Download PDF | Eckehard Simon - The Theatre of Medieval Europe_ New Research in Early Drama-Cambridge University Press (2008).
334 Pages
This volume brings together the work of thirteen internationally recognised scholars of early drama to give a comprehensive account of recent findings in the field. While reflecting the large body of research on English drama, the book widens the focus of its survey to represent the continental theatre of the period, with a succession of essays covering France, Italy, Spain, Germany, central Europe and the Low Countries. In addition, it deals with Latin musical and liturgical drama, and addresses both the archival and stage-oriented aspects of theatre research.
In reviewing the subject in this way, the collection not only offers an account of recent discoveries across a range of countries and types of drama, but also suggests the comparative and interdisciplinary ground on which these areas of research may increasingly come to meet and cross-fertilise one another in the future. A major feature of the book is its authoritative chronological and fully indexed bibliography, which should serve as an invaluable guide to the most significant contributions in the field.
Preface
This volume gathers together thirteen papers reporting on medieval drama research since the 1960s prepared for a conference convened by the Committee on Medieval Studies of Harvard University, 9-11 October 1986. The scholars participating were kind enough to read the papers in advance. At the meeting they were then joined by some local medievalists to discuss each report in detail. The discussion was taped so that the editor might use it in devising instructions for revision. As they enter the present volume, then, as a guide to research, the papers bear the imprint not of one but of a team of editors for whose help I am most grateful. Although five of the chapters are devoted to English drama, it was not this field that prompted the editor to persuade a reluctant Committee to sponsor a conference. Scholars of English drama have been talking to each other since the 1950s, not only in seminars at MLA meetings and the Kalamazoo International Congresses but in journals such as Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama and Medieval English Theatre. It seemed to me, however, that they have done this largely without the rest of us. This conference, then, was intended to help scholars of continental drama to join the conversation and to encourage all of us to begin looking over national fences.
It also seemed time to bring in the harvest. Research on medieval theatre has enjoyed enormous growth since the 1960s, and not only in England and North America. So it seemed appropriate to take stock, to see where we stand, to share our concerns and to suggest where we might go from here. The editor suspects that a major new direction will be to study European drama as a comparative field, signalled by the productive meetings of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre. The present research reports, tied to a bibliography, may perhaps serve as a guide for the work to come. The title of this book is a kind of headline to be placed over drama research since the 1960s. 'Theatre' suggests what has been most innovative and productive about this scholarship: the discovery that medieval drama was primarily theatre, that performance went far beyond the text. How this revolution began is told in the introductory essay by Glynne Wickham, the scholar first to mount the barricades. Wickham's Early English Stages, appearing since 1959, is both manifesto for and companion to this period. As will be discussed below, work to understand medieval drama as theatre has taken two directions. One has been to mine archives for theatrical activities, and is exemplified by the Toronto project 'Records of Early English Drama'.
The other has been to put on modern performances of medieval plays and thus to examine them as works of the stage, as living theatre. Moving to the subtitle, 'early' addresses the concern that this drama can be called 'medieval' only if we grant the term a long afterlife. In virtually all countries, as the conference debate made clear, medieval plays continued to be performed alongside the new theatre of the Renaissance and the Baroque periods. 'Early drama', then, designates a tradition of European theatre lasting some 800 years, from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries. With 'medieval Europe', lastly, the main title voices the hope that scholars might find it rewarding to study the drama of 'their literature' in the light of what was being staged in the countries around them. By 'countries' we should, of course, not think of European nations as they exist today. The geography of medieval drama was one of languages. It thus often differed from the political map. For the present volume, we therefore need to explain what chapter-headings like 'France', 'Spain' and 'Germany' actually mean.
The plays of France, as Alan Knight notes, were mostly written in the French of the north. But there is a substantial number of texts written in Old Occitan (Provencal), the dialect of southern France, resembling Italian and the Catalan of Spain. In the twelfth century, plays in (Anglo-Norman) French were performed in England and in the thirteenth we find French drama at the courts of southern Italy and Sicily (Adam de la Halle's Robin et Marion, for example). Later on, these courts become home for Aragonese theatre from Spain. To paraphrase Ronald Surtz, Spain did not exist. What we have is drama from four indigenous regions (Catalonia, Castile, Portugal, Aragon), remarkably different in history and traditions. Plays in German were written in such outlying regions as Latvia, Bohemia, Hungary, Romania and northern Italy (Trent, Friuli). The German plays of towns along the Lower Rhine, although linked to the south, were written in a dialect little different from early Dutch. Dutch drama, again, was found not only in today's Netherlands, but in the provinces of Flanders, Brabant and Limbourg of present-day Belgium. Language geography is further discussed in the five chapters on continental drama in this volume. While providing more coverage than some, our survey cannot claim to be complete. A few regions are missing and we do not report on the research done on certain Latin pieces. The paper on Spain omits Portuguese and Aragonese theatre because in medieval times these were not major traditions.
The same can be said of Scandinavia where the earliest vernacular play dates to the 1470s. More serious is lack of coverage for the Slavic drama of Eastern Europe. As Glynne Wickham reports, interesting work is being done in Poland, for instance, on Corpus Christi and Passion plays. It should be noted, however, that the Czech drama of Bohemia is heavily dependent on German plays. For some early texts in Byzantine Greek, there is still no evidence to determine whether they were in fact staged drama. Equally debatable, much research notwithstanding, is the theatrical status of dialogues in the manner of Terence written in the tenth century by the Saxon canoness Hrotswitha (or Hrotsvit) of Gandersheim and the so-called 'elegiac comedies', produced in the twelfth century in centres of learning along the Loire River.
These are marvellous pieces, in lively and witty Latin, and one wishes they were plays. Much recent research on them has been done by Italian scholars and Sandro Sticca gives us a brief account. The consensus at the conference was, however, that these texts were not written for the stage. Throughout medieval Europe, Latin drama was sung not spoken. But this was evidently not the case for Hrotswitha's playlets and the comoediae. That must have made them something entirely different, a different genre, as it were, from the oratorio-like Latin drama of the time. One doubts, therefore, that the authors thought of them as staged drama. Hrotswitha scholars face the additional hurdle that medieval theatre, painful as it is to state these days, was 'for men only'.
This was not a matter of conscious discrimination, of course, but of social convention. By the thirteenth century, to be sure, liturgical plays were sung by nuns in some convents and fifteenth-century civic records occasionally mention women in minor parts. But from the Winchester Easter play of c. 975 to Shakespeare and beyond, theatre was the province of men. As a learned canoness related to the reigning emperor, Hrotswitha would have been indignant at the suggestion, I think, that she and her fellow nuns, like minstrels at a banquet, should act out this Christian answer to Terence. The monastic schools, we remember, read Terence for his Latin.
Terence the playwright and the Roman stage were unknown. The same can be said of Hildegard, the learned and powerful twelfthcentury abbess of Bingen on the Rhine. It is gratifying to see our age rediscover Hildegard's poetry and her great visions. And her so-called Or do virtutum - involving vices, virtues and the devil - may in fact be the first morality. But it is poor sociology to claim, as music performance groups like Sequentia do, that Hildegard and the nuns of Bingen would have staged the Ordo in the convent cloister. These remarks reflect the engagement with which this question was debated at the conference. But we actually spent most of our time discussing the reports themselves, especially important findings new to most of us. Hansjiirgen Linke surprised us with the news that German scholars had for some years known of a second manuscript of the Ludus de Antichristo (see the bibliography, no. 78), a political Antichrist play of the 1160s from the Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee. Alan Knight shared his discovery, at Wolfenbiittel, of a large corpus of religious plays from the city of Lille.
Like some cycles of north English towns, these plays were performed on pageant wagons. Wagons were also used for Corpus Christi plays put on at the cathedral of Toledo. Among the more unexpected items, Ronald Surtz pointed to records from Catalonia mentioning Jews as participants in Christian theatre. Also much discussed was the state of research in each field and the vast differences in the rate of progress. A century ago, scholarship on medieval drama was flourishing in France, Italy, Germany and the Low Countries. During the first half of this century, however, the field lay largely dormant. It was, curious to note, the early sixties that saw a common resurgence of drama research in these countries. Yet much of this newer scholarship remains unknown to those working on English drama. Sandro Sticca observed that virtually no one outside Italy reads the important work done at centres like Viterbo. Except for publications on Latin drama, German scholarship is largely ignored as well and most of us were surprised to learn how many plays Spain produced and how much research is in progress there. England is clearly the most 'developed country'; its research economy is booming.
For every lone scholar toiling away on liturgical drama or music, on French or German plays, there are whole teams of professors and graduate students plowing and re-seeding the English field. Our volume reflects this situation, of course, in devoting five papers to early English drama. These permit a much more detailed discussion of the state of research than is possible for our correspondents from the continent. In introducing research little known to most, they must often confine themselves to listing the work done and adding brief comments. One hopes, on the other hand, that much of what David Mills, for example, has to say on editing English plays will be useful to editors of continental texts. For Church drama, Clifford Flanigan had reviewed research since 1965 in a major article published in 1975-6 (bibliography, no. 36). In their present papers, he and Andrew Hughes are therefore able to concentrate on work done since the early 1970s. As an authority on music and liturgy, Hughes casts a critical eye on Church drama research done mostly by scholars without training in musicology. This is clearly a field where most work remains to be done.
The glories of Marlowe and Shakespeare may explain why research on English drama is so far ahead of any other field. But it has probably more to do with the large number of English departments (and their size) in Great Britain and North America. The nineteenth century organised our discipline along lines of national languages. For medieval literature this created a vast discrepancy between what we have and what we study. The number of plays written in Latin or German, for example, is easily ten times that of what survives from England. For German-speaking central Europe we now have about 160 religious plays and a few new ones seem to come to light every year. The leading civilisation in drama - as in practically all medieval culture - was France.
The total corpus is now estimated at about 220 religious plays, 70 moralities and about 150 farces. Modern editions, as Alan Knight notes, exist for less than half of these. Many lengthy Passion and saint plays lie dormant in manuscripts. Here is a country, then, where many an emigrant from the overgrazed fields of England could find a happy home. One other question we debated and which the correspondents wished the editor to address was 'When does medieval drama end?' I mentioned this at the beginning when I explained why we are using 'early drama' in the subtitle. Our colleagues in English were quite spirited in pointing out that 'medieval' was not the appropriate term for the theatre we are studying. The adjective is little used by them. Since the work of Glynne Wickham one speaks of 'Early English Stages'; Toronto's archival project is called 'Records of Early English Drama'. A 1987 collection of conference papers on European drama is entitled Early Drama to 1600 (see the 'Recent works' section of the bibliography). From the English perspective, this view makes good sense. Drama written in English starts very late, at the end of the fourteenth century. The same is true for plays in Dutch: the Van Hulthem collection dates from about 1410.
And leaving aside a twelfth-century Magi play linked to France, vernacular theatre in Iberia begins even later. Yet the chronology is more 'medieval' for other traditions. When the first English plays appeared, Latin drama had been around for four centuries. The first French-language plays were written in the twelfth century. For the thirteenth, we have a few semi-dramatic Italian texts and several fairly substantial Easter and Passion plays in German. In the continental context, it seems to me, it is therefore still more appropriate to speak of medieval drama. But the question is directed more at the end than at the beginning. And here there can be no doubt that the end of the Middle Ages does not mark the end of medieval drama. This holds true for all of Europe. The great cycle play of Chester was last performed in 1575, and thus at a time when London already had a professional theatre.
Throughout the sixteenth century, as David Staines notes, the older religious cycles and morality plays were performed side by side with Tudor and Elizabethan drama. It is widely accepted that Marlowe and Shakespeare were familiar with some forms of medieval drama, notably with the Vice figure popularised in moralities. While the idea of continuity has come under question, as David Bevington points out, England is still different from France and Germany in that the new playwrights (of the Tudor period) actually worked with their medieval heritage. Only in Spain is the continuity more pronounced.
The medieval theatre of Castile leads without break into the Golden Age of the seventeenth century. In sixteenth-century Catalonia, as Ronald Surtz reports, religious plays were still sung in the manner of Latin liturgical drama. Some Easter plays continued to be performed until the nineteenth century. The Misteri d'Elx, celebrating the Assumption of the Virgin, is still being staged in the town of Elche. While its performance practices, replete with lifts and pulleys, may not be entirely medieval, some manuscripts do in fact date back to the seventeenth century and the play itself is attested since the early 1500s For England and Spain, then, the term cearly drama' is fitting because it suggests a productive continuity between the old and the new. Elsewhere, clearer lines of demarcation can be drawn. In Italy, there is a fairly sharp break in 1539 when Pope Paul III forbids the staging of sacre rappresentazioni in Rome. These pageants had by then become fairly baroque spectacles. French Renaissance playwrights, as Alan Knight observes, made a conscious break with their medieval past: 'Racine has no medieval roots' (below, p. 151).
But ignoring it does not mean that the old theatre did not continue. French morality plays were, in fact, performed continuously from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In Paris, the staging of Passion plays was officially prohibited in 1548. But it is the nature of such decrees never to reach the provinces. In villages of Savoy and the Dauphine, Passion and saint plays were put on until the eighteenth century. In German central Europe, the same holds true for those southern provinces where the Reformation did not take root. In Bavaria, Swabia, some Swiss cantons and in Austria, especially the Tirol, the medieval plays of Easter, Corpus Christi and Christmas continued to be staged in towns like Bolzano up to 1700.
The famed Passion play of Lucerne, last performed in 1616, can in fact be viewed as a public affirmation of medieval faith. While we do have a few Passion plays written by Protestant authors, in most towns medieval plays disappear from the records as Lutheranism is adopted. Oberammergau, despite its popularity, is not a true relic from the medieval past. While parts of the oldest Passion play were taken from sixteenth-century texts, what one sees today has little to do with medieval theatre. In the Low Countries, the effects of the Reformation were felt somewhat later. But the conflicts it brought eventually put an end to the old theatre produced, in happy competitions, by urban guilds known as Rederijkerskamers (Chambers of Rhetoric). In the south, the religious wars of the 15 70s and 80s prevented the guilds from meeting and in the north, as Elsa Strietman has noted, Calvinistic church councils eventually prohibited theatre of all kinds. The point of the discussion here reviewed was not, of course, to quibble over the use of 'medieval' and 'early'. The important issue was to establish that no form of medieval literature survived longer than the drama. The reason for this is that medieval drama was not really literature, as we understand it, but theatre. It was a pervasive, ubiquitous and tenacious form of popular culture. On this note, I return to the title of this volume:
The Theatre of Medieval Europe signifies the most productive turn that research since the 1960s has taken. The work on medieval theatre, as I have noted above, has been carried out on two different fronts: on the stage and in the archive. Studying medieval plays through modern productions began in England in the early 1950s. As Stanley Kahrl relates in his lively and personal account, the movement took hold in North America in the early seventies, mostly on university campuses, with Toronto leading the way. At international meetings, one hears from colleagues that performing medieval plays has caught on with student groups in France and the Low Countries as well. Little of such activity, on the other hand, is being reported from Italy, Spain and Germany.
England has remained in the lead and medieval theatre enjoys substantial academic support at universities such as Bristol, Leeds, Lancaster and Cambridge. In modernised form, medieval plays have made it to the London stage and onto television. Since 1979, these performances have been documented in Medieval English Theatre, a journal edited at Lancaster University that vigorously promotes medieval drama as living theatre. Some French and Dutch plays have joined the repertory. The movement is being led by a new generation of scholars whose ways are more informal and who easily mix with student actors and 'citizen spectators'. In his new book Playing God (bibliography, no. 136), John R. Elliott has now written the history of modern medieval theatre.
Some of the theatricals one sees are no doubt governed by the same happy spirit that dwells in such neo-medieval groups as the Society for Creative Anachronism active on American college campuses. And in service to a sterner muse, some continental colleagues will, one suspects, continue to raise an eyebrow or two. But as Stanley Kahrl makes clear, the method is sound. Medieval drama was not meant to be read. That is why our students have always found it so boring. It was meant to be heard and seen. Theatrical effects, however, cannot really be imagined: they must be reproduced and observed.
The language of stage symbolism is mainly visual. Andrew Hughes sums this up succinctly when stating that 'scholarship is never complete until the result has been seen in practice: on the boards...' (below, p. 61). It is perhaps significant that this statement comes from a musicologist. When we think of medieval music, we think of performance, not of reading notation. As a medievalist, one must be grateful that at least some of what we study is beginning to enter the popular imagination, that The Second Shepherds Play, Everyman and The Play of Daniel have become almost as much part of our repertory as, say, The Trojan Women or Oedipus Rex.
A director conversant with scholarship can no doubt give authentic shape to a performance. Anyone who has seen Toronto's Poculi Ludique Societas perform will agree. And when watching such a play, the trained eye can see effects of medieval stagecraft that no one reading the text could have imagined. When at Toronto's York Cycle of 1977 Christ was played by twelve quite different men, which pageant-wagon staging makes necessary, the effect was to humanise the role, to make Christ into suffering Everyman. What we must remember, however, is that we are only conducting an experiment. We are not really able to re-create a medieval performance. Perhaps the resurgence of research we are now witnessing will eventually result in a poetics of the medieval stage, a historically accurate dramaturgy. But at this point we really do not know whether a stage effect we find meaningful, powerful or moving was intended by the playwright or was perceived as such by the townspeople who came to watch.
Such doubts will lessen the more we combine the stage with the archive, the more those scholars direct modern performances who are doing the best research into the historical record. The return to history is the most promising trend in recent scholarship. The flagship is Toronto's 'Records of Early English Drama', a research group founded in the mid-seventies by Alexandra Johnston. REED has by now engaged dozens of scholars to search the archives of Great Britain for evidence of theatre, minstrelsy and entertainment. How rich these first harvests have been, Professor Johnston shows in her fascinating 'All the world was a stage' (chapter 7, below).
The results go beyond theatre history. When the work of many volumes is complete, much of the social history of England between 1400 and 1700 will have to be rewritten. We have always suspected that the plays we have represent only a fraction of what medieval playwrights produced. But such losses befell other types of literature as well. The REED searches are beginning to suggest, as David Mills puts it, that 'dramatic activities uncontained by text were the medieval norm' (below, p. 65). That is to say, much of what was spoken and acted on the medieval stage never existed as a formal text and hence was not written down. But we must know this kind of theatre in order to reconstruct how the plays we have were staged.
Archival research will show the way. Nothing like the REED project exists so far for continental Europe. For France, Italy and the Low Countries one still has to rely on documentation assembled in the last century by antiquarians and local historians. As useful as some of these old histories of theatre 'in our town' still are, systematic archival work remains to be done. Given its splendid heritage, one can only imagine what lies hidden in the archives of France. Here are gaps that call for scholarly action, especially from those with historical training.
What scholars heeding the call can discover is shown by the German records recently published by Bernd Neumann (bibliography, no. j6j), who spent fifteen years mining German archives. While no single scholar can cover all sources (consider the thirty-five or so researchers engaged by REED), Neumann's pioneering effort is fundamentally changing our understanding of where and how German drama was performed. The records mention types of plays previously unknown. Regions for which not a single text survives were actually dappled with theatre of all kinds. In fact, Neumann proposes the thesis that, in late-medieval times, every town had theatre; every town no matter how small had at least one l The social implications of this are profound.
Theatre played a central role in late-medieval town life. Drama was the only form of 'literature' practiced in churches and market squares, on the streets and in houses. Poems, romances and chronicles were heard in several dozen courts by perhaps a few thousand members of the gentry. Theatre, however, was for everybody. It was, in today's parlance, a mass medium, whether used by the Church for instruction, as a way to put one's town on the map, to raise money or for merry sport at Carnival and May revels.
The archival work will continue to show, in sum, that medieval theatre was an important form of popular culture. It was a popular culture that spanned seven centuries and was so ingrained in custom and civic rite that, as I have noted, it far outlasted the age that created it. Viewed as popular culture, medieval theatre would seem to be an ideal field for interdisciplinary studies. To promote such work and to foster comparative study of European drama was, of course, the reason for convening our conference and producing this volume. What, in conclusion, are the prospects for such work? It will be difficult to find good academic homes for it. Departments and institutions of literature, here and abroad, are surrounded by the traditional language fences. Theatre institutes are few - only two at German universities, for instance - and they tend to cater to the modern stage. Hopes turn once again to the English departments of Great Britain and North America, with their flocks of talented doctoral students. It might be possible to return to older standards of foreign-language proficiency. Then perhaps the important scholarship published in French, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish will not continue to pass by unread there.
Until such time, we will need largescale surveys, that is, detailed histories of Latin and continental drama written in English. The vision of professors and graduate students of English reading several foreign languages will perhaps provoke a smile. But making scholarship accessible is only half the problem. What about the plays themselves, many written in obscure regional dialects? It is hard to imagine someone in English spending years learning, say, Middle Low German just in order to read the Easter play of Redentin. So a realistic first step, the conference agreed, is to start translation projects making major plays available in English. Such a program, as Sandro Sticca reported, has now begun at the State University of New York at Binghamton under the auspices of its Medieval Center. Elsa Strietman and Robert Potter are making rapid strides in translating Dutch plays. The signs are encouraging. At conferences from Viterbo to Lancaster, in journals like Comparative Drama and Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama scholars have begun talking over the national fences.
There is much to be gained all around. As the volume goes to press, it is a pleasant task to be able to thank at least some of those who helped with this project: Harvard's Committee on Medieval Studies for sponsoring the 1986 conference, and the thirteen scholars who cheerfully took on the somewhat thankless task of writing about the work of others and who, with unruffled spirits, acceded to the host of demands made by an unyielding editor. I am grateful to Paula Nicholas for feeding the bibliography into the office computer and to Susan Deskis for reading proofs and producing the index. We all owe thanks to Cambridge University Press and its literature editor, Kevin Taylor, for accepting our research survey into its 'Studies in Medieval Literature' series and to Maureen Street for copy-editing a typescript of divers hands with judicious care. Eckehard Simon Cambridge, MA 5 January 1990
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