautier puts it, the trope is troped[27].

In the Easter Quem quaeritis the liturgical drama was born, and to it I shall return. But it must first be noted that it was so popular as to become the model for two very similar tropes belonging to Christmas and to the Ascension. Both of these are found in more than one troper, but not earlier, I believe, than the eleventh century. I quote the Christmas trope from a St. Gall manuscript[28].

‘In Natale Domini ad Missam sint parati duo diaconi induti dalmaticis, retro altare dicentes

Quem quaeritis in praesepe, pastores, dicite?

Respondeant duo cantores in choro

salvatorem Christum Dominum, infantem pannis involutum, secundum sermonem angelicum.

Item diaconi

adest hic parvulus cum Maria, matre sua, de qua, vaticinando, Isaias Propheta: ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium. et nuntiantes dicite quia natus est.

Tunc cantor dicat excelsa voce

alleluia, alleluia, iam vere scimus Christum natum in terris, de quo canite, omnes, cum Propheta dicentes:

Puer natus est.’

The Ascension trope is taken from an English troper probably belonging to Christ Church, Canterbury[29].

‘Quem cernitis ascendisse super astra, o Christicolae?

Ihesum qui surrexit de sepulchro, o caelicolae.

iam ascendit, ut praedixit, ascendo ad patrem meum et patrem vestrum, deum meum et deum vestrum.

alleluia: regna terrae, gentes, linguae, conlaudate dominum: quem adorant caeli cives in paterno solio: deo gratias dicite eia.’

I return now to the Easter Quem quaeritis. In a few churches this retained its position at the beginning of Mass, either as an Introit trope in the strict sense, or, which comes to much the same thing, as a chant for the procession which immediately preceded. This was the use of the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino at the beginning of the twelfth century, of that of St. Denys in the thirteenth[30], and of the church of St. Martin of Tours in the fifteenth[31]. Even in the seventeenth century the Quem quaeritis still appears in a Paris manuscript as a ‘tropus[32],’ and Martene records a practice similar to that of Monte Cassino and St. Denys as surviving at Rheims in his day[33].

But in many tropers, and in most of the later service-books in which it is found, the Quem quaeritis no longer appears to be designed for use at the Mass. This is the case in the only two tropers of English use in which, so far as I know, it comes, the Winchester ones printed by Mr. Frere[34]. I reproduce the earlier of these from the Bodleian manuscript used by him[35].

‘ANGELICA DE CHRISTI RESURRECTIONE.

Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, Christicolae?

Sanctarum mulierum responsio.

Ihesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o caelicola!

Angelicae voces consolatus.

non est hic, surrexit sicut praedixerat, ite, nuntiate quia surrexit, dicentes:

Sanctarum mulierum ad omnem clerum modulatio:

alleluia! resurrexit Dominus hodie, leo fortis, Christus filius Dei! Deo gratias dicite, eia!

Dicat angelus:

venite et videte locum ubi positus erat Dominus, alleluia! alleluia!

Iterum dicat angelus:

cito euntes dicite discipulis quia surrexit Dominus, alleluia! alleluia!

Mulieri una voce canant iubilantes:

surrexit Dominus de sepulchro, qui pro nobis pependit in ligno.’

In this manuscript, which is dated by Mr. Frere in 979 or 980, the text just quoted is altogether detached from the Easter day tropes. Its heading is rubricated and immediately follows the tropes for Palm Sunday. It is followed in its turn, under a fresh rubric, by the ceremonies for Holy Saturday, beginning with the Benedictio Cerei. From the second, somewhat later Cambridge manuscript, probably of the early eleventh century, the Holy Saturday ceremonies have disappeared, but the Quem quaeritis still precedes and does not follow the regular Easter tropes, which are headed Tropi in die Christi Resurrectionis[36]. The precise position which the Quem quaeritis was intended to take in the Easter services is not evident from these tropers by themselves. Fortunately another document comes to our assistance. This is the Concordia Regularis, an appendix to the Rule of St. Benedict intended for the use of the Benedictine monasteries in England reformed by Dunstan during the tenth century. The Concordia Regularis was drawn up by Ethelwold, bishop of Winchester, as a result of a council of Winchester held at some uncertain date during the reign of Edgar (959-79); it may fairly be taken for granted that it fixed at least the Winchester custom. I translate the account of the Quem quaeritis ceremony, which is described as forming part, not of the Mass, but of the third Nocturn at Matins on Easter morning[37].

‘While the third lesson is being chanted, let four brethren vest themselves. Let one of these, vested in an alb, enter as though to take part in the service, and let him approach the sepulchre without attracting attention and sit there quietly with a palm in his hand. While the third respond is chanted, let the remaining three follow, and let them all, vested in copes, bearing in their hands thuribles with incense, and stepping delicately as those who seek something, approach the sepulchre. These things are done in imitation of the angel sitting in the monument, and the women with spices coming to anoint the body of Jesus. When therefore he who sits there beholds the three approach him like folk lost and seeking something, let him begin in a dulcet voice of medium pitch to sing Quem quaeritis. And when he has sung it to the end, let the three reply in unison Ihesu Nazarenum. So he, Non est hic, surrexit sicut praedixerat. Ite, nuntiate quia surrexit a mortuis. At the word of this bidding let those three turn to the choir and say Alleluia! resurrexit Dominus! This said, let the one, still sitting there and as if recalling them, say the anthem Venite et videte locum. And saying this, let him rise, and lift the veil, and show them the place bare of the cross, but only the cloths laid there in which the cross was wrapped. And when they have seen this, let them set down the thuribles which they bare in that same sepulchre, and take the cloth, and hold it up in the face of the clergy, and as if to demonstrate that the Lord has risen and is no longer wrapped therein, let them sing the anthem Surrexit Dominus de sepulchro, and lay the cloth upon the altar. When the anthem is done, let the prior, sharing in their gladness at the triumph of our King, in that, having vanquished death, He rose again, begin the hymn Te Deum laudamus. And this begun, all the bells chime out together.’

The liberal scenario of the Concordia Regularis makes plain the change which has come about in the character of the Quem quaeritis since it was first sung by alternating half-choirs as an Introit trope[38]. Dialogued chant and mimetic action have come together and the first liturgical drama is, in all its essentials, complete.

I am not quite satisfied as to the relations of date between the Concordia Regularis and the Winchester tropers, or as to whether the Quem quaeritis was intended in one or both of these manuscripts for use at the Easter Matins[39]. But it is clear that such a use was known in England at any rate before the end of the tenth century. It was also known in France and in Germany: the former fact is testified to by the Consuetudines of the monastery of St. Vito of Verdun[40]; the latter by the occurrence of the Quem quaeritis in a troper of Bamberg, where it has the heading Ad visitandum sepulchrum and is followed by the Matins chant of Te Deum[41].

The heading of the Bamberg version and the detailed description of the Concordia Regularis bring the Quem quaeritis drama into close relations with the Easter ‘sepulchre’[42]. They are indeed the first historical notices of the ceremony so widely popular during the Middle Ages. Some account of the Easter sepulchre must accordingly be inserted here, and its basis shall be the admirably full description of St. Ethelwold[43]. He directs that on Good Friday all the monks shall go discalceati or shoeless from Prime ‘until the cross is adored’[44]. In the principal service of the day, which begins at Nones, the reading of the Passion according to St. John and a long series of prayers are included. Then a cross is made ready and laid upon a cushion a little way in front of the altar. It is unveiled, and the anthem Ecce lignum crucis is sung. The abbot advances, prostrates himself, and chants the seven penitential psalms. Then he humbly kisses the cross. His example is followed by the rest of the monks and by the clergy and congregation. St. Ethelwold proceeds:—

‘Since on this day we celebrate the laying down of the body of our Saviour, if it seem good or pleasing to any to follow on similar lines the use of certain of the religious, which is worthy of imitation for the strengthening of faith in the unlearned vulgar and in neophytes, we have ordered it on this wise. Let a likeness of a sepulchre be made in a vacant part of the altar, and a veil stretched on a ring which may hang there until the adoration of the cross is over. Let the deacons who previously carried the cross come and wrap it in a cloth in the place where it was adored[45]. Then let them carry it back, singing anthems, until they come to the place of the monument, and there having laid down the cross as if it were the buried body of our Lord Jesus Christ, let them say an anthem. And here let the holy cross be guarded with all reverence until the night of the Lord’s resurrection. By night let two brothers or three, or more if the throng be sufficient, be appointed who may keep faithful wake there chanting psalms.’

The ceremony of the burial or Depositio Crucis is followed by the Missa Praesanctificatorum, the Good Friday communion with a host not consecrated that day but specially reserved from Maundy Thursday; and there is no further reference to the sepulchre until the order for Easter day itself is reached, when St. Ethelwold directs that ‘before the bells are rung for Matins the sacristans are to take the cross and set it in a fitting place.’

In the Concordia Regularis, then, the Depositio Crucis is a sequel to the Adoratio Crucis on Good Friday. The latter ceremony, known familiarly to the sixteenth century as ‘creeping to the cross,’ was one of great antiquity. It was amongst the Holy week rites practised at Jerusalem in the fourth century[46], and was at an early date adopted in Rome[47]. But the sepulchre was no primitive part of it[48]; nor is it possible to trace either the use which served St. Ethelwold as a model[49], or the home or date of the sepulchre itself. It is unlikely, however, that the latter originated in England, as it appears almost simultaneously on the continent, and English ritual, in the tenth century, was markedly behind and not in advance of that of France and Germany[50]. St. Ethelwold speaks of it as distinctively monastic but certainly not as universal or of obligation amongst the Benedictine communities for whom he wrote. Nor did the Concordia Regularis lead to its invariable adoption, for when Ælfric adapted St. Ethelwold’s work for the benefit of Eynsham about 1005 he omitted the account of the sepulchre[51], and it is not mentioned in Archbishop Lanfranc’s Benedictine Constitutions of 1075[52]. At a later date it was used by many Benedictine houses, notably by the great Durham Priory[53]; but the Cistercians and the Carthusians, who represent two of the most famous reforms of the order, are said never to have adopted it, considering it incompatible with the austerity of their rule[54]. On the other hand it was certainly not, in mediaeval England, confined to monastic churches. The cathedrals of Salisbury[55], York[56], Lincoln[57], Hereford[58], Wells[59], all of which were served by secular canons, had their sepulchres, and the gradual spread of the Sarum use probably brought a sepulchre into the majority of parish churches throughout the land[60].

There are naturally variations and amplifications of the sepulchre ceremonial as described by St. Ethelwold to be recorded. The Depositio Crucis, instead of preceding the Missa Praesanctificatorum, was often, as in the Sarum use, transferred to the end of Vespers, which on Good Friday followed the Missa without a break[61]. The Elevatio regularly took place early on Easter morning before Matins. The oldest custom was doubtless that of the Regularis Concordia, according to which the cross was removed from the sepulchre secretly by the sacristans, since this is most closely in agreement with the narrative of the gospels. But in time the Elevatio became a function. The books of Salisbury and York provide for it a procession with the antiphons Christus resurgens and Surrexit Dominus. Continental rituals show considerable diversity of custom[62]. Perhaps the most elaborate ceremonials are those of Augsburg and Würzburg, printed by Milchsack. In these the Tollite portas procession, which we have already found borrowed from the dedication of churches for Palm Sunday, was adapted to Easter day[63]. But the old tradition was often preserved by the exclusion or only partial admission of the populace to the Elevatio. In the Augsburg ritual just quoted, all but a few privileged persons are kept out until the devil has been expelled and the doors solemnly opened[64]. A curious light is thrown upon this by a decree of the synod of Worms in 1316, which orders that the ‘mystery of the resurrection’ shall be performed before the plebs comes into the church, and gives as a reason the crowds caused by a prevalent superstition that whoever saw the crucifix raised would escape for that year ‘the inevitable hour of death’[65].

A widespread if not quite universal innovation on the earlier use was the burial, together with the cross or crucifix, of a host, which was consecrated, like that used in the Missa Praesanctificatorum, on Maundy Thursday. This host was laid in a pyx[66], monstrance[67], or cup[68], and sometimes in a special image, representing the risen Christ with the cross or labarum in his hands, the breast of which held a cavity covered with beryl or crystal[69]. Within the sepulchre both the host and the crucifix were laid upon or wrapped in a fine linen napkin.

The actual structure of the sepulchre lent itself to considerable variety. St. Ethelwold’s assimilatio quaedam sepulchri upon a vacant part of the altar may have been formed, like that at Narbonne several centuries later, by laying together some of the silver service-books[70]. There are other examples of a sepulchre at an altar, and it is possible that in some of these the altar itself may have been hollow and have held the sacred deposit. Sometimes the high altar was used, but a side-altar was naturally more convenient, and at St. Lawrence’s, Reading, the ‘sepulchre awlter’ was in the rood-loft[71]. The books were a primitive expedient. More often the sepulchre was an elaborate carved shrine of wood, iron, or silver. If this did not stand upon the altar, it was placed on the north side of the sanctuary or in a north choir aisle. In large churches the crypt was sometimes thought an appropriate site[72]. Often the base of the sepulchre was formed by the tomb of a founder or benefactor of the church, and legacies for making a structure to serve this double purpose are not uncommon in mediaeval wills. Such tombs often have a canopied recess above them, and in these cases the portable shrine may have been dispensed with. Many churches have a niche or recess, designed of sole purpose for the sepulchre[73]. Several of these more elaborate sepulchres are large enough to be entered, a very convenient arrangement for the Quem quaeritis[74]; a few of them are regular chapels, more than one of which is an exact reproduction of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, and is probably due to the piety of some local pilgrim[75]. Wood, metal, or stone, permanent or movable, the sepulchre was richly adorned with paintings and carvings of the Passion and the Resurrection, with Easter texts, with figures of censer-swinging angels and sleeping knights[76]. A seal was, at least at Hereford and in Hungary, set upon it[77]. A canopy was hung over it and upon it lay a pall, also a favourite object for a pious legacy. Similar legacies might meet the expense of the ‘sepulchre light,’ which was kept burning from Good Friday to Easter morning, and was only extinguished for a few minutes on Easter Saturday to be re-lit from the freshly blessed ‘new fire[78].’ Or the light might be provided by one of the innumerable guilds of the Middle Ages, whose members, perhaps, also undertook the devout duty of keeping the two nights’ vigil before the sepulchre[79]. This watch was important. The Augsburg ritual already quoted makes the possibility of arranging it a condition of setting up the sepulchre at all[80]. The watchers sang psalms, and it is an example of the irrepressible mediaeval tendency to mimesis that they were sometimes accoutred like the knights of Pilate[81]. After the Elevatio, the crucifix seems to have been placed upon a side-altar and visited by processions in Easter, while the host was reserved in a tabernacle. The Sarum Custumary directs that the empty sepulchre shall be daily censed at Vespers and removed on the Friday in Easter week before Mass[82]. Naturally there was some division of opinion at the Reformation as to the precise spiritual value of the Easter sepulchre. While Bishop Hooper and his fellow pulpiters were outspoken about the idolatrous cult of a ‘dead post[83],’ the more conservative views which ruled in the latter years of Henry VIII declared the ceremony to be ‘very laudable’ and ‘not to be contemned and cast away[84].’ The Cromwellian Injunctions of 1538 sanctioned the continued use of the sepulchre light, and by implication of the sepulchre itself. The Edwardine Injunctions of 1547 suppressed the sepulchre light and were certainly interpreted by Cranmer and others as suppressing the sepulchre[85]. The closely related ‘creeping to the cross’ was forbidden by proclamation in 1548; and in 1549, after the issue of the first Act of Uniformity and the first Prayer Book of Edward VI, the disallowance of both ceremonies was legalized, or renewed by Articles for the visitation of that year[86]. Payments for the breaking up of the sepulchre now appear in many churchwardens’ accounts, to be complicated before long by payments for setting the sepulchre up again, in consequence of an order by Queen Mary in 1554[87]. In the same year the crucifix and pyx were missing out of the sepulchre at St. Pancras’ Church in Cheapside, when the priests came for the Elevatio on Easter morning, and one Marsh was committed to the Counter for the sacrilege[88]. The Elizabethan Injunctions of 1559, although they do not specifically name the sepulchre, doubtless led to its final disappearance[89]. In many parts of the continent it naturally lasted longer, but the term ‘visiting sepulchres’ seems in modern times to have been transferred to the devotion paid to the reserved host on Maundy Thursday[90].

I now return to the Quem quaeritis in the second stage of its evolution, when it had ceased to be an Introit trope and had become attached to the ceremony of the sepulchre. Obviously it is not an essential part of that ceremony. The Depositio and Elevatio mutually presuppose each other and, together, are complete. For the dramatic performance, as described by St. Ethelwold, the clergy, having removed the cross at the beginning of Matins, revisited the empty sepulchre quite at the close of that service, after the third respond[91], between which and the normal ending of Matins, the Te Deum, the Quem quaeritis was intercalated. The fact that the Maries bear censers instead of or in addition to the scriptural spices, suggests that this Visitatio grew out of a custom of censing the sepulchre at the end of Matins as well as of Evensong[92]. But the Visitatio could easily be omitted, and in fact it was omitted in many churches where the Depositio and Elevatio were in use. The Sarum books, for instance, do not in any way prescribe it. On the other hand, there were probably a few churches which adopted the Visitatio without the more important rite. Bamberg seems to have been one of these, and so possibly were Sens, Senlis, and one or two others in which the Quem quaeritis is noted as taking place at an altar[93]. However, whether there was a real sepulchre or not, the regular place of the Quem quaeritis was that prescribed for it by St. Ethelwold, between the third respond and the Te Deum at Matins. It has been found in a very large number of manuscripts, and in by far the greater part of them it occupies this position[94]. In the rest, with the exception of a completely anomalous example from Vienne[95], it is either a trope[96], or else is merged with or immediately follows the Elevatio before Matins[97]. The evidence of the texts themselves is borne out by Durandus, who is aware of the variety of custom, and indicates the end of Matins as the proprior locus[98].

No less difficult to determine than the place and time at which the Easter sepulchre itself was devised, are those at which the Quem quaeritis, attached to it, stood forth as a drama. That the two first appear together can hardly be taken as evidence that they came into being together. The predominance of German and French versions of the Quem quaeritis may suggest an origin in the Frankish area: and if the influence of the Sarum use and the havoc of service-books at the Reformation may between them help to account for the comparative rarity of the play in these islands, no such explanation is available for Italy and Spain. The development of the religious drama in the peninsulas, especially in Italy, seems to have followed from the beginning lines somewhat distinct from those of north-western Europe. But between France and Germany, as between France and England, literary influences, so far as clerkly literature goes, moved freely: nor is it possible to isolate the centres and lines of diffusion of that gradual process of accretion and development through which the Quem quaeritis gave ever fuller and fuller expression to the dramatic instincts by which it was prompted. The clerici vagantes were doubtless busy agents in carrying new motives and amplifications of the text from one church to another. Nor should it be forgotten that, numerous as are the versions preserved, those which have perished must have been more numerous still, so that, if all were before us, the apparent anomaly presented by the occurrence of identical features in, for instance, the plays from Dublin and Fleury, and no others, would not improbably be removed. The existence of this or that version in the service-books of any one church must depend on divers conditions; the accidents of communication in the first place, and in the second the laxity or austerity of governing bodies at various dates in the licensing or pruning of dramatic elaboration. The simplest texts are often found in the latest manuscripts, and it may be that because their simplicity gave no offence they were permitted to remain there. A Strassburg notice suggests that the ordering of the Quem quaeritis was a matter for the discretion of each individual parish, in independence of its diocesan use[99]; while the process of textual growth is illustrated by a Laon Ordinarium, in which an earlier version has been erased and one more elaborate substituted[100].

Disregarding, however, in the main the dates of the manuscripts, it is easy so to classify the available versions as to mark the course of a development which was probably complete by the middle of the twelfth and certainly by the thirteenth century. This development affected both the text and the dramatic interest of the play. The former is the slighter matter and may be disposed of first[101].

The kernel of the whole thing is, of course, the old St. Gall trope, itself a free adaptation from the text of the Vulgate, and the few examples in which this does not occur must be regarded as quite exceptional[102]. The earliest additions were taken from anthems, which already had their place in the Easter services, and which in some manuscripts of the Gregorian Antiphonarium are grouped together as suitable for insertion wherever may be desired[103]. So far the text keeps fairly close to the words of Scripture, and even where the limits of the antiphonary are passed, the same rule holds good. In time, however, a freer dramatic handling partly establishes itself. Proses, and even metrical hymns, beginning as choral introductions, gradually usurp a place in the dialogue, and in the latest versions the metrical character is very marked. By far the most important of these insertions is the famous prose or sequence Victimae paschali, the composition of which by the monk Wipo of St. Gall can be pretty safely dated in the second quarter of the eleventh century[104]. It goes as follows:

‘Victimae paschali laudes immolant Christiani. agnus redemit oves, Christus innocens patri reconciliavit peccatores. mors et vita duello conflixere mirando, dux vitae mortuus regnat vivus. dic nobis, Maria, quid vidisti in via? sepulchrum Christi viventis et gloriam vidi resurgentis; angelicos testes, sudarium et vestes. surrexit Christus, spes mea, praecedet suos in Galilaeam. credendum est magis soli Mariae veraci, quam Iudaeorum turbae fallaci. scimus Christum surrexisse a mortuis vere: tu nobis, victor, rex, miserere.’

Originally written as an Alleluia trope or sequence proper, a place which it still occupies in the reformed Tridentine liturgy[105], the Victimae paschali cannot be shown to have made its way into the Quem quaeritis until the thirteenth century[106]. But it occurs in about a third of the extant versions, sometimes as a whole, sometimes with the omission of the first three sentences, which obviously do not lend themselves as well as the rest to dramatic treatment. When introduced, these three sentences are sung either by the choir or by the Maries: the other six fall naturally into dialogue.

The Victimae paschali is an expansion of the text of the Quem quaeritis, but it does not necessarily introduce any new dramatic motive. Of such there were, from the beginning, at least two. There was the visit of the Maries to the sepulchre and their colloquy with the angel; and there was the subsequent announcement of the Resurrection made by them in pursuance of the divine direction. Each has its appropriate action: in the one case the lifting of the pall and discovery of the empty sepulchre, in the other the display by the Maries of the cast-off grave-clothes, represented by a linteum, in token of the joyful event. It is to this second scene, if the term may be used of anything so rudimentary, that the Victimae paschali attaches itself. The dialogue of it is between the Maries and the choir, who stand for the whole body of disciples, or sometimes two singers, who are their spokesmen[107]. A new scene is, however, clearly added to the play, when these two singers not only address the Maries, but themselves pay a visit to the sepulchre. Now they represent the apostles Peter and John. In accordance with the gospel narrative John outstrips Peter in going to the sepulchre, but Peter enters first: and the business of taking up the linteum and displaying it to the other disciples is naturally transferred to them from the Maries. The apostle scene first makes its appearance in an Augsburg text of the end of the eleventh century, or the beginning of the twelfth[108]. It occurs in rather more than half the total number of versions. These are mainly German, but the evidence of Belethus is sufficient to show that it was not unknown in twelfth-century France[109]. The addition of the apostle scene completed the evolution of the Easter play for the majority of churches. There were, however, a few in which the very important step was taken of introducing the person of the risen Christ himself; and this naturally entailed yet another new scene. Of this type there are fifteen extant versions, coming from one Italian, four French, and four German churches[110]. The earliest is of the twelfth century, from a Prague convent. The new scene closely follows the Scripture narrative. Mary Magdalen remains behind the other Maries at the sepulchre. The Christ appears; she takes him for the gardener, and he reveals himself with the Noli me tangere. Mary returns with the new wonder to the choir. This is the simplest version of the new episode. It occurs in a play of which the text is purely liturgical, and does not even include the Victimae paschali. A somewhat longer one is found in a Fleury play, which is in other respects highly elaborate and metrical. Here the Christ appears twice, first disguised in similitudinem hortolani, afterwards in similitudinem domini with the labarum or resurrection banner. The remaining versions do not depart widely from these two types, except that at Rouen and Mont St.-Michel, the Christ scene takes place, not at the sepulchre but at the altar, and at Cividale in a spot described as the ortus Christi[111].

The formal classification, then, of the versions of the Quem quaeritis, gives three types. In the first, the scenes between the Maries and the angel, and between the Maries and the choir, are alone present; in the second the apostle scene is added to these; the third, of which there are only fifteen known examples, is distinguished by the presence of the Christ scene. In any one of these types, the Victimae paschali and other proses and hymns may or may not be found[112]. And it must now be added that it is on the presence of these that the greater or less development of lyric feeling, as distinct from dramatic action, in the play depends. The metrical hymns in particular, when they are not merely choral overtures, are often of the nature of planctus or laments put in the mouths of the Maries as they approach the sepulchre or at some other appropriate moment. These planctus add greatly to the vividness and humanity of the play, and are thus an important step in the dramatic evolution. The use of them may be illustrated by that of the hymn Heu! pius pastor occiditur in the Dublin version found by Mr. Frere and printed, after a different text from his, in an appendix[113]. This play has not the Christ scene, and belongs, therefore, to the second type of Quem quaeritis, but, in other respects, including the planctus, it closely resembles the Fleury version described above. Another planctus, found in plays of the third type from Engelberg, Nuremberg, Einsiedeln, and Cividale, is the Heu nobis! internas mentes[114]; a third, the Heu! miserae cur contigit, seems to have been interpolated in the Heu! pius pastor at Dublin; a fourth, the Omnipotens pater altissime, with a refrain Heu quantus est dolor noster! is found at places so far apart as Narbonne and Prague[115]: and a fifth, Heu dolor, heu quam dira doloris angustia! is also in the Fleury text[116].

Another advance towards drama is made in four Prague versions of the third type by the introduction of an episode for which there is no Scriptural basis at all. On their way to the sepulchre, the Maries stop and buy the necessary spices of a spice-merchant or unguentarius. In three thirteenth-century texts the unguentarius is merely a persona muta; in one of the fourteenth he is given four lines[117]. The unguentarius was destined to become a very popular character, and to afford much comic relief in the vernacular religious drama of Germany. Nor can it be quite confidently said that his appearance in these comparatively late liturgical plays is a natural development and not merely an instance of reaction by the vernacular stage.

The scenic effect of the Quem quaeritis can be to some extent gathered from the rubrics, although these are often absent and often not very explicit, being content with a general direction for the performers to be arrayed in similitudinem mulierum or angelorum or apostolorum, as the case may be. The setting was obviously simple, and few properties or costumes beyond what the vestments and ornaments of the church could supply were used. The Maries had their heads veiled[118], and wore surplices, copes, chasubles, dalmatics, albs, or the like. These were either white or coloured. At Fécamp one, presumably the Magdalen, was in red, the other two in white[119]. The thuribles which, as already pointed out, they carried, were sometimes replaced by boxes or vases representing the ointment and spices[120]. Sometimes also they carried, or had carried before them, candles. Two or three rubrics direct them to go pedetemptim, as sad or searching[121]. They were generally three in number, occasionally two, or one only. The angels, or angel, as the case might be, sat within the sepulchre or at its door. They, too, had vestments, generally white, and veiled or crowned heads. At Narbonne, and probably elsewhere, they had wings[122]. They held lights, a palm, or an ear of corn, symbolizing the Resurrection[123]. The apostles are rarely described; the ordinary priestly robes doubtless sufficed. At Dublin, St. John, in white, held a palm, and St. Peter, in red, the keys[124]. In the earliest Prague version of the Christ scene, the Christ seems to be represented by one of the angels[125]. At Nuremberg the dominica persona has a crown and bare feet[126]. At Rouen he holds a cross, and though there is a double appearance, there is no hint of any change of costume[127]. But at Coutances and Fleury the first appearance is as hortulanus, indicated perhaps by a spade, which is exchanged on the second for the cross[128].

It must be borne in mind that the Quem quaeritis remained imperfectly detached from the liturgy, out of which it arose. The performers were priests, or nuns, and choir-boys. The play was always chanted, not spoken[129]. It was not even completely resolved into dialogue. In many quite late versions narrative anthems giving the gist of each scene are retained, and are sung either by the principal actors or by the choir, which thus, as in the hymns or proses which occur as overtures[130], holds a position distinct from the part which it takes as representing the disciples[131]. Finally the whole performance ends in most cases with the Te Deum laudamus, and thus becomes a constituent part of Matins, which normally comes to a close with that hymn. The intervention of the congregation, with its Easter hymn Christ ist erstanden, seems to lie outside the main period of the evolution of the Quem quaeritis. I only find one example so early as the thirteenth century[132]. It is in quite late texts also that certain other Easter motives have become attached to the play. The commonest of these are the whispered greeting of Surrexit Christus and the kiss of peace, which have been noted elsewhere as preceding Matins[133]. At Eichstädt, in 1560, is an amusing direction, which Mr. Collins would have thought very proper, that the pax is to be given to the dominus terrae, si ibi fuerit, before the priest. The same manuscript shows a curious combination of the Quem quaeritis with the irrepressible Tollite portas ceremony[134]. Another such is found at Venice[135]. But this is as late as the eighteenth century, to which also belongs the practice at Angers described by De Moleon, according to which the Maries took up from the sepulchre with the linteum two large Easter eggs—deux œufs d’autruche[136].

Besides the Quem quaeritis, Easter week had another liturgical drama in the Peregrini or Peregrinus[137]. This was established by the twelfth century. It was regularly played at Lichfield[138], but no text is extant from England, except a late transitional one, written partly in the vernacular[139]. France affords four texts, from Saintes[140], Rouen[141], Beauvais[142], and Fleury[143]. The play is also recorded at Lille[144]. In Germany it is represented by a recently-discovered fragment of the famous early thirteenth-century repertory of the scholares vagantes from the Benedictbeuern monastery[145]. The simplest version is that of Saintes, in which the action is confined to the journey to Emmaus and the supper there. The Rouen play is on the same lines, but at the close the disciples are joined by St. Mary Magdalen, and the Victimae paschali is sung. The Benedictbeuern play similarly ends with the introduction of the Virgin and two other Maries to greet the risen Christ. But here, and in the Beauvais and Fleury plays, a distinct scene is added, of which the subject is the incredulity of Thomas and the apparition to him. It is, I think, a reasonable conjecture that the Peregrini, in which the risen Christ is a character, was not devised until he had already been introduced into the later versions of the Quem quaeritis. Indeed the Fleury Peregrini, with its double appearance and change of costume for Christ, seems clearly modelled on the Fleury Quem quaeritis. But the lesser play has its own proper and natural place in the Easter week services. It is attached to the Processio ad fontes which is a regular portion, during that season, of Vespers[146]. The Christ with the Resurrection cross is personated by the priest who normally accompanies the procession cum cruce. At Rouen the play was a kind of dramatization of the procession itself[147]; at Lille it seems to have had the same position; at Saintes and Beauvais it preceded the Magnificat and Oratio or Collecta, after which the procession started. In the remaining cases there is no indication of the exact time for the Peregrini. The regular day for it appears to have been the Monday in Easter week, of the Gospel for which the journey to Emmaus is the subject; but at Fleury it was on the Tuesday, when the Gospel subject is the incredulity of Thomas. At Saintes, a curious rubric directs the Christ during the supper at Emmaus to divide the ‘host’ among the Peregrini. It seems possible that in this way a final disposal was found for the host which had previously figured in the Depositio and Elevatio of the sepulchre ceremony.

A long play, probably of Norman origin and now preserved in a manuscript at Tours, represents a merging of the Elevatio, the Quem quaeritis, and the Peregrini[148]. The beginning is imperfect, but it may be conjectured from a fragment belonging to Klosterneuburg in Germany, that only a few lines are lost[149]. Pilate sets a watch before the sepulchre. An angel sends lightning, and the soldiers fall as if dead[150]. Then come the Maries, with planctus. There is a scene with the unguentarius or mercator, much longer than that at Prague, followed by more planctus. After the Quem quaeritis, the soldiers announce the event to Pilate. A planctus by the Magdalen leads up to the apparition to her. The Maries return to the disciples. Christ appears to the disciples, then to Thomas, and the Victimae paschali and Te Deum conclude the performance. A fragment of a very similar play, breaking off before the Quem quaeritis, belongs to the Benedictbeuern manuscript already mentioned[151].

It is clear from the rubrics that the Tours play, long as it is, was still acted in church, and probably, as the Te Deum suggests, at the Easter Matins[152]. Certainly this was the case with the Benedictbeuern play. In a sense, these plays only mark a further stage in the process of elaboration by which the fuller versions of the Quem quaeritis proper came into being. But the introduction at the beginning and end of motives outside the events of the Easter morning itself points to possibilities of expansion which were presently realized, and which ultimately transformed the whole character of the liturgical drama. All the plays, however, which have so far been mentioned, are strictly plays of the Resurrection. Their action begins after the Burial of Christ, and does not stretch back into the events of the Passion. Nor indeed can the liturgical drama proper be shown to have advanced beyond a very rudimentary representation of the Passion. This began with the planctus, akin to those of the Quem quaeritis, which express the sorrows of the Virgin and the Maries and St. John around the cross[153]. Such planctus exist both in Latin and the vernacular. The earliest are of the twelfth century. Several of them are in dialogue, in which Christ himself occasionally takes part, and they appear to have been sung in church after Matins on Good Friday[154]. The planctus must be regarded as the starting-point of a drama of the Passion, which presently established itself beside the drama of the Resurrection. This process was mainly outside the churches, but an early and perhaps still liturgical stage of it is to be seen in the ludus breviter de passione which precedes the elaborated Quem quaeritis of the Benedictbeuern manuscript, and was probably treated as a sort of prologue to it. The action extends from the preparation for the Last Supper to the Burial. It is mainly in dumb-show, and the slight dialogue introduced is wholly out of the Vulgate. But at one point occurs the rubric Maria planctum faciat quantum melius potest, and a later hand has inserted out of its place in the text the most famous of all the laments of the Virgin, the Planctus ante nescia[155].

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XIX. LITURGICAL PLAYS (continued)

The ‘Twelve days’ of the Christmas season are no less important than Easter itself in the evolution of the liturgical drama. I have mentioned in the last chapter a Christmas trope which is evidently based upon the older Easter dialogue. Instead of Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, o Christicolae? it begins Quem quaeritis in praesepe, pastores, dicite? It occurs in eleventh- and twelfth-century tropers from St. Gall, Limoges, St. Magloire, and Nevers. Originally it was an Introit trope for the third or ‘great’ Mass. In a fifteenth-century breviary from Clermont-Ferrand it has been transferred to Matins, where it follows the Te Deum; and this is precisely the place in the Christmas services occupied, at Rouen, by a liturgical drama known as the Officium Pastorum, which appears to have grown out of the Quem quaeritis in praesepe? by a process analogous to that by which the Easter drama grew out of the Quem quaeritis in sepulchro[156]? A praesepe or ‘crib,’ covered by a curtain, was made ready behind the altar, and in it was placed an image of the Virgin. After the Te Deum five canons or vicars, representing the shepherds, approached the great west door of the choir. A boy in similitudinem angeli perched in excelso sang them the ‘good tidings,’ and a number of others in voltis ecclesiae took up the Gloria in excelsis. The shepherds, singing a hymn, advanced to the praesepe. Here they were met with the Quem quaeritis by two priests quasi obstetrices[157]. The dialogue of the trope, expanded by another hymn during which the shepherds adore, follows, and so the drama ends. But the shepherds ‘rule the choir’ throughout the Missa in Gallicantu immediately afterwards, and at Lauds, the anthem for which much resembles the Quem quaeritis itself[158]. The misterium pastorum was still performed at Rouen in the middle of the fifteenth century, and at this date the shepherds, cessantibus stultitiis et insolenciis, so far as this could be ensured by the chapter, took the whole ‘service’ of the day, just as did the deacons, priests, and choir-boys during the triduum[159].

If the central point of the Quem quaeritis is the sepulchrum, that of the Pastores is the praesepe. In either case the drama, properly so called, is an addition, and by no means an invariable one, to the symbolical ceremony. The Pastores may, in fact, be described, although the term does not occur in the documents, as a Visitatio praesepis. The history of the praesepe can be more definitely stated than that of the sepulchrum. It is by no means extinct. The Christmas ‘crib’ or crèche, a more or less realistic representation of the Nativity, with a Christ-child in the manger, a Joseph and Mary, and very often an ox and an ass, is a common feature in all Catholic countries at Christmas time[160]. At Rome, in particular, the esposizione del santo bambino takes place with great ceremony[161]. A tradition ascribes the first presepio known in Italy to St. Francis, who is said to have invented it at Greccio in 1223[162]. But this is a mistake. The custom is many centuries older than St. Francis. Its Roman home is the church of S. Maria Maggiore or Ad Praesepe, otherwise called the ‘basilica of Liberius.’ Here there was in the eighth century a permanent praesepe[163], probably built in imitation of one which had long existed at Bethlehem, and to which an allusion is traced in the writings of Origen[164]. The praesepe of S. Maria Maggiore was in the right aisle. When the Sistine chapel was built in 1585-90 it was moved to the crypt, where it may now be seen. This church became an important station for the Papal services at Christmas. The Pope celebrated Mass here on the vigil, and remained until he had also celebrated the first Mass on Christmas morning. The bread was broken on the manger itself, which served as an altar. At S. Maria Maggiore, moreover, is an important relic, in some boards from the culla or cradle of Christ, which are exposed on the presepio during Christmas[165]. The presepio of S. Maria Maggiore became demonstrably the model for other similar chapels in Rome[166], and doubtless for the more temporary structures throughout Italy and western Europe in general.

In the present state of our knowledge it is a little difficult to be precise as to the range or date of the Pastores. The only full mediaeval Latin text, other than that of Rouen, which has come to light, is also of Norman origin, and is still unprinted[167]. In the eighteenth century the play survived at Lisieux and Clermont[168]. The earliest Rouen manuscript is of the thirteenth century, and the absence of any reference to the Officium Pastorum by John of Avranches, who writes primarily of Rouen, and who does mention the Officium Stellae, makes it probable that it was not there known about 1070[169]. Its existence, however, in England in the twelfth century is shown by the Lichfield Statutes of 1188-98, and on the whole it is not likely to have taken shape later than the eleventh. Very likely it never, as a self-contained play, acquired the vogue of the Quem quaeritis. As will be seen presently, it was overshadowed and absorbed by rivals. I find no trace of it in Germany, where the praesepe became a centre, less for liturgical drama, than for carols, dances, and ‘crib-rocking[170].’

Still rarer than the Pastores is the drama, presumably belonging to Innocents’ day, of Rachel. It is found in a primitive form, hardly more than a trope, in a Limoges manuscript of the eleventh century. Here it is called Lamentatio Rachel, and consists of a short planctus by Rachel herself, and a short reply by a consoling angel. There is nothing to show what place it occupied in the services[171].

The fact is that both the Pastores and the Rachel were in many churches taken up into a third drama belonging to the Epiphany. This is variously known as the Tres Reges, the Magi, Herodes, and the Stella. It exists in a fair number of different but related forms. Like the Quem quaeritis and the Pastores, it had a material starting-point, in the shape of a star, lit with candles, which hung from the roof of the church, and could sometimes be moved, by a simple mechanical device, from place to place[172]. As with the Quem quaeritis, the development of the Stella must be studied without much reference to the relative age of the manuscripts in which it happens to be found. But it was probably complete by the end of the eleventh century, since manuscripts of that date contain the play in its latest forms[173].

The simplest version is from Limoges[174]. The three kings enter by the great door of the choir singing a prosula. They show their gifts, the royal gold, the divine incense, the myrrh for funeral. Then they see the star, and follow it to the high altar. Here they offer their gifts, each contained in a gilt cup, or some other iocale pretiosum, after which a boy, representing an angel, announces to them the birth of Christ, and they retire singing to the sacristy. The text of this version stands by itself: nearly all the others are derived from a common tradition, which is seen in its simplest form at Rouen[175]. In the Rouen Officium Stellae, the three kings, coming respectively from the east, north, and south of the church, meet before the altar. One of them points to the star with his stick, and they sing:

‘1. Stella fulgore nimio rutilat, 2. Quae regem regum natum demonstrat 3. Quem venturum olim prophetiae signaverant.’

They kiss each other and sing an anthem, which occurs also in the Limoges version: Eamus ergo et inquiramus eum, offerentes ei munera; aurum thus et myrrham. A procession is now formed, and as it moves towards the nave, the choir chant narrative passages, describing the visit of the Magi to Jerusalem and their reception by Herod. Meanwhile a star is lit over the altar of the cross where an image of the Virgin has been placed. The Magi approach it, singing the passage which begins Ecce stella in Oriente. They are met by two in dalmatics, who appear to be identical with the obstetrices of the Rouen Pastores. A dialogue follows:

‘Qui sunt hi qui, stella duce, nos adeuntes inaudita ferunt.

Magi respondeant:

nos sumus, quos cernitis, reges Tharsis et Arabum et Saba, dona ferentes Christo, regi nato, Domino, quem, stella deducente, adorare venimus.

Tunc duo Dalmaticati aperientes cortinam dicant:

ecce puer adest quem queritis, Iam properate adorate, quia ipse est redemptio mundi.

Tunc procidentes Reges ad terram, simul salutent puerum, ita dicentes:

salve, princeps saeculorum.

Tunc unus a suo famulo aurum accipiat et dicat:

suscipe, rex, aurum.

Et offerat.

Secundus ita dicat et offerat:

tolle thus, tu, vere Deus.

Tercius ita dicat et offerat:

mirram, signum sepulturae.’

Then the congregation make their oblations. Meanwhile the Magi pray and fall asleep. In their sleep an angel warns them to return home another way. The procession returns up a side aisle to the choir; and the Mass, in which the Magi, like the shepherds on Christmas day, ‘rule the choir,’ follows.

In spite of the difference of text the incidents of the Rouen and Limoges versions, except for the angelic warning introduced at Rouen, are the same. There was a dramatic advance when the visit to Jerusalem, instead of being merely narrated by the choir, was inserted into the action. In the play performed at Nevers[176], Herod himself, destined in the fullness of time to become the protagonist of the Corpus Christi stage, makes his first appearance. There are two versions of the Nevers play. In the earlier the new scene is confined to a colloquy between Herod and the Magi:

‘[Magi.] Vidimus stellam eius in Oriente, et agnovimus regem regum esse natum.

[Herodes.] regem quem queritis natum stella quo signo didicistis? Si illum regnare creditis, dicite nobis.

[Magi.] illum natum esse didicimus in Oriente stella monstrante.

[Herodes.] ite et de puero diligenter investigate, et inventum redeuntes mihi renuntiate.’

The later version adds two further episodes. In one a nuntius announces the coming of the Magi, and is sent to fetch them before Herod: in the other Herod sends his courtiers for the scribes, who find a prophecy of the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem. Obviously the Herod scene gives point to the words at the end of the Rouen play, in which the angel bids the Magi to return home by a different way.

At Compiègne the action closes with yet another scene, in which Herod learns that the Magi have escaped him[177].

‘Nuncius. Delusus es domine, magi viam redierunt aliam.

[Herodes. incendium meum ruina extinguam[178].]

Armiger. decerne, domine, vindicari iram tuam, et stricto mucrone quaerere iube puerum, forte inter occisos occidetur et ipse.

Herodes. indolis eximiae pueros fac ense perire.

Angelus. sinite parvulos venire ad me, talium est enim regnum caelorum.’

In a Norman version which has the same incidents as the Compiègne play, but in parts a different text, the armiger is the son of Herod, and the play ends with Herod taking a sword from a bystander and brandishing it in the air[179]. Already he is beginning to tear a passion to tatters in the manner that became traditionally connected with his name. Another peculiarity of this Norman version is that the Magi address Herod in an outlandish jargon, which seems to contain fragments of Hebrew and Arabic speech.

The play of the Stella must now, perhaps, be considered, except so far as mere amplifications of the text are concerned, strictly complete. But another step was irresistibly suggested by the course it had taken. The massacre of the Innocents, although it lay outside the range of action in which the Magi themselves figured, could be not merely threatened but actually represented. This was done at Laon[180]. The cruel suggestion of Archelaus is carried out. The Innocents come in singing and bearing a lamb. They are slain, and the play ends with a dialogue, like that of the distinct Limoges planctus, between the lamenting Rachel and an angelic consolatrix.

The absorption of the motives proper to other feasts of the Twelve nights into the Epiphany play has clearly begun. A fresh series of examples shows a similar treatment of the Pastores. At Strassburg the Magi, as they leave Herod, meet the shepherds returning from Bethlehem:

‘Pastores, dicite, quidnam vidistis? infantem vidimus.’

This, however, is not taken from the Pastores itself, but from the Christmas Lauds antiphon[181]. Its dramatic use may be compared with that of the Victimae paschali in the Quem quaeritis. In versions from Bilsen[182] near Liège and from Mans[183], on the other hand, although the meeting of the Magi and the shepherds is retained, a complete Pastores, with the angelic tidings and the adoration at the praesepe, forms the first part of the office, before the Magi are introduced at all.

The Strassburg, Bilsen, and Mans plays have not the Rachel, although the first two have the scene in which the nuntius informs Herod that the Magi have deceived him. A further stage is reached when, as at Freising and at Fleury, the Pastores, Stella and Rachel all coalesce in a single, and by this time considerable, drama. The Freising texts, of which there are two, are rather puzzling[184]. The first closely resembles the plays of the group just described. It begins with a short Pastores, comprising the angelic tidings only. Then the scenes between the Magi and Herod are treated at great length. The meeting of the Magi and the shepherds is followed by the oblation, the angelic warning, and the return of the messenger to Herod. In the second Freising text, which is almost wholly metrical, the Pastores is complete. It is followed by a quite new scene, the dream of Joseph and his flight into Egypt. Then come successively the scene of fury at court, the massacre, the planctus and consolation of Rachel. Clearly this second text, as it stands, is incomplete. The Magi are omitted, and the whole of the latter part of the play is consequently rendered meaningless. But it is the Magi who are alone treated fully in the first Freising text. I suggest, therefore, that the second text is intended to supplement and not to replace the first. It really comprises two fragments: one a revision of the Pastores, the other a revision of the closing scene and an expansion of it by a Rachel.

As to the Fleury version there can be no doubt whatever[185]. The matter is, indeed, arranged in two plays, a Herodes and an Interfectio Puerorum, each ending with a Te Deum; and the performance may possibly have extended over two days. But the style is the same throughout and the episodes form one continuous action. It is impossible to regard the Interfectio Puerorum as a separate piece from the Herodes, acted a week earlier on the feast of the Innocents; for into it, after the first entry of the children with their lamb, gaudentes per monasterium, come the flight into Egypt, the return of the nuntius, and the wrath of Herod, which, of course, presuppose the Magi scenes. Another new incident is added at the end of the Fleury play. Herod is deposed and Archelaus set up; the Holy Family return from Egypt, and settle in the parts of Galilee[186].

I have attempted to arrange the dozen or so complete Epiphany plays known to scholars in at least the logical order of their development. There are also three fragments, which fit readily enough into the system. Two, from a Paris manuscript and from Einsiedeln, may be classed respectively with the Compiègne and Strassburg texts[187]. The third, from Vienne, is an independent version, in leonine hexameters, of the scene in which the Magi first sight the star, a theme common to all the plays except that of Limoges[188]. I do not feel certain that this fragment is from a liturgical drama at all.

The textual development of the Stella is closely parallel to that of the Quem quaeritis. The more primitive versions consist of antiphons and prose sentences based upon or in the manner of the Scriptures. The later ones, doubtless under the influence of wandering scholars, become increasingly metrical. The classical tags, from Sallust and Virgil, are an obvious note of the scholarly pen. With the exception of that from Limoges, all the texts appear to be derived by successive accretions and modifications from an archetype fairly represented at Rouen. The Bilsen text and the Vienne fragment have been freely rewritten, and the process of rewriting is well illustrated by the alternative versions found side by side in the later Nevers manuscript. With regard to the place occupied by the Stella in the Epiphany services, such manuscripts as give any indications at all seem to point to a considerable divergence of local use. At Limoges and Nevers, the play was of the nature of a trope to the Mass, inserted in the former case at the Offertorium, in the latter at the Communio[189]. At Rouen the Officium followed Tierce, and preceded the ordinary procession before Mass. At Fleury the use of the Te Deum suggests that it was at Matins; at Strassburg it followed the Magnificat at Vespers, but on the octave of Epiphany, not Epiphany itself. Perhaps the second part of the Fleury play was also on the octave. At Bilsen the play followed the Benedicamus, but with this versicle nearly all the Hours end[190]. I do not, however, hesitate to say that the Limoges use must have been the most primitive one. The kernel of the whole performance is a dramatized Offertorium. It was a custom for Christian kings to offer gold and frankincense and myrrh at the altar on Epiphany day[191]; and I take the play to have served as a substitute for this ceremony, where no king actually regnant was present.

There is yet one other liturgical play belonging to the Christmas season, which for the future development of the drama is the most important of all. This is the Prophetae[192]. It differs from the Quem quaeritis, the Peregrini, the Pastores, and the Stella by the large number of performers required, and by the epical mode of its composition. Its origin, in fact, is to be sought in a narrative, a lectio, not a chant. The source was the pseudo-Augustinian Sermo contra Iudaeos, Paganos et Arianos de Symbolo, probably written in the sixth century, but ascribed throughout the Middle Ages to the great African[193]. A portion of this sermon was used in many churches as a lesson for some part or other of the Christmas offices[194]. The passage chosen is in a highly rhetorical vein. Vos, inquam, convenio, O Iudaei cries the preacher, and calls upon the Jews to bear witness out of the mouths of their own prophets to the Christ. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Moses, David, Habakkuk, Simeon, Zacharias and Elisabeth, John the Baptist;—each in turn is bidden to speak, and each testimony is triumphantly quoted. Then: Ecce, convertimur ad gentes. Virgil—poeta facundissimus—is pressed into the service, for the famous line of his fourth eclogue:

‘iam nova progenies caelo demittitur alto[195],’

Nebuchadnezzar, who saw four walking in the furnace, and finally the Erythraean Sibyl, whose acrostic verses on the ‘Signs of Judgement’ first appear in the writings of Eusebius[196].

The dramatic form of this lectio possibly led to its being chanted instead of read, and distributed between several voices in the manner of the Passions from Palm Sunday to Good Friday[197]. At any rate in the eleventh century there appears in a Limoges manuscript a metrical adaptation in which it has been wholly converted into a dramatic dialogue[198]. This Limoges Prophetae follows the sermon pretty closely in its arrangement. A Precentor begins:

‘Omnes gentes congaudentes, dent cantum laetitiae! deus homo fit, de domo David, natus hodie.’

He addresses a couplet each Ad Iudaeos, Ad Gentes, and then calls in turn upon each of the prophets, who reply, Virgil pronouncing his line, the Sibyl the Iudicii Signum, and the others a couplet or quatrain apiece. They are nearly identical with the personages of the sermon: Israel is added, Zacharias disappears, and the order is slightly different. Finally the Precentor concludes:

‘Iudaea incredula, cur manens adhuc inverecunda?’

Two later versions, belonging respectively to Laon[199] and to Rouen[200], diverge far more from the model. They are at much the same stage of development. In both the play is ushered in with the hymn Gloriosi et famosi, the verses of which are sung by the prophets, and the refrain by the choir[201]. The costumes and symbols of the prophets are carefully indicated in the rubrics. The Precentor of Limoges is represented by two singers, called at Laon Appellatores, and at Rouen Vocatores. The dialogue is amplified beyond that of Limoges. Sex Iudaei and sex Gentiles, for instance, take parts: and the Vocatores comment with the choir in an identical form of words on each prophecy. The Laon text is a good deal the shorter. The prophets are practically the same as at Limoges, with one remarkable exception. At the end is introduced Balaam, and to his prophecy is appended a miniature drama, with the angel and the ass: thus—

‘Hic veniat Angelus cum gladio. Balaam tangit asinam, et illa non praecedente, dicit iratus:

quid moraris, asina, obstinata bestia? iam scindent calcaria costas et praecordia.

Puer sub asina respondet:

angelus cum gladio, quem adstare video, prohibet ne transeam; timeo ne peream.’

The Rouen text adds quite a number of prophets. The full list includes Moses, Amos, Isaiah, Aaron, Jeremiah, Daniel, Habakkuk, Balaam, Samuel, David, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Ezekiel, Malachi, Zacharias, Elisabeth, John the Baptist, Simeon, Virgil, Nebuchadnezzar, and the Sibyl. In this version, also, the part of Balaam is expanded into a drama.

‘Duo missi a rege Balac dicant:

Balaam, veni et fac.

Tunc Balaam, ornatus, sedens super asinam, habens calcaria, retineat lora et calcaribus percutiat asinam, et quidam iuvenis, habens alas, tenens gladium, obstet asinae. Quidam sub asina dicat:

cur me cum calcaribus miseram sic laeditis.

Hoc dicto, Angelus ei dicat:

desine regis Balac praeceptum perficere.’

Here, too, another little drama is similarly introduced. This is the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, which, with an imago for the brethren to refuse to worship and a fornax for them to be cast into, attaches itself to the vocatio of Nebuchadnezzar.

In the Limoges manuscript the Prophetae is followed by the words Hic inchoant Benedicamus[202]. As has been pointed out in the case of the Bilsen Pastores, this is not conclusive as to the hour at which the performance took place. The day was probably that of Christmas itself. But even the day would naturally vary with the variable position of the lectio out of which the Prophetae grew. At Lincoln it was likewise Christmas day. But at Rouen the processio asinorum was on Christmas eve, and took the place of the ordinary festal procession after Tierce and before Mass[203]. And at St. Martin of Tours the Prophetae was on New Year’s day, performances being given both at Matins and Vespers[204].

The question naturally suggests itself: What was the relation of these liturgical plays of the Christmas season to the Feast of Fools and other ecclesiastical ludi of the Twelve nights, which were discussed in the first volume? At Rouen, the Prophetae received the name of processio asinorum and took place at a festum asinorum, a name which we know to have been elsewhere synonymous with festum fatuorum. At Tours, it was played at a reformed festum novi anni, with a Boy Bishop and at least traces of expelled disorder. So, too, with the other plays. The Rouen Pastores was infected by the fifteenth century with the stultitiae et insolentiae of the triduum. At Bilsen the Stella was performed before a rex, who can hardly have been any other than a rex fatuorum of Epiphany. At Autun the regnum Herodis was considered a Feast of Fools[205]. Probably in both churches the rex acted Herod in the play. I think it must be taken for granted that the plays are the older institution of the two. They seem all to have taken shape by the eleventh century, before there is any clear sign that the Kalends had made their way into the churches and become the Feast of Fools. The plays may even have been encouraged as a counter-attraction, for the congregation, to the Kalends outside. On the other hand, I do not hold, as some writers do, that the riotous Feasts of Asses were derived from the pious and instructive ceremony so called at Rouen[206]. On the contrary, Balaam and his ass are an interpolation in the Prophetae both at Rouen and, more obviously, at Laon. Balaam, alone of the Laon performers, is not from the pseudo-Augustine sermon. Is he not, therefore, to be regarded as a reaction of the Feast of Fools upon the Prophetae, as an attempt to turn the established presence of the ass in the church to purposes of edification, rather than of ribaldry[207]? I think the explanation is the more plausible one. And I find a parallel reaction of the turbulence of the Feast of Fools upon the Stella, in the violence of speech and gesture which permanently associated itself at a very early stage with the character of Herod. The view here taken will be confirmed, when we come to consider certain ecclesiastical criticisms passed upon the liturgical plays in the twelfth century.

Whatever the exact relation of the divine and profane ludi at Easter and Christmas may be, it seems to have been, in the main, at these two great seasons of festivity that what may be called the spontaneous growth of drama out of liturgy took place. There are yet a fair number of Latin plays to be spoken of which are in a sense liturgical. That is to say, they were acted, certainly or probably, in churches and during intervals in the services. But of these such a spontaneous growth cannot be asserted, although it cannot also, in the present state of the evidence, be confidently denied. Their metrical and literary style is parallel to that of the Easter and Christmas plays in the latest stages of development; and, until further data turn up, it is perhaps permissible to conjecture that they were deliberately composed on the model of the Quem quaeritis and the Stella, when these had become widespread and popular. Indeed, some such derivation of the Peregrini from the Quem quaeritis and of the Stella itself, at least in part, from the Pastores, has already appeared probable.

In dealing with this new group of plays, we come, for the first and only time, upon an individual author. As might be expected, this author is a scholaris vagans, by name Hilarius. It would even be doing him no great injustice to call him a goliard. What little is known of Hilarius is gathered from his writings, which exist in a single manuscript. He may have been an Englishman, for a large proportion of his verses are addressed to English folk. He was a pupil, about 1125, of the famous Abelard at his oratory of Paraclete in a desert near Nogent-sur-Seine. Afterwards he made his way to Angers. Many of his verses are of the familiar goliardic type, amorous and jocund; but amongst them are three plays[208]. Two of these are comparatively short, and contain each a few stanzas of French interspersed amongst the Latin. The subject of one is a miracle wrought by St. Nicholas[209]; of the other, the Suscitatio Lazari[210]. The third play, wholly in Latin, falls into two parts, and gives at considerable length the story of Daniel[211]. I take it that these plays were not written for any church in particular, but represent the repertory of a band of wandering clerks. At the end, both of the Daniel and of the Suscitatio Lazari, is a rubric or stage-direction, to the effect that, if the performance is given at Matins, the Te Deum should follow; if at Vespers, the Magnificat. Evidently the connexion with the church service, so organic in the plays of the more primitive type, has become for Hilarius almost accidental. As to the place of the plays in the calendar, the manuscript gives no indication, and probably Hilarius and his friends would be willing enough to act them whenever they got a chance. But the St. Nicholas play would come most naturally on the day of that saint, December 6. The Suscitatio Lazari would be appropriate enough as an addition to the Quem quaeritis and the Peregrini in Easter week. The story is told, indeed, in the Gospel for Friday in the fourth week in Lent; but that does not seem a very likely date for a play. The Daniel perhaps grew, as we have seen a Balaam and a Nebuchadnezzar growing, out of a Prophetae; and may have been a substitute for a Prophetae at Christmas.

These dates are borne out, or not contradicted, by other similar plays, which have more of a local habitation. For no one of Hilarius’ three stands quite alone. Of Latin plays of St. Nicholas, indeed, quite a little group exists; and the great scholastic feast evidently afforded an occasion, less only than Easter and Christmas, for dramatic performances. The earliest texts are from Germany. Two are found in a Hildesheim manuscript of the eleventh century[212]; a third in an Einsiedeln manuscript of the twelfth[213]. The thirteenth-century Fleury play-book contains no less than four, two of which appear to be more developed forms of the Hildesheim plays. The theme is in every case one of the miraculous deeds which so largely make up the widespread legend of the saint[214]. Nicholas restores to life the three clerks

‘quos causa discendi literas apud gentes transmisit exteras,’

and whom the greed of an innkeeper has slain[215]. He provides with a dowry the daughters of a poor gentleman, who are threatened with a life of shame[216]. He brings back from captivity the son of his wealthy adorer[217]. His image preserves from housebreakers the riches of a Jew[218]. Alone of the extant Latin plays, these of St. Nicholas are drawn from outside the Biblical story. Each of the Fleury versions introduces at the end one of the anthems proper to St. Nicholas’ day, and their connexion with the feast is therefore clear.

A second Lazarus play, which includes not only the Suscitatio but also the episode of Mary Magdalen in the house of Simon, is likewise in the Fleury play-book[219]. A second Daniel, composed by the iuventus of Beauvais, occurs in the same manuscript which contains the Office of the Circumcision for that cathedral[220]. It was perhaps intended for performance on the day of the asinaria festa. Other plays seem, in the same way as the Daniel, to have budded off from the Prophetae. A fragment is preserved of an Isaac and Rebecca from Kloster Vorau in Styria[221]. A twelfth-century mention of an Elisaeus[222] and an eleventh-century one of a Convivium Herodis[223], which suggests rather the story of John the Baptist than that of the Magi, point to an activity in this direction of which all the traces have possibly not yet been discovered.

Three plays, each more or less unique in character, complete the tale. The Fleury play-book has a Conversio Beati Pauli Apostoli, doubtless designed for the feast on January 25[224]. The shorter, but highly interesting collection from Limoges, has a play of the wise and foolish virgins, under the title of Sponsus[225]. This has attracted much attention from scholars, on account of the fact that it is partly in French, or more strictly in a dialect belonging to the Angoumois, and slightly affected by Provençal. As it is therefore of the nature of a transitional form, it may be well to give a somewhat full account of it. It opens with a Latin chorus beginning

‘Adest sponsus qui est Christus: vigilate, virgines!’

The angel Gabriel then addresses the virgins, and warns them in four French stanzas to expect ‘un espos, Sauvaire a nom.’ Each stanza has a refrain, probably sung chorally:

‘gaire noi dormet: aici’s l’espos que vos or atendet!

Then comes a lyric dialogue, in which the Fatuae, who have wasted their oil, attempt in vain to get some, first from the Prudentes, and then from some Mercatores, whose presence here recalls the unguentarius in the Prague versions of the Quem quaeritis[226]. This dialogue is in Latin, but with a French refrain:

‘dolentas, chaitivas, trop i avem (or avet) dormit.’

Then comes the Sponsus, to whom the Fatuae finally appeal:

‘audi, sponse, voces plangentium: aperire fac nobis ostium cum sociis ad dulce prandium; nostrae culpae praebe remedium! dolentas, chaitivas, trop i avem dormit. Christus. amen dico, vos ignosco, nam caretis lumine, quod qui perdunt procul pergunt huius aulae limine. alet, chaitivas, alet, malaüreias! a tot jors mais vos son penas livreias, e en efern ora seret meneias! Modo accipiant eas daemones et praecipitentur in infernum.’

This stage direction, together with an allusion in the opening lines of the Sponsus to the ‘second Adam,’ link this remarkable, and, I venture to think, finely conceived little piece to the Christmas play of Adam to be discussed in the next chapter. It has essentially an Advent theme, and must have been performed either in Advent itself or at the Christmas season, with which Advent is prophetically connected[227].

Finally, there is a play which was almost certainly performed at Advent[228]. This is the Tegernsee play of Antichristus[229]. It is founded upon the prophecy in St. Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians of the homo peccati, filius perditionis, who shall sit in the temple of God until the Christ shall slay him with the breath of his mouth, and destroy him with the glory of his advent[230]: and it is an elaborate spectacle, requiring for its proper performance a large number of actors and a spacious stage, with a temple of God and seven royal sedes, together with room for much marching and counter-marching and warfare[231]. It must have taken up the whole nave of some great church. It begins with a procession of Emperor, Pope, and Kings, accompanied by personages emblematic of Gentilitas, Sinagoga and Ecclesia with her attendants Misericordia and Iustitia. The first part of the action represents the conquest of the four corners of Christendom by the Emperor and his championship of Jerusalem against the King of Babylon. Ecclesia, Gentilitas, and Synagoga punctuate the performance with their characteristic chants. Then come the Hypocrites, sub silentio et specie humilitatis inclinantes circumquaque et captantes favorem laicorum. They are followed by Antichrist himself, who instructs Hypocrisy and Heresy to prepare the way for his advent. Presently Antichrist is enthroned in the temple and gradually saps the Empire, winning over the King of the Greeks by threats, the King of the Franks by gifts, and the King of the Teutons, who is incorruptible and invincible, by signs and wonders. He marks his vassals on the brow with the first letter of his name. Then the Hypocrites attempt to persuade Synagoga that Antichrist is the Messiah; but are refuted by the prophets Enoch and Elijah. Antichrist has the rebels slain; but while he is throned in state, thunder breaks suddenly over his head, he falls, and Ecclesia comes to her own again with a Laudem dicite deo nostro.

The author of the Antichristus is not only a skilled craftsman in rhyming Latin metres; he is also capable of carrying a big literary scheme successfully to a close. His immediate source was probably the tenth-century Libellus de Antichristo of Adso of Toul[232]. Into this he has worked the central theme of the Prophetae and the debating figures from that very popular débat or ‘estrif,’ the Altercatio Ecclesiae et Synagogae[233]. His work differs in several obvious respects from the comparatively simple, often naïve, liturgical dramas which have been considered. It is ambitious in scope, extending to between four and five hundred lines. It introduces allegorical figures, such as we shall find, long after, in the moralities. It has a purpose other than that of devotion, or even amusement. It is, in fact, a Tendenzschrift, a pamphlet. The instinct of the drama, which sways the imaginations of men perhaps more powerfully than any other form of literature, to mix itself up with politics is incorrigible: Antichristus is a subtle vindication, on the one hand, of the Empire against the Papacy, on the other of the rex Teutonicorum against the rex Francorum. It probably dates from about 1160, when Frederick Barbarossa was at the height of his struggle with Alexander III, who enjoyed the sympathies of Louis VII of France. And it is anti-clerical. The Hypocrites who carry out the machinations of Antichrist are the clerical reformers, such as Gerhoh of Reichersberg[234], who were the mainstay of the papacy in Germany.

It is improbable that the few and scattered texts which have come to light represent all the liturgical plays which had made their appearance by the middle of the twelfth century. Besides the lost Elisaeus and Convivium Herodis, there is evidence, for example, of scholars’ plays in honour, not only of St. Nicholas, but of their second patron, the philosophical St. Catharine of Alexandria. Such a ludus de Sancta Katarina was prepared at Dunstable in England by one Geoffrey, a Norman clerk who had been invited to England as schoolmaster to the abbey of St. Albans. For it he borrowed certain choir copes belonging to the abbey, and had the misfortune to let these be burnt with his house. Deeply repentant, he took the religious habit, and in 1119 became abbot of St. Albans. From this date that of the ludus may be judged to be early in the twelfth century[235].

It cannot, of course, be assumed that every play, say in the fifteenth century, which although probably or certainly written in the vernacular was performed in a church, had a Latin prototype[236]. Many such may have been written and acted for the first time on existing models, when the vernacular drama was already well established. But there are certain feasts where it is possible to trace, on the one hand, the element of mimetic ceremony in the services, and on the other, perhaps, some later representation in the dramatic cycles, and where a Latin text might at any time turn up without causing surprise. With a few notes on some of these this chapter must conclude. A highly dramatic trope for Ascension day, closely resembling the Quem quaeritis, has already been quoted from the tropers of Limoges[237]. An Ordinarium of St. Peter’s of Lille directs that, after the respond Non vos relinquam, the officiant shall mount a pulpit and thence appear to ascend towards heaven from the top of a mountain[238]. Fifteenth-century computi speak of this or of a more elaborate performance as a mysterium, and include amongst other items payments for painting the scars on the hands of the performer[239]. On Whit-Sunday it was the custom at St. Paul’s in London and many other churches, during the singing of the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus at Tierce, to open a hole in the roof and let down symbols of the Pentecost; a dove, a globe of fire, bits of burning tow to represent tongues of fire, a censer, flowers, pieces of flaky pastry[240]. This same hole in the roof sometimes served a similar purpose at a mimetic representation of the Annunciation. The Gospel for the day was recited by two clerks dressed as Mary and the angel, and at the words Spiritus Sanctus supervenit in te a white dove descended from the roof. This can hardly be called a drama, for, with the exception of a short fifteenth-century text from Cividale, only the words of the Gospel itself seem to have been used; but obviously it is on the extreme verge of drama. A curious variant in the date of this ceremony is to be noted. In several Italian examples, of which the earliest dates from 1261, and in one or two from France, it belongs to the feast of the Annunciation proper on March 25[241]. But in later French examples, and apparently also at Lincoln[242], it has been transferred to the Advent season, during which naturally the Annunciation was greatly held in remembrance, and has been attached to the so-called ‘golden’ Mass celebrated ten days before Christmas during the Quatuor Tempora[243]. It thus became absorbed into the Christmas dramatic cycle.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XX. THE SECULARIZATION OF THE PLAYS

[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:

‘Mundi delectatio dulcis est et grata, cuius conversatio suavis et ornata.’

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:

‘En ceste manere recitom La seinte resurreccion. Primerement apareillons Tus les lius e les mansions: Le crucifix primerement E puis apres le monument. Une jaiole i deit aver Pur les prisons emprisoner. Enfer seit mis de cele part, E mansions de l’altre part, E puis le ciel; et as estals Primes Pilate od ces vassals. Sis u set chivaliers aura. Caïphas en l’altre serra; Od lui seit la jeuerie, Puis Joseph, cil d’Arimachie. El quart liu seit danz Nichodemes. Chescons i ad od sei les soens. El quint les deciples Crist. Les treis Maries saient el sist. Si seit pourvéu que l’om face Galilée en mi la place; Jemaüs uncore i seit fait, U Jhesu fut al hostel trait; E cum la gent est tute asise, E la pés de tutez parz mise, Dan Joseph, cil d’Arimachie, Venge a Pilate, si lui die.’

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].

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XXI. GUILD PLAYS AND PARISH PLAYS

[Bibliographical Note.—The English miracle play has been often, fully, and admirably studied from the point of view of dramatic literature; perhaps less so from that of stage history. The best accounts are those of B. Ten Brink, History of English Literature, bk. v, chs. 2-6 (trans. W. C. Robinson, vol. ii, 1893); A. W. Ward, History of English Dramatic Literature (2nd ed., 1899), vol. i, ch. 1; W. Creizenach, Geschichte des neueren Dramas, vol. i (1893); and the introduction to A. W. Pollard, English Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes (3rd ed., 1898). These supersede J. P. Collier, History of English Dramatic Poetry (2nd ed., 1879), vol. ii, and J. L. Klein, Geschichte des englischen Dramas (1876), vol. i. Other useful books are J. A. Symonds, Shakspere’s Predecessors in the English Drama (1884), ch. 3; K. L. Bates, The English Religious Drama (1893), and J. J. Jusserand, Le Théâtre en Angleterre (1881), ch. 2. The substance of this last is incorporated in the same writer’s Literary History of the English People, vol. i (1895), bk. iii, ch. 6. W. J. Courthope, History of English Poetry, vol. i (1895), ch. 10, should also be consulted, as well as the valuable detailed investigations of A. Hohlfeld, Die altenglischen Kollektivmisterien, in Anglia, vol. xi (1889), and C. Davidson, Studies in the English Mystery Plays (1892). I do not think that S. W. Clarke, The Miracle Play in England (n.d.), and C. Hastings, Le Théâtre français et anglais (1900, trans. 1901), add very much. A. Ebert, Die englischen Mysterien, in Jahrbuch für romanische und englische Literatur, vol. i (1859), is an early manifestation of German interest in the subject, and the still earlier native learning may be found in T. Warton, History of English Poetry (ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 1871), §§ 6, 33; E. Malone, Historical Account of the English Stage, in Variorum Shakespeare (1821), vol. iii; W. Hone, Ancient Mysteries Described (1823). The antiquarianism of T. Sharp, Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently Performed at Coventry (1825), is still a mine of material on the Realien of the stage.—The four great cycles have been edited as follows, in most cases with important introductions: the Chester Plays by T. Wright (Shakespeare Society, 1843-7) and by H. Deimling (E. E. T. S., part only issued in 1893); the York Plays by L. T. Smith (1885); the Towneley or Wakefield Plays by an uncertain editor (Surtees Society, 1836), and by G. England and A. W. Pollard (E. E. T. S. 1897); the Ludus Coventriae, by J. O. Halliwell [-Phillipps] (Shakespeare Society, 1841). A miscellaneous collection of late plays from one of the Bodleian Digby MSS. has been printed by T. Sharp (Abbotsford Club, 1835), and F. J. Furnivall (New Shakespeare Society, 1882, E. E. T. S. 1896). The Cornish cycle is in E. Norris, The Ancient Cornish Drama (1859). Good selections of typical plays are in A. W. Pollard’s book, and J. M. Manly, Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama (1897), vol. i. Older books of the same kind are J. P. Collier, Five Miracle Plays, or Scriptural Dramas (1836), and W. Marriott, A Collection of English Miracle Plays or Mysteries (Basle, 1838). The bibliographies given by Miss Bates and by F. H. Stoddard, References for Students of Miracle Plays and Mysteries (1887), may be supplemented from my Appendices of Representations and Texts, which I have tried to make as complete as possible.]

There is no reason to doubt that England had its full share in the earlier development of the religious drama. Texts of the liturgical period are, indeed, rare. The tenth-century version of the Quem quaeritis from Winchester and the fourteenth-century version from Dublin stand, at least for the present, alone. But the wholesale destruction of liturgical books at the Reformation is sufficient to account for such a sparseness, and a few stray notices gathered from the wreckage of time bear sufficient witness to the presence in this country of several amongst the more widespread types of liturgical play. The Lichfield statutes (1188-98) provide for repraesentationes of the Pastores, the Resurrectio, the Peregrini; those of York (†1255) for the Pastores and the Tres Reges; a Salisbury inventory of 1222 includes ‘crowns’ or more probably ‘stars’ (coronae) ad repraesentationes faciendas; while Lincoln account books of the early fifteenth century appear to add the Annuntiatio and the Prophetae, a visus called Rubum quem viderat in 1420 perhaps forming a Moses scene in the latter. So late as 1518 the Quem quaeritis was performed in Magdalen College chapel, and plays of the Nativity and the Resurrection by the clerks of the chapel are contemplated at about the same date in the household regulations of the Earl of Northumberland at Leconfield. Nor were dramatic versions of the legends of saints unknown. I do not trace a St. Nicholas cycle in England, although Hilarius, in whose repertory a St. Nicholas play is included, is thought to have been an Englishman by birth. But the memory of a play of St. Catherine prepared by Geoffrey the Norman at Dunstable early in the twelfth century was preserved, owing to the accident which led to Geoffrey ultimately becoming abbot of St. Albans; and towards the close of the same century William Fitzstephen records the representations of the miracles of holy confessors and the passions of martyrs which took the place of minstrelsy in London. For the most part such early plays are found in close connexion with the cathedrals and great monasteries. But a document of about 1220, the interpretation of which must, however, be considered doubtful, would seem to suggest that plays (actiones) were habitually given at no less than five chapelries within the single parish of Shipton in Oxfordshire, and that the profits thereof formed an appreciable part of the income derived from that living by the prebendaries of Salisbury cathedral.

Examples of the transitional forms by which the liturgical drama grew into the popular religious drama of the great cycles can also be found in England. At Beverley a Resurrection play is described as taking place in the graveyard of the minster about 1220. The intrusion of the vernacular is represented by the curious bilingual text of a single actor’s parts in the Pastores, Quem quaeritis and Peregrini, printed by Professor Skeat from a manuscript found at Shrewsbury. These are probably still liturgical in character, and it is to be observed that their subjects are precisely those of the three plays known to have been used in the neighbouring cathedral of Lichfield. It must remain a moot point whether the religious drama passed directly, in this country, from Latin to English, or whether there was a period during which performances were given in Norman-French. Scholars are inclined to find an Anglo-Norman dialect in that very important monument of the transition, the Repraesentatio Adae, as well as in an early example of the expanded Easter play. But even if the authors of these were, like Hilarius, of English birth, it hardly follows that their productions were acted in England. Nor do the probable borrowings of the Chester and other cycles from French texts much affect the question[364]. That the disfavour with which the austerer section of the clergy looked upon the vernacular religious plays had its spokesmen in England, was sufficiently illustrated in the last chapter.

The English miracle-play reaches its full development with the formation of the great processional cycles almost immediately after the establishment of the Corpus Christi festival in 1311. The local tradition of Chester, stripped of a certain confusion between the names of two distinct mayors of that city which has clung about it, is found to fix the foundation of the Chester plays in 1328. The date has the authority of an official municipal document, forms part of a quite consistent story, several points in which can be independently corroborated, and is on a priori grounds extremely plausible. Unfortunately, owing to the comparative scarcity of archives during this period, the first fifty years of the history of municipal drama are practically a blank. A mention, about 1350, of a ludus filiorum Israelis, in connexion with a guild of Corpus Christi at Cambridge, spans a wide gulf. There is no actual record of plays at Chester itself until 1462. Those of Beverley are first mentioned in 1377, those of York in 1378, and those of Coventry in 1392. But it must be added that the Beverley plays were an antiqua consuetudo in 1390, and that those of York were to take place at stations antiquitus assignatis in 1394. It is in 1378 that the earliest notice of plays in London, since the days of William Fitzstephen, comes to light. The fuller records which are from this time onward available reveal, during the next hundred and fifty years, a vigorous and widespread dramatic activity throughout the length and breadth of the land. It manifests itself at such extreme points as the Cinque Ports in the east, Cornwall in the west, and Newcastle in the north. It penetrates to Aberdeen and to Dublin. And though naturally it finds its fullest scope in the annually repeated performances of several amongst the greater cities, yet it is curious to observe in what insignificant villages it was from time to time found possible to organize plays. Performers from thirteen neighbouring places, many of them quite small, made their way to New Romney between 1399 and 1508; whilst the churchwardens of Chelmsford, in the twelve years after their own play in 1562, reaped a profit by hiring out their stock of garments to the men of some seventeen aspiring parishes. On the other hand, there were several important towns in which, so far as we can judge from documents, such as craft ordinances, which would almost certainly have referred to the plays of the crafts, if these had existed, the normal type of municipal drama failed to establish itself. London is one, although here the want was supplied in another way; others are Northampton, Nottingham, Bristol, Oxford, and Reading. And occasionally plays, which had once been annual, were allowed to fall into desuetude and decay. The corporation of Canterbury, for instance, called upon the crafts about 1500 to revive a Corpus Christi play which for some time had been ‘left and laid apart.’ Certainly, by the sixteenth century, if there was still pride and interest taken in many of the municipal plays, signs were not wanting that they were an institution which had almost outlived its day. A reason for this need hardly be sought beyond the Zeitgeist. No doubt the plays were a financial burden upon the poorer crafts and the poorer members of crafts. There was much grumbling at Beverley in 1411 because certain well-to-do persons (generosi), who did not practise any trade or handicraft, had hitherto escaped the payment of contributions to the civic function; and municipal authorities were constantly called upon to adjust and readjust the responsibility for this and that pageant with the fluctuations of prosperity amongst the various occupations. But on the other hand, the plays, were the cause of much and profitable resort to those fortunate towns which possessed them. The mercers’ guild at Shrewsbury found it necessary to impose a special fine upon those of its members whose business avocations required them ‘to ride or goe to Coventrie Faire’ at Corpus Christi tide, and so to miss the procession of guilds at home[365]. And although the mayor of Coventry wrote to Thomas Cromwell, in 1539, that the poor commoners were put to such expense with their plays and pageants that they fared the worse all the year after, yet against this may be set the statement made to Dugdale by ‘some old people who had in their younger days been eye-witnesses of these pageants’ that ‘the confluence of people from farr and neare to see that shew was extraordinary great, and yeilded noe small advantage to this cittye.’ Moreover the levy upon individuals was a trifling one; the whole of the company of smiths at Coventry only paid 3_s._ 4_d._ amongst them for ‘pagent pencys’ in 1552. A leitourgia is always an unpopular institution, and these complaints resemble nothing so much as the groans of an opulent London tradesman in the twentieth century over an extra penny on the education rate. In the smaller places it is clear that plays, far from being a source of expense, were a recognized method of raising funds for public purposes. Even in 1220 the emolumentum actionum from the chapelries of Shipton went to swell the purses of the Salisbury prebendaries. In 1505 the churchwardens of Kingston-on-Thames made £4 towards their new steeple by getting up a play for which they secured the patronage of royalty. At Braintree, in Essex, funds were similarly raised by Nicholas Udall and others, between 1523 and 1534, for the repair of the church. I have little doubt that when the mayor of Coventry said economy he meant Protestantism, just as when, under Elizabeth, the corporation of London wished to make a Puritanic attack upon the theatres, they were always smitten with a terrible dread of the infection of the plague[366].

Certainly the spirit of Protestantism, although it came to be willing to use the religious drama for its own purposes[367], was inclined to see both profanity and superstition in the ordinary miracle-plays[368]. Here, as elsewhere, it inherited the hostile tradition which such reforming clerics as Gerhoh of Reichersberg in the twelfth century and Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth had handed down to Wyclif and his Lollards. At Bungay in 1514 certain ill-disposed persons ‘brake and threw down five pageants’ usually borne about the town on Corpus Christi day. One may fairly suspect, even at this early date, a Lollardist intention in the outrage, and perhaps also in the interposition of the authority of the warden of the Cinque Ports to suppress the play of New Romney in 1518. With the progress of the new ideas the big cycles began to be irregularly performed or to undergo textual modification. The plays of York, for example, were shorn in 1548 of the pageants representing the Death, Assumption, and Coronation of the Virgin. On the other hand, religious plays sometimes became a rallying-point for those who favoured the old order of things. There is extant a letter from Henry VIII to the justices of York, in which he refers to a riot promoted by certain papists at a play of St. Thomas the Apostle, and warns them not to suffer upon such occasions any language likely to tend to a breach of the peace. The brief Marian reaction led to the resumption of the plays in more than one town which had dropped them. The Lincoln corporation ordered ‘St. Anne’s Gild with Corpus Cristi play’ to be brought forward again in 1554 and 1555. In London Henry Machyn records during 1557 a Passion play at the Grey Friars, and another in the church of St. Olave’s, Silver Street, on the festival of the patron. The New Romney play was elaborately revived, after forty-two years’ interval, in 1560. But the process of decay soon set in again. Even where the plays survived, they were Protestantized, and as Corpus Christi day was no longer observed, the performances had to be transferred to some other date. At York the text of the Corpus Christi play was ‘perused and otherwise amended’ in 1568. In 1569 it was acted upon Whit-Tuesday. Then it lay by until 1579, when the book was referred to the archbishop and dean for further revision, and apparently impounded by them. The Creed play was suppressed, by advice of the dean, in 1568, as unsuitable to ‘this happie time of the gospell.’ The Paternoster play was revised and played in 1572. Then this text also fell into the hands of the archbishop, and the corporation seem to have been unable to recover it. So ended the religious drama in York. In Chester the municipal authorities stood out gallantly for their plays. John Hankey and Sir John Savage, mayors in 1572 and 1575 respectively, were called before the privy council for sanctioning performances in spite of inhibitions from the archbishop of York and other persons of authority. They had revised the text, and had a new and Protestant version of the preliminary ‘banns’ prepared. Copies of the text appear to have been got ready for yet another performance in 1600, but the local annalists record that Henry Hardware, then mayor, ‘would not suffer any Playes.’ In one or two cities, new plays, dealing with apocryphal or other merely semi-religious themes, were substituted for the old ones. Thus at Lincoln a ‘standing play’ of the story of Tobit was given in 1564 and 1567; and in Coventry, where the old cycle had been ‘laid down’ in 1580, an Oxford scholar was hired in 1584 to write a semi-religious semi-historical drama of the Destruction of Jerusalem. In 1591, the Conquest of the Danes and the History of King Edward the Confessor were proposed as alternatives for this. By the end of the sixteenth century all the cycles of which most is known had come to an end. The smaller places—Chelmsford in 1574, Braintree in 1579, Bungay in 1591—had sold off their stock of playing-garments. For such dramatic entertainment as the provinces were still to get, they must look to travelling companies taking their summer vacation from the metropolis. Miracle-plays during the seventeenth century were a mere survival. They lingered in distant Cornwall and at Kendal in the hill country of the north; and had been replaced by morals, themselves almost equally obsolete, at Manningtree. The last religious play recorded in England is a quite exceptional one, given at the end of James I’s reign before Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, and an audience which numbered thousands at Ely Place in Holborn.

In giving some account of the distribution of the various types of religious play throughout England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, I am dispensed from any obligation to be exhaustive by the fact that the greater municipal dramas at least have already been the subject of more than one fairly adequate discussion. All I shall attempt will be a brief general summary of the main points which emerge from the more or less detailed local notices collected in a lengthy appendix.

The characteristic English type of play was the long cycle given annually under the superintendence of the corporation or governing body of an important city and divided into a number of distinct scenes or ‘pageants,’ each of which was the special charge of one or more of the local ‘crafts,’ ‘arts,’ or ‘occupations.’ Such cycles, organized upon very similar lines, can be studied in the records available from Chester, York, Beverley, Coventry, Newcastle, Lincoln, and Norwich; and the same general model is known or conjectured—sometimes, it is true, on the slightest indication—to have been followed in the plays of Lancaster, Preston, Kendal, Wakefield, Leicester, Worcester, Louth, Bungay, Canterbury, Dublin, and Aberdeen. As in all matters of municipal custom, the relative functions of the corporations and the crafts were nicely adjusted. The direction and control of the plays as a whole were in the hands of the corporations. They decided annually whether the performance should be given, or whether, for war, pestilence, or other reason, it should be withheld. They sent round their officers to read the proclamation or ‘banns’ of the play. They kept an official version of the text, at Chester an ‘original,’ at York a ‘register’ copied from the ‘originals’ belonging to the crafts. Agreements and disputes as to the liability of this or that craft to maintain or contribute to a particular pageant were entered or determined before them. They maintained order at the time of the play and inflicted fines on the turbulent, or upon crafts neglectful or unskilful in carrying out their responsibilities. In particular they required the provision of properly qualified actors. Thus Robert Greene and others were admonished before the leet of Coventry in 1440, that they should play bene et sufficienter so as not to cause a hindrance in any iocus. Similarly, Henry Cowper, ‘webster,’ was fined by the wardens of Beverley in 1452, quod nesciebat ludum suum. An order at York, in 1476, directed the choice of a body of ‘connyng, discrete, and able players’ to test the quality of all those selected as actors. All ‘insufficiant personnes, either in connyng, voice or personne’ they were to ‘discharge, ammove, and avoide’; and no one was to perform more than twice in the course of the day. Sometimes the actual oversight of the plays was delegated to specially appointed officers. At Beverley the wardens themselves ‘governed’ the Corpus Christi plays, but the Paternoster play was in the hands of ‘aldermen of the pageants.’ At Aberdeen the Haliblude play was undertaken in 1440 by the local lord of misrule, known as the Abbot of Bon Accord; for the Candlemas play ‘bailyes’ represented the corporation. At Lincoln the ‘graceman’ of the guild of St. Anne was responsible, and had the aid of the mayor. At Leicester a number of ‘overseers’ with two ‘bedalls’ were chosen to have the ‘gydyng and rule’ of the play.

The corporations do not appear to have themselves incurred much expenditure over the performances. They provided sitting-room and refreshments for their own members, and for distinguished guests. Richard II was elaborately entertained with a special pagina when he visited York on Corpus Christi day, 1397. Sixty years later a collation, including ‘ij cofyns of counfetys and a pot of grene gynger,’ was made ready for Queen Margaret on her visit to Coventry. At York and Beverley, but not at Coventry, the corporations paid the minstrels, and occasionally made a special contribution to the funds of a particularly poor pageant. At York the corporation could well afford to do this, for they claimed the right to fix certain ‘stations’ at which, as well as at two or three traditional ones, the plays should be given, and they made a considerable annual profit out of payments by well-to-do citizens who aspired to have one of these at their doors. The stations were marked by banners broidered with the arms of the city. At Leicester the ‘playyng germands’ seem to have belonged to the corporation. At Beverley in 1391 they owned all the ‘necessaries,’ pageant garments and properties, of the play of Paradise, and lent the same upon security to the craft charged therewith. The pageants may also have been originally corporation property in York, for it was stipulated in 1422 that one of them, like the banners at the stations, should bear the arms of the city, to the exclusion of those of the craft.

As a rule, the cost of the plays fell almost wholly upon the crafts. The ordinances of the craft-guilds provide for their maintenance as a leitourgia or fraternal duty, in the same way as they often provide for a ‘serge’ or light to be burnt in some chapel or carried in the Corpus Christi procession, or, at Beverley, for the castellum in which the craft sat to do honour to the procession of St. John of Beverley in Rogation week. At Coventry, where the burden upon the crafts was perhaps heaviest, they were responsible for the provision, repairing, ornamenting, cleaning, and strewing with rushes of the pageant, for the ‘ferme’ or rent of the pageant house, for the payment of actors, minstrels, and prompter, for the revision of play-book and songs and the copying of parts, for the ‘drawing’ or ‘horsing’ of the pageant on the day of the performance, for costumes and properties, and above all for copious refreshments before and after the play, at the stations, and during the preliminary rehearsals. The total cost of the smiths’ pageant in 1490 was £3 7_s._ 5½_d._ In 1453 they had contracted with one Thomas Colclow to have ‘the rewle of the pajaunt’ for twelve years at an annual payment of £2 6_s._ 8_d._, and other examples of ‘play lettine’ can be traced at Newcastle and elsewhere. But it was more usual for the crafts to retain the management of the pageants in their own hands; at York each guild appointed its ‘pageant-masters’ for this purpose. The expense to the craft primarily in charge of a pageant was sometimes lightened by fixed contributions from one or more minor bodies affiliated to it for the purpose. Part of it was probably met from the general funds of the craft; the rest was raised by various expedients. A levy, known as ‘pagent pencys’ at Coventry and as ‘pajaunt silver’ at York, was made upon every member. The amount varied with the numbers of the craft and the status of the craftsman. At York it ranged from 1_d._ to 8_d._ At Beverley the journeymen paid 8_d._ to light, play, and castle, and 6_d._ only in years when there was no play. At Coventry the ordinary members of more than one craft paid 1_s._; others apparently less. To the proceeds of the levy might be added fines for the breach of craft ordinances, payments on the taking out of freedom by strangers and the setting up of shop or indenturing of apprentices by freemen. At York, the mercers are found granting free admission to a candidate for their fraternity on condition of his entering into a favourable contract for the supply of a new pageant. At Coventry, in 1517, one William Pisford left a scarlet and a crimson gown to the tanners for their plays, together with 3_s._ 4_d._ to every craft charged with the maintenance of a pageant. Besides the levy, certain personal services were binding upon the craftsmen. They had to attend upon the play, to do it honour; the Coventry cappers expected their journeymen to do the ‘horsing’ of the pageant.

In some cities, the crafts received help from outside. At Coventry, in 1501, the tilers’ pageant got a contribution of 5_s._ from the neighbouring tilers of Stoke. At Chester, vestments were borrowed from the clergy; at Lincoln from the priory and the local gentry. A ‘gathering’ was also made in the surrounding districts. The only trace of any charge made to the spectators, other than the fees for ‘stations’ at York, is at Leicester, where, in 1477, the players paid over to the ‘pachents’ certain sums they had received for playing.

The majority of the crafts in a big city were, of course, already formed into guilds for ordinary trade purposes, and in their case the necessary organization for the plays was to hand. But no citizen could wholly escape his responsibility in so important a civic matter. At Coventry it was ordered in 1494 that every person exercising any craft must become contributory to some pageant or other. At York the innholders, who do not appear to have been a regular guild, were organized in 1483 for the purposes of a pageant on the basis of a yearly contribution of 4_d._ from each man. The demand at Beverley in 1411 for the appropriation of a play to the generosi has already been alluded to. In a Beverley list of 1520 the ‘Gentylmen’ are put down for the ‘Castle of Emaut.’ It may be suspected that some of the other crafts named in the same list, such as the ‘Husbandmen’ and the ‘Labourers,’ were not regular guilds; not to speak of the ‘Prestes,’ who played the ‘Coronacion of Our Lady.’ This participation of religious bodies in the craft plays can be paralleled from other towns. At York the hospital of St. Leonard took the Purification in 1415; at Lincoln the cathedral clergy, like the priests at Beverley, were responsible for the Coronation or Assumption of the Virgin, a play which at Chester was given by the ‘worshipfull wyves of this town,’ and at York by the innholders. Both at York and Chester this scene was dropped at the Reformation. Possibly its somewhat exceptional position may be accounted for by its having been a comparatively late addition in all four cycles. Some endeavour after dramatic appropriateness is visible in the apportioning of the other plays amongst the crafts. Thus Noah is given to the shipwrights (York, Newcastle), the watermen (Beverley, Chester), the fishers and mariners (York); the Magi to the goldsmiths (Beverley, Newcastle, York); the Disputation in the Temple to the scriveners (Beverley); the Last Supper to the bakers (Beverley, Chester, York); the Harrowing of Hell to the cooks (Beverley, Chester).

A somewhat anomalous position is occupied amongst towns in which the plays were in the hands of the crafts by Lincoln. Here the task of supervision was shared with the corporation by a special guild, religious and social rather than industrial in character[369], of St. Anne. Perhaps this guild had at one time been solely responsible for the plays, and there had been a crisis such as took place at Norwich in 1527. Before that date the charge of the plays had been borne, fittingly enough, by the guild of St. Luke, composed of painters and metalworkers. But in 1527 this guild was ‘almost fully decayed,’ and upon the representation of its members the corporation agreed that in future the pageants should be distributed amongst the various crafts as was customary elsewhere. The Lincoln plays were on St. Anne’s day, but one does not find a position comparable to that of the St. Anne’s guild held by Corpus Christi guilds in other towns. As a rule such guilds concerned themselves with the Corpus Christi procession, but not with the plays. At Ipswich, indeed, the Corpus Christi guild had the whole conduct of the plays, and the craft-guilds as such were not called upon; but this Ipswich guild arose out of a reorganization of the old merchant-guild, included all the burgesses, and was practically identical with the corporation. Other towns, in which the corporation managed the plays itself, without the intervention of the craft-guilds, are Shrewsbury, New Romney, and Lydd.

On the other hand, where neither the corporation nor the crafts undertook plays, it was no uncommon thing for a guild of the religious or social type to step into the breach. A series of London plays recorded in 1384, 1391, 1409, and 1411 may all be not unreasonably ascribed to a guild of St. Nicholas, composed of the ‘parish clerks’ attached to the many churches of the city. At a later date the performances of this guild seem to have become annual and they are traceable, with no very great certainty, to the beginning of the sixteenth century. They were cyclical in character, but not processional, and took place hard by the well known indifferently as Skinners’ well or Clerkenwell, amongst the orchards to the north of London. Chaucer says of his ‘parish clerk,’ the ‘joly Absolon,’ that

‘Somtyme, to shewe his lightnesse and maistrye, He pleyeth Heródës, on a scaffold hye[370].’

These London plays may have had some original connexion with the great fair of the neighbouring priory of St. Bartholomew upon August 24; but they are recorded at various dates during the summer, and extended over four, five, or even seven days. Whether the guild of St. Nicholas bore any relation to the clerks of St. Paul’s, who petitioned Richard II in 1378 against the rivalry of certain ‘unexpert people’ in the production of an Old Testament play, must be matter for conjecture. The performance contemplated at St. Paul’s was to be at Christmas. The Cambridge guild of Corpus Christi was responsible for a ludus Filiorum Israelis about 1350, and this is more likely to have formed part of a cycle than to have stood alone. An unverified extract of Warton’s from a Michael-House computus suggests that some of the Cambridge colleges may have assisted in dramatic undertakings. At Abingdon the hospital of Christ held their feast on Holy Cross day (May 3), 1445, ‘with pageantes and playes, and May games.’ At Sleaford, in 1480, a play of the Ascension was performed by the guild of the Holy Trinity. At Wymondham a guild seems to have existed in the sixteenth century for the express purpose of holding a ‘watch and play’ at Midsummer. The proceedings were directed by officers designated ‘husbands.’ The one example of an isolated play under the management of a craft-guild is at Hull. Here an annual play of Noah, with a ship or ark which went in procession, was in the hands of the Trinity House, a guild of master mariners and pilots. The records extend from 1421 to 1529. There is no sign of a dramatic cycle at Hull. The Noah play was given on Plough Monday, and it is possible that one may trace here a dramatized version of just such a ship procession as may be found elsewhere upon the coasts in spring[371]. After the performance the ‘ship’ was hung up in the church. The text of the play was perhaps borrowed from that of the watermen of the neighbouring city of Beverley.

Where there were craft-plays, social and religious guilds sometimes gave supplementary performances. The ‘schaft’ or parochial guild of St. Dunstan’s, Canterbury, owned a play of Abraham and Isaac in 1491. This may have been merely a contribution towards the craft-cycle on Corpus Christi day. On the other hand, the play of St. George, contemplated by the guild of that saint at New Romney in 1490, was probably an independent undertaking. The town play here was a Passion play. At York there were two rivals to the Corpus Christi plays. One was the Paternoster play, for the production of which a guild of the Lord’s Prayer was in existence at least as early as 1378. By 1488 this guild was absorbed into the Holy Trinity guild of the mercers, and in the year named the play was given, apparently at the charges of the mercers, instead of the ordinary cycle. All the crafts contributed to similar performances in 1558 and 1572. But by this time the supervision, under the corporation, of the play had passed to one of the few religious guilds in York which had escaped suppression, that of St. Anthony. The other extraordinary York play was a Creed play, bequeathed to the guild of Corpus Christi in 1446. This was stationary, and was acted decennially about Lammas-tide (August 1) at the common hall. In 1483, it was ‘apon the cost of the most onest men of every parish,’ who were, it may be supposed, members of the guild. In 1535 the crafts paid for it instead of their usual cycle. Upon the suppression of the guild, the play-book passed into the custody of the hospital of St. Thomas.

In the same way there are instances in which the clergy, who elsewhere lent help to the craft-plays, gave independent exhibitions of their own. At Chester, before the Reformation, they eked out the Whitsun cycle by a supplementary performance on Corpus Christi day. The priors of St. John of Jerusalem, Holy Trinity, and All Saints contributed their share to the somewhat incongruous blend of religious and secular entertainments provided by the traders of Dublin for the earl of Kildare in 1528. The so-called Ludus Coventriae has often been supposed to be the play-book of a cycle acted by the Grey Friars or Franciscans of Coventry. This theory hardly survives critical examination. But in 1557, during the Marian reaction, a Passion play was given at the Grey Friars in London, and the actors were possibly restored brethren. Miracle-plays must often have been performed in choir schools, especially upon their traditional feast-days of St. Nicholas, St. Catherine, and the Holy Innocents. But there are only two examples, besides that of St. Paul’s in 1378, actually upon record. In 1430 the pueri eleemosynae of Maxstoke acted on Candlemas day in the hall of Lord Clinton’s castle; and in 1486 those of St. Swithin’s and Hyde abbeys combined to entertain Henry VII with the Harrowing of Hell as he sat at dinner in Winchester.

Many minor plays, both in towns and in country villages, were organized by the clergy and other officials of parish churches, and are mentioned in the account books of churchwardens. At London, Kingston, Oxford, Reading, Salisbury, Bath, Tewkesbury, Leicester, Bungay, and Yarmouth, such parochial plays can be traced, sometimes side by side with those provided by craft or other guilds. The parochial organization was the natural one for the smaller places, where the parish church had remained the centre of the popular life[372]. The actiones in the chapelries of Shipton in Oxfordshire during the thirteenth century may have been plays of this type. The municipal records of Lydd and New Romney mention visits of players to the towns between 1399 and 1508 from no less than fourteen neighbouring places in Kent and Sussex, many of which must have been then, as they are now, quite insignificant. They are Hythe, Wittersham, Herne, Ruckinge, Folkestone, Appledore, Chart, Rye, Wye, Brookland, Halden, Bethersden, Ham, and Stone. A few other village plays are to be traced in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century they are fairly numerous, especially in the eastern counties. In Essex they are found at Chelmsford, Braintree, Halstead, Heybridge, Malden, Saffron Walden, Billericay, Starford, Baddow (by ‘children’), Little Baddow, Sabsford, Boreham, Lanchire, Witham, Brentwood, Nayland, Burnham, High Easter, Writtle, Woodham Walter, and Hanningfield; in Cambridgeshire at Bassingbourne; in Lincolnshire at Holbeach; in Norfolk at Harling, Lopham, Garboldisham, Shelfhanger, and Kenninghall; in Suffolk at Boxford, Lavenham, and Mildenhall; in Leicestershire at Foston; in Somersetshire at Morebath; and in Kent once more at Bethersden. The latest instance is a ‘Kynge play’ at Hascombe in Surrey in 1579.

Parochial plays, whether in town or country, appear to have been in most cases occasional, rather than annual. Sometimes, as at Kingston and Braintree, they became a means of raising money for the church, and even where this object is not apparent, the expenses were lightened in various ways at the cost of neighbouring villages. ‘Banns’ were sent round to announce the play; or the play itself was carried round on tour. Twenty-seven villages contributed to a play at Bassingbourne in 1511. The Chelmsford play of 1562 and 1563 cost about £50, of which a good proportion was received from the spectators. The play was given at Malden and Braintree as well as at Chelmsford, and for years afterwards the letting out of the stock of garments proved a source of revenue to the parish. This same practice of hiring garments can be traced at Oxford, Leicester, and elsewhere. The parochial plays were always, so far as can be seen, stationary. At Leicester, Braintree, Halstead, and Heybridge they were in the church. That of Harling was ‘at the church gate,’ that of Bassingbourne in a ‘croft’; that of Chelmsford in a ‘pightell.’ At Reading performances in the market-place and in an open piece of ground called (then and now) the ‘Forbury’ are mentioned.

There remain a certain number of plays as to the organization of which nothing definite can be said. Such are the minor plays, on the legends of saints, recorded by the annalists of London, Coventry, and Lincoln; those referred to in the corporation accounts of King’s Lynn, as given by unspecified players between 1385 and 1462; and those which took place, as late as the seventeenth century, in ‘rounds’ or amphitheatres at St. Just, Perranzabulo, and elsewhere in Cornwall.

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