Download Medieval Theatre

Medieval Theatre
 First five centuries ( 400-900 A.D) of Middle Ages= Dark Ages
 Pagan rites an festivities containing theatrical elements like music, dancing, and masks
persisted despite the Church’s opposition
 By the 10th century, the church introduced its own dramatic ceremonies (ending the
Dark Ages)
 Trope: short liturgical plays performed during religious services (mass)
 Characteristics of tropes:
 Written in Latin
 Chanted or sung
 Performed by choirboys or members of the clergy
 Financed by church
 By 1200 religious plays were being performed outside of church
 By 1375 a religious drama had developed independent of the liturgy
 Characteristics of Religious Drama:
 Written in the common language of an area
 Were written to be spoken rather than chanted or sung
 Were performed by laymen not clergy
 Financed by community, not church
 Why would the church use the theatre when it had forbidden it for 500 years?
 Theatre had been proven to reach the masses
 To communicate with members that don’t speak Latin or are uneducated
 To highlight the events of the Christian calendar
 Three types of plays:
 Mystery Plays (also called Cycle Plays)
 They are a series of short biblical dramas performed in a cycle on a series of outdoor
stages through which the audience chronologically rotates
 Miracle Plays
 They were performed on the days celebrating a town’s patron saint (to tell their
story)
 Morality Plays
 They brought moral sentiments and religious beliefs to life through drama
 Theatre Production
 Outdoor festivals plays were performed on both fixed or movable stages
 The movable stages, called mansions, were usually wagons carrying a background
scenery
 Medieval producers gave great attention to special effects, which they called “secrets”
 Certain emblems, accessories and properties helped audiences to identify specific
characters: St. Peter and his keys; Judas and his red hair; angels and their wings
 Plays often featured music: choruses of angels for heavenly scenes; trumpet fanfares for
the entrance of God
 Controversy and Decline
 The church carefully watched over the scripts, in order to ensure that the faithful were
being taught the accepted doctrine
 Puritan opposition to the stage was informed by the arguments of the early church
fathers who had written against the decadent and violent entertainments of the
Romans (pagans)
 Puritans argued not only that the stage in general was pagan, but that any play that
represented a religious figure was inherently idolatrous
 A sweeping assault against the alleged immortalities of the theatre crushed whatever
remained in England of the Medieval dramatic tradition