Medieval Theatre in Context: An Introduction

John Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134961894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

First Published in 1992. Medieval Theatre in Context is the first systematic attempt to relate the development of medieval drama - both Christian and pagan - to contemporary society and the Christian church.

1
The Passion of Jesus Christ

On Sunday, 1 April, in his thirtieth year, Jesus of Nazareth made a triumphant entry into Jerusalem riding on the back of an ass-colt. He was by that time widely acclaimed as a healer and it was believed by many Jews that he was the Messiah or Christ - the Anointed One - who had come at last to liberate them from the tyranny of Imperial Rome, just as Moses had liberated the Jewish people from their slavery in Egypt; but Jesus rejected the Old Law of 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth' and taught that there were only two essential commandments: first, to love God without reservation; and, second, to love your neighbour as sincerely as you loved yourself - he had no interest in rebellion.

He had come to Jerusalem because it was the beginning of the Passover week, and he intended to celebrate the feast with his disciples in the heart of the Jewish world. He went straight to the Temple, where he was horrified to find that the courtyards had been turned into a bazaar. He looked sternly about him, but took no action that day, although in the morning he returned and chased the money-changers out of the building, causing a minor riot.

After he had 'purged' the Temple he spent the rest of the week preaching and holding long discussions with his disciples, trying to prepare them for what he knew was inevitable. On Thursday, 5 April, he sent two of his followers to make final arrangements with one of the citizens, in whose large upper room he intended to celebrate the Passover. These arrangements were necessary because, for reasons of his own, he had decided to hold the ceremony a day early. He celebrated the festival that evening, as he had planned.

Eighteen hours later, on Friday afternoon, he was dead - nailed to the Cross as a common criminal, after being betrayed by one of his disciples, put on trial by the Jewish and Roman authorities, cruelly mocked, and savagely tortured, before he was finally condemned to death.

When the body was taken down and buried, the Jewish authorities, fearful that the disciples might steal it and then claim Jesus had risen from the dead as he had prophesied, sealed the mouth of the tomb with a heavy stone and set guards to watch it.

His disciples were all in disarray. But early on the Sunday morning, his mother Mary visited the tomb where his body had been laid, together with two of her friends, only to find that the guards had gone, the stone had been rolled back, and the body was no longer there, although the sheet in which it had been wrapped was still present. They carried this information back to the other disciples, claiming that Christ had risen from the dead, as he had frequently promised them. At this there was great rejoicing. Later, other members of the community claimed to have met the risen Jesus and talked with him, and this did much to reinforce the faith of his followers.

Of the agonising and stirring events of those few days, one picture remained with the disciples very clearly, because Christ himself had given the occasion great weight, and that was the Last Supper, the Passover meal they had shared with him.

The Passover was a very important Jewish feast, celebrating the occasion when Moses had brought the Jews out of their slavery in Egypt. The Jewish God had visited nine fearful plagues upon the country, but Pharaoh had stubbornly refused to let God's people go. Finally Moses received detailed instructions about the tenth, and most terrible, plague: God was preparing to destroy all the firstborn in the land of Egypt and, to ensure that none of his chosen people should suffer, they were to give him a sign. Each Jewish household was to kill an unblemished lamb and use its blood to mark the sideposts and upper crosspiece of the door; they were to roast the lamb and eat it, with a garnish of unleavened bread and bitter herbs; it was to be consumed to the last crumb, and it was to be eaten with the loins girded for travel, with sandals on the feet and a staff in the hand, ready to depart from Egypt; for in the night God would send his Angel of Death to smite all the firstborn of Egypt, but where he saw blood on the doorposts he would pass over that house, and its inhabitants would come to no harm - hence the name of the feast.

By the time of Jesus, the Passover had become an intimate family festival, celebrated in April, called the 'Pessach' or 'Pasch', at which the story of the escape from Egypt was recounted and praise and thanks were given to God for preserving the liberty and identity of the Jewish people.

It took the form of a commemorative supper retaining the basic features of the meal in Egypt - the Paschal Lamb, the unleavened bread and the bitter herbs - and central to it were two blessings that were to become central also to the Christian message. Before the lamb was eaten, the head of the household took bread, and broke it, and blessed it, and passed it round the table for all to eat - and after the meal a cup was filled with wine, and the head of the household took the wine, and blessed it, and passed it round the table for all to drink. The blessings pronounced upon the bread and the wine could be quite original, and those that Jesus chose to utter at the Last Supper were solemn and disturbing in the extreme, which made them very memorable.

The earliest account of the Last Supper is provided by St Paul, who describes it in the way those present described it to him:

that the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread: and when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, 'Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.' After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, 'This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me.'

It is obvious that many things were running through Jesus' mind at the time, and led to these strange words of blessing. For one thing, we know he believed he was the 'suffering servant' the prophets had foretold who would die to release mankind from the miseries brought on them by the disobedience of Adam and Eve. He also clearly identified himself with the pure, unblemished Lamb of the Passover - the Paschal Lamb - which was to be eaten to sustain the Jewish people and whose blood was to be the sign that liberated the faithful from death. He may also have seen himself as part of the universal spirit of God, which was just as much present in the bread and wine as it was in himself, and which nourished and supported all things; and lurking somewhere in the background was possibly the folk-memory of a human sacrifice, in which the body of a 'king of the year', who had been ritually slain, was eaten by his followers to allow them to absorb his strength and life and so renew their own vital forces. 'Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you . . . This cup is the new testament in my blood': the words could not be plainer or more direct, but their meaning was profound.

When he spoke, the disciples will also have remembered his assurance that his body would be restored to life after his death - for the suffering servant was to be resurrected, the indwelling spirit of God was indestructible, and the Lamb of the Passover, and the primitive human sacrifice, died to ensure the continuing life of the community,

After Christ's death, the disciples obeyed his injunction, and regularly re-created the Last Supper as a memorial meal, which they called the Eucharist, or 'thanksgiving', to celebrate the fact that his death had released all men from their inborn tendency to sin and brought them the promise of everlasting life, confirmed by his Resurrection.

So the celebration of the Lord's Supper, better known as the Mass, became the central feature of Christian ritual, although the whole Passion, or 'suffering', of Christ, the tortures and humiliations he underwent from the time of the Last Supper to his death on the Cross, and above all the joy of his Resurrection at sunrise on Easter Day, were equally important.

The events of the Passion were eventually destined to produce a new form of theatre in Europe several centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the Mass was the trigger for the process. Nor is it surprising that drama should spring from a story abounding with so much tension and pathos, and containing so many memorable scenes such vivid images of suffering and rejoicing. What is surprising is that it took so long.

St Paul's advice to the Corinthians on how they should conduct the service of the Eucharist makes it clear that in his day the occasion was still a communal meal like the original Passover, but that the new meaning Christ had given it had turned it into a very different kind of ceremony that required some kind of self-examination and confession of your sins or shortcomings before you approached the Lord's Table. After all, it was to save men from their sins and set them right with God that Christ had suffered torture and death, and it was only proper that you should realise that you were one of the sinners that he had died to save.

By that time the ceremony was being conducted in Greek instead of Hebrew, because Greek was currently the most 'international' language in the eastern Mediterranean, and Christianity, largely through St Paul's influence, had become a movement to save all men, not just the Jews.

In due course, the growing Christian communities became too large to hold the Eucharist as a domestic gathering, and the supper element of the ceremony wasted away, except for a single table at which the presiding elder pronounced the thanksgiving over the bread and the wine, now viewed as two different 'species', or physical aspects, of Christ's body.

Because of the warm Mediterranean climate, it was, and still is, the custom of both Jews and Greeks to eat their main meal in the cool of the evening, and the Eucharist had also been eaten at that time, normally on a Thursday, to recall the circumstances of the Last Supper; but once the meal element had disappeared, there was nothing to prevent the choice of another part of the day for the ceremony, or even another day of the week.

The logical choice of day was Sunday, because that was the day on which Christ had risen from the dead, and his Resurrection was the most obvious reason for thanksgiving. The hour was moved to the early morning, partly because it was reminiscent of the rising sun when Mary and her companions came to the tomb, and because the rising sun was also a very apt symbol for the Resurrection; but the main consideration was probably practical: such an early hour was convenient because it fell outside the labourer's usual working day, which often extended far into the evening - and the bulk of the early Christians were slaves and labourers to whom the radicalism of the new religion appealed very strongly because of its call for the equal division of wealth and the common ownership of all possessions (very much the reasons why Communism appeals to the poor and oppressed today).

There was a basic simplicity and informality about the early Greek Eucharist. The service ('liturgy' in Greek) could apparently take almost any form the celebrants liked, providing it contained somewhere the essential account of the Last Supper and the blessing and distribution of the bread and wine, which were known in Greek as the 'canon', or 'standard part', of the service. Water was mixed with the wine, because that was the normal Greek drinking practice, but the custom was usually justified by the report in St John's Gospel that when the dead Christ's side was pierced with a Roman spear 'there came forth blood and water'. In fact one mystical sect, called the Gnostics, renounced wine entirely, and used only water to celebrate the Eucharist, but, when the doctrines of Christianity were set down more precisely by the Roman Church, this practice was ruled heretical.

The ceremony still retained many Jewish features from the disciples' background and upbringing, despite its use of Greek. In particular it borrowed from the synagogue the Sabbath practice of incorporating two readings of the Scriptures - one from the 'Old Law' of Moses and one from the 'New Law' of the prophets - together with the singing of psalms and the delivery of a short address, either explaining the readings or commenting on some current moral or devotional problem. In the Christian ceremony the two readings, or 'lessons', were taken respectively from the Jewish Old Testament and from Jesus' teachings in the New Testament, the elder's address became the 'sermon', and these two features became a regular accompaniment to the central ritual of the Mass. When the new drama eventually arose, each of these three aspects of the service {lessons, sermon and liturgy) would become the inspiration for a different kind of play.

The fourth century saw the beginning of a new and unfortunate trend in Christianity, which developed from the Church's over-reaction to a popular heresy called Arianism and was later to provide the main reason for the coming of religious drama.

Arius, a well-educated priest who lived in Alexandria at that time, believed that Christ must have been created by God, like everything else in the world, and that, though he was doubtless the first and most perfect of God's creatures, he was in no way divine. In short, however holy and inspired Christ's teachings might be, he was basically a man like other men - a very great and good man, but a man nonetheless.

This opinion created chaos in the Church because the worship of Christ, if he was only a man, was plainly a form of idolatry - so the newly converted Emperor Constantine called a Church council at Nicaea near Byzantium in AD 325 with the express purpose of putting an end to the Arian question. The council's job was to make the godhead of Christ quite plain, and, with the help of Athanasius, another very enthusiastic Alexandrian, it drew up a declaration of belief, which clearly affirmed that Christ was 'begotten not made, being of one substance with the father' - and so, Constantine hoped, the problem of Arianism was laid to rest.

However, this was far from the case. Setting aside the new problem of Athanasius - who was so rabidly anti-Arian that he was constantly being exiled by the Church for being too extreme - the main effect of the Council of Nicaea was to split the Roman world. Local nationalism, which had seemed to be dead since the Roman conquest, suddenly revived. The Western Empire enthusiastically accepted the Nicene Creed, and Egypt, too, fanatically supported Athanasius, who was now their bishop; but Constantinople, the new centre of the Empire, and most of Asia, were strongly inclined to Arianism, and the overall result was the emergence of new sects all over the Middle East, preaching more or less Arian doctrines, and serious disagreements between Christians everywhere.

The Church now began to stress the divinity of Christ in order to combat Arianism, and his image began to change from that of a noble God-man figure into a much more unearthly spiritualised being, who exercised the unquestioned rights of a God, and who therefore needed priests to mediate between his divinity and the common people - in this way the supremely human qualities of Jesus began to disappear in a blaze of godhead.

In the meantime, the Latin Mass had gradually taken over from the Greek Eucharist in all the Western parts of the Roman Empire. This happened remarkably slowly, considering that the Latin service had existed since the second century, and that Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of Rome in 312, but, in fact, the Latin Mass does not seem to have achieved its position of supremacy until the fifth century. At that time, first under the threat of Gothic invasion, and later during actual occupation by the Lombards, the Pope - in the absence of any emperor in the West, and quite unaided by any military forces from Byzantium in the East - was forced to take over the helm and become the civil administrator of Rome as well as its spiritual leader.

This explains a noticeable feature of the new Mass: in marked contrast to the Greek freedom of expression, it is absolutely rigid in nature and demands a specific order of service. This seems to have been a desperate affirmation of the Roman sense of order, and the universality of Roman influence, at a time when the residents of the Western Empire could see nothing around them but a total collapse of all civilised values. The magnificently theatrical processional elements of the Roman Mass and the elaborate vestments worn by its priests can similarly be seen as a last-ditch attempt to preserve Roman morale - for there was little to stress but spiritual unity at a time when all the material components of the Western Empire were falling into ruins!

In accordance with this policy, St Gregory (the first Pope of that name) made strenuous efforts to establish a common form for the Mass throughout the Western Empire in the sixth century, when independent forms of the service were flourishing everywhere - particularly amongst the Celts. The standardisation he envisaged was not to occur in his lifetime, but his Sacramentary, or 'book of rules', was destined to become the pattern for a universal Catholic Mass.

More importantly, though, Gregory was not satisfied with establishing the proper shape of the Mass, he also wanted to establish what he believed to be its true interpretation, and this he did in another work, called the Dialogues, which became the accepted guide to the meaning of the service.

Believing as he did in the doctrine of the Real Presence - which taught that when the bread and wine were united in the Mass, to symbolise the Resurrection, the living Christ became present there in person - he saw the service as literally the re-creation of the Passion of Jesus Christ, a renewal of his act of sacrifice, to obtain a renewed absolution of all Christians from sin.

He also saw the service as a confluence of two worlds, the earthly and the spiritual, in which the radiance and joy of Heaven interpenetrate and illuminate the ritual movements of both priest and people. In a famous passage he says:

What right-believing Christian can doubt that in the very hour of the sacrifice, at the words of the Priest, the heavens are opened . . . that high things are accomplished together with low, and earthly joined to heavenly and that a union is made of the visible and the invisible.

Indeed, Gregory's successors concurred with him in regarding the Mass, and the Holy Scriptures too, as a fusion of a 'visible' outer meaning, which was often a simple story, with various kinds of 'invisible' symbolic meanings reflecting the purposes of God.

This way of thinking, which is typically medieval, also embraced events in the physical world, which, it was believed, might well possess an inner symbolic meaning far more important than their simple outward appearance. Its origins lay in an earlier Jewish vision of the whole of life as the unfolding of God's divine plan for the world, as it had been exclusively revealed to his chosen people - a viewpoint the Christians had ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1 The Passion of Jesus Christ
• 2 Christians versus pagans
• 3 From ritual to drama
• 4 The church as a theatre
• 5 The language of the people
• 6 The village and the court
• 7 The coming of Corpus Christi
• 8 An acute sense of sin
• 9 The structure of the cycles
• 10 Staging the cycles on scaffolds
• 11 Staging the cycles on wagons
• 12 Producing the cycles
• 13 The moral dimension
• 14 Moral interludes in action
• 15 News from the court
• 16 Mysteries' end
• Notes on the individual chapters
• Notes on the illustrations
• Recommended background reading
• Index