Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage

Collected Studies in Mediaeval, Tudor and Shakespearean Drama

Glynne Wickham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135032616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage shows that the drama of Elizabethan and Jacobean England is deeply indebted to the religious drama of the Middle Ages and represents a climax, in secular guise, to mediaeval experiment and achievement rather than a new beginning. This is fully examined in terms of dramatic literature as well as in terms of theatres, stages and production conventions. The plays studied include: Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale and Marlowe's King Edward II.

Section One

The Mediaeval Heritage of Shakespearean Drama

I

Drama and Religion in the Middle Ages

IF we are to attempt to understand what drama meant to the mediaeval mind or to assess the approach adopted by men and women of the Middle Ages to dramatic entertainment, our first step must be to make several large adjustments in our own current attitudes to both the theatre and religion. Because so much of mediaeval drama was a product of Roman Catholicism, we have got to make allowance not only for the vast blanket of Protestant prejudice in which it has been smothered since the Reformation, but also for the more recent critical pre-conceptions which have their roots in anti-clericalism and scientific scepticism. One or more of these creeds has underlain almost every historical account of the origin and development of drama in the Middle Ages written during the past hundred and fifty years. It is hardly surprising therefore that to the student of today the words ‘mediaeval drama’, if they mean anything at all, carry with them images of quaint pageant-wagons, of crude devils with black faces and fireworks exploding out of their bottoms and of little alliterative playlets suitable for Sunday School but irrelevant to either life or the theatre in the twentieth century: nor have teachers, whether in schools or Universities, helped to dispel these deeply contemptuous and ingrained notions by persistently treating mediaeval drama as if it were at best some primitive, gothic prologue to Shakespearean drama which only merits a place in a curriculum of English studies because it happens to provide some useful Middle English texts for analysis. Needless to say the Latin antecedents of these texts have been almost wholly ignored. The idea has thus taken root that a latin drama of genuinely religious origin grew up in the early Middle Ages, was banished from the church to the market-place, was translated into the vernacular, secularized and vulgarized with superstitious and idolatrous accretions until it died in the late Middle Ages of its own obesity. The Penguin Short History of English Drama supplies an admirable example of this thesis in the form it has taken at popular level.

In general [reads this text, pp. 19–20], it would seem that the plays began in the choir, and from the choir went to the nave, and from the nave to the outside of the church. When the crowds outside the church became too unseemly for the holy precincts the play moved to the market-place, or joined a succession of plays which were shifted from one position to another in procession around the city. The change illustrates the desire of the clerical authorities to be less intimately associated with the drama, and it is obvious that once the play was in the market-place, and in competition with other forms of entertainment, its character would increase in secularity.

The first noticeable change in these basically Victorian attitudes can, I think, be directly attributed to the revivals of the York and Chester Cycles of Miracle Plays which were presented in those cities in 1951 to mark the Festival of Britain. Since then there have been several subsequent revivals of both these Cycles; the Towneley Cycle has been presented in a London theatre and at Bretton Hall, the Christmas and Easter sequences of the Ludus Coventriae have been revived in Tewkesbury Abbey, and the New York ‘Pro Musica’ has toured the latin liturgical music drama, Ludus Danielis, in America and Europe. The impact of these productions upon the public has been great. Confronted with one of the most moving dramatic experiences of their lives, audiences have paused to ask how it came about that they should never have been told what they might expect of these mediaeval plays, or why it was that they had been so seriously misled by historians and critics. These questions have been pursued, and in some cases answered, by many scholars during the fifteen years that have elapsed since the Festival of Britain. One scholarly book, however, had at least suggested that a thorough-going reappraisal of contemporary attitudes to mediaeval drama was long overdue some five years before the first revival of the York Cycle: this was Father F. C. Gardiner’s Mysteries End. In this monograph Father Gardiner advanced the startling idea that the religious theatre of the Middle Ages did not peter out towards the end of the fifteenth century because audiences were bored with it, or scandalized by its childishness, ribaldry or increasing production costs, but was conscientiously suppressed as a matter of government policy between 1530 and 1580: Chester lost the right to perform its Cycle with impunity in 1574, York in 1575, Wakefield in 1576 and Coventry as late as 1581.

Father Gardiner’s admirably argued and lavishly documented monograph was definitive in at least one respect: it charted in a new and refreshing manner the closing years of the Catholic religious stage in England. This achievement sufficed of itself however to reopen to speculative enquiry all other areas of the subject which formerly had seemed to have been so firmly closed by the publication of Sir Edmund Chambers’ The Mediaeval Stage (1903) and Karl Young’s The Drama of the Mediaeval Church (1933).

The next person to extend the vistas opened initially by Gardiner’s work was Professor F. M. Salter with his book of essays, Mediaeval Drama in Chester, published in 1955. This dropped a timely bomb upon the cherished notion of compilation of cyclic drama by means of translation from latin into vernacular texts with the addition of an occasional original play here and there. Nevertheless, reactionary opinion was to be substantially reinforced a year later by the publication in 1956 of Professor Hardin Craig’s English Religious Drama, which despite some novel ideas (especially those relating to the Ludus Coventriae) reiterated the traditionally accepted patterns of development from latin devotional and didactic texts to extended vernacular and secularized cycles. This was a view I felt bound to challenge in 1958 when I published the first volume of Early English Stages, since it squared neither with Gardiner’s nor Salter’s findings on the one hand, nor with my own instinctive reactions to the performances I had witnessed in Chester and York and actually presented in Tewkesbury Abbey on the other. The question that was uppermost in my mind, and to which neither Chambers’, Young’s nor Craig’s account of the origins and development of mediaeval religious drama gave any satisfactory answer, was why there should be so obvious a difference of quality between latin liturgical music-drama and vernacular cyclic drama. To define this difference of religious feeling and artistic atmosphere was more than I could fully accomplish at that time; but I did sense a parallel in dramatic terms to what, in architectural parlance, we have come to describe as Romanesque and Gothic—a recognizable difference of style which in the nature of things was to be explained by a corresponding difference in creative motivation. I therefore ventured to suggest that we should

admit the likelihood of two dramas of single Christian origin but independent motivation: the drama of the Real Presence within the liturgy and the imitative drama of Christ’s Humanity in the world outside. The one is a drama of adoration, praise and thanksgiving: the other is a drama of humour, suffering and violence, of laughter and sorrow. Where the former remains ritualistic, the latter carries within it the germs of tragedy and comedy.¹

I was soundly rebuked by Hardin Craig in the columns of Speculum for my presumption and folly in advancing these views, and for drawing attention to the co-existence of a secular tradition.² However, notwithstanding this magisterial admonition, these views appear to have found some favour with more recent writers and to have provided the basis for the three most substantial volumes to have appeared on the subject of mediaeval drama during the present decade: Emily Prosser’s Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays (1961), O. B. Hardison’s Christian Rite and Christian Drama (1965) and V. A. Kolve’s The Play Called Corpus Christi (1966). Indeed, it is not too much to say that Hardison’s and Kolve’s books between them go far towards proving that latin liturgical music-drama and Corpus Christi vernacular drama are as different in spirit and character as are the plays of Shakespeare from those of Ibsen or O’Neill. The time has come therefore to ask some searching questions of the traditionally accepted accounts of the origins and growth of religious drama in the Middle Ages.

Let us then take the question of origin first. On one point at least everyone is agreed. The first recognizable manifestation of the existence of drama within the Christian Church is to be found in a ceremony associated with the Introit which was used to begin Mass on Easter Sunday in the Roman liturgy of the tenth century and which was initiated in the monastic churches of Northern France and Southern England.

Quem Quaeritis in sepulchro, O Christicolae?
Jesum Nazarenum crucifixum, O coelicolae!

Historians, however, who were working on the nineteenth-century assumption that effects must be explained in terms of causes and who viewed events as items in an evolutionary process which moved from small beginnings to bigger and thus to better things, seriously misunderstood the significance of this Introit and the dramatic manner in which it was presented by the celebrants of the Mass in question. Looking back over their shoulders through historical time they viewed this ceremony as the beginning of just such an evolutionary process (which it was not), and interpreted its advent causally as an attempt to teach biblical history to illiterate congregations. The questions which ought to have been put to this proposition and were not are:

1 If instruction of an illiterate laity is the prime objective, why do this in Latin?

2 Why chant it and not speak it?

3 Why do it in monastic churches for the benefit of clergy who were the schoolmasters and university dons of the time?

Ask these questions, and whatever else the primary objective of the Introit ceremony may have been, it clearly cannot have been a teaching exercise. Had that been the intention, a simple, spoken vernacular text would have been used, and parish churches chosen for the performance of them. The most that can be harvested from approaching the Easter Introit ceremony of the tenth century in the name of didacticism is an admission that representation of the visit of the three Maries to the tomb illustrates as well as ornaments the liturgical ceremony proper to the occasion.

Where the beginnings of the vernacular drama of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are concerned, a very similar situation pertains in respect of critical approach. Historians who were wedded to the idea that the historical past should be analysed in terms of scientific methodology and of the evolutionary concept, were predisposed to force a direct and organic connection between the early latin plays of the eleventh and twelfth centuries and the fully developed vernacular cycles that have survived to us. The ideal hypothetical means by which to effect such a process and on which to base such a thesis of development lay to hand in the supposition that latin originals were translated into the vernacular, coalesced with one another and were then augmented with any portions still missing. The question which ought to have been asked of this thesis (and was not) was why Christ’s crucifixion was never dramatized in latin liturgical form at any time between the tenth and thirteenth centuries? Another question which might have been asked (and was not) was why this same subject augmented by the betrayal on one side and the harrowing of hell in the other should have lain at the very heart of the vernacular drama from its inception. There is a lacuna in the orthodox argument at this point of crucial importance and which cannot be glossed over since it represents a major difference of substance affecting both the form and content of the two types of play.

There is one other question that must be asked of the standard textbook account of the origins and development of religious drama in the Middle Ages. It is noticeable that the vernacular plays associated with the Feast of Corpus Christi coalesced naturally into a single dramatic Festival from the outset, whereas the latin liturgical plays remained isolated from one another throughout their history, each being particular to its appointed Calendar day and continuing to be presented in this context until Roman Catholicism ceased to be the accepted religion of the country; and this notwithstanding the advent of the Feast of Corpus Christi and the vernacular plays associated with it. Why then, we must ask, did the Corpus Christi vernacular plays coalesce into what we term Cycles when no hint to this end was offered by latin liturgical precedent, and indeed while the latter obstinately refused to do so?

If all these questions that I have been asking are looked at collectively, the damage that results to the orthodox nineteenth-and twentieth-century accounts of the history of mediaeval drama is virtually irreparable: for the standard narrative is assaulted and breached at its beginning, in the middle and at its end. What remains is hardly worth trying to patch up and repair. There is, however, one factor which is common to all those questions the asking of which has occasioned this destruction and which warrants close attention since it may supply the basis for a new approach to the subject and thus to a more accurate reconstruction of events: this is the religious and artistic considerations which moved men of the Middle Ages to express themselves in drama.

If we ask ourselves why the earliest liturgical plays of the tenth and eleventh centuries were chanted in Latin in monastic churches instead of being spoken in the vernacular in parish churches, if we ask ourselves why the Corpus Christi vernacular plays coalesced immediately into large cycles embracing the history of the universe from Creation to Doomsday when their latin predecessors had remained short and isolated from one another and had avoided any treatment of the Crucifixion, if we ask ourselves why the Corpus Christi cycles and vernacular Morality Plays did not expire naturally but had to be censored and suppressed by the central government in Elizabethan London, we at once find ourselves obliged to give precedence to religious and artistic considerations in our thinking about these problems. And if we are to get to grips with these religious and artistic questions we shall have first to involve ourselves with a number of subjects which at present have little or no place in the normal school or university curriculum. No intelligent beginning can be made, for instance, without a working knowledge of the forms of Christian worship practised in the years preceding the advent of liturgical drama. And since so many of these ceremonies made extensive use of the arts (notably the fine arts, music and mime) a sound grounding in Byzantine and Romanesque achievement in the arts is another basic tool for such an enquiry. This knowledge in its turn must be supplemented by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 The Mediaeval Heritage of Shakespearean Drama
• 2 Reformation and Renaissance
• 3 Stages and Stage Directions
• 4 Studies in Shakespeare
• Index