Liturgical drama

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Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1480) by Hugo van der Goes may have borrowed elements from the Officium pastores. This is evoked by the theatrical gesture of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah raising curtains to reveal the scene

The sacred play (also known as spiritual drama or liturgical play) is a form of European medieval theatre that originally developed as part of the Christian liturgy. Liturgical plays were performed in the churches at Christmas and Easter as part of the Divine Office. From the High Middle Ages onwards, it served to proclaim salvation in dramatic form and developed into several popular genres into modern times, which are still cultivated today.

History

The definition of liturgical drama has been the subject of much controversy since Edmond de Coussemaker published his collection in 1860.[1][lower-alpha 1] The generally accept definition was given by Helmut de Boor,[8] which distinguishes, in particular, between liturgical drama incorporated into the liturgy and plays that have no specific place in it; but the medieval vocabulary makes no such distinction. Among the liturgical dramas of the Middle Ages whose texts have been preserved, those of Christmas and Easter are the most numerous: no less than four hundred dramas that relate to the Resurrection were preserved.

Origin and development

File:Geistliches Spiel 1652.jpg
Depiction of a play scene from Ein zwiefacher poetischer Act und geistliches Spiel (1652)

Their earliest use can be traced to the Abbey of Saint Gall in the 9th century, and from there they spread throughout Europe.[9] The concept of liturgical drama arose when they moved from simply chanting the short text to accompanying it with a small performance around the altar.[lower-alpha 2] These embryonic liturgical dramas already had the didactic vocation that the use of mimesis and the existence of an audience presupposes.

The sacred play developed from the 10th century onwards from the tropes sung at church festivities.[10] Its text was therefore originally in Latin. The Easter trope,[11] which deals with Mary's journey to Jesus' tomb, became the basis of the Easter drama due to its antiphonal structure.[lower-alpha 3] This form was expanded to include further scenes and plot elements from the biblical resurrection story, so that the Easter plays grew into extensive dramas by the time they flourished in the 13th century, some of them already in the vernacular languages of the time. Following the example of the Easter trope, the Christmas trope developed in the 11th century and the Christmas play in the 13th century, which centred on the Annunciation to the shepherds in the field. This form is still practised to this day as a nativity play in a popular setting, regionally also in the respective dialects. At the same time, the first passion plays, which expanded the Easter play to include the story of Christ's Passion, and various forms of processional plays in the context of Christian feast days emerged. Common to the play forms, which also incorporated profane customs and scenes into the plot, is the humanisation of the sacred in a Christian-religious context. Further developments that emerged from the sacred play are the miracle and mystery play. The striking analogy between these two can be traced back to their common origin.

Under the influence of the flourishing bourgeois culture, the sacred play changed in the 14th century. On the one hand, it moved away from the liturgical setting and was performed — sometimes on the orders of the church — in non-ecclesiastical venues, often also in the open air on market squares, whereby these performances popularised the sacred play through mass scenes, more elaborate costumes and decorations as well as the popular languages that prevailed, bringing it close to the carnival play. The design and production was the responsibility of the townspeople, often the brotherhoods of the towns. On the other hand, the character of the plays changed from the symbolic visualisation of salvation to realistic, often drastic and even obscene depictions. Nevertheless, the spiritual play remained liturgically bound into this era and strictly orientated towards the material from the Bible and the legends of the saints, without allowing for poetic creations and artistic freedom.

From the 15th century onwards, the sacred play entered a late phase. The length of some of the plays had grown to several thousand verses. As a result, the performances lasted several days and eventually resembled popular festivals. The mass scenes were greatly enlarged and the population was once again involved in a quasi-liturgical manner through communal prayer and choral singing.

Decline

The humanist Renaissance culture, which led to new forms of theatre through the renewed reception of Greek and Roman drama, and the Reformation, which, according to Martin Luther's instructions, rejected sacred drama because of its proximity to the liturgy, led to the decline of liturgical drama in the first half of the 16th century. It only survived in regions strongly influenced by Catholicism, e.g. in Spain, until the Counter-Reformation in the 16th century. A well-known example from Germany is the Oberammergau Passion play, which has been performed since 1634.

Influences of the sacred play have since been productive in Protestant school drama and in Latin Jesuit theatre. The shift from community theatre to court drama, which was brought about by changing political and social conditions and the new role of princely courts as cultural pillars of the absolutist age, also saw the naive openness to faith of the Middle Ages give way to a dualistic view of this world and the hereafter.

Johann Klaj's oratorios (Resurrection of Jesus Christ, Ascension and Assumption of Jesus Christ) marked the beginning of the oratorio and oratorical passion music form, which was particularly popular in the 17th and 18th centuries. In contrast, theatre censorship in the 18th and 19th centuries severely restricted religious material on stage. In the 19th century, religious melodramas became common in some cities as a popular form of theatre.

The attempts by Zacharias Werner and other theorists to revive the liturgical form as an alternative to 19th century drama led to only a few (adapted) works, most specially in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Everyman (1911), The Salzburg Great Theatre of the World (1922) and Max Mell's plays, but also in the renewed spirit of Paul Claudel's The Satin Slipper (1925) and finally, in music theatre, Carl Orff's Comoedia de Christi Resurrectione (1956), Ludus de nato Infante mirificus (1960) and De temporum fine comoedia (1973/79/81) as well as in Benjamin Britten's church parables.

An attempt to revive liturgical drama in the late 20th century was the 1981 representation at Warsaw Cathedral of Kazimierz Dejmek's Passion Play, edited by Julian Lewański.

Play practice

The typical stage form for the sacred plays that were performed in public spaces was the pageant wagon; the set-ups were located in different parts of a square and the audience and actors moved back and forth between the different parts of the stage for each scene. The scenes were opened and closed by a praecursor with an introduction or moralising summary for the audience. There is also evidence of explanatory comments addressed to the audience during the scenes and requests for prayer and singing. Dramatic texts, instructions for the play, comments and instructions for the stage set are summarised in conducting roles. The play emphasised declamation rather than the mimed interpretation of the roles.

Characteristics in various European languages

In the late Middle Ages, vernacular languages were increasingly used instead of the ecclesiastical language of instruction.[12] The influence of the languages that replaced Latin led to the development of "national" traditions from the 14th century onwards. The first beginnings had previously only been found in Antichrist poetry,[13] e.g. in the Latin Ludus de Antichristo (around 1160), and in the German Last Judgment play. The most important late medieval genre in the German-speaking world were the passion plays, which extended the plot beyond the events of Easter to the entire Christian story of salvation in the Old and New Testaments, from the Creation and the Fall of Man to the Resurrection of Christ.

In the history of English theatre, extensive cycles were created, the main genres of which were Corpus Christi plays and, from the middle of the 14th century, morality plays. At the centre of the plot was the struggle between good and evil forces (see Vice), virtues and vices or angels and devils for the soul of man. The plays often also included contrasting comic elements. The rolling stage was the favoured stage construction.

The development of French plays began much earlier in the 12th century with an Anglo-Norman Le Jeu d'Adam and Jean Bodel's Le Jeu de saint Nicolas (around 1200). The characteristic form was the mystery play, the subject matter was mainly legends of saints alongside biblical stories. While German and English plays were mainly written by anonymous authors, it was in France that well-known poets emerged for the first time. In addition to Bodel, these included Eustache Marcadé and Simon Gréban. The pantomime mystères mimes, which were presented as an early form of tableaux vivants, played a special role. The productions showed an early tendency towards the effective and theatrical, for which the stage machinery also served. Comic and serious scenes were strictly separated.

Pantomimes were also known as stomme spelen in the Netherlands. Alongside the allegorical Zinnespel morality plays and miracle plays, they were among the most important genres. Several Easter plays have survived from Dutch monasteries and churches, of which those from Maastricht and Rijnsburg Abbey are among the best known.[14] Only one role of a play from Delft has survived. From the accounts of the performance, it can be inferred that this must have been a very elaborate play, performed in the churchyard.[15] In the very elaborate theatrical performances of the Easter drama, the church or cathedral was divided into a number of locations also called 'houses'.

Italian development largely took place outside of the major European literatures. Unlike in other countries, sacred plays did not become popular plays, but remained the task of ecclesiastical brotherhoods until well into the 15th century. The main genres were the dramatic lauda, processional-like forms that developed from the ballads sung during processions via dialogue into small dramatic scenes, and the devozione, a form of sermon play, which developed the sermon with living images and dialogue scenes. Both genres were only incorporated into urban festivals in the course of the 15th century, culminating in the sacred representations. As in France, legends of saints were also used alongside biblical material, and the Italian theatre paid particular attention to the magnificent Baroque décor, for which important painters and sculptors of the time worked.

According to Alan Deyermond, liturgical dramas in Latin have been easily documented in Catalonia, but not in Castile (in the cathedrals of Palencia and Segovia); in the rest of the medieval peninsular kingdoms there are some remains and clues, such as a Quem quaeritis from Santiago de Compostela, and very similar examples from the Officium pastorum in Coimbra, Huesca and a 15th-century missal from the Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragoza. For Deyermond, the abundance of these pieces in Catalonia is due to Occitan political and cultural influence. In turn, the scarce development of liturgical drama in Latin in Castile was due to the late introduction of the Roman rite in the Meseta and the influence exercised by the Clunisian monks, an order that, it seems, was not interested in the development of drama.[16]

The heyday of the sacred play in Spanish literature came relatively late in the Golden Age during the 16th and 17th centuries with Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. The most important form was the autos sacramentales.[17] Defined in 1924 by Ángel Valbuena Prat as "dramatic compositions in one day, allegorical and generally relating to Communion",[18] the autos sacramentales began to be performed in the porticoes of churches and temples (and later, on carriages mounted as stages in the squares of towns and villages) in the 16th century, continuing the dramatic-religious tradition of mysteries and miracles. They were banned as such a genre in 1765.[19]

See also

Notes

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Before Coussemaker, other scholars such as Charles Magnin,[2] Heinrich Alt (1811–1893)[3] and the bibliophile Victor Luzarche[4] had already dealt with the subject of liturgical dramas. Certain modern scholars such as Clifford Flanigan[5] and Michael Norton[6] have argued against the term liturgical drama. While narrative structures abound in several part of the Mass and its readings, liturgies may also convey visual impressions, solemn processional entries, complex tableaux or lyrics. Stories are not necessarily part of the classic elements of medieval liturgies, like visitatio sepulchri, Passion plays, Jesus descending the cross, shepherd's plays, sorrows of the Virgin Mary, or Corpus Christi plays. The example of Cistercian nuns crowning Marian statues in their monastic enclosure at Wienhausen shows the limits of liturgical drama, according to Caroline Bynum. Bynum has shown that the crowning ceremonies included alternating clothing for Mary, even royal crowns were donated to the statues. The nuns, for their part, dressed and crowned themselves on given occasions in the liturgical year. Examples that show clear aspects of performance and liturgy.[7]
  2. ↑ These small representations were performed by the officiants of the mass themselves, even using the same objects used in the liturgy, thus exploiting their symbolic value and affirming the sacred character that would protect them from the criticism of the theatre that was frequent among the Church Fathers and medieval moralists.
  3. ↑ The earliest known performances of the so-called Quem quaeritis? or Visitatio sepulchri, were associated with the Easter Vigil celebrations, which dramatised the visit of the Three Marys to the tomb of Jesus and their conversation with an angel. It developed throughout Western Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries. The first record of this liturgical drama in the Iberian Peninsula is found in late 11th-century breviaries from the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos.

Citations

  1. ↑ Coussemaker, Edmond de (1860). Drames liturgiques du Moyen-Age-texte et musique. Rennes: Impr. de H. Vatar.
  2. ↑ Magnin, Charles (1838). Les Origines du théâtre moderne. Paris: Hachette.
  3. ↑ Alt, Heinrich (1846). Theater und Kirche in ihrem gegenseitigen Verhältniss. Berlin: Plahn Buchhandlung.
  4. ↑ Luzarche, Victor (1856). Office de Pâques ou de la Résurrection, accompagné de la notation musicale et suivi d'hymnes et de séquences inédites, publié pour la première fois d'après un manuscrit du XIIe siècle de la bibliothèque de Tours.Tours: Impr. de J. Bouserez.
  5. ↑ Flanigan, Clifford (1975–1976). "Liturgical Drama and Its Tradition: A Review of Scholarship 1965–1975," Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama, Vol. XVIII/XIX, pp. 81–102, 109–136.
  6. ↑ Batoff, Melanie (2019). "Michael Norton, Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater . (Early Medieval Drama, Art, and Music.) Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2017. Pp. ix, 272; 3 musical examples and 7 tables. $89. ISBN: 978-1-5804-4262-60," Speculum, Vol. XCIV, No. 1, pp. 259–61.
  7. ↑ Bynum, Caroline (2015). "'Crowned with Many Crowns' Nuns and Their Statues in Late-Medieval Wienhausen," The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. CI, No. 1, pp. 18–40.
  8. ↑ Boor, Helmut de (1967). Die Textgeschichte der lateinischen Osterfeiern. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
  9. ↑ Quirante, Luis; Evangelina Rodríguez & Josep Lluís Sirera (1999). Pràctiques escèniques de l'edat mitjana als segles d'or. Valencia: Universidad, p. 43.
  10. ↑ Gautier, Léon (1886). Histoire de la poésie liturgique au moyen âge: Les tropes. Paris: V. Palmé.
  11. ↑ Petersen, Nils Holger (2000). "Les textes polyvalents du Quem quaeritis à Winchester au Xe siècle", Revue de musicologie, Vol. LXXXVI, No. 1, pp. 105–18.
  12. ↑ Zijlstra, Marcel (2001). "Liturgische spelen in kerken en kloosters." In: Louis Peter Grijp, ed., Een muziekgeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 15–22.
  13. ↑ Aichele, Klaus (1974). Das Antichristdrama des Mittelalters, der Reformation, und Gegenreformation. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
  14. ↑ Loos, Ike de (2012). "Drama als liturgie - liturgie als drama." In: Patronen ontrafeld. Hilversum, pp. 161–81.
  15. ↑ Oosterbaan, D.P. (1967). "Het Delftse Paasspel van omstreeks 1496," Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal en Letterkunde, Vol. LXXXIII, pp. 1–20.
  16. ↑ Deyermond, Alan (2003). Historia de la literatura española 1. La Edad Media. Barcelona: Ariel. pp. 362–63.
  17. ↑ Gómez García, Manuel (1997). Diccionario del teatro. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, p. 265.
  18. ↑ Valbuena Prat, Angel (1956). Historia del teatro español. Barcelona: Editorial Noguer.
  19. ↑ Ruíz Ramón, Francisco (1981). Historia del teatro español. Madrid: Cátedra.

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