Medieval Theatre: Staging Cycles, Other Religious Drama, Secular Drama

York is one of the towns in northern England for which we have evidence of moveable staging. It also stages some of its cycle plays every four years so we can see what it might have looked like.

The last lecture/post ended with a description of cycle plays, the most widely performed theatre of the Middle Ages. Now let’s examine how they were performed. To answer the question “How?” simply, they were played on stages that utilized the concept of mansion and platea, and that were either fixed or movable.  Fixed stages were usual on the continent, although in Spain there is evidence that at times movable staging was the method, and much of the staging in Britain was movable.  Let’s look at movable staging first.

The traditional view is that in most British cycle plays each different mansion was mounted on a pageant wagon.  All the

wagons then moved in succession, stopping at a number of places within the town. Though some cycles moved from town to town, much more often cycle plays were performed in a single city, for and by the people of that town.  At each stop in a given town, the crowds that gathered watched one play, then the next pageant wagon would pull up and the crowd saw THAT play, and so on.

I attended the York Mysteries in summer 2006. Here is one
of the wagons, holding the city of Jerusalem

And here it is opened up (tightly packed wagon!) - the players have formed a
platea around the mansion wagon. This was the last of four stops thru the city, in a lovely park on the grounds of the York Museum (in the background).

Some scholars have doubts about the traditional method and suggest that the wagons might have acted as parade floats, on which, in a ride through town before the plays were actually performed, the players mimed a bit of the action, or froze into a tableau of a scene, tempting the people who watched with an idea of what they might see later.  The wagons then entered a central place, usually a town square, and pulled up one after another behind platforms.  In this theory the wagons became the mansions, the platforms acted as the plateas. The audience that gathered in the square might then move from wagon to wagon as different plays in the cycle were performed.  There is pictorial evidence in Spain of a mansion wagon, or carros, pulling up behind a platea wagon.

      

Most recently scholars have been closely examining staging in Britain, in the Records of Early English Drama project (REED), and have unearthed evidence that while some cities used movable scenery – a map of the route in York (located in the north of England), indicates that in that town at least the parade method was used – but that more places, especially in the southern parts of England, used fixed staging instead of movable.

A preserved "round" in Cornwall, St Piran's (Perran)
Round

On the continent, fixed stages were more common than movable.  There were several kinds of fixed staging, and some of these have been found in England as well.  At Rome, Bourges and other cities

What a round such as St Piran's might have looked
like with fixed staging)

ancient Roman amphitheatres were used. In Cornwall (to give an example from the far southwest of England) the so-called “Cornish rounds” offered a playing space similar to the old amphitheatres – a form of arena staging, or theatre in the round.  The most typical fixed staging, however, was presented in large public squares.  We have a drawing, for example, of the first day of the Lucerne Passion Play in 1583.  Mansions are stationed throughout the square; the audience is basically in the middle, though much could be seen from the upper storey windows and balconies of buildings that surrounded the square as well. 

One of the most complicated and best documented of the continental cycles was the Valenciennes Passion, in France.  We

know what it looked like because in 1547, the last year of its existence, Hubert Cailleau painted its stage, or stages – Alois Nagler has dubbed it a “polyscenic stage of juxtaposition.”  It is a long, narrow stage on which several mansions are apparent. The most complicated are at either end:  Heaven and Hell.  The mansions in between those two were changed as needed during the 25 days it took to complete the cycle.  (A reminder that the lengthy duration of this collection of plays probably did not last for a full day, but perhaps for an hour or two of each of the 25 days). Most cycles did not last 25 days; many were finished in one. The average throughout England and Europe was three days. The longest on record took 40 days.  

      

What did they look like?  They varied immensely, in fact in a given town some of the pageant wagons were magnificent, others not nearly as complex. Certainly very few were as complicated as that at Valenciennes, where this is part of what one spectator saw in 1547:

"The machines of the Paradise and Hell were absolutely prodigious and could be taken by the populace for magic.  For we saw Truth,

 with Angels, and other characters descend from very high, sometimes visibly, sometimes invisibly, appearing suddenly.  Lucifer was raised from Hell on a dragon without our being able to see how.  The rod of Moses, dry and sterile, suddenly put forth flowers and fruits.  Devils carried the souls of Herod and Judas through the air...Here Jesus Christ was carried up by the devil who scaled a wall forty feet high."

"There He became invisible. Finally He was transfigured on Mount Tabor.  We saw water changed to wine so mysteriously that we could not believe it, and more than a hundred persons wanted to taste this wine.  The five breads and the two fish seemed to be multiplied and were distributed to more than a thousand spectators, and yet there were more than twelve baskets left.  The fig tree, cursed by Our Lord, appeared to dry up, its leaves withering in an instant.  The eclipse, the earthquake, the splitting of the rocks and other miracles at the death of Our Lord were shown with new marvels. "

(Nagler, Sourcebook in Theatre History) 

Though the amount of scenic trickery described above is unusual, in general fixed stages offered more opportunity for spectacle than movable stages.

      

With such sophisticated, complex staging possible, it seems logical that someone would have had to oversee or direct the action, and in fact some of the larger cycles used directors, or pageant masters. Renward Cysat arranged the Lucerne plays in 1583,

 Wilhelm Rollinger directed the plays in Vienna in 1505 and Jean Bouchet staged them in Poitiers in 1508. Bouchet became sought after throughout Europe, and also described in detail what was expected of pageant masters. There is also an interesting piece of visual evidence. Jean Fouquet’s miniature painting of “the Martyrdom of St. Apollonia,” depicts what some scholars believe is a director/pageant master.  In it a man stands, book in one hand, wand in the other, physically directing or conducting the performance, and probably prompting as well. Some of the directors reading this may have wished to take such control in productions that tended to get out of control. Could their story be our story?

      

The plays in the cycles are often referred to as “mysteries” or “mystery plays.”  There have been several theories about this title, but not because they’re suspense-filled whodunits. Some scholars argue that they deal with “mysteries” of the faith, but there is no real evidence for this.  A more plausible explanation bases it on the word “ministerium,” which meant a religious group that comes together for a purpose, and religious confraternities sometimes produced mystery plays. The theory that I find most plausible bases the name on the Anglo-French word “mestrie” or “maistrie” which meant “mastery.” Trade guilds (places where masters plied their trade) often presented cycle plays, certainly in England where the guilds were sometimes known as “masteries;” from this to “mysteries” is rather easy transition. But we’ll probably never know for certain, so it must remain (wait for it)…a mystery.

      

Trade guilds were among the most powerful groups in medieval cities, and their members some of the wealthiest men in the 

Guildhall, London, built early 15th century - a
powerful symbol of the guilds

community. Sponsoring one of the plays in a cycle was thought of as a civic duty, and possibly also a chance to show off. Different guilds were assigned plays in the cycle -- the goldsmiths might present the three kings; the carpenters Noah’s ark; and so on.  The actors were mostly amateur.  I can’t help but think of the mechanicals in Midsummer. But the point is not the bravura of the acting nor the splendor of the scenery, the point is to show illiterate people the great cycle on which their faith was founded and that helped enable them to make it through the rough daily life they faced in the Middle Ages.

Perhaps the greatest single cycle play is The Second Shepherd’s Play from the English Wakefield cycle, in which a secular farce is juxtaposed with the birth of Jesus.  Three shepherds have to guard their sheep from thieves.  Enter Mak, a person the shepherds suspect is a sheep-stealer.  Mak offers to watch with the shepherds, they fall asleep and Mak steals a sheep!  Having discovered that a sheep is missing the shepherds make for Mak’s place where he and his wife are celebrating the theft. The shepherds knock, Mak’s wife hides the sheep in a manger and pretends she’s just had a baby.  The trick works and the shepherds leave apologetic, then return with gifts for the baby, and they catch Mak and his wife just as they’re about to do the sheep in!  Instead of bringing Mak to justice (which could well have meant death in those days) they toss him in a blanket. They leave and are stopped by an angel, who takes them to a stable where Christ has just been born.  They give the gifts they’d brought for Mak’s baby to Mary and Joseph, who in the tiny amateur productions of the cycles might have been played by Mak and his wife.  I saw the play staged with this double casting, and it worked very well. In a beautiful, simple, perhaps somewhat naive turn, the farce becomes a piece about the central figure of salvation, the baby Jesus. In a sense, the good shepherds have been rewarded by the Good Shepherd.  

      

While the cycles were the most common religious plays of the era, there were others as well, that I’ll touch on briefly. First, the miracle play, which often deals with the life and death (usually the gruesome death) of a saint – and usually within which some miracle is performed.  These plays were usually performed on the saint’s feast day. Sometimes a town that felt it owed its survival (after a plague or flood, for example) to a saint prepared a miracle play to celebrate and thank that saint.  In French medieval theatre a series of 40 plays was found on the subject The Miracles of Our Lady, in which the dramatic conflict is resolved by the intervention of the Virgin Mary, who performs a miracle to make things right.

The morality play dramatized the spiritual trials of common men and women in an allegorical manner – virtues and sins are personified in allegories – actors playing the seven deadly sins 

Max Rei groundbreaking director in the early 20th
century, staged Everyman at the first Salzburg Festival.
Everyman remains a staple of the festival today

tempt the common person, and actors playing the virtues literally defend him or her.  The most famous morality play is Everyman (c 1500), like most moralities, late in the medieval period.  Everyman meets Death, who tells him his time has come and that he must prepare for death by showing what he’s done in his life.  So Everyman seeks out his allegorical “friends,” Strength, Beauty, Wit (all individual characters) to accompany him as he moves towards death. But one by one they desert him on the journey – all but one – Good Deeds. With him, Everyman can face death.

In the morality play an important shift occurs in religious drama.  The cycle plays focus on Christ – on God.  In the morality, man... everyman...is the center, man as he deals with god and the Devil.  Thus the morality play provides a very important bridge towards the secularization of the religious drama and mightily influences later, greater plays.  Compare Everyman, for example, with Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.   Some of the secular moments in moralities can get fairly humorous.  In The Castle of Perseverance a stage direction says, “He that shall play Belial [one of the devils], look that he have gunpowder burning in pipes in his hands, in his ears, and in his arse when he goethe to battel!”

      

Of course there are secular elements in miracle plays and in mysteries as well -- as early as the visitatio plays there’s the spice seller who haggles with the three Maries, and in the cycles devils provide a form of comic relief, before they turn ugly.  In one French play, for example, some devils take a woman out of a boiling cauldron and taste her, then throw her back in – she’s not cooked enough!  And Noah’s wife is portrayed as a real shrew in several cycles: “so why all these animals, Noah? The mess they’ll make – Blech!”

        

This discussion of comic elements and emphasis on an every-man in some religious drama, provides an excellent segue into secular medieval drama, which we’ll discuss only briefly. Secular drama is important however, and strongly influences several genres in later European theatre.

Singers, jugglers, story-tellers and other entertainers played for the common people and sometimes the courts throughout the middle

Medieval jesters/fools dancing

 ages.  Often they theatricalized their songs and stories, which were often hilariously funny and frequently quite crude.  The result was the farce, one of the most popular forms throughout fifteenth century Europe.  The French are responsible for what most would call the masterpiece in this genre, Pierre Pathelin (c 1470), whose title character is a shyster lawyer that regularly plays tricks on people he does business with.  He defends in court a man he takes to be a stupid peasant accused of stealing a sheep.  Pierre’s brilliant if unorthodox defense strategy is that whenever anyone, even the judge, asks the defendant a question, the peasant should answer “Baaaa!”  The peasant follows his lawyer’s instructions and sure enough the judge soon becomes exasperated and throws the case out of court.  Then, when Pathelin, triumphant, demands his fee, the peasant says ”Baaaa!” and runs away.  The trickster is tricked, a theme that becomes very popular in later, greater farces including Ben Jonson’s Volpone and in Moliére’s Tartuffe.

      

In Germany, Hans Sachs, a shoemaker but also a “meistersinger” traveled through the Germanic states telling stories in song and 

Hans Sachs statue, Nuremburg

sometimes enacting them with a small troupe of players.  He wrote nearly 200 short farces, rough in tone but very funny.  He wrote a series of “wandering scholar” plays, such as The Wandering Scholar and Exorcist, in which a student convinces a man that he can conjure the devil.  The student forces a priest to impersonate this “devil” because the student knows the priest has been getting it on with the man’s wife.  In the end everybody pays the student money; the man, because he’s “seen the devil,” the priest and the wife to keep the student from blabbing about their adultery.

      

In England John Heywood wrote some of the first secular farces. His most famous is Johan, Johan.  Johan’s wife isn’t as nice to him as she used to be. Why? Poor Johan isn’t aware that his wife has found greater happiness sleeping with the local priest.  The last scene features the three of them at supper.  The wife wants to fool around with the priest, so she sends Johan out to fetch some water. But,  there’s a hole in the bucket (some of you will know that old song) so Johan comes back to mend it, catches the priest and his wife on the table, and kicks them BOTH out of the house. 

   

Notice that authority figures are being mocked in these farces. In Pierre Pathelin a lawyer, in The Wandering Scholar and Exorcist and in Johan, Johan a priest. 

      

Along with farce, another popular secular form was the folk play.  More gentle than farce, this kind of play dealt with common folk usually in a pastoral setting.  Some of the earliest extant medieval plays were written in France by Adam de la Halle in this style.  He combined shepherds and farmers with elements of farce, and bawdy play, but also incorporated fantasy material, including fairies and supernatural occurrences.  In Halle’s play Robin and Marion (1283) we get a tale of true love between a shepherd and shepherdess.  She remains faithful even when wooed by a knight.  These pastoral folk plays are forerunners to later romantic comedy, including As You Like It.

If you look closely at what's happening on stage, you'll see a man just entering
the scene, catching his wife making love with a priest!

Farces, folk plays and other secular forms were often performed on simple wood platforms set up on trestles -- these stages were called

booth or trestle stages.  They were set up in a town square, backed up to a building or perhaps the wagon on which the troupe of players had come to town.  These itinerant troupes always had to have an eye out for the law, unless they were hired by nobles or wealthy businessmen.  Then they were protected, and could perform not only in the streets but even in the great hall of the lord who was protecting and paying them.  Often the players presented their entertainments between courses at a dinner, and these offerings became known as 

interludes.  They might be any kind of play, but were more often comic than serious, more usually secular than religious.  The interludes begin a trend which will lead to a great change in the theatre, for the actors were paid by the lord, and those troupes who were especially good began to be retained by the nobles: “You play for me at my weekly banquets and for nobody else! And I’ll make it worth your while.” This practice meant nothing less than beginning of professional players and companies. Think a bit ahead to Shakespeare’s time. The companies in that era were known as the Lord Admiral’s Men, Lord Strange’s Men, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. That tradition started, from necessity, in Medieval times.

Interludes were presented indoors, usually in a large rectangular banqueting hall.  At one end of the hall a platform was set up, backed by a screen (often rather ornate) that led to the kitchen and hid that room from the view of the diners and in addition served as a simple background for the actors. This marked beginning of the modern theatre space.

      

I’ve not even touched on a number of paratheatrical events, among them mummings, tournaments, pageants, royal entries, and so 

The Triumph of Isabella, a royal entry in Brussels, 1615

forth. While these were important and significant, even if we added them to the secular forms (farce, folk play, interludes) we have just reviewed, they paled next to the primary theatre of the medieval era –religious drama.  So it’s ironic that just at what would seem to have been the height of the medieval religious theatre, forces were at work that would undermine it.

      

It has primarily to do with the corruption and decline of the Roman Catholic Church.  Between 1305 and 1377 the seat of the Church

Palais du Papes (Palace of the Popes) Avignon,
from a trip I took there in 1999

was wrenched from Rome and moved to Avignon.  The Popes first became virtual prisoners of the French, and then Frenchmen began to be elected to the papacy. Immediately after that turbulent time for the Church, between 1378 and 1417 there were rival popes, one Italian and one French, and at one point three different men claimed to be pope! This sort of nonsense, along with several questionable practices, such as the selling of indulgences, was questioned harshly by new voices all over Europe. Early in the 16th century the Protestant Reformation began, and countries began to be divided along religious lines.

In this time of near chaotic atmosphere, imagine attempting to produce religious drama.  What had until that time been a joyous affirmation of faith became a provocation to controversy and maybe even violence in nearly every European country.  As a result in 1539 in the Netherlands religious plays began to be banned; in 1547 religious play production was stopped in Italy; in 1548 Paris banned religious drama; so did Queen Elizabeth in England in 1558.  Only in Spain, where the Inquisition had been particularly effective in making sure the Catholic Church was the ONLY church, did religious drama continue. A change had arrived that profoundly affected the relationship between theatre and society right down to today.  I quote theatre historian Oscar Brockett, who explains it rather well:

“In Greece, Rome, and medieval Europe the theatre enjoyed the active support of government and religious groups.  Essentially it had been a community offering used to celebrate special events considered significant to all.  Beginning in the sixteenth century, however, the theatre ceased to have a religious and civic function, and henceforth had to justify itself on commercial or artistic grounds. At first it was sustained by noblemen and rulers...with their help the professional theatre was gradually able to establish itself throughout Europe.  Thus at the end of the Medieval period, the theatre began a new phase in its existence.”

And so we’ll bid farewell to the Middle Ages and next time examine the Italian Renaissance.